Net Zero is not a goal — it's a measure

On the need for design to sketch out what a sustainable future should look like — counterweighting the popular tendency to only focus on what it shouldn’t.

Key take-outs:

Although the trend for companies to pledge Net Zero is incredibly important, it isn’t enough to bring about the organisational transformations we hope for. As a driver for change, it is flawed. It doesn’t specify a desired state, a goal or a vision. This creates a couple of problems:

• It only focuses on decreasing the problem state
• It cannot measure progress towards the desired state
• The metric has become the goal, which invites loophole-seeking behaviour and reductionism

Net Zero — the popular format for climate ambition

“Net Zero, Net Zero, what does that mean? Should I plant a tree for every customer I serve?”

A comment overheard by a colleague of mine when she was working with a customer-facing team at a mobility provider. This is not the first time my Livework studio colleagues and I have heard remarks like that. We worked with digital teams, innovation departments and customer experience staff who don’t understand their role in reaching this goal and have difficulty imagining the future world they should be contributing to achieve. 

As someone who cares about the planet and all its inhabitants, I’m thrilled that climate change awareness and policies are starting to have an effect. Companies and governments of all stripes are pledging to do their part in a shared effort to take better care of our planet. The growing climate ambition has a dominant focus: “Net Zero emissions”. In the latest counts, the Net Zero pledges cover over 60% of global emissions(1), with target dates typically tied to the goals in the Paris agreement.

Net Zero is, first and foremost, a scientific concept — one of the many that can be used to think about planetary health. But over the last couple of years, it has moved to centre stage in the sustainability discourse and has become synonymous with climate ambition and sustainability. 

That centre-stage attention translates to how Net Zero is being used in organisations. For people across the globe, it is now the one frame of reference through which they understand and structure their business’s transition to being sustainable(2). As a consultant in service design and organisational change, I doubt whether Net Zero is suitable for that. This article elaborates on some of the shortcomings of Net Zero as a driver for change. 

Problem vs Solution space

“You can never improve anything by trying to reduce something”,

said Russell Ackoff (1919-2009), a pioneer in the field of operations research, systems thinking and management science. In one of his most quoted speeches(3), he explains that getting rid of the things you do not want, however rigorous the effort, doesn’t necessarily get you to a state you do want. Net Zero makes exactly that mistake. It focuses all attention on getting rid of carbon emissions — either by reducing or by capturing it. Unfortunately, doing so doesn’t all of a sudden get us organisations/value chains/industries that harmoniously combine and connect the needs and strengths of “people, planet and profit”.

In design, we talk about the difference between the problem and the solution space. A good designer starts with deeply understanding the problem space, then takes that understanding and starts imagining, creating and testing a future where that problem doesn’t exist. Upon implementation, success is measured not only by measuring the diminishing of the problem state but, importantly also, by measuring if the solution envisioned is coming to be (the desired state).

Net Zero skips the imagination and creation of the solution space entirely and goes straight to measuring the reduction of the problem state. The problem with neglecting to do that work is that we are optimising the (linear) status quo with just one extra KPI instead of truly transforming our organisations and bigger ecosystem altogether.

A measure for a goal

Net Zero seems to be a "Key Performance Indicator" (KPI) rather than a goal. 

A little intro to the differences between goals, measures and KPIs (skip this paragraph if you are well-versed in performance management) — Goals are the overarching objectives or desired outcomes you have for your business. They are usually intangible, like: "providing an excellent customer experience" or "providing high-quality products". Goals are seldom (if ever) measurable by just one metric, as these are just flawed proxies for what it is really about. That is why it is usually wise to choose more than one metric as KPI (a KPI is a strategically selected metric accompanied by a target value and a timeframe for achieving this target). And it is even better to choose different kinds of metrics for KPIs (e.g. complementing quantitative with qualitative and attitudinal with behavioural insight). 

Back to Net Zero — Net Zero is defined as: “the net product of emitted greenhouse gases minus the greenhouse gases removed from the atmosphere” and, therefore, is a metric with a target state. Combined with a timeframe (e.g. Net Zero by 2040), it is definitely a KPI, not a goal. Many companies fail to link this KPI to a bigger goal. That is an old mistake, widely known as “Goodhart’s law”, which tells us that ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’. In short, the problem with confusing the two is that it invites loophole-seeking behaviour (e.g. outsourcing high-emission work to partners abroad), short-term action (e.g. temporary carbon offsetting solutions) and over-reductionism (e.g. forgetting about the other eight planetary boundaries like loss of biodiversity or chemical pollution(4)).

The need for a Northstar to guide teams across organisations

While Net Zero has done much to mobilise corporates and governments for planetary health, it is not well suited to drive organisational change. 

Net Zero lacks imagination, vision, an idea of what the future should look like, or at least a clear picture of its qualities, making it incredibly hard for people to understand how they can contribute to transforming their organisation to that future state. This is especially true for teams in those parts of the organisation whose work does not directly impact the operation’s carbon emission (think digital, sales, customer service, HR etc.). 

The solution to this problem is to provide people with a tangible vision they CAN start acting on. My Livework colleagues and I call this a Northstar. It is a tool that describes the qualities of a desired future and visualises what it could look like. It inspires, gives direction and invites people to look at what they are doing through the lens of this desired state. 

We do this for a wide range of challenges, and it works. We, for example, imagine and set a Northstar vision for what the future customer experience should look like. We make sure to accompany it with a structured overview of everything the company does, seen through the eyes of the customer. We highlight areas where we expect change moving to the future state (we call it a customer experience or service architecture). This provides a single shared view on what we want the future to look like — giving everyone a common language and a single approach to label, discuss, report about and improve the customer experience across the organisation.

Organisations also need a “single shared view” of what their sustainable future looks like.

Conclusion: Let’s go beyond Net Zero — onto transformation

Obviously, it is great, important and hopeful that organisations across the globe are pledging Net Zero. It should, and I believe it will change our businesses and industries. But Net Zero without a bigger sustainable purpose isn’t enough. 

I think of Net Zero as just the beginning of a larger transformational journey. A journey that starts with understanding and decreasing the problem space but goes beyond — aiming for a future that truly transforms the status quo. That needs more than one single metric to focus on. It needs imagining and painting a better future. A bright vision that mobilises teams across the organisation and helps them understand what actions they can take. Something tangible, exciting and guiding — a shared Northstar.

References

1. Black, R. et al. Taking Stock: A Global Assessment of Net Zero Targets (ECIU and Oxford Net Zero, 2021).
2. Fankhauser, S., Smith, S. M., Allen, M., Axelsson, K., Hale, T., Hepburn, C., Kendall, J. M., Khosla, R., Lezaun, J., Mitchell-Larson, E., Obersteiner, M., Rajamani, L., Rickaby, R., Seddon, N., & Wetzer, T. (2021, December 20). The meaning of Net Zero and how to get it right. Nature News.
3. YouTube. If Russ Ackoff had given a TED talk…
4. Stockholm Resilience Centre. The nine planetary boundaries.