The Impact Files Podcast – Adam Garfunkel, Partner and Chief Impact Officer, Junxion Strategy
Ned: Welcome to The Impact Files podcast. And this week, Ally and I are delighted to be joined by Adam Garfunkel, a partner and chief impact officer at Junxion Strategy.
Ally: Welcome, Adam. Great to have you here.
Adam: Hello, Ally. Hello, Ned. Thank you. Great to be here.
Ned: Really nice to have you here, Adam. So let’s start with an introduction to yourself, to Junxion Strategy, and the work that you do.
Adam: Sure, of course, happy to. So, Adam Garfunkel is my name. I’ve been working in this field a very long time now, and I see myself, as your title suggests, as one of the two owners of the business, but also as the person in charge of impact at our business.
And what is our business? Junxion Strategy. We see ourselves as an impact consulting firm, so we’re offering advisory services. And the sorts of problems that we solve for people, I think you could say, are things like: how do we know what social and environmental issues we’re supposed to focus on? We’ve heard a lot about sustainability – what does that mean for us?
Or: either we have to, or we want to, produce a report about our progress on addressing those issues. We don’t really know what one of those looks like. Could you help consult with us on that, and maybe write it, maybe even design it for us?
Or: we think we’re doing lots of great things, but we’ve just got no idea how to share that story with people. So that’s a bit more of a communications piece.
Or something, relatively speaking, quite technical, like: how do we become a certified B Corporation? We know you guys are a B Corp, we know you do lots of that work. What does that look like? Could you help us with that?
But essentially, we’re helping companies build a strategy that delivers on their ambitions to be good for people and planet. And we think that helps businesses be more resilient. We think that’s good for their business in the long term, not just for people and planet. So that’s really our starting point in what we do.
Ned: And what sort of organisations do you work with?
Adam: Yeah, I think we punch above our weight. We’re only about 10-plus people, sort of million-plus revenue, and I’m really proud of the roster of clients we have. I personally, and the business, have a long relationship with the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative. We had a long relationship with Adidas, where I was essentially their lead outsourced sustainability consultant for 15 years. Intersport, the world’s largest sporting goods company in terms of retail outlets. Brompton Bicycle, the fantastic bike people.
Ned: Oh, cool.
Adam: The Guardian newspaper. Seasalt, the Cornish clothing company, who have done so much to pioneer some really great organic clothing. So we have, I think, a roster of clients that are generally progressive, keen to do more, but wrapped up in this mainstream system that we all have to operate in, and obviously struggling with the tensions that creates for businesses.
Ned: Now, that is triggering two probably quite large questions for me. One is, how did you come to be where you are? What’s your story? How did this happen? So let’s start there.
Adam: Yeah, okay. Well, I met a woman in a bar in Bruges in Belgium, Ned.
Ned: Excellent!
Adam: And it turned out that we liked each other, and I ended up, a year or so later, after ridiculous love letter correspondence, chasing her to Canada, where she was from.
And when I got there, I couldn’t work, I needed a job, and someone said Greenpeace was hiring door-to-door canvassers. So I turned up. I was rubbish at door-to-door canvassing to begin with. “Hi, my name’s Adam, would you like to become a member of Greenpeace?” You know, slam, slam, slam. But I got very good at it in time, and I spent a year doing that for Greenpeace, and then a year for a local wilderness preservation group.
And while I was there, I wrote a cheeky one-page business plan that suggested we could go canvassing in a different town, in another part of British Columbia, not in Vancouver, and that they’d be really up for it. Anyway, they funded me to do that. I went there for a month, and we canvassed the 40,000 or so households in the area of that small city. I recruited local people to do that and everything. And for 20 years after, there was a branch office of this wilderness conservation group in that town.
And I came back to the UK, and I started volunteering at Friends of the Earth. This would have been the early 90s. And I became a campaigner there, and I led Friends of the Earth’s lobbying on what became the Environment Act 1995.
Ned: Oh, wow.
Adam: And we got some better access-to-information provisions embedded in that Act. The work we did there in the industry and pollution team was all about accountability, transparency, performance, and that’s been a bit of a red thread. I took that into consulting. Okay: if companies ought to be accountable, they ought to be transparent about how they’re getting on, and they ought to do better, because we’re going to hell in a handcart if things carry on as they currently are.
I thought, well, I can do that not just as a campaigner. I went into a communications agency, and I did it there from a communications standpoint. And I did that for a while, and then I thought, well, actually, it’s a bit more than just putting out stories. It’s a bit deeper than that. I think it’s more about business strategy. And so I moved into consulting.
I worked for myself for about 10 years, and then I got the opportunity to join Junxion in 2013. Junxion had been going for a while already, and we’ve morphed it into an impact consulting firm. It’s not so different from what it was, but the focus, and the split between businesses and not-for-profits and all the work we do, is slightly different from what it was. And I lead most of our work with larger businesses.
Ned: And you’ve got some really interesting clients, and I guess the cheeky, nosy part of me is thinking, how do you know these clients? Where do these relationships come from?
Adam: Yeah, well, I should answer the question about relationships by saying that the Canadian woman I chased moved back here, and we’ve been married nearly 30 years now, and have kids together. So that worked out well.
Ally: I was hoping that was the end of the story.
Adam: That is the end of that story, of that relationship. And just to segue onto building relationships with clients: well, how do we do that? I suppose, like any agency or consulting business, you’re offering some insight into the world, and then you’re drawing people towards you. I think you have to be generous. I think you have to offer something. And generosity is one of our values at Junxion. You have to offer something out, and meet people where they are.
And then, ideally, you offer some insight, and you have a good process helping them solve their problems. And so it’s through sharing thought leadership and ideas, and, I suppose, networking and community – field building, you could call it.
When I started working on sustainability consulting and reporting, that didn’t really exist. There’s a whole field around reporting on sustainability now. When I started doing it, it was only environmental reporting. The field was very nascent in the mid to late 90s. It was called environmental reporting, because that’s all that people thought was necessary.
So I guess I’ve been in this a long time, and done some good work that people have valued. I definitely think it’s about relationships over transactions. It’s about meeting people where they are. It’s about offering something for nothing, not thinking everything needs to have a dollar sign next to it.
Ned: Indeed. And I suppose my point really was curiosity around the quality of the clients you’re working with, because you’re not purely doing interesting work, you’re doing interesting work with some significant organisations. And, yes, the process that you talk about is absolutely the right one, but I also sense that you’ve been doing it a long time, and I think you were probably first to market.
Adam: Yes, I think that’s true. I mean, we were pretty much the first agency – the previous agency, in the 90s – that I knew of offering what was called environmental reporting as a service back then. And we were the first consulting firm in the UK to offer services, in the mid-2010s, around B Corp certification. We’ve been doing that for 10 years. We already have a lot of experience with the new standards, which companies have only been able to submit on for a couple of months now.
So, yes, we have made the most of being pioneers, and of trying to find early movers, and pioneering, or at least progressive, companies to work with. We don’t work with the late majority, in that classic bell curve. We’re definitely working with pioneers and early adopters, I would say.
So, for example, Adidas. How did I meet Adidas? I went to a conference in Washington, DC, which was quite a stretch for us back in 2000, for the agency I was with then. It was the second-ever symposium, I think they called it, for what has become the standard for sustainability reporting, the Global Reporting Initiative, or GRI for short. So this was very, very early days in that world, and to your point, Ned, about being an early mover…
I think I glommed on to the other English people in the room, and I met a couple of nice English people who were together. They knew each other, I didn’t know them, and we hung out together. And, frankly, we got horrifically drunk that first evening of the conference, and we became matey. We’d been in the bar trenches with each other a little bit, and swapped war stories about the work we did, and so on.
Anyway, it turned out that this woman was the ex-wife of the guy who’d just been appointed Social and Environmental Affairs Director for Adidas, and they were still friends, and she said, “Dave, you should meet this guy.” So, I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s a new business strategy that will always pay off, but it worked in that instance.
Ally: The bar-based strategy seems to work well for you, personally.
Adam: It works personally, yeah. There’s definitely a theme there.
Ned: It’s a familiar one.
Adam: It feels very old school to be talking about drinks and business. I guess I am a little bit old school in some ways, but what’s more true to say is that we’ve always thought this matters. When I started working for Greenpeace, as I say, I was 21 or 22 or something. And I’d admired them, but I didn’t grow up in a family where that was all we talked about. I didn’t grow up on a farm. We did lots of countryside walks and so on, but I didn’t have any particular leaning in that direction, if I’m honest. It was an opportunity.
But within a month of working there, I remember thinking to myself, wow, there is so much that is going wrong for the planet, and there’s so much that needs to change. That was a real light bulb moment. I would have been 21, 22, and I just thought… I don’t know that I thought I’d found my thing, but I definitely thought, well, there’s lots to do, and I seem to be somewhere interesting doing it.
And I’ve stayed true to that. I’ve had opportunities to go more mainstream. The agency that I was working at when I won the Adidas client was sold to a big, top-five corporate design agency in London. And they wanted to buy us and make us their in-house sustainability or CSR team. Not an unreasonable model, I totally get it. They were selling annual reports, and product branding, and corporate branding, and this was a new service line they could offer: two reports for the price of one and a half, and all that. It would make perfect sense. I’m sure, with your backgrounds, you can totally see why they would have been interested in us. We were 10, 12 people, they were 120 or something.
But I made the decision that I didn’t want to go and work within a mainstream comms agency. I felt we’d be swallowed up. Just by the numbers, it wasn’t the focus of the agency. They were just mainstream corporate, and this was a new thing that they could offer.
And, frankly, if I pat myself on the back a little bit, it would be to say that once I’d found this area, I haven’t taken easy steps that would have diluted my focus on it, and probably earned me more money. I’ve stayed true to what I’ve been passionate about. And I think that comes across in the way that I engage with clients. I don’t think anyone meets me and thinks, “Oh, I don’t think that guy really cares”, or “I don’t think he’s authentic about this stuff.” So I think it’s paid off being, dare I say, true to who I am and what I care about.
Ned: Indeed. Let’s fast-forward to Junxion as it is today. Over to you, Ally, to dig down into that a little bit.
Ally: Okey-doke. Having heard all that really interesting background about your personal journey, Adam, and the development of Junxion, and the choices you’ve made about the directions you want to go in, I’d like to talk a bit about how you deliver within Junxion: the balancing act, or the balance, that your clients predominantly need you to deliver. Your clients come to you with different sorts of problems to solve, as you described. Sometimes they might not know the problems, or you might say, “Actually, your problem isn’t this, it’s this.”
But essentially, what they need is to be sustainable, and to demonstrate they’re sustainable, while still being profitable. So I’m really interested in how, within Junxion, you achieve that balance. You need to walk the walk, of course, in everything that you’re talking to your clients about in terms of sustainability, but you also need to earn money to continue to deliver that high level of service. So how do you balance sustainability and profitability through the people you hire, the skills you’re looking for, the processes you have in place?
Adam: Yeah, thanks, Ally. That’s a great question, or set of questions, perhaps.
Ally: Sorry, yes.
Adam: They cluster around our culture, I suppose, and our way of operating as a business. It’s very important to me, and to Mike, my business partner, that we are an exemplar of the type of business we think we need to see more of in the world.
There aren’t enough businesses that are purpose-driven, and are seeking to have a positive impact on people and planet above making profits. There are not enough businesses that recognise that profit can be a fuel to drive you towards your purpose. A purpose that is only about maximising profits will eventually, inevitably, exploit people and pollute the planet.
And so we want to be an exemplar of something different. We want to help companies go on that journey to being purpose-driven, and resilient through so doing. And we have to model what that looks like, collectively and within the business. That’s taken as read at Junxion, and I really appreciate that. And I have to say that a lot of my joy and challenges and sense of purpose, in some ways, are delivered by holding onto that ambition, working through the challenges of it, and finding the joy in it. That’s really important, and motivating, and galvanising for me.
So we do a number of different things to work on that. In the past, we’ve had a monthly pulse survey of staff, which, given there’s only 10 or a dozen of us, is quite a mechanism for a company of our size to run with that regularity. It’s been just a few questions. And I have to say, perhaps it was a slightly over-egged tool, because Mike and I weren’t able to respond to it quickly enough, in real time, with the pressures of business.
And we’ve recognised that we were asking the right questions in some areas, but we weren’t necessarily listening to the answers, and there were other questions, or other ways of being, that we weren’t modelling sufficiently. So we’re trying to do something about that. This quarter, the work we’re doing on the business itself is all about our culture.
And one of the ways we’re looking at that is exploring how we can have more courageous conversations with each other, essentially. How we can give each other more useful feedback, at a time when people are willing and able to hear it. And that’s on me, as one of the leaders of the business. There’s work for me to do here. I’m not very defensive about feedback I get, but I could ask for it more often.
And in modelling that kind of behaviour, one of the tools we’re using is a book called Radical Candor. It’s been around for a long time, and we’re reading it as a book club at work, and we’re having three sessions exploring what it means for us as a business and as individuals.
So that’s time together. That’s time taken away from billable time, and agency life is all about those ratios: billable time, utilisation rates, and what you can charge people out at. On the face of it, that’s challenging for profitability, right? To have everyone in the company sitting in a room. But we think it’s important to build the culture that we need.
Ally: Cool. Ned?
Ned: Yeah, interesting, Adam. I think it would be easy to imagine that, as a business of 10 people, you’re all sitting in the same room, and lines of communication are very obvious, and you can wait for somebody to stand up and make themselves a cup of tea before you go and give that feedback. But I’m guessing… are you remote?
Adam: Yes, that’s a good point. I should have clarified that for the listeners. We have people in Canada, the UK and Austria. And while four of us can get together semi-regularly in London, the 10 of us get together hardly ever. In fact, 2024 was a bit of a lean year. 2025, we made a small profit, which was a challenging year to do that in, and I’m very proud of the work of the team to achieve it. But we haven’t been able to find the time for all of us to gather together in one place since summer.
Ned: And I think that makes it much harder.
Adam: It makes it much harder, yeah. We’re in Vancouver, we’re in Calgary, we’re in Toronto, we’re in Montreal, we’re in London, we’re in Innsbruck. There are a lot of cities that we’re in, and there are 9 time zones between them. So we have to work quite hard at being remote-first, and at making these times to be with each other, and working around people’s childcare responsibilities. So it’s a juggle, and it doesn’t always work.
But we think it’s important to invest that effort, partly because we’re remote-first, and partly because there isn’t water cooler time, when this stuff might semi-naturally occur. We think it’s really important to build that openness as much as we can, and there are challenges with that. Some people on the team have never met each other in real life. So that’s difficult, but we think it’s important that we find a way to build a business where people feel they can contribute, and they understand what’s important, and they understand the way that we want to operate. I think being purpose-driven is not just about what you’re trying to achieve, it’s about how you’re going to get there.
Ally: Adam, are those some of the questions that you ask in your pulse surveys? I’m curious as to what your measures are.
Adam: Yes. We’ve asked questions about psychological safety, and wellbeing, and future career aspirations. We are asking some of those sorts of questions, and we do get feedback. And I have to say, we didn’t action some of the feedback we got last year when we could have done. That’s part of the reason for this focus on it this quarter.
But, yes, satisfaction, engagement, those kinds of questions we absolutely have asked. Under advice, and on reflection, we’re going to move to a slightly richer six-monthly survey now, which we think is going to give us better data. It’s going to take a bit longer to complete, but it’s going to give us a stronger picture, and also a rhythm that I think we can respond to.
And one of the things we also do, and we will probably build this into the six-monthly survey: we’ve just done some work to refresh our values recently. We have four values. I’ve mentioned a couple of them. Generosity, courage, curiosity and fun.
And this is actually a service that we do with companies. Those are very fine, nice words. Great, stick them up on a wall, put them in 72-point font, see them on the way in. All the clients go, “Fun! I want to work with these guys.” That’s absolutely not what we’re about. We think you’ve got to unpack those, and we do that through storytelling. So: when was a time that you can recall when you reacted generously? And then you unpack those stories.
We ran breakout groups on Zoom for all of us, so we ended up with, I think, three or four groups having those kinds of conversations about when those values came to life. From that, we were able to distil what you can call guiding principles: statements that indicate how you should act. What does courage mean? Speak truth to power. Right, so that’s an example of a guiding principle of how you act courageously.
And we’ve distilled those into guiding principles, and we’ve refined them, and everyone’s contributed to those guiding principles. So they know the values, and they can see their story embedded in those guiding principles. This isn’t “this is how you do it at Junxion”. It’s much more bottom-up than that. And they’re invested, and they’ve engaged, and they’ve contributed to the creation not only of the values, but, much more importantly, of the guiding principles, so they know how to live them. And then we codify that, and we put it into our onboarding pack and our culture guide.
So now we’ve built a team with real clarity about how we operate at Junxion, and a real set of guiding principles. And if we can layer on this radically candid feedback that we’re working on, we can call each other out, as appropriate, when we’re not doing enough of that.
Ally: And that’s the psychological safety point that you referred to, isn’t it?
Adam: Yes. You’ve got to feel comfortable doing that. It’s a bit sensitive. We’re not shouty, we’re not rude, we’re not “just do it my way”. We’re trying to build a more inclusive way of running a business, where people feel they’ve had a stake in designing the services, designing the style, the way we operate, the values and the guiding principles, and are comfortable to challenge leadership and not stand on hierarchy, and say, “I don’t think you guys are doing a good enough job of that at the moment.” I would welcome that. More of that.
Ally: Good stuff, thank you. That’s so interesting, because sometimes, when we talk about people and skills and processes, we find ourselves talking in quite operational terms, which can be interesting too. In one of the podcasts recently, our guest was talking about systems they’ve developed, coding they’ve written, et cetera. Really interesting stuff. But to me, it’s interesting that your answer demonstrates culture first, people first.
Adam: Yeah, and it builds on where Ned was going. As a remote-first business, we have to over-index on some of the people processes, I think, and on engaging people in designing those processes, because it’s not going to happen at the water cooler, right?
But I think that’s right, and in our client work, we’re also like that. We’re quite high-touch. We’re not the kind of consulting firm that will do it to you. We do it with you. And so the value of curiosity gets embedded in our interview questions. We’re starting a project, and the client was like, “Oh, do you really need to do all those interviews?” And we were saying, “Well, we think we’ll really learn some useful stuff, and we’re not just going to play back exactly what we hear. We’re going to synthesise it together, and chunk up a level, and see what the real problem is here.”
It’s that classic Design Council Double Diamond: restate the problem that we’re trying to solve. All of this is a useful way of understanding what’s really underlying, and maybe holding you back in achieving what you’re trying to achieve, dear client. And sometimes we find ourselves explaining that process to them, but that is who we are.
I was reflecting the other day: I have a master’s in something that at the time was called the Public Understanding of Environmental Change, from UCL. I think it’s called something like Environment, Society and Politics now. It was the inaugural year when I did it, back in 1999, as a mature student. And I did 15 interviews as the methodology for my thesis: five with pressure groups that worked on the environment, five with people that worked for business, and five with people that worked on social issues. So it’s my jam. I love that way of engaging. That’s how we show up as being curious: asking a bunch of questions.
Ned: And how I originally came across you, Adam, was on LinkedIn. You were talking about the high net promoter score that you’d got within the business. And I think my observation, talking to you, is that you work with large organisations, using methodologies that are typically seen in larger organisations, and you’re applying these to your own organisation in quite an unusual, quite an interesting way.
Adam: Well, yeah. Just to clarify, Ned, we’ve got work to do on our employee net promoter score, but I’m super proud of our client net promoter score. We do use that tool with our clients, and we had a +100 – the highest score you could possibly get. Everyone said yes, 9 or 10 out of 10, that they would recommend us to friends or colleagues, from our projects that closed last year. Which is awesome, and I’m so proud of that, and our team should be proud of that. That’s really living our values: being curious, being generous, being courageous when we need to be, but making it fun as we go along, and delivering quality work.
I don’t really see why we shouldn’t shoot for those stars. It shouldn’t be a drudge of a project. It should be engaging and interesting, and it should take you to where you need to be. And we’re very rigorous in our project management. We have a phase that we call initiation and planning, and we have a project charter, so there’s clarity on all the deliverables. We use some of what you might call big-company processes to get crystal clear, even on relatively small or modest-budget projects, because we think that’s one of the ways you end up with a client net promoter score of 100, right?
Ally: And that leads into my next question on this. You’ve talked about embedding behaviours, cultures, ways of thinking, ways of interrogating – interrogating’s a strong word, sorry – ways of questioning current behaviours, when you first start talking to your clients, and then in the project framework you’ve just described. Is there… I was going to say a closing phase, but actually, I probably mean a rolling phase. Once you’ve delivered what the project sets out to deliver, do you have a mechanism for measuring the ongoing impact of your work, and whether, or to what extent, the clients have embedded those recommendations?
Adam: Yes. Well, I’ll take us back to go forwards. We have what we call project health check-ins. I’ll often act as a project sponsor. I might be engaged in the project at key moments, but my senior consultants will be delivering the vast majority of the work. I will check in with a named project sponsor – we make sure we know who that is at the beginning of the project. We check in with them halfway through. It’s light-touch, very brief – 15 minutes is totally sufficient. And at the end, we have a wrap-up process.
And then what we’re trying to do, 6 months later, is check back in, get back in touch with them, and say, “That piece of work we delivered for you, did it have the impact you wished it had? What barriers have you come across?” And so on. Because we want to know that our work is having an impact over time, right? Impact management theory teaches you that impact is positive change for stakeholders that otherwise would not have happened. It is additive. So we want to know what’s been additive, and we want to know that it endures. If it doesn’t endure, if it doesn’t have impact over time, it was just a nice strategy document that sits on the shelf, and that’s no good to anyone. So, yes, we do check in.
Just to be very open, it can be quite hard to get responses to those follow-ups, because clients might have moved on. They might not be thinking about it now. They might have seen it as a project that they’ve done, and then they’re on to the next one, and they’re busy. But we do strive to check in at 6 and 12 months, yes.
Ally: Thank you.
Ned: I’d like to move us on, if I may. We’ve talked about lots of successes, actually. Lots of really interesting things to celebrate. It would be interesting to dig down into some of the things that didn’t go so well, that you’ve learned from, that you’ve had to overcome on the journey over the last few years.
Adam: Yeah, well, in terms of running our own business, we’ve made plenty of mistakes. Everyone’s tried ways of selling that haven’t worked, or tried people that haven’t worked out.
But in terms of running the business, I’m conscious of how regularly you need to check in, especially as a remote-first business. Mike’s in Vancouver, I’m in London. We’re geographically dispersed, so we have some challenges. I can see most of the London team every week, so it’s a bit easier on my side. But I don’t spend a lot of time with people based in Canada. I don’t spend a lot of time with people based in the UK. And as leaders, we need to work harder at that. We need to work harder at those staying-in-touch things, and we’re conscious of that. If I’m honest, we do it a little bit sporadically. We could be much better at it, without wishing to draw too much time away from billable time. But we know that you get better work if people feel more connected. It’s actually on us to make the time. So I think that’s a mistake we’ve made internally that we need to do better at.
And externally, I think we’ve misinterpreted requirements or context sometimes. So, a story about that. We were invited to help an accounting firm, quite a large one, to explore and define its purpose. And that seemed like a really, really good thing to do. We started the process, and I had some little concerns, little noises off, and I wasn’t really paying due attention to them.
Ned: Hmm.
Adam: And where we got to was that we parted as friends, but they were unable or unwilling to collectively define their purpose. Which is not on them, it’s actually on us. What we should have said to them is: given where you are today, you’re trying to take two jumps, and you need to just take one. What we should have said is, that’s too much of a stretch for you from where you’re coming from.
Ned: Yeah.
Adam: “You’re ambitious, and I love it, and I know you want to do the right thing, but there are a whole bunch of baby steps, more steps, you should take on that journey. Then you should get comfortable over there, and then you can think about defining your purpose.” So, actually, they were trying to run before they could walk a little bit. The people in the business weren’t ready for it. The terms were getting a bit frightening for people, and the implications were getting a bit concerning, and that was because not everyone was quite as far along as some of the people in the business.
And that was what they needed to do. They needed to do a better job of confirming what their ambition was, communicating it internally, and having a plan of action that people could see progress on over a year or two in that direction. And then they should have been revisiting their purpose. I ignored the noises off that were, frankly, telling me that, and I tried to hold true to the big ambition: let’s define our purpose. And actually, I should have said, “You know what, there are some interim steps you should take.”
Ned: And that’s very interesting, because it’s a very simple-sounding brief. You can frame it in a sentence: help us define our purpose. But underneath that, there’s an immense amount of potential change management that needs to be done. So I can see that’s a hugely interesting thing to be doing.
Adam: And that’s on me. I absolutely… that’s on me. I didn’t listen attentively enough. I wasn’t sufficiently curious, perhaps. I wasn’t sufficiently courageous to articulate that, share it back with our client point of contact, and suggest a pretty bold pivot to something quite different that wasn’t on the table. So it’s just a reminder that when I’m at my best, when I live the values that we say we should live, I can do really good work, internally and externally. And when I come away from following those guiding principles and our values, things can go awry.
Ned: You mentioned the role of communications in that kind of change management and defining of purpose, and that’s a huge element of it, I would imagine.
Adam: Totally. I always say this work is only about two things. It’s glib, but, glibly said, the two things all this work is about are integration and communication. That’s all.
Right? So if you don’t integrate and embed your purpose into how you operate, the decisions you make, what your strategy looks like, who you choose to work with, how you operate internally, then it’s not integrated, it’s just some nice words. And if you don’t communicate about why we’re doing this, why this is important, why this is going to put us on a firmer footing in the future, how everyone can play their part, and what I expect of you in this transition – if leaders don’t communicate that well, it falls over. Too many conversations in side rooms will kill it, frankly.
The worst thing for a company can be: “I don’t believe the direction that the top guys are setting out for us.” Or, “I don’t understand it.” Or, “They haven’t explained to me why we have to do this.” Or, “The explanation they’ve given is not one I believe. I think there’s another reason they’re just not telling us.” All of those things kill any culture change or strategic change management project, like transitioning to being more purpose-driven and better for people and planet. Any of those noises kill it, right? So you’ve got to have brilliant communication.
Ned: And I would imagine that you’re working quite intimately with the internal communications teams within your clients, to frame these changes in the right way.
Adam: Yeah, definitely. Part of the work that we do is all about that. So, for example, we’re working with the brand director, as one of our main points of contact, in a big sports business at the moment. And he’s like, “I need you to be able to articulate the impact vision. Where are we going to go? What’s going to be different? I need you to articulate that so that I can share it, so that I can build communications around it.” And he’s very, very conscious that he needs that clarity, which is great. I love it.
Ned: We’re coming towards the end of our time, and I’d like to go to you, Ally, to look at some of those wrapping-up questions.
Ally: Sure. So my next question was going to be – and you can tell I’m putting a caveat on it – where do you hope your sector will be in 10 years’ time? My caveat, or my expansion on that, is that I’d love to hear from you, Adam, either from the point of view of the sustainability sector, the services to purpose-led businesses, and/or I’m interested in hearing your views on B Corp, actually, as a certification scheme, and whether you think it, or structures like it, need to do more, can change, will evolve. So, again, sorry, I’ve given you a whole bunch of things there, but I’d just be interested to hear what you think the key changes should be, or could be, in the next 10 years.
Adam: Well, sustainability consulting collectively, I think, has to raise its level. And, arguably, dare I be so bold as to suggest, a little bit more courage from some of our peers wouldn’t go amiss. I think there’s too much of “Okay, yeah, there you go, ticked your box for you.” We’re happy to take lots of box-ticking assignments: you feel better, and we’ve got money in the bank. Great. That doesn’t meet the moment, frankly. And, increasingly, it’s not going to meet the moment. So more courage is needed from sustainability consultancies in general, collectively, I think. I think there are some brilliant individual consultants out there.
And when it comes to certification schemes like B Corp, they have just recently launched these new standards. They’re much better. I think they will be more impactful. I think we’ll see a bunch of drop-off, though, in the short term.
Ally: Hmm.
Adam: Significant drop-off, even. I think too many companies will find them too demanding, which I think is an interesting, good challenge. But those that go there, I think, are going to find some real merit in it. Because the old standards were really about “How can I and my business be best for the world?”, and the new standards are much more like, “How can my business play its part in creating the system that we need?”
And so I think they’re much more powerful in this iteration. And I think those companies that go on that journey, and contribute richly and fully to the sentiment and the letter of the new standards, will genuinely be playing their part in contributing to the change in the system that we need. So that’s tremendously exciting. Lots of us who work in the B Corp movement would say these are really strong standards, we’re really delighted they finally got here – it took a long time – and if we can hold lots of companies to them, that’s going to be a good thing for people and planet.
Ally: That’s really interesting. Okay, thank you. A little left-field question for you as we approach the end. Can you think of one thing – it might be an element of communications, or behaviour, or something else – which you would say your clients, or your potential clients, could do to foster an environment of trust within their organisations?
Adam: Fostering an environment of trust… I think leaders need to have, and be able to communicate, a sense of vision about where the company’s going, and why that’s a good thing. And alongside that, they need to have the systems or the people in place such that every individual in that business is clear on the expectations on them to deliver and contribute towards that vision. So, vision, and clarity on expectations. I think that’s it. If you can do those two things, I think you’ve got an awesome business that is going to do really, really well.
Ally: Brilliant, thank you. And, yes, that very much loops back to some of those examples you were giving us. It makes a lot of sense. Okay, last but not least, can we just check how people can find out more about you and Junxion?
Adam: Sure. Our website is junxion.com, J-U-N-X-I-O-N dot com. I’m on LinkedIn, and so are Mike Rowlands, my business partner, and our colleagues. And we show up in the purpose field-building community, in the B Corp community and others, so come along to events – we might well be there. So, yeah, plenty of ways.
Ned: Fantastic.
Ally: Thank you very much indeed.
Ned: That was so interesting, Adam, thank you so much.
