How to Use Journey-Mapping for Sustainability: A Step-by-Step Guide Part 1

Firstly, what is Journey-Mapping in sustainability?

It’s a detailed roadmap of your business operations, from inputs to outputs, to outcomes. This comprehensive process helps you understand what's happening at every step in your business, using environmental, social, and commercial perspectives to uncover opportunities, challenges, and innovative solutions.

It can accomplish an awful lot when used correctly, you gain:

1) A communication tool to align every team member, department and stakeholder to the overall business, as well as views on key focus areas to review from their strategic role

2) A workshopping tool to develop specific sustainability and commercial initiatives

3) A space to prioritise ideas, solutions and challenges in relation to what actually occurs in your current business

4) A space to identify gaps, opportunities and challenges in not only environmental and social areas, but also commercial innovations

5) An empathy tool to deeply understand and connect with your customers and stakeholders

6) A tool that visualises the impact of better design in your business

Here’s a zoomed-in gif example of a product-centric value chain, the green boxes are opportunities and the red boxes are challenges.

How is Journey-Mapping Used?

Firstly, it identifies gaps in information. For example in the image below, if you’re unsure about the fate of a waste stream, mark it as an information gap. This helps you prioritize and decide how to address it in the context of other findings from the session.

The goal is to pinpoint these gaps, then prioritize them, and create actionable plans based on customer demands, regulations, and organizational resources.

This extracted section shows purple boxes indicated for this company the gaps in information to later prioritise and work-through with our team

How to Conduct Journey-Mapping

Journey-mapping is a team effort that involves collaboration, iteration, and tools like Mural or Miro. If you’re able to engage team members from different departments to ensure diverse perspectives AND have a decision-maker present for immediate approvals and strategic context, you’ll be able to see real sustainability change in weeks, not years.

Here’s an example of that in action: The Christchurch Town Hall achieved a 93% waste diversion figure for a client’s event in 2023, up from 20%. The facility manager and the client’s event manager were empowered to make direct decisions while they were conducting the journey-mapping exercise. There were no back n’ forth emails and meetings, in other words, the people on the ground and the decision-makers were in the same room:

• The facility manager representing operations and HR approved messages, posters and changes to the operational flow to improve recycling, composting and use of teams and tools at the facility

• The event manager approved changes to vendor rules and suppliers which affected the budget - some of these included changing suppliers on the spot, which in this case even saved some money.

This drive link shows the full example of the event journey map above, this was facilitated in-person in less than 2 hours with both decision-makers and experienced on-ground team members.

The 7 Steps to Journey-Mapping for Sustainability

1.Pick a Value Chain:

• For physical products, choose a product-based value chain, such as the event journey-map sample as above.

• For all businesses, especially digital or service-based businesses, choose a people-based journey, such as this internship journey map.

2. Map Important Touchpoints:

• Identify key stages such as the desire to use the product/service, engagement on key platforms, sourcing of products etc. These touchpoints are strategic, meaning it’s up to you to decide commercially what the most important areas to consider are, as well as hotspots where sustainability outcomes can be best improved. The internship journey for example covered the first internship day, first 30 days and even alumni as this was deemed significant for them.

3. Apply Sustainability Perspectives :

• Apply impact categories based on your priorities; such as customer and regulatory demands.

• Review each stage with questions like:

  • What is our current energy efficiency?

  • What is the embodied carbon at this stage?

  • Can we source materials locally?

  • How sustainable is our packaging?

  • What are the waste outcomes after the useful life of our product at this stage?

4. Identify Opportunities and Challenges

• At each touch point, colour green boxes for opportunities and red boxes for challenges or information gaps. To help your future self and other users, write enough context into each box. For example, ‘information gap’ isn’t as useful as ‘Information gap - what happens to the scrap copper and where does it go?’, this creates a much more actionable challenge and opportunity.

5. Cluster the sticky notes:

• Group the red and green boxes after mapping or after each session, certain challenges and opportunities will be related. For example, following up with your waste supplier on pricing for polystyrene recycling will likely be placed together with following up with the same waste supplier on outcomes for landfill waste.

  6. Prioritise Decisions:

  • Categorize decisions into micro, messo, and macro based on timing and resources.

    • Micro decisions are quick, impactful, immediately actionable decisions. ie) Changing to a more environmentally-friendly supplier which costs the same price with no locked-in contract

    • Messo decisions are medium term, requires multiple steps or multiple stakeholders, more learning and understanding, potentially more funding and resources. ie) Changing waste suppliers (typically locked-in contracts)

    • Macro decisions are long term, investment heavy decisions ie) investing in an end-of-life material recycling/treatment system 

  • Here are a list of considerations when prioritising across the list of tasks and initiatives that arise from journey-mapping; organisation-wide strategic priorities, resources, team morale, user feedback, founder's intention, timeliness, and regulatory/market conditions.

  7. Create a Timeline:

  • This is the easy part! Organise the tasks into a timeline which will likely extend into the 5 or even 10 year mark due to the messo and macro decisions. Remember to be ruthless in your priorities to channel focus, as working on sustainability related reporting and development may end up with backlash if poorly communicated and roughly executed. Consequences range from being labelled as greenwashing, to being fined by an institutional body to physical harm if developments to physical product aren’t being correctly assessed.

Following this article will be two posts specifically detailing the two different approaches to journey mapping; Product-Centric Journey and User/ People-Centric Journey. If you’d like support and advice in starting your own journey, consider joining the Sustainability Mastermind programme, which aims to drastically improve affordability, efficacy and efficiency of sustainability outcomes through journey mapping.