The real world doesn’t have easy answers
By Joye
Ever since I was a kid, my dream was to help people and the environment. I’ve been working in the nonprofit/social sector for several years now and feel fortunate that I have been able to help people in my work. However, all the work I’ve been doing thus far has been to address issues that are a microcosm of city, state, national, or local issues. What happens when you are tasked with solving a problem that affects thousands of people across a large region of an entire country?
Our consulting problem was to create a business plan to help the economy of Mpumalanga Province transition from a coal-based economy to a renewable energy one, create green jobs for the unskilled coalworkers who worked in the coal industry, and improve the environmental conditions in the region that the coal industry created. Talk about a large-scale problem!
In my Corporate Sustainability Strategy class that I took this past fall (and which I highly recommend), we learned about the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Many of these goals are relevant to the problem we are working on for our client, such as: No Poverty; Good Health and Well-Being; Clean Water and Sanitation; Affordable and Clean Energy; Decent Work and Economic Growth; and Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure. In fact, all sixteen of the goals are relevant in some way. Sustainability would be at the core of how we approached this problem. However, I learned it is much easier to address a sustainability problem when it comes in the form of a case study or when you are looking at what a company should have done in hindsight than you come face to face with it in the present and have a deadline in which to come up with a practical solution. Nothing was cut and dry, but rather a tangled web of messy problems, and there was no easy answer. In addition, the sustainability plans we looked at in class were mostly for individual companies. This plan was for a business foundation to use to drive growth for an entire province! However, the end goals were still much the same: the main difference was that we were focusing on sustainability for an entire region, as opposed to sustainability for a specific company. Regions consist of many moving parts, from the people to the infrastructure to the energy source; but so do large corporations. Perhaps there were more similarities than differences. So we approached the problem in a similar fashion.
As we worked on our business plan, we had to prioritize some of the goals over other.
We had to make compromises, ones that I would not make in an ideal situation. For example, was creating work and economic growth for the coal miners more important than reducing pollution? Was it simply not possible to create a plan that addressed every single problem?
We used our conversations with our client to aid us in prioritizing.
As we wait to see our client’s reaction to our plan, my mind is filled with thoughts of the people who will be affected by our plan: the coal miners of Mpumalanga Province. I am glad we are going to gain on-the-ground experience in South Africa, but it is doubtful that we will have the opportunity to visit Mpumalanga Province to meet the coalminers face to face and see the conditions that they are living and working in. I wish we could. I think having a deeper understanding of how your recommendations affect people is what makes you a better consultant. Learning what the people in the community want and how they feel about a proposed plan is something that can’t be learned in a textbook or a course. However, talking with our client and spending time in South Africa will at least give us a better understanding and a glimpse into the lives of the people we are trying to help. Hopefully our recommendations will give our client some ideas