Maximizing the socio-ecological impact of responsible businesses in emerging markets

Helping businesses tackle societal issues

Every year hundreds of thousands of organizations pursue responsible business objectives to tackle important and urgent grand challenges such as poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation. That’s awesome.

Unfortunately, the same strategic due diligence that they would exercise for, say, new market entrance, is not employed in determining where and how to tackle these societal issues. In doing so they tend to address the symptoms of problems, which means that at best they waste valuable resources without creating meaningful change and at worst they validate the problem by creating vested stakeholder interests in its continued existence.

Everyone has good intentions. No doubt. However, when it comes to combining the direct and tough business world with the complex and delicate socio-ecological world through responsible business, even the best intentions can have worse outcomes.

Cultivating resilience through systems thinking

Responsible businesses and their stakeholders need a mindset change.

Viewing ingrained socio-ecological problems from a systemic perspective allows businesses to engage them more effectively. That requires understanding the interdependencies and dynamics between all the factors that lead to unwanted system behavior and identifying the most effective leverage points to realize change.

Businesses that do so design various kinds of interventions at different levels so that as many people as possible benefit socially, environmentally, and economically.

That’s easier said than done, but we can help you with that. It’s what we do.