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I was bemused last week by a light-hearted post on LinkedIn listing the rights of passage of junior Sustainability professionals – eg “Sending out 700 supplier questionnaires and getting 7 back.” The post was obviously dripping in irony, but the reality is far too many Sustainability professionals get locked into that ‘grind it out’ mindset.

Now, maybe it’s because I’m as lazy as sheugh water* as my dear mother would have said, but I’ve always felt that we as a profession waste far too much effort on largely pointless activities. Spending your time chasing 693 questionnaires from suppliers regardless of their significance is the epitome of box-ticking over change-making.

It’s 10 years since I wrote Accelerating Sustainability Using the 80:20 Rule, but I refer back to it a lot. The 80:20 Rule says that, in general, 20% of your input efforts deliver 80% of the results and vice-versa. If you prioritise the ‘productive’ 20%, you’ll deliver change – if you get bogged down in the other 80%, ie large effort for small returns, you’ll be ticking boxes at best.

So to take the hypothetical example above, one set of supplier questionnaires can bog down dozens of Sustainability professionals up and down the value chain as they spend all their time translating the same information in different formats. If you treat all suppliers equally, the whole system gets bogged down in green tape, time everybody could spend actually improving Sustainability performance.

If you’re, say, a construction company, I’ll tell you now that your office stationery supplies will be insignificant compared to steel or cement manufacture. Why? The 80:20 rule often applies here too – a small number of suppliers will make up the bulk of your Scope 3 emissions. So use a screening indicator of some kind (eg generic ‘spend’ carbon data) to identify the big contributors and spend your time there. Better still, write sustainability requirements into your next tenders for those high carbon/high impact suppliers so information flows smoothly.

So, think 80:20 – a bit of positive laziness would unlock a lot of progress!

* sheugh – pronounced ‘shuck’ – is Northern Irish for a muddy ditch