A while back, my fellow CommScrummer, Mike Klein, and I locked horns over different perspectives on sustainability and opportunities for value creation (see here).

With reference to some of Umair Haque’s great posts on his HBR blog, I was attempting to make the case that extreme differentiation and competitive advantage, where sustainability is concerned, is only really achievable when it is adopted as a fundamental design value – fully integrated into strategy and culture as a key driver of innovation; a perspective on brand and business strategy that inextricably links long-term business success with serving a higher social purpose.

I’m paraphrasing, of course, but Mike’s essential beef with that assertion came down to quick wins. How, so ran the challenge he laid down, can the rapid adoption of sustainability-centricity provide competitive advantage to specific companies in the short- as well as long-term?

A fair question, and one that I hope I can begin to answer with an example from the strategy I’ve been pulling together for my current client, who, as you can probably imagine, have been occupying themselves with very much the same question.

The emergence of sustainability as a critical dimension of business value and design thinking as the methodology to achieve it – is rapidly gathering momentum.