Sustainability Transformation: The power of Impact Hacking — Stéphanie Bretonniere — TEDxSUMAS

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Have you ever heard of impact hacking? Probably not, but I'm sure you've heard of growth hacking. The core principle behind growth hacking is to quickly and cheaply test your marketing idea, use data to analyze the outcome, and to iterate, optimize, implement, or change the experiment. It is an extremely creative process that requires people to swim against the flow. This is the methodology, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Uber, or even Hotmail used to grow from humble beginnings to the powerhouses we know today. If instead of testing a marketing idea, you apply this principle, this mindset to sustainability, you get a first sense of what impact hacking is about. So how and why can impact hacking speed up any corporate sustainability transformation? Why do companies have a key role to play to mitigate climate change? We have to mobilize the private sector. It represents 75% of the global GDP. It is crucial when it comes to fighting climate change, but also to meet sustainable development goals by 2030. And we are not on track on this. 75% of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by 100 companies worldwide. These last words are not mine, but those of Antonio Gutierrez, the UN General Secretary. How many speeches on global warming, on climate change have we listened to without paying the necessary attention, without taking personal action? We have only nine years left. Only nine years to do so much. The time for a big reset has come. And COVID-19 has forced CEOs to enter into this decade of change, whether they like it or not. We can't afford to continue playing a game in which almost everybody waits for someone else to make the first move. Of course, everyone has a role to play, but the biggest effort must come from companies. But don't get me wrong. Believe me, I know what it takes to be a CEO nowadays. And for sure, it is more difficult than ever. We face unprecedented times dealing with five simultaneous challenges. Global economic crisis. Organizational and managerial transformation. Technology, data and digital revolution. People and skills crisis. And last but not least, sustainability transformation. Talking to CEOs and executive boards, I often hear that sustainability will be the last priority they will tackle from that list. They always highlight the same three objections. And these three C-suite excuses are captured in these three C-words: costly, complex, concealed. Before, a CEO's role used to be to demonstrate experience and knowledge, anticipate, predict and plan months or even years in advance. Today, C-suite executives have to become comfortable with less control, dealing with uncertainty and ignorance, but still remaining an inspirational trusted leader while working with remote teams. What was valid yesterday is no longer applicable in today's world. In 2013, a serious health problem shuttled my life and my plans. For 15 years, I had worked for international groups, living on three different continents and traveling in more than 60 countries, becoming a well-established executive in charge of digital transformation. Suddenly, I no longer had any control over anything. The life I had worked so hard to create was gone. Considering my future looked uncertain, I decided to realize my dream: a two-year trip around the world with my family, traveling overland through four continents. It turned out to be the best decision I ever made, as I learned a life-changing lesson. Why am I telling you this? When facing unprecedented times, you have three options. You can run away from the problem. This is a symptomatic survival reaction triggered by our reptilian brain in response to a threat. You can keep going exactly as before, continuing the fight to put a square peg in a round hole until finally giving up or dying of exhaustion. Or you can accept that change, become the new norm. You develop your ability to adapt, to acquire new skills, and to leverage every new experience. But this process to develop a lifelong learning approach is not simple. It requires a lot of humility, of letting go, of resilience, and the willingness to accept help. Personally, I always choose the third option. During this world tour, and especially in Africa, I found out about three fundamental things: Climate change became a reality only when I face it physically, emotionally, personally, through tremendous heat waves, tropical storms, or getting difficulties to access water. Living in developed countries, climate change remains a sort of fiction, something we see only on TV or in movies. Jougat innovation and the circular economy were the second thing I learned the most during that trip. I've been so impressed by the way African leaders leverage the few resources they have to make a strong impact. How they ingeniously recycle and repurpose things. How they are focusing on being a solution maker rather than a problem highlighter. As an example, I invite you to Google the M-Pizza Kenyan solution, which blew my mind at that time. We, as a leader from developed countries, we have a lot to learn from the experiences of this continent. The challenges we face now have been their challenges for so long. Last but not least, I learned that sustainability goes along with much more inclusivity. The challenge is not about winners and losers. The economies of developed countries cannot become greener if it is at the expense of developing countries. Today, all C-suite players have to deal with this big reset and implement a big shift, which requires them to think differently, to think out of the box. It is time for action. It is time to unleash the power of impact hacking in every company. To come back to the 3 C excuses, my challenge is to demonstrate by giving you a concrete example, highlighting the principle of impact hacking that the 3 Cs can be overcome by 3 I's. Costly can be turned into inexpensive. Complexity can be overcome by iteration. Conceal long-term benefits can be turned into highly visible immediate impact. The example chosen, Colalife, demonstrate the mindset and the skills we have to develop to come up with new solutions. Colalife is an independent British NGO, founded in 2008, tackling the problem of the global child killer, diarrhea. Somewhere in the world, one child dies from diarrhea every minute. This is despite the fact that a simple, cheap, globally recommended life-saving treatment has been available for 30 years. In 2015, Colalife launched Operational Trial Zambia. Local systems were falling to making life-saving healthcare products accessible in remote regions. To bypass these deep-rooted bottlenecks for medicine delivery, Colalife built a hack, which resulted in a massive growth in the uptake of this treatment in this remote area, from less than 1% to 53% within 3 years. How did they manage to obtain such results in just 3 years and with no investment? They started with the observation that Coca-Cola seems to be available everywhere in developing countries, yet life-saving medicines did not. For sure, Colalife did not consider Coca-Cola for the organic properties of the product. But the nonprofit analyzed how fast-moving consumer goods, like Coca-Cola, get into the hands of people living in remote areas of sub-Saharan Africa. This analysis purged the idea of emulating Coca-Cola's value chain to improve access to diarrhea treatment, the second biggest infectious killer of children under 5 in the region. Instead of building their own supply chain infrastructure, which would have taken years and millions of dollars, they leveraged the ecosystem of Coca-Cola, mobilizing world sellers in the district towns and training existing rural micro-retailers. To find out the best way to do it, they've run several iterations in the different areas, improving the process each time thanks to the data collected on all aspects. The outcome and impact of these experiences were measurable and could be leveraged and scale, replicating this model in other countries. Initially, the problem faced by Colalife was complex, definitely costly, if the accepted solution of creating a dedicated logistic infrastructure had been adopted. And this accepted route would have concealed any benefit for the long time that implementation would have taken. During the last years, I went through the process of finding out how to do it differently, how I could leverage what I learned when living or traveling in these 60 countries for the last 20 years, building a global network, chatting with international experts and CEOs. As a result of all of this, in March 2020, I felt I had to humbly do something about it. I founded WeImpact.World to support the sustainable transformation of companies unleashing my vision of impact hacking. Impact hacking is for me not only inspired by growth hacking, but also involves green and sharing economy, behavioral and cognitive science, no-code data and automation, marketing and innovation, while harnessing the benefits of Scrum methodology and lean management. Impact hacking aims, in a smart and more affordable way, to scale sustainability on the whole value chain of a company to transform any business in a more sustainable, inclusive and fair model, while engaging peers, providers, partners and the entire team of the organization. The old world business patterns, based on top-to-bottom organizational models, self-centered brands, abundant resources and a divided world, are over. To reach sustainable developments, we have to build a more sustainable capitalism, stop seeing ecology and economy as opposing forces, and reduce the gap between developed and developing countries in accessing greener solutions. Becoming an impact hacker, a clever, altruistic, benevolent and innovative business leader, should become the new norm. It is first, and foremost, a matter of decision. Knowing this is where growth opportunities are, as this is what clients and teams expect from any responsible CEOs. I truly believe Ben Horowitz is right when he says: "What you do is who you are." Having limited resources should be seen as a trigger to be turned into an opportunity, to come up with non-obvious heuristic benefitting from non-intuitive ways, to pursue an unconventional solution to a systemic problem. ColorLife example demonstrates that the three objections: costly, complexity, and concealed cannot justify the inaction of any companies in regards to sustainability, when we know that inexpensive, iterative, and immediate impact solutions exist. The cost of inactions has been estimated at 1.5 trillion US dollars. Choosing inaction is equivalent to committing a company to obsolescence, because those who do not move forward, move backward. We are running out of time. We can't afford to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we should benefit from any peers' experience or innovation to move forward and to improve faster. We should definitely crack the change, playing more collaboratively, cross-industry, cross-continent, to increase our global impact and speed up this lifetime transformation for the benefits of all. But don't get me wrong, I do not pretend that impact hacking is a miracle solution, which will on its own change the world, save our planet, and impact tomorrow on climate change. But impact definition is when planet, people, profits meet. To get unexpected results, we have to use unusual methods to do what we have never done before while working with unexpected people and leveraging unexpected knowledge. Winston Churchill used to say, "If you don't take change by the hand, it will take you by the throat." Every transformation starts with the first action. At the value is in everything we don't know.