Co-Create Gets Stakeholders Involved in Company Sustainability Strategies

In many large companies, sustainability strategies are created by external advisors and experts. Typically, stakeholders like employees, customers and investors don’t find out about new strategies until they’re already in place. One well-quoted stat argues that 70% of these kinds of change management plans fail.

The Crowd, which offers a range of services to drive sharing and innovation between businesses, believes that there are 2 reasons these strategies fail:

• External advisers may not share the same concerns as stakeholders.
• External advisers don’t have as broad an understanding of the company and the issues it faces.

Back in 2012, The Crowd launched their ‘Going Naked’ initiative, which invited companies to lay bare their strategies to a crowd of experts who would provide comment and critique. Sainsbury’s was the first company go Go Naked back in 2012, followed by British Land in 2013.

Both Sainsbury’s and British Land presented strategies to a crowd of experts who were asked to rate the strategies in 10 key areas such as targets and measurement, employee engagement and communication and carbon and energy initiatives. The crowd rated the organisations on how well they thought they were performing in those areas, allowing the organisations to see whether they were ahead or falling behind on specific issues.

Simpleweb has recently teamed up with The Crowd to work on Co-Create, a platform born out of Going Naked, which allows stakeholders to get a say in their company’s strategies, as well as experts. By bringing a wider and more diverse group into the strategic decision making process, The Crowd believes that companies can create effective strategies that will be easier to implement and maintain due to stakeholder buy-in.

“Wikipedia worked with 1,000 people to draw up their strategy, allowing it to access extraordinary intelligence and engage their core users” said Jim Woods, CEO of The Crowd. “It took a lot of time, but the results are there to be seen. The challenge facing most companies as they draw up sustainability and other strategies is how to engage their stakeholders in a time and cost-efficient manner. We hope Co-Create will solve that problem.”

With Co-Create, organisations can ask stakeholders questions around “pillars”, or topics, that the company believes will affect success. Pillars could be anything from employee engagement to carbon and energy policies to setting targets. Suggestions and comments from stakeholders can then be used by management to draw up strategies that are in line with stakeholders’ values.