A Developing Story

It’s as true for private companies as it is for democracies: our day-to-day reality often falls short of our highest ideals. We define ourselves by what we believe is right, but we live in a compromised version of that utopia, sustained by the promise that we are a work in progress and that, one day, our patience will be rewarded with the full actualization of our principles.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen what happens when that patience runs out.

Blame it on the pandemic, a global social reckoning, widespread unemployment, or toxic conspiracy theories. Any number of stressors on our system could have been the final straw, or perhaps it was the cumulative weight of so many crises occurring at once.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

Frederick Douglass

We firmly believe that no person of integrity and conscience could emerge from this tumultuous era unchanged. That also goes for us as a company, and, we believe, our entire industry. Over the past decade, many of the world’s largest consulting companies have launched lucrative CSR, DEI, and ESG practices, talking the talk of social progress in pursuit of accelerated growth. While these practices may contribute to real social and environmental progress, they are also profoundly out of proportion to the influence our industry yields over the ills that plague our culture and our environment. Social justice, sustainability, racial and gender equality—these goals must inform all the work we do, not just serve to fuel additional revenue streams.

In short, the consulting industry can, and must, do better. And that includes SYLVAIN. Social progress has always been a goal and an animating force behind the work we do. It’s why we became a Certified B Corporation ; it’s why we have always maintained a strong portfolio of volunteer and pro-bono work and donate a portion of our profits, and it’s one of the reasons we are so diverse. But it hasn’t been enough. This report is a first step toward identifying what better looks like, the path that will get us there, and the steps we will take to achieve our goal.

While the distance between our current reality and the honest realization of our principles may be vast, we are fully aware of that gap and motivated to do something about it. We are committed to progress, for ourselves and our clients, and to promoting an understanding of progress that serves our collective ideals.

Social justice, sustainability, racial and gender equality—these goals must inform all the work we do, not just serve to fuel additional revenue streams.

Given the distance we have to travel, and the rapidly dwindling time we have to get there, it is no longer morally justifiable for the consulting industry to remain bystanders—much less to actively worsen our predicament. Collectively, consultants reap $900 billion in revenue annually by advising the world’s most influential companies on the most consequential aspects of their businesses, from improving sales to resizing their workforces to acquiring other companies. In the industry’s darker moments—some not far in the past—large consultancies have actively promoted societal ills, from opioid addiction to predatory mortgages, in shameful attempts to drive greater profits, both for their clients and themselves. Knowing the consequences of these actions now, it would be an abdication of our most elemental responsibility to society, our clients, and our own humanity not to adopt an aggressive, sincere approach to social and environmental progress.

It is to the industry’s credit that we long ago recognized we had a role to play in the ESG, CSR, and DEI movements. When ESG investing started becoming a significant factor in global markets, a handful of forward-thinking consultancies saw the opportunity to provide a competitive new service that would also help clients become better corporate citizens. That these new practices were motivated more by a desire to grow revenue than a sense of moral obligation is neither surprising nor regrettable—many of industry’s greatest contributions to society (railroads, vaccines, etc.) were a result of opportunity aligning with public need.

But a decade later, as concerns over corporate governance metrics have moved from Wall Street to Main Street, socially responsible consulting, for lack of a better term, has grown from a niche market into a veritable gold rush, with consultancies practically tripping over themselves to launch specialized practices and partnerships that promise to help companies put sustainability, social justice, or diversity “at the core of their business.” Not surprisingly, in their rush to capitalize on the opportunity, some consultancies are making false claims about their own track records to establish their progressive bona fides and differentiate themselves from the competition. Others think nothing of promoting themselves as “human-centered” even as they maintain an abusive internal culture or serve clients that directly profit from environmental or human rights abuses.

It’s easy to dismiss such violations as the proverbial gambling in the casino. Anyone who put their faith in global consulting firms to bring about a golden age of sustainability, diversity, and social justice probably wasn’t too familiar with the industry to begin with. But hypocrisy and exaggerated credentials may ultimately pale in comparison to more insidious ills that have infected the industry. Namely, laziness and greed.

How does the epidemic of off-the-shelf solutions take advantage of clients and harm the public?

An Epidemic of Off-the-Shelf Solutions

Today, far too many consulting companies are offering cookie-cutter ESG, DEI, and CSR advice, urging vastly different organizations with unique challenges and business models to embrace the same practices, metrics, and reporting structures. Gone are the days when consultancies tailored their sustainability advice to a client’s particular needs, replaced by an age of ready-made, off-the-shelf solutions that emphasize annual reports over real-world impact (and enable consultancies to scale their new practices).

Such insincere efforts not only take advantage of clients, they ultimately harm consumers and weaken the overall drive toward social and environmental progress.

Consider the number of high-profile CSR executives who have recently gone public with their belief that ESG reporting standards—metrics that consultants have done more than nearly any other profession to mainstream—may be doing more harm than good. Earlier this year, Tariq Fancy former global chief investment officer for sustainable investing at BlackRock (a SYLVAIN client), called ESG investing “a dangerous placebo” that companies used to mollify investors without significantly changing their behavior. Almost simultaneously, Kenneth P. Pucker, former COO of Timberland, wrote in the Harvard Business Review that the impact of ESG reporting and measurement had been vastly oversold, noting that carbon emissions, environmental degradation, and income inequality—all standard ESG metrics—had only gotten worse even as the ESG movement has exploded:

The focus on reporting may actually be an obstacle to progress—consuming bandwidth, exaggerating gains, and distracting from the very real need for changes in mindsets, regulation, and corporate behavior.

But hypocrisy and exaggerated credentials may ultimately pale in comparison to more insidious ills that have infected the industry. Namely, laziness and greed.

Not a Game to be Won

We point out these failings not to suggest that we at SYLVAIN have sidestepped them, or that we have found a better way. Or even that we lament more than other consultancies—including those that have fallen victim to them. Like any for-profit business, our day-to-day operations have often fallen short of our ideals. We raise these issues because we know that we, like the rest of the industry, must do better. Because the last 18 months have renewed our commitment to being a progress-oriented consultancy that helps clients make tangible strides toward fulfilling their own ideals. Because we see that our window is short, so the recommendations we make, the services we sell, and the work we create alongside our clients must have real, scaled, and lasting consequences

Like the industry at large, we must start by making internal progress before rushing to sell new progress-oriented service offerings. This will help ensure that we approach the work with the right intent and that we are equipped to tackle the big challenges effectively. And we want to do our part to help not only ourselves and our clients, but all consultants of good faith and integrity.

This is an opportunity for all of us to transform and revitalize a mature industry at risk of decline. In 2013, Clayton Christensen—Harvard Business School professor, founder of consulting company Innosight, and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma—predicted that “the same forces that disrupted so many businesses, from steel to publishing, are starting to reshape the world of consulting.” That fear of disruption and irrelevance can be seen in the industry’s current scramble to reposition itself to fit a technology-driven landscape. But our industry’s credibility and viability in the next 10 years will depend on our ability to help clients become good corporate citizens as much as our capacity to increase their growth.

We work in a competitive industry, but sustainability, diversity, and social responsibility are not games to be won. Approaching this the right way means doing the work internally to make sure that we are nurturing the right mindset in approaching these big challenges and we are positioned to respond to them effectively. How we respond to this demand will have tangible, long-term consequences for our industry, our clients, and the world.

Before we can help our clients reorient toward progress, we need to take a hard look at how we operate and the impact we’re having on our culture and society. The heart of this report is a framework designed to help us (and any consultancy) assess our own progress so we can embody the change we hope to inspire. We believe that, in the end, our consultancy, our clients, and anyone in our industry who ventures to ask themselves hard questions will be better off as a result.

See how our work with Twitter made online conversations more inclusive.

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The Future of Healthy Communities

The rapidly evolving world of technology is rife with both rich opportunities and devastating consequences for society at large. So in September 2020, Twitter’s research team wanted a deeper understanding of how their members and moderators influenced the creation of healthy online communities. All in an effort to answer one of the most sought-after questions of our time—can we make the gray area that is the internet a safer place?

They developed a three-pronged approach that led to the development of a long-term moderation strategy that will make online conversations healthier, safer, and more inclusive. All subsequent product launches included tools that allow community leaders and moderators to set and enforce standards beyond Twitter’s regulations. This toolkit, named Twitter Communities, rolled out in September 2021.

Before we can help our clients re-orient toward progress, we need to take a hard look at how we operate and the impact we’re having on our culture and society.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Extinction

In the summer of 2020, Sylvain Labs, as we were still known, was facing extinction. In the face of the pandemic, our clients had canceled or postponed nearly all their significant projects, and our new business prospects had dried up completely. We had managed to keep our team intact by reducing salaries across the board. But the situation was unsustainable. We needed work, and fast.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, we began receiving briefs from all kinds of companies looking to increase their outreach to people of color. Unfortunately, what we saw was as disappointing as it was eye-opening. Far too many of the briefs were overwhelmingly performative, tone deaf, or simply insincere. Granted, the public pressure on organizations to immediately and loudly proclaim themselves anti-racist was unprecedented, likely leading to some misguided briefs from companies that would normally know better. But the fact remained that we had a choice to make: potentially save our company by aligning ourselves with disingenuous efforts to sidestep public criticism, or heed our conscience and risk losing everything we’d built together over the past 10 years?

A Blast from the Past

As we were grappling with this dilemma, we received an unexpected sign from our younger selves in the form of a breaking news alert.

Several years ago, one of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods companies—knowing our reputation as a progressive consultancy—came to us for help modernizing a problematic brand. We did our research and consulted with some leading minds on the subject. We also consulted our own sensibilities, asking ourselves how this brand made us feel and what images it brought to mind. In the end, we concluded that the brand was not worth saving. The name and iconography were simply incompatible with modern sensibilities and needed to be discarded outright. We made our recommendation to the client—who promptly lost our number.

Now, in the face of global demands for racial justice, that company was making headlines for doing precisely what we had recommended. This very old, very successful brand would be permanently retired, to the relief of many (and the righteous consternation of others).

To the world, it was an acknowledgment that harmful portrayals of non-white people would no longer be tolerated as business as usual.

To us, it was a reminder that our humanity and our conscience were a core part of the service we offer to clients. That there was no place in our business for simply being “yes people,” and that we built this company not to be bystanders but stewards of a better, more equitable society—and maybe, in this historic moment, the rest of the corporate world was warming to our vision of the future.

What we saw was as disappointing as it was eye-opening. Far too many of the briefs were overwhelmingly performative, tone deaf, or simply insincere.

A New Perspective

With our commitment to our longstanding principles renewed, we passed on all but the sincerest and most potentially impactful projects we had before us. And while Sylvain Labs returned to profitability by the end of 2020—somehow eking out 3% annual growth along the way—the road we chose was hardly the quickest or least painful path to get there.

But we walked away from that moment with more than a temporary reacquaintance with our humanity. We walked away with a validated sense of our mission, our value, and what we owe to our clients. We remembered that while our clients help pay our bills, it’s the public that ultimately benefits from or bears the brunt of our work. In that regard, we must recognize our role as public servants and always keep in mind the impact our work may have on the most vulnerable and defenseless members of our society.

See how we helped PGE bring eco-friendly services to low-income areas.

PGE

Read More About PGE

Piloting Customer-Centric Innovation

It is critical to ensure that society’s essential services (electric, gas, and water) are as efficient and accessible as possible. So when we worked with Portland General Electric (PGE) to develop a new approach to innovation—one that put its customers and clean environmental practices first—the mission resonated with SYLVAIN’S desire to place human needs at the heart of our work.

We collaborated with PGE’s team to develop a set of innovation priorities that customers found most important and a toolkit to put them into action. As of Q2 2021, PGE is taking many of these new services to market. A successful rollout would affect energy distribution across Oregon, significantly improving both the resilience of their energy grid and the accessibility of eco-friendly services to lower income populations often excluded by sustainable premiums.

Like most consultancies, we will never be confused with a charitable organization. But as advisors to the world’s most powerful companies, we are very much stewards of the public trust. As such, it is our moral obligation to work with our clients to align the actions of decision-makers in corporate America with the pursuit of social justice and environmental health. We must align our internal operations toward selling courage and tools for meaningful change to clients, not decks and proprietary technology. These insights are why we rebranded as SYLVAIN, a name that moves us away from any one person and toward a collective institution. We also adopted a new wordmark that represents the interconnectedness of our team—our connection to each other and society at large.

See how we drove greater cultural relevance for The Museum of Modern Art.

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Read More About The Museum of Modern Art

Increasing Audience Focus at MoMA

Established, legacy organizations have immense potential to positively influence society at large. We immediately recognized this when we worked with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in October 2020 to help them refocus their offering and drive broader relevance in culture. They needed an audience-centric plan that would drive immediate engagement and build long-term relationships, starting with New Yorkers.

We developed a brand platform to serve a new, community-driven North Star and created product concepts to help activate the strategy.

We consider ourselves lucky to have made it through when many others closed their doors or significantly downsized. And, while luck undoubtedly had something to do with it, we also credit these decisions—the right and the flawed ones—for teaching us what it means to act as a progress-guided consultancy.

In the next section, we will look at how those decisions have helped us codify what it means to be a progress-guided consultancy. And later in this report, we will share a number of tools we’ve developed to help other consultancies adopt a progress-oriented mindset. It is our hope that these tools and this report will contribute to large-scale change for any consultancy that shares our vision for a more responsible future.

But we walked away from that moment with more than a temporary reacquaintance with our humanity. We walked away with a validated sense of our mission, our value, and what we owe to our clients.

The decisions we made during the darkest days of 2020 are now helping us forge the vision of the company we hope to become. By reflecting on those decisions and the lessons we learned from enacting them, we have come up with five character traits that we believe are essential to being a progress-guided consultancy. These traits are the guidelines against which we will measure our performance, and—we believe—should be standard for consultancies working with corporations on their social and environmental impact efforts.

It is worth noting that we have chosen character traits rather than specific principles or values to guide us in our journey. While there are many principles that we, as an organization, wholeheartedly subscribe to—gender and racial equality, economic justice, environmental sustainability—we find that translating principles into everyday practice can fluctuate greatly depending on who’s doing the translating. For example, well-intentioned people often disagree on what actions today will bring about racial justice tomorrow.

However, by adhering to character traits rather than principles, we keep the focus on our actions and our intentions rather than projected outcomes. Character traits are inherently human and expressed through our choices, whereas principles—especially corporate principles—are associated with beliefs and too easily put aside in the name of expediency.

In short, by adopting these character traits, we hope to keep our moral compass properly aligned ensuring that we will ultimately act in accordance with our collective principles.

Today, we are actively working to embed these traits throughout our organization. Ultimately, we hope that they will guide and inform every decision we make. In this graph, we have drilled down on each trait, defining it, breaking it down by its various components, providing the proof points by which we can judge our adherence to them, and finally listing which tools can best help implement them.

We have also developed a free, downloadable template of this framework and a workbook that others can use to begin instilling these traits in their own organization.