I’ve been asked again this week how certain sustainable supply chain ideas fit into a particular procurement framework. As I’m bureaucracy-intolerant, I always have to bite my lip at such times as my honest answer would be to scream “Who cares?! That’s the wrong question! Sod the framework! How do we take sustainability to the next level? is the question!”

I recently interviewed Ramon Arratia of InterfaceFLOR and he made similar points:

“We continue to be impressed by what can be achieved when suppliers are encouraged to innovate and are rewarded for solving our problems instead of us trying to solve theirs. We have witnessed how much more the ‘inspire, measure, innovate’ approach can deliver than ‘code, questionnaire, audit’.”

“Rather than ticking boxes and checking certificates and all that crap, if you stop doing business with a high impact supplier and start using low impact suppliers, things will start to change very quickly.”

Whether we are talking with suppliers, employees or partners, the question should always be “how will you/we raise the bar?” That might mean ripping up existing systems if they only serve to choke off progress. Let’s unleash people’s latent creativity by challenging and inspiring them first – and sort out the dull bits second.