Show me the boxes to tick
The Duke University course told me what to do next
This post is about my experience in getting my formal certification in Impact Measurement & Management for the SDGs, and why I feel everyone in business should do it.
Why do we need a course?
We need a course because the world of the UN SDGs is indescribably complex. Let’s be honest: “indescribably complex”. And add to that “overwhelming”, “confusing” and “intimidating”. No one person can realistically ever get their head around all 17 of the UN Goals, the measures and targets, translating those into measures and targets which we as individuals or teams of people in businesses can impact, the data collection, reporting, agreeing which actions to take, and prioritising them, let alone evaluating the outcomes and impacts of those actions and the forensic work to be able to say, at the end of the day:
“Yes, the actions DID we took, created the impacts we wanted, which affected the impacts we needed to make.”
Because it is so complex and comprehensive, even two people working in similar areas might likely find themselves doing entirely different things to achieve the same goals, duplicating energies in inventing processes and systems and even using different language in communicating with each other. (Just watch two people talking about “impacts” and “outcomes” and see if you can spot if they are both using those terms in the same way, or the right way.)
Time is short. There’s much to do. We need to be as efficient (doing things right) and effective (doing the right things) as we possibly can. We need to get to doing the right actions with the minimum of delay. The course absolutely helps with this.
The over-20 hours I invested in the course was precious time. (It’s nine hours of video and with replays, playbacks and the accompanying documentation and tests, the work was at least 20 hours). The monetary cost is negligible (the course is free - the certificate costs £40). But the conviction, resolve and clarity with which I left the course made it worthwhile - it meant I could dive right in to taking big steps within Honey knowing that they were part of a masterplan which others far wiser than us had architected. We got conviction, we got resolve and we had clarity.
I’ll link all future posts (in some way) to the methodology. I hope this will inform the methodology and allow us to highlight where we need to adapt the methodology to make it work for us.