Giles Hutchins – Head of Sustainability Solutions

Last month Defra launched a discussion paper that will lead to the first Natural Environment white paper in 20 years. The paper highlights how our natural assets are the natural foundation on which our economy is built, recognising their true value, as they create thousands of jobs and generating billions of pounds and helping us to stay healthy - all at no cost.


But there is another side of our natural assets that we often don't consider - they are a blueprint for the future of business.

We are shifting from growth based on consumption to growth based on knowledge. The pace of change, however, is extremely fast. To succeed we must be agile, creative, alert, spontaneous and responsive – operating in completely new ways.

The rule book for managing organisational change needs to be rewritten, as change needs to be dynamic and evolutionary. It needs to be based more on the way species and ecosystems adapt to change in the natural world around us than the incomplete rules of socio-economics. We are witnessing a merging of social, economic and environmental issues, opportunities and ways of addressing change.

Our organisations could be likened to dynamically adapting living organisms. They are thriving within in an ever-changing business and socio-economic set of ecosystems, all interdependent and operating within global social, environmental and economic markets.

Like living systems thriving in such an environment, to survive our organisations need to be able to learn from the changing world within and around them. To do this, the structured and siloed nature of today’s centralised, top-down, hierarchical monolithic organisations needs to be broken down as it stifles learning. The result will be bottom-up, decentralised, interdependent, multifunctional, self-organising units.

And there is still more we could learn from nature - where waste is food, consumption is kept to a minimum, value is maximised and relationships within the ecosystem provide synergy.

Tomorrow’s company is a business that is inspired by nature.

Read more about: Our People and Change capability
                             Our sustainability solutions