Tima and I began our conversation by reflecting on whether Corporate Social Responsibility has run its course.  Tima had a two-part answer.  First, she said, it’s clear that CSR has been polarized.  We are dealing with Greenwashing, Woke and AntiWoke-ism, and a whole slate of related criticisms about how CSR has become politicized.  But second, it’s not entirely clear whether CSR has run its course.    Tima believes that CSR is still a valuable framework, although the core of the opportunities are now often expressed as the pursuit of Sustainability.

I asked Tima about the difference between CSR and Sustainability.  She described how the two ways of thinking have different origins.   CSR was birthed, she said, at the Harvard Business School among a group of academic that saw the purpose of business in society as important.  This heritage is profiled in an article that Tima wrote in the Academy of Management Annals for which a link is on the Resources list that is tied to our conversation.   The core approach of this group was in ethics.    In contrast, the field of Sustainability was birthed in 1987 from work at the United Nation that was grounded in analytics and descriptive approaches rather than primarily in ethics (although the ethical issues retain their relevance).

We talked about what Sustainability means particularly in context of the article that Tima and I wrote with several co-authors (also available through the Resources list).   Sustainability, she said, is about intra- and inter-generational equity.  It’s about not using up all the resources that are available today in ways that create strain on future generations.

I asked Tima about our online debate with Professor Nicolai Foss (see the Resources page for a link), who suggested that poverty alleviation, which continues to be a compelling social aim, requires capitalist processes that may have an impact on the environment.   Tima said Nicolai is right that we are wealthier on average because of the advances of capitalism, but she finds the logic incomplete because wealth distribution is worse than it has ever been.  She pointed to the ecological fallacy that we wrote about in our joint article, which arises from the argument that each actor is better off when the average rises.   What is needed is a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between business activity and society’s aims.

That point took us down a path of discussing where we go from here.   Tima has been working on a new initiative called Innovation North (at www.innovationnorth.ca) in which she and colleagues have been thinking about time – temporality – and systems lenses on sustainable development.    I asked here whether her arguments about time were primarily that we should think longer-term, or that we should think about punctuated, fast changes as opportunities for systems innovation.   Her response was that we need to do both.  We need to think about the time-scale of renewal of renewable resources such as trees and the consequences of this slowness for the carbon impact of business on the planet.  I had the feeling that we could have talked about these issues for hours!   A link to Tima’s recent article on the facets of time and the implications for Sustainability is also on the Resources page.

We then turned to a discussion of the relationships between time and systems change.   Innovation North, Tima’s new initiative, is oriented around the question, What if we were to reimagine system sustainability?   She provided the example of insurance companies, which are on the frontier of the climate crisis.  We need more resilient buildings, but how do we get there without using more greenfield materials?   A company with which Tima is working is studying how insurance companies can promote drying in place.    Instead of rebuilding, rapid drying preserves materials, allows people quicker access to their homes, and is less expensive.   Innovations such as this are examples of system change that works.

Tima described three points of contact between the constructs of time and sustainability.  First, we need to move from short-term thinking to both short- and long-term thinking.  Second, we need to move from thinking globally to both global and local thinking.  Third, we need to move from seeking scale to seeking both scale and local impact.  There are paradoxes to overcome, such as in the relationships between connectivity and uncertainty.   Uncertainty makes it harder to think long term.   We can overcome this by reflecting on corporate purpose, which sets our line of sight further into the future.   Instead of thinking only incrementally about how to survive the challenges that we come upon as the result of the climate crisis today, we also need to envision the future that we want to create, and to start to develop the capabilities to get there.  That’s systems thinking.  Tima emphasized nature-based solutions as a critical opportunity.  These stand in contrast to the engineering-based solutions that we tend to emphasize in our culture.   Trees can take carbon out of the air more efficiently than augmented concrete, for example.  

I asked Tima about the interaction between the private sector and the public sector in accomplishing these goals, and she said something that I found truly remarkable:   We need to reinvest in government to work better with the private sector.   Instead of thinking of government as setting guardrails – as regulating – we need to think of government as a long-term partner in accomplishments across sectors.   There’s a lot more to consider here for sure.

Tima got the last word when I asked her what makes her optimistic about the future.  She said that, while it’s easy to become overwhelmed, she becomes optimistic when she thinks about what we can do as individuals.   Tima and Anita both believe that businesses and business schools can make a difference as we steer toward a sustainable future.   We need to work hard, though, to steer toward the future we want.