Become deeply adaptable today, or else
By: Alexander Díaz
Tags: Management, Future, Predict Column, Sustainability, Climate Change

The ESG edge

The particulars vary, naturally, by company, industry and location. That’s precisely why it takes adaptability, which is attitude combined with capability, an openness to the excitement of risk and uncertainty combined with the skill and empowerment to act on the spot and make the judgment calls that manage situations successfully as they unfold. It has become the primary skillset for the Age of Climate Adaptation we are in.

If you’re an ESG company, you have a clear edge, since you have ingrained sustainability and best Environmental Social and Governance practices over the years, enough to earn a place in the thriving $35 trillion ESG investment market and the trust of portfolio managers.

That’s why this is the time for you to lead on adaptation, and you now have the C-CAM model and the TCFD framework to make the process far easier and way faster. If you’re not ESG, think of COVID-19 as the spark to go for it. You’ve set up teams to manage the crisis — start there!

E and S signal that you care about planet and people and back up your conscience with visionary programs and initiatives. As we’re seeing with COVID-19, that is a huge fundamental.

The G, your governance, your approach to leadership, might be an even bigger ingredient when it comes to pivoting to this new variety of deep adaptability — from the focus you’ve had up to now on slashing emissions, preserving biodiversity, and otherwise solving climate change, to a new focus on preparing for and recovering from climate impacts (like COVID) already upon us and the inevitable ones to come.

That’s because deep adaptability doesn’t happen automatically. It does for some people, but not for most, and you want it in everyone everywhere across the company. So you must trigger it, nurture it, deliberately, culturally, institutionally, and that requires a certain organizational constitution. Your ESG practices and mindset give you a head start, and there is no better time than now to shoot higher.

So let’s begin. The immediate priority is the coronavirus. Stretching your company’s response and adaptability for another couple of years of COVID takes two things simultaneously: an action agenda and communications. There is simply no time to do the first before starting the second. Both must happen at the same time.

An action agenda

So far, you’ve been managing the immediate as we all wait for the economy to reopen. But we learned this week in this definitive article what that reopening will likely look like and why we must all go back to the drawing board and deepen the action agenda. We also learned from this one by Bill Gates how long it it will likely take for medicine to eliminate the COVID risk altogether. Articles like this one, this one and this one offer a deeper glimpse.

The restaurant example is particularly daunting and illustrates what every company, no matter your size and industry, must now adapt to. Operationally, as a local economy begins to reopen, you must put in place the most rigorous possible kitchen and supply-chain practices to give customers and employees the confidence they won’t be infected. Dining-area distancing and cleaning practices, too. As you do, show customers real-time via cameras in your kitchen. Provide education on your website and via direct email and social media. And more.

The creativity, discipline and consistency required, the sweet spot between supervision and autonomy, to sustain such an effort for as long as it takes in every business unit, and to launch this level immediately — well, that’s what we’re talking about.

Multiply that by all your locations, with the varying economy-opening pace and policies, and across all your suppliers, for 18 months or more, and you can see the next-level complexity — and therefore how fast you need to move on this agenda and how thoroughly you need to delegate and empower across the organization, if you expect your company to have a shot at being among the winners.

And it’s not just on your end. For the coronavirus to remain in check across geographies and not rekindle and explode anew, customers themselves must act with rigorous discipline. So must your competitors and every business in all industries.

So you also have to engage in customer education, trade associations, policy task forces, etc., to be part of a broader systemic solution that is now as critical to your own preservation and profitability as everything you do inside your four walls. Welcome to deep adaptability.

Again, the particulars vary. The starting point, though, is to realize this is not managed with temporary measures for a few weeks of stay-at-home lockdowns. The restrictions under any reopening scenario change the game, vary per location, and will vary over time.

That is the nature of this virus. It is too aggressive and will not go away soon. Defeating it takes rolling restrictions, and to navigate those restrictions takes a bottom-up, empowerment-driven cultural approach to enterprise-wide decision-making across your organization, along with smart top-down direction and strategy. That level, in such a tight time frame, calls now for the second part of the equation.

Enterprise-wide communications

Start with internal and direct comm to prep your people and stakeholders, and then direct your messaging at customers and the public. Your company may have to do both at once. Ideally, though, you want internal and direct to precede.

Why? Because the whole point is to deepen the adaptability of everyone everywhere across your organization, so they can then better care for and make smarter autonomous decisions that affect external stakeholders.

Each corporate department manages distinct stakeholders — customers, suppliers and partners, banks and investors, trade associations, community groups, regulators, the media, the general public and others specific to your business. The communication has to be tailored and strategic for each.

For that to be fast and optimized, apply the Five Tasks of internal and direct communications:

Paint a visual picture of what society will be like under all these restrictions and rigorous practices. It’s a natural human bias to shrink from an action when the picture looks blurry or complicated. Simplify and clarify it for them, and notice how much faster everyone will get it and feel empowered to act accordingly. Deploy smart messaging and creative. You do this for every comm effort. The human dynamics are so particular this time — the level of personal protection and responsibility needed, the humanity of it all, the high stakes, the anxiety, as well as the excitement and optimism mentioned above — that the strategy and execution must be different. Spark high engagement. This, too, is a tried and true practice, and every good (particularly ESG-driven) HR director knows the 10-or-so levers to pull. But once more, COVID is pushing the agenda, and that calls for communication strategies across those 10-or-so levers to engage everyone everywhere and bring out the deep adaptability in all of them. Build a deep adaptability culture. This is engagement’s partner, because engagement is needed to build a culture, but culture-building includes other pieces, mainly systems, structures and values. And there’s comm designed for these parts, as well. Trigger events. Another thing we know from behavior science is that most people, most, do not express what they really feel about a thorny subject. And COVID is a thorny subject! So they remain passive when action is most needed. That is the one thing you do not want across your company. Items 1–4 help bring this out and spark deep adaptability, but research tells us one of the most effective strategies are trigger events within and outside the company. Set up a team to track and insert them in your communications.

The speed and precision with which you must pivot on this requires not just the traditional comm skillset from your agency and in-house team. It also helps if they have the knowledge and instinct to manage natural-disaster and risk-management communications, as well as the behavior-science expertise to know what message and creative hot buttons to push to elicit fast and focused participation by everyone everywhere. So you shouldn’t use just anyone anywhere to do this for you. Select wisely.