A quick piece to share some reflections on the growing pains we are seeing associated with scaling sustainability.

Over the past 18 months, across a wide range of sectors, we have seen something of a shift from start-up to scale-up – in terms of both mentality and investment.

You might recognise the start-up phase. It is typically characterised by sustainability:

  • being led by a few passionate and/or knowledgeable people driving change
  • often sitting a little outside of BAU, loosely housed across both supply and demand sides of a business
  • having limited resources, often leveraging or reallocating existing headcount and budgets
  • work tending to be highly project- and issue-based

As start-up teams begin to reveal the true extent of change required to reach often very stretching goals, many companies are significantly scaling up their efforts. This is very good news as it leads to more fundamental change and greater impact.

However, we have started to see some challenges emerging as the stakes get higher, structures formalise, teams scale and investment becomes more significant. We are seeing two key themes:

  1. Investment and the creation of specialist teams looking at impact beyond just carbon – increasingly into social, nature and biodiversity – and an increasing focus on measuring impact. This is absolutely the right thing to do, but it can lead to the creation of silos, with implications of duplication and reputational risk when the head is not talking to the hand.
  2. Sustainability spreading to the wider organisation means that less expert teams are engaging with the agenda in a more meaningful way. Again, this is good news as more people owning the agenda should mean more progress – but the involvement of less expert teams can increase the risk of unintentional greenwashing or mixed messages.

We see three interventions which are smoothing the transition from start-up to scale-up in sustainability:

Strategy

An emphasis on seeking clarity and focus – calling out the relative importance and interplay of targets, trade-offs and connections to commercial strategy. This impacts decision-making and investment, ways of working and accountabilities, and measurement.

Innovation

Examination and exploration of new ways to do new things and, perhaps more critically in impact terms, new ways of doing the things that make the core of the business tick.

Capability

Moving from capability work that is more general and focused on awareness, towards a greater focus on application and solutions in the context of a specific business or industry.

To find out more about the start-up to scale-up challenge, please get in touch with the Mangrove team at hello@mangroveconsulting.co.uk.

Nick Pye
Co-Founder
Mangrove