Setting Environmental and Sustainability Strategy Goals that Stay Relevant

(Photo Credit: Toyota UK, Flickr Creative Commons)

Ryan McMullan wants to spare sustainability professionals from the pain that can occur when setting strategy goals. Having spent 13 years at Toyota, most recently as environmental and safety manager, he shared advice at the Environmental Leader & Energy Manager Conference this week.

During the track “Goal Setting in Environmental and Sustainability Strategy,” McMullan described being eager to get going when he started. His Toyota Production System instructor taught him that everything would go better when he spent time building consensus.

McMullan talked about the Japanese goal deployment and management approach hoshin kanri.

“The key thing that makes it different from a lot of other approaches is this cascading effect where you’re reinterpreting the goals at different parts of the business at different levels of detail,” he said. This way it stays relevant across the company. He added that he spent time thinking about adapting this proven method to environmental goals.

Now a strategic sustainability consultant in the LA area, McMullan realized at Toyota there are three different categories to describe what is being measured:

• Targets are well quantified and within the control of a group that is responsible for them. Targets determine whether your goals are successful.
• Metrics are also well quantified and controllable, but they’re not part of a target. They are important for their explanatory power. “To take an example from waste, we shifted our waste goals to focus on the waste we’re not making,” McMullan said, describing the process at Toyota. “We had a goal around ‘waste avoidance,’ but you still want to track the recycling rate and pounds to landfill.”
• Indicators are outside of our control. “To take the waste example, it might be the tipping rate of the landfill,” McMullan said. “It’s important for us to know that, it has explanatory power, but we can’t control it.” You don’t want to set a target around it, but knowing the data can help explain trends and changes.

These goal setting and deployment approaches aren’t high-tech developments, McMullan pointed out, describing them as social technology.

“It’s about having a method of meeting with people, listening, being willing to change your goals when you learn more about what the different corners of the company do and need,” he said. “It’s not whiz-bang, it’s not sexy, but it works.”