… if you’ve squeezed every efficiency out of a system, but you still aren’t where you want to be, then you need to change the system!

Secret No 3 of The Three Secrets of Green Business is about making a series of huge leaps to align your systems and processes towards sustainability while making continual incremental improvements in between. The latter will only take you so far before you have to make another huge leap.

The key is in making sure each leap will lead to the goal and not up a cul-de-sac. I use ‘backcasting‘ with clients to make sure all leaps forward take you in the right direction.

Backcasting will help you decide what to do. Another big strategic question is what are we not going to do? The best organisations kill off products, services and processes which are holding them back. That takes real guts.