Did you know that there are 17 United Nation, sustainable development goals. Did you know that when you’re measuring value, you can consider societal value as part of that. And that could include consideration for those 17 United Nation sustainable development goals. Now those 17 United Nation sustainable development goals, they do compete against each other.
So there is an element of balance there, but if you decide to go after maybe a couple of them, for example, reducing carbon footprint or passing on plastic, that’s something that could be considered when you’re ordering the backlogs or when the product owners that you’ve empowered to, order backlogs for you.
They can consider societal value when they’re ordering the backlog. And I would urge you to go for authentic sustainability as opposed to. Greenwashing is just a waste of energy. Really. We could be delivering more value to customers and greenwashing is just a real cynical approach to pretending to be sustainable.
Instead of being inauthentic with our sustainability, let’s aim to really reduce the plastic let’s aim to really reduce the carbon footprint, not just in the product or service that’s produced, but in how that’s actually produced as well so sustainability is central to what we’re doing. There are really no recipes to improving sustainability, just like there really are no recipes to improving organizational agility.
But what you can do is you can make sure that sustainability is something that is central to how you are ruthless about value by being ruthless about value. You can be ruthless about how much we’re going to reduce carbon footprint, how much we’re going to reduce plastic, and so on. Also what you can do is you can consider what power is being consumed.
What level of travel is involved when people are producing your products and services? Are we getting components on the other side of the planet when they could have been sourced more locally and so on? So it’s quite a broad area and there’s lots of things you can do There are no silver bullets for this.
If you want to improve sustainability, consider it in terms of how you prioritize value, how you order your backlogs in scrum kanban, how you do your experiments and consider can we achieve more competitiveness in the market by providing a more sustainable product or service without increasing cost. Take your sustainable product, if in doing so, it’s going to cost them more. So there’s going to be some level of R and D to try and figure this out, but that would be my nudge on sustainability.