SUSTAINABILITY

SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS FOR A VOLATILE WORLD

Sustainability

Despite the name, “sustainability” isn’t a word that’s been able to sustain one definition for very long. It’s become one of those words of which the meaning changes depending on who’s talking.

At Decision Strategies, we believe “sustainability” refers to having a business strategy that allows the company to drive its operations into the indefinite future, given the resource constraints and planetary limits that are becoming increasingly crucial. And when Sustainability is defined this way, it must be a critical component of any company’s corporate strategy.

However, Sustainability presents a unique host of challenges: how to get from where we are now to where we need to be, and how do it within the imperative time frame. As a society, we must do this while “keeping the lights on” – i.e., we can’t stop providing people with essential services while we ponder our next steps.

And as a company, we also must do this while remaining profitable…because in the end, the best long-term strategy in the world is useless if we go out of business within the year.

Developing a sustainable business strategy means integrating multiple types of uncertain and/or ambiguous information – economic factors, corporate values, natural and physical constraints, future policy and regulatory regimes, and more…all while finding a flexible, robust path forward. The consultants at Decision Strategies, a sustainability consulting firm, not only have decades of business experience and deep expertise in decision science, but they also have technical backgrounds. From biotechnology to geophysics to chemical engineering, we don’t just understand what makes your business tick; we understand the ins and outs of how the natural world works, too. This breadth of knowledge is a critical advantage when finding solutions to problems that arise at the economic and natural interface, such as Sustainability.