Future Search that Put Sustainability into IKEA's Global Business Plans

Future Search that Put Sustainability into IKEAʼs Global Business Plans*

IKEA is the worldʼs largest home-furnishings company. For years it has had a corporate culture that supports good relations with customers and employees. The company was introduced to Future Search in 2003 by its human resources manager, Tomas Oxelman. It was immediately embraced by Josephine Rydberg-Dumont, then head of IKEAʼs design, production, and distribution arm. At her urging the company ran a Future Search “to look clearly at the entire global operation from design to customer through the lens of a single product, the Ektorp sofa”. In 2005 Rydberg-Dumont and Supply-chain Manager Goran Stark used Future Search to redesign IKEAʼs supply process and again in China to improve supplier relations. Of the latter effort, Stark said, “We put quality in focus, assuring that ʻMade in Chinaʼ actually stood for quality in our stores.”

The company also had a public commitment to sustainability. “We had been thinking about environmental questions,” said Torbjorn Loof, Rydberg-Dumontʼs successor, “but we had never been able to put it into a strategic context. We didnʼt have a common language. We lacked a holistic view.”

In 2008 IKEA decided to make itself a global leader by reducing its carbon footprint. “We could have done what we have always done and written the strategy centrally,” said Sustainability Manager Thomas Bergmark. “What we really wanted was to integrate sustainability fully into the way we do business.” Future Search, 2^nd edition, Weisbord and Janoff, (Berrett-Koeher, 2000) provided him with many case examples outside of the supply chain process to support his thinking.

In May 2008, IKEA organized a Future Search with internal stakeholders from all functions, suppliers, and external partners such as the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace International, UNICEF, and the European Union Commission. The aim was to imagine how a fully sustainable IKEA would do business. People

worked intensively on how to reduce the carbon footprint of 300 stores, 10,000 products from suppliers in 55 countries, and 130,000 staff servicing 600 million customers per year.

“If you succeed in furnishing the homes of all the people on earth the way you do business today,” asked one external participant, “will we have any resources left?”

As the dialogue progressed, the NGO members had an “aha” moment when they realized that their individual wishes for IKEA made it impossible for the company to satisfy any of them. Said one environmentalist, “We want you to be successful. Itʼs your moral obligation to be both profitable and sustainable.”

IKEA and its partners then built a common-ground agenda. They committed to a long-range “cradle-to-cradle” concept of having every product made from recyclable, reusable, or renewable materials. “Our materials strategy completely changed as a result of this,” said Loof. “We began tracking and rating the environmental impact of all products.”

All management groups accepted sustainability goals and action steps as integral to their business plans, on par with quality, range of products, and price. Each core process and function was charged with setting and implementing its own sustainability goals. “In 2000,” said IKEA President Anders Dahlvig, “the levels of insight and understanding and the attitudes were totally different. We werenʼt ready for this discussion. Now we are putting the responsibility for what we can achieve fairly and squarely on our own shoulders. We can make huge progress toward making the world a better place to live in.”

Said Bergmark, “In the Future Search, we created the foundation. We had all the key people from inside and outside, who are now strong drivers of the ongoing process. Sustainability is no longer just my departmentʼs job. It is a core part of our product development and materials procurement strategies.”