Driving value with your THESIS results

Using your THESIS results to drive value for your organization involves 3 steps:

Understand your THESIS Results
Use your organization’s strategic priorities to identify your key areas of improvement
Create and implement your Action Plan(s)

Step 1: Understand your THESIS results

Understanding your THESIS results include:

Identify patterns

As you understand your THESIS results, begin to cluster your results so you can identify patterns and plan to efficiently make progress. You can cluster by:

• Broader impact and issues: For example, which KPIs address climate or deforestation goals?

• How they're related to your sustainability goals

• By supply chain stages: which do you have more control to influence?

• By mechanism you’ll use to address them

How to Understand your THESIS Assessment Scorecards

Step 2: Use your organization’s strategic priorities to identify your key areas of improvement

Work with your colleagues in different areas across the business to have strategic conversations about their goals and priorities. These can include your public relations, risk management, marketing, sourcing, sales, corporate affairs, and buying teams.

Determine your key priorities and where you’ll focus to maximize your ability to make progress.

THESIS’s holistic, science and stakeholder collaboration-based hotspots create clarity on the most pressing sustainability impacts for your products. Your THESIS results include tailored action recommendations to inform your priority areas and planning for improvements year over year. Overlaying your THESIS results with your organizational, retailer, and stakeholder priorities further supports your success in most efficiently driving results.

Consider:

The sustainability goals and priorities of your retailer buyer(s)
The sustainability priorities and goals of your company
External consumer intelligence sources, like Nielsen
Priorities from your important external stakeholders
Would a certification effectively address the hotspot?
Identify relevant mechanisms to address different risks and impacts
Are there existing operational processes you can utilize?
Review your learnings and pain points from your THESIS assessment process, including your data collection and earlier phases. What can you implement to make the process more efficient and effective?  
What are collective action organizations and initiatives you can participate in to expedite your organization’s progress towards your goals?
What are the risks of not addressing a hotspot or impact? Examples might include public relations risks or supply chain disruptions.
Where can you begin to make improvements and progress, even while you search for data and information?
How work intensive would it be to address a hotspot in comparison to the relative impact?

Step 3: Create and implement your Action Plan(s)

Use the priorities and relevant mechanisms you’ve identified to create action plans. Set ambitious, SMART goals that include year-over-year improvements, with tangible milestones that can be communicated to your retailer buyers, customers, consumers, financial partners, and other stakeholders. Consider sharing your initiatives externally to build stakeholder trust through transparency.

While creating your action plans, include:

Identification of a recurring schedule to provide updates on progress and create alignment on priorities and decisions with both internal and external stakeholders
How can you circle back to your facilities, stakeholders, and suppliers to share key learnings from your THESIS process?
Ways to integrate other business areas into your action plans and decision making
What are ways that you can influence your supply chain partners to make improvements and incentivize action on key priorities?
How will you communicate these to your retail buyers, customers, and external stakeholders?

Execute your action plans and plan regular progress updates with your key stakeholders. As you execute your plans, ensure you:

Monitor progress and engage your stakeholders
Identify potential internal champions and external experts that support your initiatives
Share regular progress updates with clear success metrics, especially highlighting early successful initiatives to increase engagement
Tie your initiatives to key organizational strategies and goals. Ensure you’re emphasizing the importance to creating long term business value
Identify and utilize external initiatives that you can join to support progress on your initiatives