What we do
Future Focused Leadership helps clients with their urgent needs of compliance with various ESG standards and strong reporting, while developing long-term solutions and systems. Without a supportive and inclusive organisational culture, your investments in ESG and sustainability improvements will have limited benefits. Our work includes embedding sustainability in organisations across all business units and functions. We facilitate this process by using our ESG, reporting, skills development, and change management expertise. Our interventions will solve your immediate sustainability challenges and triggering culture change in the business. A good start are our Masterclasses and Coaching sessions to support executives or Materiality Assessments to prioritise topics and projects.
Masterclasses & Coaching
Our masterclasses and coaching sessions support leaders to be on top of their sustainability game. Masterclasses aim to learn about leading the journey, dealing with resistance and discover the positives of sustainability. Content is tailor-made to be relevant for the sector and role of participants. Our classes will be a good start towards a more sustainable and resilient business. Coaching can be for teams or individuals. The sessions guide new thinking, processes and decision making in this complex and for many novel context.
Materiality Assessments
A Materiality Assessment supports your organisation to prioritise sustainability topics and it lays the foundation for a successful strategy. Our team leads these assessments which are made compulsory in certain jurisdictions and ESG reporting frameworks. A Materiality Assessment requires you to identify, assess and report on sustainability risks that significantly impact on your (financial) performance. The assessment could include how the business is impacting on people and planet. The outcome is critical for future planning and reporting.
Advisory & Reporting
Our broad team of experts cover a large spectrum of topics that are relevant for effective planning, implementation and corporate reporting. This includes advice on social and environmental risks or opportunities, M&E, reporting frameworks and organisational change options.
We advise organisation on content creation for reports and how to collect and capture relevant data. Our writers co-develop reports while training internal staff in the complexities of frameworks such as IFRS S1 and S2, GRI, ESRS, and CDP.
Embedding Sustainability
Our framework for embedding sustainability is thorough and efficient, yet unlikely to be a “quick fix.” It is a journey compromising a range of complementary steps to support organisational change, which enables your organisation to benefit fully from the investments made in sustainability. The FFL framework is based on six steps, from organisational scanning to reporting the learnings of the process. The reward is achieving a culture of sustainability.
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Future Focus Scan
The Future Focus Scan is the first step towards embedding sustainability. Whereas a Materiality Assessment helps you to prioritise what topics are most urgent to address, the Future Focus Scan is an add-on and a deep dive into the organisational readiness to address sustainability. Our experts assess the existing business culture, the resistance to change and identify the positive aspects in your organisation which can support the sustainability journey’s success. The outcome includes a set of expectations, organisational risks and opportunities.
The Future Focus Scan includes a questionnaire, interviews and internal workshops. Independency and confidentiality are critical in this process and therefore best managed by external experts.
In addition, we review policies, procedures and relevant documents. This is to understand how sustainability ambitions could be better supported in the future, by changing certain text or adjusting the way things are done. For example, job descriptions or KPIs need to be revised or a relook at selection criteria for new employees.
Transformation Strategy
The aim of a Transformation Strategy is to identify and articulate the key shifts that will enable your organisation to reach future-proofed resiliency. The expectations, risks and opportunities identified during the Scan will inform this strategy. Scenario planning and facilitating quality thinking through executive coaching are key elements that will support the rollout of a fresh and future-focused organisational vision.
Our role is to advise and support leadership to design the organisational change strategy and its alignment with the over-all sustainability strategy and ESG reporting requirements.
Transformation Plan
During the planning phase, activities and timelines are agreed. Cross-functional engagement is critical to have buy-in from all business units. Your plan needs to include two elements; the people’s plan and the policies, procedures and documentation revision plan. Planning comprises the allocation of role and responsibilities of all business units, departments and branches included in the scope.
Partnership building can be highly beneficial to organisations in the planning phase, and FFL can leverage its extended network in the sustainability space to help find the right partners where needed.
Implementation
Change processes in complex adaptive systems are continuous and iterative. During the implementation phase, our experts draw on organisational change technologies which enables change to be navigated successfully and with due impact. Interventions include coaching teams and leaders in the organisation to trigger new thinking in line with your transformation strategy, skills development, and working explicitly with change processes across your organisation to implement necessary changes on all levels. Relevant sustainability focus areas for your business are used as scenarios to learn from which makes the experience more real and understandable.
Parallel to the activities with staff members, FFL will work with your teams and revise selected policies, procedures and documents. These need to be in line with standard requirements and expectations of stakeholders. The revisions will support the work we do on culture change and embedding sustainability.
Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning
The organisational transformation process needs a monitoring system to measure progress towards achieving targets. Our experts help to identify meaningful indicators and efficient data collection and capturing. We build internal capacity to maintain this system in the future.
The purpose of evaluation is to understand progress, identify challenges, and celebrate and amplify success, which FFL consultants facilitate. The data and learnings from this evaluation feed into various types of reporting such as internal feedback, board of directors reports, ESG reports, annual report, etc.
Reporting
The learnings from the evaluation process are reported to various internal and external stakeholders. Importantly, the learnings are inputs towards an annual revision of the Transformation Plan.
Our reporting team supports you in telling the story. Internal reports inform employees of the work done and achievements. These reports are motivational and celebrate successes achieved during the reporting period. Reports to the Board of Directors are typically more quantitative.
Externally, the process followed, the data and learnings are reported according to ESG standards and requirements. The organisational change progress could be a chapter in your annual and integrated report. The FFL role is to transfer reporting skills to your team. Alternatively, our reporting experts take over these responsibilities completely.
Future Focus Scan
The Future Focus Scan is the first step towards embedding sustainability. Whereas a Materiality Assessment helps you to prioritise what topics are most urgent to address, the Future Focus Scan is an add-on and a deep dive into the organisational readiness to address sustainability. Our experts assess the existing business culture, the resistance to change and identify the positive aspects in your organisation which can support the sustainability journey’s success. The outcome includes a set of expectations, organisational risks and opportunities.
The Future Focus Scan includes a questionnaire, interviews and internal workshops. Independency and confidentiality are critical in this process and therefore best managed by external experts.
In addition, we review policies, procedures and relevant documents. This is to understand how sustainability ambitions could be better supported in the future, by changing certain text or adjusting the way things are done. For example, job descriptions or KPIs need to be revised or a relook at selection criteria for new employees.
Transformation Strategy
The aim of a Transformation Strategy is to identify and articulate the key shifts that will enable your organisation to reach future-proofed resiliency. The expectations, risks and opportunities identified during the Scan will inform this strategy. Scenario planning and facilitating quality thinking through executive coaching are key elements that will support the rollout of a fresh and future-focused organisational vision.
Our role is to advise and support leadership to design the organisational change strategy and its alignment with the over-all sustainability strategy and ESG reporting requirements.
Transformation Plan
During the planning phase, activities and timelines are agreed. Cross-functional engagement is critical to have buy-in from all business units. Your plan needs to include two elements; the people’s plan and the policies, procedures and documentation revision plan. Planning comprises the allocation of role and responsibilities of all business units, departments and branches included in the scope.
Partnership building can be highly beneficial to organisations in the planning phase, and FFL can leverage its extended network in the sustainability space to help find the right partners where needed.
Implementation
Change processes in complex adaptive systems are continuous and iterative. During the implementation phase, our experts draw on organisational change technologies which enables change to be navigated successfully and with due impact. Interventions include coaching teams and leaders in the organisation to trigger new thinking in line with your transformation strategy, skills development, and working explicitly with change processes across your organisation to implement necessary changes on all levels. Relevant sustainability focus areas for your business are used as scenarios to learn from which makes the experience more real and understandable.
Parallel to the activities with staff members, FFL will work with your teams and revise selected policies, procedures and documents. These need to be in line with standard requirements and expectations of stakeholders. The revisions will support the work we do on culture change and embedding sustainability.
Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning
The organisational transformation process needs a monitoring system to measure progress towards achieving targets. Our experts help to identify meaningful indicators and efficient data collection and capturing. We build internal capacity to maintain this system in the future.
The purpose of evaluation is to understand progress, identify challenges, and celebrate and amplify success, which FFL consultants facilitate. The data and learnings from this evaluation feed into various types of reporting such as internal feedback, board of directors reports, ESG reports, annual report, etc.
Reporting
The learnings from the evaluation process are reported to various internal and external stakeholders. Importantly, the learnings are inputs towards an annual revision of the Transformation Plan.
Our reporting team supports you in telling the story. Internal reports inform employees of the work done and achievements. These reports are motivational and celebrate successes achieved during the reporting period. Reports to the Board of Directors are typically more quantitative.
Externally, the process followed, the data and learnings are reported according to ESG standards and requirements. The organisational change progress could be a chapter in your annual and integrated report. The FFL role is to transfer reporting skills to your team. Alternatively, our reporting experts take over these responsibilities completely.
We’re keenly aware that every organisation is unique and requires a tailor-made approach. Together we decide what steps need to be taken for your organisation and where in the process you are today. Contact us for a free consultation call.
Who we work with
Our services are relevant to any sector or type of organisation. We focus on regional and international organisations working in Africa and Europe, but always open to discuss projects elsewhere. Our combined expertise covers the following sectors: agriculture, food & beverage, hospitality, retail, finance, construction, and mining.
Financial Institutions
Increasingly, access to finance is conditional upon sustainable behaviour of your organisation. In reality, lenders and investors have limited capacity to assess and improve the client’s sustainability performance. To fill this gap, we collaborate with financial institutions that are concerned about greenwashing or non-compliance with standards. Based on the our Materiality Assessments and Future Focus Scans, we support these clients towards embedding sustainability across all business units and functions, thereby improving access to green, climate or other sustainability funds.