10 years ago the United Nations launched the global Sustainable Development Goals - a basket of 17 thematic aspirations that, if pursed well, will help see our common world a generally better place to live, work, and play for all of us (as well as those animals and vegetations that we also share the planet with too).
And in the year that followed, I redesigned the impact reporting framework I'd started to create for my own enterprise around it.
The goals, and my engagement with them in this way, have subsequently drawn ongoing interest and recognition - most recently from a new global special interest group who asked me to be their inaugural guest speaker. Specifically, the group is made up of facilitators who are all part of the global International Association of Facilitators, and who were keen to explore and understand different perspectives in how facilitators (one of the capes I sometimes don) have thought about how the Goals relate to their practice and profession.
As always, when I have opportunity to share some of my own story in this way, I try to deliberately pause to reflect on it afterwards. This post is therefore what struck me as being of most interest and encouragement from my side of the screen (but if you manage to join this interest group - links below, you'll also get to read other's take-ways to add to these):
Good ideas take time
Most people who have a passing awareness with the Goals might know that they were launched in 2015.
But they weren't officially adopted until 2016, the first guidance about reporting against them wasn't published until the year after that - and it took 3 years to even get to their launch point after the concept for them was first agreed and started to be explored in 2012.
So whatever your aspirations might be to create change; design new systems; and see people adopt new ways of working - take some consolation that it took the UN 3 years to get to the point of being able to start to get some early adopters to commit to adopt these Goals after they first started to talk about the idea of them.
You don't (and shouldn't try to) do it all
One of the few regrets I have in this life, is that I didn't buy all of the mugs I once saw in a shop window, with the message "you can't save everyone" printed on them.
The Goals are no different - they were never designed or intended to be adopted in their entirety by any single organisation. That's why I've focussed on working to 5 of the 17 Goals: it means I can hopefully be more credible in how I'm presenting myself in how I'm contributing to them (i.e. I'm not making what many would see as incredulous claims about how my different business offers are helping to improve the biosphere for life under the sea).
Altruism isn't (and shouldn't be) the only motivation for all of us that adopt the Goals
As part of my reflections with the group, I'd mapped the Goals against the IAF's professional standards for facilitators. In doing so, it highlighted how taking a Goals-based approach to how you design and deliver your work very easily demonstrates how you're meeting and working to occupational and quality assurance standards - so there's also a clear direct business case for the Goals to be picked up, as well as an ethical/moral one.
My using the Goals helps others to contribute to their delivery
As my business model and ways of working are wrapped around the Goals, then the more I work, the more I'm delivering against them. Which means that whenever a client commissions me, I'll do more work = more delivery against the Goals.
I'm not aware that any client has ever engaged me solely on the basis of this, but it's an additional assurance I can offer them as to the wider benefits they get from using me as their consultant?
We don't usually think about how the Goals help us have better conversations about our role in local communities and the wider economy
I was struck by how most people hadn't fully appreciated the wider importance of small and micro businesses, and how we can encourage and support these by trying to prioritise them in our own respective supply chains - despite us all bemoaning when a large employer closes their site, and the wave of unemployment this causes with the knock on effects to other businesses, families being able to remain in the area to find new work, etc.
The Goals prompt us to think about who we're doing business with, and how this in turn helps build more resilient local communities in the context of seemingly increasingly unpredictable economies and extreme weather events.
We're all already doing more than we realise
Through breakout room reflections, people shared a range of practices that they already used that were aligned with the Goals, but who hadn't realised the importance or impact of, before correlating them in this way. This meant people were more encouraged to continue and build on these models of working. And, within the framework of the Goals, they'll now be able to more easily share with others, as encouragement and challenge for them to consider doing similar.
If you'd like to know more about the conversations which are exploring how the Global Goals are being supported through the work of facilitators, please check out the IAF's Special Interest Group at: https://www.iaf-members.org/site/chapters/sustainable-development-goals
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