Win-win: Reality or fantasy?
By: Anna Pakkala
Tags: Sustainable Business, Sustainability, Business Strategy, Corporate Innovation

Even when we seemingly have created a win-win scenario for all, we may have only scratched the surface.

When it comes to business, win-win thinking is an entrenched cliché. We strive to create win-win scenarios for companies and clients, for companies and suppliers, and when it relates to sustainability, for companies, the environment and the communities they interact with.

Win-win thinking is often used as way to motivate or legitimize sustainable business, with good reason. Taking steps towards reducing production waste or increasing energy efficiency, for example, are clear cases of a win-win for both the environment and a company’s bottom line. Certain product lines, such as solar lamps providing emission-free light to areas where a lack of electricity prohibits children from studying after dark, provide environmental, social and economic benefits for the stakeholders involved.

Defined by its name alone, it’s easy to think that there are no downsides to win-win scenarios. However, the problem with this type of thinking is that it only gets us to an acceptable point.

Sometimes acceptable is fine — but in business, will you settle when your profits are just acceptable?

Win-wins may actually inhibit us from reaching the best possible net outcome. In their 2010 article “Trade-Offs in Corporate Sustainability: You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It”, Tobias Hahn and his fellow researchers outline different dimensions and levels where trade-offs are made both on the corporate and societal levels in developing sustainable solutions. The article argues that focusing on win-win ignores the full range of possible corporate trade-offs, in turn limiting the role corporations can play in sustainable development.

To examine this a bit further, let’s take a step back and consider what a win-win truly means. A sustainable win-win would entail the best, most desired outcome for environment, social and economic factors alike. A truly sustainable, win-win solution would be one that beats out other solutions in comparison on every metric.

But how often is this truly the case?

Even when we seemingly have created a win-win scenario for all, we may have only scratched the surface. For example, a disposable product produced sustainably, like biodegradable trash bags, may be able to tout a win-win for environment and bottom line alike, while representing only an incremental improvement on both scales. But even with biodegradable bags, there will still be food waste that needs to be collected, stored, and processed. Where things can get really exciting is if the same company were to develop a business model to tackle the real issue, household waste, in a novel way, rather than focusing on a win-win scenario for current business models.

The future belongs to the companies that aren’t afraid to innovate themselves out.

In the most extreme case, the most environmentally beneficial solution for a product might be for it to not exist — not exactly a win-win for economics, and depending on the product, society either. In these cases, in order to ensure longevity of the business, a company might want to take a page out of the Australian company Seabin’s book, and operate with the goal of strategically innovating themselves out of the game. In Seabin’s case, they explicitly say that their goal is to create a world where their product, a bin that collects sea rubbish, is no longer needed. This type of creative trade-off and clear-eyed sense of vision can create a mentality that will carry a company much further than any one product line ever will.

These problems with win-win thinking highlight why sustainability is so difficult to manage, and more importantly, to get right. In the real world, win-win solutions are far and few between. More likely are ‘better-better’, ‘win-acceptable’, or ‘we can live with this-win’ solutions. Finding the right balance and the right trade-offs requires deep reflection on the real problem, the business model, the stakeholders involved, and your company values.