This is why sustainability plans never leave the boardroom

Good afternoon, Mikulaj. Thank you for having me here today. It's always a pleasure to have the opportunity to talk a little bit about my own journey and my sustainability advisory journey. So thank you for having me here.

So my stadium comes from having identified a gap that there was in the sport and in the events industry. My industrial engineering background had taught me how to develop a management system. At the time, there were already some very important management systems which were working around quality and which were working around environmental management, but there wasn't a specific ad hoc framework. that could be adopted by the sport and the vent industry. And so what I've done, I've merged basically my industrial engineering background and my knowledge about management systems with the knowledge and understanding of the sports industry because I practice sports since I was a kid and I was playing football at a decent level. And that helped me in really understanding what the essence of sport was and what being part of sport teaming event implied. Then when I moved to London, that was almost 20 years ago, I had the feeling that there was a shift in terms of paradigms. When I bumped into what at the time was called the PSA 901, which was the British standard for sustainable event management. And by studying it a bit more in depth, I understood that that was nothing more, nothing less than a simplified version of a management system. And that was the kind of connection because my background was in strategic planning primarily. Sustainability was added into my background and into my set of skills throughout the journey. And that was depending on the fact that this British standard was then turned into an ISO standard in 2012. And it became the standard of reference for the sports and events industry. for everything that concerns sustainability. And it was part of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games legacy. When they won the Olympic Games, one of the commitments they made was that they would have developed a sort of guidelines, a framework on how to plan, organize, and deliver sustainable events. So that's where I saw that there was the need for someone like me who could bridge this gap and can help sport and events organizations which were 20 years ago was slightly different, the industry. Really need of some help and some support, not only from the technical point of view, but also as I said, from the strategic point of view to understand how sustainability could have become a source for competitive advantage for them, which at the time was not perceived like that. There was not even sustainability managers as a profession. There were what was called at the time corporate social responsibility people. which were normally people from HR or people from marketing and comms, were not more operations people who also had an interest in, again, was not even called sustainability, but in adopting more green initiatives. That's how they were called at the time. So I identified that kind of gap. The difficulty lied in the fact that probably I landed on that planet a little bit too early. So it took me a while and a few iterations before crafting what really the set of tools, the kind of trainings, the kind of support this sport organization would have needed. Then after the ISO standard was published, of course, my life was much, much easier, especially after COP21 in Paris, where they really outlined the sort of book of rules of how sustainability had to be embedded, not only in the sports industry, but in all the organizations. That really gave me a big, big boost.

He he he he. So it's a very, very, very interesting question this one. So you have to be very disciplined because of course every client is quite demanding and they got different agendas. They got different ways of working. So my week looks like there are days allocated to each and every client, but in reality they tend to overlap because things do happen. So you have to allow yourself that level of flexibility, which enables you to, know. to take that call, to attend that meeting, to go to the office if needed. So in practical terms, it's quite complicated. In real terms, I'm lucky enough that I don't live far away from my clients. So even an in-person meeting is not too difficult to be arranged. The more philosophical answer is that you really need to have a sort of baseline of common issues that... you know, sports industry has, as we were saying earlier. And having identified those before anything else, develop some sort of clusters of expertise. So there's the environmental pillar, there's the social pillar, the economic pillar. And then you adapt to what the needs of your clients are, depending on what their priorities are, their budget allocation, the people they have on the ground versus the people that need to be appointed as external experts because in-house you don't have that level of expertise. It really depends on the client, on the size of the client, where they are in their sustainability journey. So it varies a lot, the level of commitment, the level of involvement in the day-to-day work, and also on the budgets they got available. It's obvious, right?

Thanks. I think. There are always good intentions, but then when reality steps in, there's a gap in terms of knowledge and understanding of these things. Everyone wants to be sustainable. What does it mean? So when I start my conversations with them, although it looks like a bit like I'm lecturing them or not, I already asked them, what do you mean by strategy? What do you mean by sustainability? How do we develop a sustainability strategy? And then I use a a double funnel, I call it. So there's a top-down approach, which is using the literature, using the standards, these frameworks, what's been done already, what is known to be considered a best practice in the industry or beyond the industry. But then most importantly, there's the bottom-up approach. And during the very first years with my clients, I'm the one who learns more than what they learn, because you have to understand how they operate on the ground. So the example I use is that it's like, When you are developing your strategic plan and when you have developed a series of policies, processes, documentation, et cetera, it's like if you're building the engine. But then if you don't build the transmission that enables the wheels to go, it's not getting anywhere. And that transmission is granted by the people who operate on the ground, the one who really know how to deliver their events, the kind of difficulties they find, the kind of suppliers they have to deal with. the host cities, the local authorities, the local schools, which sometimes complain because of the road closures, all the nitty gritty little or big hurdles that you find along the way. And that's how inferring most of the times, but learning from the ground, you develop your plan. And I can give you a practical example. In season two of Formula E, we had a big issue. with one of the communities that felt that the event was really putting their own park at risk, although it was not exactly true. But that was the perception. And that caused almost the cancellation of the event. Since then, we used everything we learned with my colleagues at Formula E to develop what we call at the time the Strategic Community Engagement Plan, which we... based on the bronze, silver and gold levels. And we brought every event since then to bronze and to silver and to gold across the different seasons by learning from the ground, on site, what were their needs and expectations, trying to translate those into a series of activities, programs, initiatives that were minimizing that perception of you disrupting their day-to-day life because of your circus coming to town. So it's really about putting your hair on the ground and trying to figure out what's really needed. And what I love to say, you have to focus more on the expectations. What verbally is not explicitly said, but is expected from you. So they expect tickets for the local schools and the local businesses. They expect you to invite the mayor or all the other local authorities. expect, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They will never. or put it openly to you. But it's part of you being hosted there. We should never forget wherever we go, we are guests. So we need to behave like guests. We cannot go there and impose our own will on these are the standards of work of ours. That doesn't make any sense. Right. So it's really about transferring your knowledge and understanding from the framers, the literature, the knowledge, the experience you have accrued, but then matching it with what they do, how they operate, what's valuable to them. Because if you go and talk to the operations manager, to the procurement manager, and you don't manage to transfer, translating into their own language, practically speaking, what this close of the standard means, or what this strategic planning phase means, doesn't add any value to the day-to-day work. So they're going to tick the box just to do the exercise with you, because the boss has told them that we need to get certified. but no one will never embed into its own way of working what we are trying to do. So it's an iterative approach and it consists of education, conversations, difficult conversations sometimes, and continual improvement as the basis for everything you want to do, constructive criticism when necessary, and lessons learned when things don't go according to plan so we can get it better than next year. So it's really the reason why takes you years. There's no shortcut for this.

You want an example with a specific client? What kind of...

I think the let's keep it generic because it's really across the board the kind of difficulty I find. It's really how to provide some quick wins to get especially top management on board because their role is crucial. When I was talking about this transmission, that's phase two. Phase one is to get the buy-in from top management. So it's developing some using some low-hanging fruits to develop some initiatives that will make them shine in the short term. So they start seeing value in the work that you do, because I said there are plenty of biases around sustainability. People think that we are like, I don't know, Greenpeace people who go and fight for freedom of whales. I have very much respect for them, but I do a completely different job. I put in place management systems to enable organizations to position themselves differently in comparison to the competitors. This has got nothing to do with being, you know, campaigning for X, Y, Z environmental issue. I try to tackle event related environmental and social issues. Yes. And I try to study in depth, as I said earlier, what each and every location where this event takes place is going to be struggling with, or we can help in taking to a higher level in terms of sustainability. Yes. But this needs... top management, sponsorship and support. Because if then this message is cascaded down through the hierarchy, then that transmission starts working from day one and that's how you manage to achieve the impossible, the non-achievable. Like shifting the culture and the mentality in the motorsport industry that when I joined, believe me, was very backwards in that respect. But they had the issue of motorsport being perceived as a polluting sport. So they had the sense of urgency coming from that, but still struggling to understand how that could be done, bringing value to the comp.

I think AI plays a very important role nowadays because especially when you work with standards and you have to harmonize processes and procedures, having the ability to speed up on some of these operations, on some of these procedures, which otherwise require a lot of time because you have to, you know, add all the data into the system, managing the data and turning them into useful information that will then enable you to take the right action or put in place the right corrections. I think one of the usage where I see AI helping a lot, especially event operators, is really in having more detailed and more structured data collection. Take the example of monitoring and measuring your carbon footprint. Having the opportunity to use some tools, smart tools that can help you developing. But from your own data, from your own footprint, from your own areas, which are more responsible for your carbon footprint, the measures that need to be prioritized, because rather than just tackling the different scopes of net zero, you understand that, for example, trade and shipping things around the world are responsible, like it happens especially for global events, of 70, 80 % of your carbon footprint. That's where you're going to start. So if only have one pound, euro, dollar available, that's where I'm going to start from. Because if I manage to reduce by 1 % that, I almost reduce by 1 % the whole carbon footprint of my company. So it's really about enabling even people who don't have a deep knowledge and understanding of these topics to get access to this data, to get access, to turn them into useful information so we can act more smartly and more rapidly.

The goal is to offer more and more integrated strategies, sustainability and governance architecture services. So going beyond what the usual buzz word, not so buzz anymore, sustainability has meant so far, because things are evolving very rapidly. You named AI. we can see what's going on in terms of geopolitical terms and the disruption on the supply chain, access to energy being more costly. So there's really the need for building companies that are better adaptable to changes. And that's where, again, having the right frameworks in place, developing solid management systems can support people and organization in achieving that. So I see it as a sort of next step that will enable the clients of mine or the new potential clients to adopt more strategic measures but also more operational initiatives to make the company more adaptable to all these changes that they have to face on a day-to-day basis.

The best place is on the website www.mystadium.net or they can search for my LinkedIn profile and that's where also they can find a lot of information about the work that we do, the kind of progress that we made, the lessons learned sometimes because not everything goes according to plan but you learn from that and you in that logic of continual improvement that I was talking about earlier you can improve and you can do better. So LinkedIn, I think, is a good place and website.

Thank you, Miklas.