about the program
Senior executive councils are often the biggest asset to sustainability programs. Council support and ongoing engagement is increasingly understood as critical to the ability of sustainability teams to achieve meaningfully progress. Moreover, the next phase of sustainability requires moving beyond isolated programs, and will entail integration of sustainability tenets and responsibilities into business cores and across departments. However, some companies are struggling to engage their councils and keep them relevant.
PROGRAM PURPOSE AND STRATEGY
Facilitate creation of and direction for executive councils, as catalysts for the next phase of corporate sustainability. This year-long program will leverage the futures tools to engage councils in actionable workshops that result in new, sustainability-related ideas that the council members are excited to implement. It will conclude with tools that leverage the council members’ own business expertise and can be brought to their own teams, thereby engaging more than just the council members alone.
First, please review the overview document, which includes an overview of the program, a sample timeline, and information about all of the materials that were developed. Then download all of the documents via the links below.
| Workshop | Workshop objective | Workshop materials for download (download all as zip file) |
| Workshop 1. Sustainability Megatrends Changing Retail | Define the most major changes occurring in retail and your function | |
| Workshop 2. Innovation is Required | Council should see that innovation is a necessity to remain successful. Identify ideas and apply a SWOT and a sustainability lens to innovation ideas | |
| Workshop 3. Making it Work | Develop an action plan to begin implementing the ideas | |
| Workshop 4. Taking Innovation to Your Departments | Council members will have tools and action plans to promote this process within their departments | |
RILA's role
Throughout the year, RILA will provide support (sample PPT presentations, workshop exercises, etc.), and host conference calls with a small group of sustainability leads to share ideas and learn from one another—a “virtual team.” RILA will also send relevant articles and stories to sustainability leads to forward on to councils.
Program Materials
The outcome of the year-long Retail Horizons program are free tools that retailers and product manufacturers can use to drive sustainable change within their organizations. They are all available in the downloadable toolkit, and include trends, scenarios, and other useful tools. RILA has developed additional resources for retailers that want to implement Retail Horizons with their Sustainability Executive Councils. Those resources are also free to download via the links to the right. Those tools include sample workshop agendas, pre-reads, sample presentations, and exercise templates. | Full program materials (zip) Download components, including: Facilitator Notes & Program Overview Workshop 1: Workshop 2: Workshop 3: Workshop 4: |