Our ambition for the future

We will help our clients thrive by improving equality and sustainability – the biggest challenges facing society today.

We’ll help the people that we work with consider their longer-term purpose, and take action.

Then, they will make their organisations, society, and the environment better for everyone.

Alt text: Speech bubbles in various shapes, sizes and colours. In the middle, there is a speech bubble that contains a map of the world.

Huge challenges

These challenges are enormous, and seemingly impossible to solve. But they can’t be ignored. We’re still dealing with covid, a cost-of-living crisis, a climate emergency, social inequality, and widening divisions between people.

We’re not going to solve the challenges overnight, and we’re not going to solve them alone. But, by partnering with both private and public-sector organisations, and by taking a people-centred approach, we think we can have an impact:

We can design services that don’t exclude members of society
We can create more ethical services
We can design services that encourage more sustainable behaviours
We can make sustainable services easier to use and more competitive
We can help organisations consider their long-term impact, and plan for the future.

Read on, to see what we’re doing to achieve this.

Sustainable organisations

Tackling these challenges will also help organisations become more sustainable – socially, environmentally, but also economically.

The opportunities:

New audiences, by being more inclusive. For the private sector, that has commercial benefits. For instance, The Purple Pound estimates that £2billion is lost by businesses every month by ignoring the needs of disabled people.
More loyalty, as the trend for consumers to make choices based on ethical corporate practice increases.
More engaged staff. According to TotalJobs, 28% of employees check a company’s sustainability practices before applying for a job (rising to 39% for millennials).
Less risk, as organisations are required to meet sustainability targets. For instance, net-zero targets, or regulation to protect vulnerable customers in financial services.
Better commercial performance. According to the investment company Blackrock, 81% of collections of sustainable stocks performed better than similar collections that didn’t prioritise sustainability.

What we’re doing to achieve our ambition

Inequality and sustainability are knotty things to tackle. There’s a risk that we make mistakes, but we want to be open about our efforts:

1. Inclusive design and research

We aim to learn about the needs of people with different identities, demographics, abilities, access-needs and vulnerabilities.

By designing for these needs, we want to prevent people from being excluded by services. That means more equitable services, leading to a fairer society.

Our inclusive design projects include:

Creating a chat service for survivors of domestic abuse, with Women’s Aid.
Research with people who have had a mental health crisis, for the NHS. We looked at enabling them to express their treatment needs, should they be detained under the Mental Health Act.
Understanding the needs of vulnerable clients, for an investment platform.

We also have an Inclusivity Community of Practice who regularly meet to share knowledge, approaches and tools. Recently they have focussed on small ways to involve audiences in more of our design process, as in our project for GambleAware.

A prototype we created for our work for the NHS and the mental health act.

2. A new ethics capability

To create services that protect people and the planet, we need to consider the ethical implications of an organisation’s actions, and the technology they use.

Now, as part of Sopra Steria Next, we are joined by experts in ethics.

Our teammates’ work includes:

Developing a strategy for a major bank, looking at how to use data ethically, and in a way that would be trusted by their customers.
Providing guidance for the Scottish Government’s vision of an Ethical Digital Nation.
A communications strategy for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, focussed on how to collect sensitive data from victims and witnesses of crime.

3. Scan, map, measure

‘Scan, map, measure’ is a process we have developed that helps organisations focus on the outcomes and impact of their offering.

But we don’t stop at commercial outcomes, such as increasing profit. We also consider societal and environmental outcomes.

The process involves:

Scanning: What can we expect to happen in the future? What are the problems, risks, harms, and opportunities?
Mapping: We create an ‘impact map’ that connects our intended solution to its outcomes and long-term impact. Read more about impact mapping.
Measuring: We define what to measure, and how to measure it.

We applied this approach for a large bank: We defined environmental outcomes for a tool they had developed for smaller businesses.

We also have a dedicated ‘Social impact’ Community of Practice who are developing the Scan, Map , Measure approach.

A simplified impact map – showing the connection between solutions, outcomes and impact.

4. Shifting attention to the long-term

Another benefit of ‘Scan, map, measure’ is that it shifts the attention of organisations to the long-term.

This shift is important. Ignoring the longer-term impact of our near-term actions has led to challenges such as the climate crisis. Mark Carney, ex-Bank of England governor, calls this ‘the tragedy of the horizons’.

We’re also building our capability in ‘speculative design’ so that we can help organisations think about the long term. This is where we create prototypes from the future, but with a purpose of encouraging debate: “is this a future we want?”

In our last internal conference we created speculative futures that explored societal and environmental challenges. One prototype was an energy bill that also included a repayment for the climate damage caused to other countries.

A speculative design created for our company conference. This an energy bill designed to encourage debate around the concept of a ‘climate debt’ and who that debt should sit with.

5. Designing environmentally-friendly services

We are exploring how products and services can be designed to be better for the environment.

We can encourage environmentally-friendly behaviour by making environmental impact easier to understand, and by nudging people to act in the right way. For example, we looked at how to encourage people to make their pensions greener. And we looked at how we can reduce eCommerce returns (and emissions) through better design.
We can reduce people’s concerns about using more sustainable services. For example, we helped a car rental company understand how to make it less daunting for people to rent Electric Vehicles.
We can make sustainable services easier to use, and more competitive than their unsustainable counterparts. For instance, we helped Good Energy to create a more usable account area.

We’ll be sharing more thinking on this soon.

A concept that visualises the environmental impact of someone’s pension as part of an annual report. The goal was to encourage people to make their pension ‘greener’.

6. The people we work with

Reaching our ambition will be easier by working with organisations that share that ambition.

We like working with financial service organisations because they want to treat people in vulnerable circumstances more fairly. We worked with BP so that we had the opportunity to help them achieve their net-zero ambition. We like working with SSE because they are a leading generator of renewable electricity. And our public sector work is so important to us because their whole purpose is to serve society.

We want to work with you if your organisation is at the start of your journey to become more purpose-driven.

And we also want to work with you if you are already purpose driven.

So, if you share our ambition, we’d love to hear from you.