With the European directive (CSRD) that makes sustainability reporting mandatory, your organisation finds itself at a crossroad. Are you leading your organisation to check the ESG boxes or are you going for full organisational adoption?

Ask yourself the following 7 questions:

1. Where is your organisation related to the Sustainable Development Goals?
2. Where is your organisation related to the competetition?
3. Does your organisation meet societal expectations?
4. How well informed is the leadership?
5. How engaged is your workforce?
6. Does your organisation have an integral strategy?
7. How important is sustainable development for your organisation?

If you are indifferent to the questions above, you probably don't see the need for transformation. But if these questions do trigger some discomfort, you probably want to know the answers as well.

The organisational culture and input/output data streams are key to providing you with the answers. With these answers you can build a strategy. There is an anthropological saying - that never lies - which should be hanging above every CEO’s bed:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”

A winning strategy fully relies on the right use of organisational patterns. Patterns that can be identified with participant observation and a decent data treasure hunt.

Your organisation is a wild river of data finding its way through the economical landscape. The data river forms the landscape and the landscape forms the river.

With the Shein model for business culture you can analyse the qualitative data, collected with typical anthropological methods. Those methods rely on interaction with your people: listening, looking, smelling, hearing, interviewing, questionning and interpreting the meaning they produce and reproduce.

“People produce and reproduce meaning AND (digital) data”

At the same time all those people produce data all day long and every day again. Input and output data, HR data, procurement data, sales data, energy data, asset data etc etc. This is the quantitative data, that is stored in databases. It's anthropologies new treasure to understand organisational culture and it's direction.

Not only does the data tell you if the direction is towards sustainable development. Together with the cultural patterns of the organisation, the data can be your guide to fully align with sustainable development

As an anthropologist I have a special interest in organisational culture. Analysing organisational patterns can be done by participant observation, interviews and even questionnaires.

I prefer the use of sustainable development over sustainability. A dynamic process in which people adopt the ability to transform the economy. This makes it inherently a social matter.

• Sustainable Development is a movement
• The circular economy is the engine
• People are the operators
• Green Skills are the fuel

The movement is directed towards a steady state for life on earth. The SDG's are measurable milestones down the road. ESG provides you business guidelines. And CSRD puts some pressure on the matter.

Don't believe the hype. Green, circular, biobased, regenerative and all the other fancy terms people throw at you, they are just terms to describe the next big thing to work on sustainable development. They don't compete! They just challenge each other to do better.

Here you can find my Sustainable Development Model