How To Start
Live reporting from "Meeting #1" on the UN SDG journey with a new client
I really enjoyed this morning’s UN SDG meeting with one of our new clients. It was “Meeting #1” in the process of monthly meetings which we invite our clients to sign up for when they engage a Honey company. I’d like to tell you about the meeting, and the wider UN SDG story, because I took the big bet of trying to “humanise” the interaction, rather than “corporatise” the interaction and I have a feeling it paid off.
The story starts with our Terms and Conditions (Ts&Cs). When we have contact with a new client, we send them our Ts&Cs as first gesture (they include things like terms of payment so there is no faff of going through a proposal process only to find the client only pays 90 days after the event). Top of our Ts&Cs, it says “We are a UN SDG Company” and we set out the groundrules that when we work with a new client, we will bring UN SDG thinking to everything from the research to the creative, through to production, execution and monitoring. The key phrase in the Ts&Cs is “the client will appoint a UN SDG Designated Person who will work with Honey’s UN SDG Designated Person to develop a UN SDG plan, reviewed in monthly meetings”. It’s partly a warning (“Every single creative you get from us will have a progressive/sustainability angle”), partly an expectation-setter and partly a reverse sell: by raising sometimes quite brutal terms and conditions, we hope to clearly mark out that we take it seriously, that it all matters and that we can’t tolerate slippage and that a near zero-tolerance approach from us makes us even better commercial partners for both parties.
The reaction to this clause that we always hoped to see from clients was along the lines of:
this is great, of course UN SDG thinking plays a big role in our company, brand, comms, PR and social and it’s really valuable that you bring this right up front in our discussions
we are so committed to CSR and ESG that we value immensely every single one of our suppliers and commercial partners bringing more of those skills to the table
we have amazing guidelines in place already and will gladly onboard you with those so that your branding, comms, social, PR, content work will fully benefit from our authentic approach
In reality, the actual reaction to the upfront Ts&Cs has usually been along the lines of:
we already do this, so no need to make extra work
we do CSR and not SDG, so we don’t need this at all
our parent company does this, not us, so we don’t need this service
ESG is handled by our investor relations team and not this team, so we don’t need it
In other words, the response is usually to lean out from the topic, rather than leaning in, but we get to understand how strong a client’s operational siloes are, and how much space and attitude has been unleashed within a client company to make progress on these matters - and it almost always confirms for us that there is “work to do” to helping the client progress.
In this case, today, the client (a large subsidiary of a stock-market listed conglomerate) was very willing to have that first meeting. They readily, and quickly, appointed their UN SDG Designated Person. They were receptive and engaged in the discussion.
(By the way - the appointment of a person with a role such as “UN SDG Designated Person” is something we cite as a relatively serious “win” in our journey to progress 100 companies to do things they would not have done or to do things faster.)
The meeting was scheduled for 1 hour but I usually try to set expectations for the work to be done in 30 minutes.
That seems strange, right? You may expect the first meeting to be an expensive “workshop” with research and analysis, charts and graphs, visions and missions, case studies, models, and checklists (loads of checklists).
But no, our agenda for Meeting 1 is always supershort, and almost always:
Where is the company now in its UN SDGs journey?
How far does the company want to go in its UN SDG journey
In today’s case, we did do some (massive) preparatory work in reviewing the partner company’s most ESG and Social Responsibility Report which happened to cite 11 UN SDG goals with which it sought alignment, and so we added a third agenda item:
Let’s agree our first UN SDG focus area.
So, to summarise, our Meeting #1 to kick off a client’s journey with the UN SDGs is a 30-minute meeting with three agenda points.
Each of us within Honey plays these meetings slightly differently according to our own temperament, as it should be. I think the emotional ingredient in working to the UN SDGs is more important than the corporate element, and our job is to unlock the individual motivations of those people who are doing the work. The only way we can encourage them to give of themselves into the process, is for us to do the same - to speak from the heart about why we do what we do, why it matters to us and why we want to help our clients progress.
We try to make it personal.
Let’s look that those three questions. “Where is the company now” and “How far do you want to go” is actually just a structured discussion and the outcomes are usually along the lines of “We’re not far” and “We’re not sure we want to go that far because its complex and big and dangerous”. But getting that honest admission upfront and on the table is a major step. It takes time, because the usual natural order of things is for a client to be defensive and protective against its weaknesses and proud of its successes. When citing the successes, everything from recycling initiatives to the top level overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, can be presented as “We have this nailed, and we’re doing great”. If it goes well, we can get to a place within a few minutes where the client team is happy to say, with humility, “We have made some starts” and “We’d like to be much better”.
If we can capture that spirit in the first meeting - the rest has focus and becomes much easier.
The question “Let’s agree our first UN SDG focus area” is the tough one.
First off, it’s counterintuitive. You do NOT under ANY circumstances start a corporate UN SDG journey by picking one of these seventeen coloured squares:
Next, it takes time. Surely a company can’t simply conjure out of thin air within a 30-minute meeting a UN SDG goal to be at the heart of its corporate culture?
Next, it takes rigour. Where’s the research? What proves this is the right one for us? Will it align with our business goals? Will our employees and other stakeholders engage with this? Could our leadership teams embrace it?
Next, it requires a risk assessment, a process, an owner, goals, objectives, strategies, sellins, alignments, signoffs, approvals, buyin. You get the idea - things.
But we don’t have time for this. We’re in an emergency. Really. We’ve only got seven years to 2030. And we need some emergency thinking to progress.
So we start with Emergency Thinking. Pick a goal, quick.
And today it worked. “Health and Wellbeing” said the boss. “Climate Action” said another. “Life on Land” said another. And before too long, in a spirit of genuine human spontaneity, we had added “Responsible Consumption and Production” and “Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure”. Five goals. And the list ran out. No one wanted to add any more. We were done.
So we ended the meeting. And the meeting notes (always issued within minutes of the meeting end) read like this:
Honey team will carry out desk research on the goals to help identify alignment with client’s stakeholders.
Client team will reflect on the shortlisted goals and agree which might be their priority goal.
We will convene Meeting #2 in two weeks - to try to evolve specific actions to progress towards our chosen goal.
After the meeting, we contributed a SWOT analysis (yech - I hate SWOTs, but you know what I mean) on the chosen goals to help the team make their own assessment.
The Meeting #2s are usually designed to be a month after the first, but the client team was keen to move faster and requested a two-week timeframe. Very happy with that enthusiasm.
So there we have it - that’s how a UN SDG Meeting #1 with a client played out today. They are all different, mind you. But this was a good one because:
There was an opportunity for the individuals on the client team to contribute at a personal level from an early stage
The boss was really clear and forthright in citing at least one of the goals which mattered to them
No one felt they had an unworkable new todo list with a ton of new acronyms and spreadsheet cells they had to complete
Everyone felt optimistic and positive that they could take tangible steps forward that made them feel good
I must confess, that I would like to be a purist and apply the very complete and perfect “Masterplan” which I studied in my “Impact Measurement and Management for the SDGs” certification. And the approach was WRONG in so many ways:
We did not start with Enterprise Purpose and objectives
We did not launch the Stakeholder Consultation
We did not specifically review business goals and run a prioritisation process
We did not sell in a process: “Set Strategy, Integrate, Optimise, Reinforce”
But I think today proved one thing: there absolutely is appetite, if not outright enthusiasm, for Emergency Thinking, Jumping In, Getting Going, Getting On With It and Moving Quickly.
Most organisations simply do not have the capacity at all levels (from most junior intern to CEO up through all the departments) to engage in a meaningful way with the UN SDGs within their workplace. Time, experience, tools, processes and systems, teamwork, money, data, authority are very finite and we need them all to make good progress.
But we so readily make them a BARRIER to progress.
I see a huge opportunity to overlay these formal processes now that the bus is moving. We’ve got energy and interest, we’re making progress and we have some destinations in sight. Introducing the formalities now, while we’re travelling, will be seen as reassurance and reinforcement on our journey. And I bet, in this case, that will get us further and faster over the next year than if we’d taken the more formal route.
And what was it exactly that made the difference? I think it was the personal stake which each member of the client team made into the process in that very first meeting.
Within 30 minutes (OK, it overran to 45 minutes) I think they are all on the bus and the bus got rolling.
That really is a win.