How a small and young company can become a global agent of positive change in 2 years.
Given the latest datas from a submarine robot, The Doomsday Glacier seems to start collapsing. This massive glacier in Antartica, also known as the Glacier of Apocalypse, is 120 km wide and 600 km long. If it were to melt completely, it alone would cause a 1 to 3 meters rise in the level of the oceans — and a rise in water levels of such magnitude could engulf part of the world’s coastal areas, while more than 40% of humanity lives less than 100 km from the coast (UN).
This terrifying news came almost unseen even in the specialised media, as they have been clogged with an enormous level of threats every week during the last months: killer heat waves in Canada, France, India amongst dozens of other places on the Planet, giant fires ravaging California, and Europe (France again…), the Amazon forest shrinking to a level where it is unclear if it will recover one day, massive floods in Pakistan…
The emergency has become absolute.
Humanity is facing a challenge that becomes clearer every day, if the screams of scientists had not been clear enough for the last 30 years: We are in front of our very survival. As a species. And the next 5 to 10 years have to be pivotal.
As Antonio Guterres said 2 days ago at the UN Assembly in NYC, “this is just at 1.2 degrees of global warming and we are heading for over 3 degrees”. We are far, very far from what would be needed to aim at a sustainable future, let alone a simply livable future.
So what could we do…?
I mean, shall we drop the pencil and go hide in the woods, build bunkers and hide until doomsday? Is that really too late? Are we f…ed?
I personally deeply believe that no, we still can change our fate. As an impact entrepreneur I am at the crossroads of dozens of other entrepreneurs, investors, professionals and humans who prove everyday how deep the change could be. We will not stop Climate Change by tomorrow 5PM, but we have the means to mitigate it and still make a better future happen. We all witnessed during the 2 years of CoVid that yes, you can pivot massive systems, and no, you do not need 25 years to do so.
In that context, how can Business keep relevant?
More than the sole CSR and ESG strategies, how can we become the actual curers of this never-seen-before crisis, with so little time left, at such a scale?
When we founded We Don’t Need Roads, that question was the haunting leitmotiv of all our thinking. We had to create as fast as possible, a tool that could reach a global scale in months, with a high transformative power, and that could move very fast, making our clients move as fast as us — a tool that could grow faster than the problem.
An Army of Good, as-a-service.
We are talking to global companies and brands, that need now to do by 2028 what they had scheduled for 2050. They need a very high quality of advising, as well as they have to be very fast, which quite none of them is designed for.
What is more, they need to operate and accelerate their plans everywhere on the Planet at once, with accuracy and reliability.
We are also working with solutions and entrepreneurs who hold incredible concepts and technologies, and need to scale in order to maximise their impact. They are trailblazers on their markets, whether it be Carbon Capture, Vertical Agriculture, Green Hydrogen or Clean Banking… And they need to scale fast to set up the right standards on these sectors that are designing the future of the economy. They need speed, and trust, as overnight, everyone on LinkedIn has become an expert on Impact. As an entrepreneur in the field for the last 15 years, I saw that shift happening very quickly lately, and the field has become very difficult to read for those who look for expertise.
Building our commandos, we identified that a very short percentage of the “said so” Impact experts are actual, verified, skilled, operational, seasoned experts who can give activable advice on a plan and help give it the right muscles.
And we are professionals in the field, I mean how could a CMO who has put this topic on his agenda 6 months ago, find the right help in that context? I am not surprised that so many global brands continue to activate safe, massive consulting companies that bring 150 slides on the table with not a single clue on how they are going to do that. Because it is simpler to do as we always did.
Yet, this is what brought us to where we are now, and the result has to change — and therefore the means too.
So what about these commandos?
As we say in the company’s Manifesto (yes, we were not joking), “in the era of the Infinite Game, there’s no more point of competing against one another. The only success that matters is a collective one: making a sustainable economy a reality. We need to break down the silos, end the secrecy kept in the name of “competitive advantage”, and stop the vicious individualist circle we are locked into. Collaboration is the new competition.”
From the beginning of the company, we started gathering all the partners, experts and talents we could, globally — even consulting, branding or innovation consultancies that were operating in the same field. Our point was to pre-load immediately available forces around the globe, on every important transitions and impact topics, with a very strong connection to the business.
As we move as activist entrepreneurs, we connected first with Climate, Carbon, Biodiversity, Mobility, Food experts. But we almost immediately had very nice conversations with a multitude of profiles, scientists, consultants, Start-up founders, investors, marketing and innovation teams, … which became our own version of an Underground Impact Collective: Hundreds of people from more than 30 countries (and counting), officially or secretly working on sustainability, answered our call to join our impact hybrid commando teams and tackle what is complicated, or too slow, or too small.
They are able to join our hybrid commando teams, tackling our clients’ topics for every transition, equipped with our own methodologies and frameworks.
Methodologies are the essence of such an army’s efficiency
Oh yes, the methodologies… We spent the last 2 years to carefully design, test and learn on these methodologies, and they are what gives our commandos such transformational power. Gathering hundreds of experts in a proprietary database like we did, would have missed the point if we had stopped there. We now know how they think, what they want to do, how they interact, what they can do besides their LinkedIn headline, and we have our own way to activate them, in addition to our in-house teams in Europe and in the US.
They connect and collaborate with our clients’ teams and work with them in a fast-paced and action-focused format.
We bring our help where it is needed, and we are now operating more and more global projects for brands, entrepreneurs and institutions, from brands like the cosmetics group Pierre Fabre’s lines of circular products, or the global sports retailer Decathlon’s Climate Plan operationalisation, to promising scale-up and SMIs that need help to accelerate like Climeworks, and non-profit moonshots like UN’s and Global Mangrove Alliance Breakthrough project.
Our “Army of Good” has become a value itself for our clients and partners. They are united by their search for positive impact and our common fight, and create unexpected value by talking to each other, like during our gatherings… we break the silos and connect entrepreneurs with brands, investors with NGOs, scientists with movie creators, and discover new ways to create together that would not exist without these “out-of-the-box” connections.
Disrupting the consulting sector
This is how We Don’t Need Roads has successfully delivered more than 50 missions in the last 24 months, and is disrupting the world of consulting. Most brands and companies we have been working with were equipped with one or several global consulting firms, for their Climate or CSR plans, or for their growth. We un-stuck them, and allowed them to speed it up at diverse levels, would it be the plans themselves, or their consequences, like product & service innovation, branding & marketing, solutions scaling & market fitting… And for the companies we help to scale, we are the perfect fit, impact driven, agile and powerful.
We are fast, and bold, as promised.
And we will get it done.
We have very nice missions incoming… Want to join our army?
Here, click on the link!
https://wedontneedroads.io/en/join-the-global-pack/
Tired of the 150+ slides of your CSR plans? Our commandos can help you de-risk, operationalise, accelerate and implement your plans.
Contact me in PM!
Guillaume de Vesvrotte, co-founder We Don’t Need Roads