The Business of “doing good” is good for business.
By: Mark Polane, Aka The Mightydutchman
Tags: Purpose, Sdgs, Sustainable Development, Brm, Values

The Business of “doing good” is good for business.

When I arrived in the United Nations Regional Service Center’s Field Technology Service in Entebbe in May 2017, I was told by my boss that he wanted me to help spread Business Relationship Management (BRM) throughout the Africa region which we support in terms of Information & Communications Technologies.

After carrying out a bit of research I ended up on the BRM Institute website, and from there our BRM journey began, we arranged a pilot training for a few people here in Entebbe, where we had a South African Training Provider deliver BRMP training and a two day “Strategic Partnering” workshop, as we were really at the very beginning of our BRM journey, the realization was that perhaps the Strategic Partnering workshop was a bit premature. Notwithstanding its prematurity, it was still a very useful exercise, to understand where our journey should ultimately end up, providing a clear goal to work towards to.

The last year and a half, has seen me, creating a Community of Practice using various initiatives and platforms such as MsTeams and Yammer, we organised additional BRMP training for a further 11 more BRM Focal points in the African Regional Peacekeeping Operations. We conducted a “Grab@Pizza” gaming exercise with our newly trained BRM focal points and senior ICT Leaders from the various UN missions who were all here during a regional ICT Leadership conference.

An executive brief delivered to a group of Senior Mission Leadership that happened to be in Entebbe at the same time, didn’t go as well as we had hoped, which gave us time to reflect and think of our approach to bringing the BRM Philosophy to life in the UN missions.

Building a BRM capacity and culture within our own Technology organization is perhaps a better focus for now, and through results of applying BRM capabilities and techniques being able to show the Value of a BRM approach through practical success stories with our senior management. Using a “bottom” up approach so to speak.

Purpose, Meaning and Value

Keeping abreast with the latest information on management and leadership forums such as MIT Sloan, HBR and others it becomes more and more apparent that there is a shift happening within global business, and organizations and people in general around the globe. Young people are much more engaged in global affairs, the young lady from Sweden that has created a movement to draw attention to climate action is but one example.

The generation that is entering the workforce now, demand that their job and contributions have meaning and that the company they work for serves a purpose other than just the bottom line.

So, it follows that businesses and organizations are redefining and finetuning what “Value” really means to them.

A recent global CEO study conducted by “Leaders on Purpose” which is a “Cross-Sector international collaborative dedicated to recognizing, analysing and developing innovative leadership strategies that incorporate the UN Sustainable development goals”, which involved 16 CEO’s from large international businesses indicates that these leaders “galvanize their workforce around social and environmental value creation informed by the global context and long-term thinking”. Calling this shared goal their “North Star” giving stakeholders something to strive for and allowing them to leverage their organizations’ core competencies to create positive change”.

As BRM’s I believe it is important that we work with key stakeholders and organisational leaders to help identify this “North Star”. BRM’s as strategic partners should be examining how technology, process enhancement etc. can help to facilitate the key findings of this study which are; Organizational Agility, Purpose Activation, advocating for the “New Business Logic” and help identify “Global Context Awareness”.

By understanding purpose and meaning around these parameters BRM’s can help identify business solutions for companies and organizations that can improve and sustain overall value and focus on long term growth rather than quick profits at the expense of Sustainable Development.

The shift towards “purposeful’ leadership, and meaning, is giving rise to companies that aim to facilitate the identification of meaning and purpose for the organization as well as the individual aiming to converge both personal and organizational meaning, and thereby creating “Purposeful or Meaningful Value”. “Goodup” is a good example of this, by providing an engagement platform for all stakeholders and linking, them together with projects, initiatives etc.

Global Goals for Good

Understanding the 17 SDG’s and learning how to map and connect them in relation to your business goals can help to create meaning in business. We have recently carried out an abbreviated version of this “SDG mapping” exercise within our own Field Technology Department to see how we ourselves can incorporate these SDG’s in our ICT operations and how we might be able to derive purpose from them. Seeing how these #GlobalGoals are all connected and how in turn they are connected to our work, our lives and our planet is an empowering experience. The UN SDG Helpdesk which is created by colleagues in the UN Economic & Social Council East Asia Pacific (UN ESCAP) in Bangkok is a very valuable tool and resource, furthermore the UN ESCAP provides E-Learning courses on the topic. There is also a mobile app called “SDG’s in Action” which facilitates individuals to take or join an action towards achieving the SDG’s.

The UN’s Global Compact is a voluntary compact for Business CEO’s to implement sustainability principles and help towards implementation of the SDG’s, if offers a great opportunity for big business to get behind “doing good” and establish a “purpose” for their businesses beyond just profits, the CEO’s showcased in the Global CEO study referenced earlier are great examples of how the SDG’s help drive “business for good”.

Purpose and Value in UN Peacekeeping

In our UN Peacekeeping mission’s environment, I believe that the purpose is clear, (We all want peace) achieving this however is a difficult and complex task, understanding the mandate of the Peacekeeping mission is crucially important for our BRM’s and ICT leaders to be able to identify areas where we as technologists and trusted advisors can provide value by providing business solutions using innovative technologies to the various stakeholders that make up a Peacekeeping mission.

UN Missions are multi-dimensional and very complex in terms of the diverse elements that operate within a mission. We are dealing with Military Components, Civilian Police Components, Law, Judicial and Prison components, State and Institution building components, Political Components, Public Information Components, Election Components, Mine Action Components, Humanitarian components, and many more actors that make up a UN Peacekeeping Operation.

As part of the introduction of a BRM approach to the management and leadership of our “Field Technology Components” we advocate that our Mission Technology Leaders are proactive, engaging the various actors within the mission to identify areas where we can work with them together in order to improve their capacities and capabilities to respond to their needs and requirements.

Value in our arena has many different meanings and manifests itself in a multitude of ways;

o Being able to save lives of civilians = Value

o Being able to keep our staff and our military and other components safe = Value

o Enabling accurate decision making through the data analysis of situational awareness technologies = Value

o Helping to conduct local elections = Value

o Creating conditions on the ground for development of local communities = Value

o Providing and maintaining connectivity = Value

o Keeping the lights on = Value

Because the UN is not a business working towards revenue and profits, the focus of our operations is always very much on cost and getting the best value from limited resources.

Identifying value and how through technological solutions we can amplify and increase Value becomes apparent.

For most of us working in the Peacekeeping Operations, Peace is simply the end of violence and hostilities. Once this “peace” has been established a peacekeeping mission would exit the stage, however there is a lot more work that follows to sustain peace.

Measuring peace and its value will have some more complex parameters to consider. There are initiatives that aim to “Measure Peace” which we as technologists and BRM’s could be looking at in terms of how collected data can help to identify the impact and value of our operations. The Peace Innovation Institute in collaboration with the Peace innovation Lab at Stanford has been working to establish a “Peace Data Standard” aimed at creating a “metrics-based approach to measure and price the value of peace”. The international Peace Institute advocates “Measuring Peace through Locally driven everyday peace indicators.”

I believe that there are many opportunities for a BRM Approach to help with technological solutions that can facilitate our key stakeholders to find the data they require and help to quantify and measure Peace. This is useful during an operation, and will continue to be important when Peacekeeping exits the scene and something else replaces it. The collection of reliable and accurate data is a serious challenge however.

Our Field Technology Operations are shifting their approach in relation to ICT delivery, this is very much a cultural shift to ”the way we do business” moving away from the “order taker” and “Service Delivery” model to begin to profile ourselves as ”trusted technology advisors” and “strategic partners” to the key stakeholders and components of a mission.

This journey started less than 2 years ago, when our senior management formally adopted a BRM approach to be incorporated in our peacekeeping operations, identifying “BRM Focal Points”. (In Most Missions)

Since resources are scarce, and the BRM functions are still an “add-on” function for most people who have other main functions and priorities, shifting the paradigm and changing the culture is slow, but steady.

Converging the purpose of our Field Technology Service with the Mission’s Purpose and our people’s purpose will be important to continue to deliver value to our key stakeholders and subsequently deliver value to the world in the form of lasting peace and security for the people in the countries that we serve.

References:

• North Star: Purpose-Driven Leadership for the 21stCentury

• Putting Purpose to Work, A study of purpose in the workplace

• Putting purpose into action

• What is the Peace Data Standard?

• Sustainable Development Goals Help Desk

• UN Sustainable Development Goals

• UN Global Compact, Business as a source for good

• Big holes in the UN Development Goals are exposed by new studies

• BRM Institute full length recording of webinar (BRMI Members only)