What is The Conception Forum?
Davos, Meet Accelerator
Most business, investment and government leaders today recognize that climate instability, resource limits, growing inequality, and demographic change require new approaches to the management of risk and opportunity. The Conception Forum (TCF) is where executives, innovators and sustainability experts join to uncover and develop the opportunities for both positive impact and competitive advantage present in these pressing issues.
Although businesses are adapting to volatility and uncertainty as a way of life, innovative solutions to new challenges seldom come from within the organization alone. The unpredictability associated with these challenges is testing even the strongest organizations.
How does your organization meet these pressing challenges?
Does your team or Board need an updated perspective or to learn new skills?
Do you want to find company-specific solutions that can be implemented this year?
Membership in The Conception Forum will actively help your organization to address the challenges you face, and implement customized solutions over a nine-month timeframe.
Why Join The Conception Forum?
Invest in Your Ability to Innovate and Respond
Continuous innovation happens when you create a culture of innovation by investing in your organization’s human capital. This culture is enhanced by ‘Integrated Thinking’ along with the appropriate management tools that allow you to manage drivers of financial value beyond mere financial performance information.
TCF helps by providing Members with a competitive talent advantage through:
a comprehensive understanding of the ecological and social landscape within which your organizational strategy must succeed;
insight into the latent opportunities unique to your organization that you can cultivate and realize to navigate these complexities;
practical, market-tested tools with which to guide the development of solutions, manage their implementation, and report on their performance; and
sustained, results-oriented support over nine months translating these insights into responses within your organization that begin to deliver measurable results.
How Does The Conception Forum Work?
Discover and Implement Powerful Solutions Through Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing
Over the course of nine months, The Conception Forum helps Members identify their organization’s Environmental and Social assets and liabilities. These are used to enable discovery of the organization’s competitive advantages, and to shape potential plans. TCF provides quantitative tools to enable analysis and scenario planning of these assets. Finally, TCF provides sustained consultancy support to enable members to make real headway within their organization at a ratio of 3:1 consulting support to meeting time over the course of the year.
TCF’s acceleration program entails:
1) Megatrends: Mega-Risks with Mega-Opportunities
TCF members get an up-to-date briefing on the facts, trends and material impacts of The Paris Agreement, Sustainable Development Goals, and other global initiatives. These initiatives are responses to pervasive, underlying threats to organizations’ license to operate. By understanding these threats, organizations can become more agile and resilient to the changes that an unpredictable market, climate and policy environment inevitably bring.
2) Integrated Thinking: Connecting Performance with Purpose
What are the business implications of these megatrends and how can organizations respond to them? Through the ‘Integrated Thinking’ concept, developed by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), TCF members will learn how they can reconcile competitiveness and sustainable growth to take advantage of the opportunities and face the challenges of the market.
3) Information Blind Spots: Understand and Manage Environmental and Social Impact
Finance teams usually take center stage to provide management information that fosters the generation of solutions. However, as observed in a recent CIMA research report, financial information complemented with a mishmash of sustainability tactics does not guarantee business decisions and strategies for long-term value creation. Instead innovation today requires an integrated approach that combines financial performance data with environmental and social impact information – currently a notorious blind spot in most organizations.
To address this blind spot, lean versions of two tools will be customized for each TCF Member:
(a) Environmental P&L (“EP&L”), an open-source ecological footprinting tool developed and implemented by Kering, and
(b) Social Value Analysis (“SVA”), a globally-recognized methodology that has been recently promoted by the world’s largest private equity fund.
Together with financial information, both tools provide TCF members with a fundamentally upgraded business operating system to drive innovation and sustained competitive advantage.
4) Change Management
Today’s fast-changing world demands more than yesterday’s ‘change management’; it requires the capacity to engage with the change occurring around the organization and its constituents.
TCF offers customized consulting support : meeting time at a 3:1 ratio over the duration of the program.
