Chasing Progress, Not Perfection: Thought Leadership by Natalie Vine
Doing good isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a must-do.
We (Discova) pride ourselves on being a company that operates responsibly, building partnerships with local communities, nurturing cultural resilience, and promoting sustainable travel. But good intentions don’t matter unless they’re backed by action, transparency, and accountability.
That’s what led us to B-Corp. The certification holds a mirror up to our operations, allowing us to celebrate our successes while forcing us to confront our short falls.
Why B-Corp? Why Now?
When the pandemic hit, budgets were slashed, and maintaining travel-specific sustainability accreditations became an unfortunate casualty. With the pandemic now a distant memory, we want something bigger, broader, and more rigorous than an industry-specific programme.
B-Corp stood out because it doesn’t just measure sustainability, it evaluates the entire social and environmental impact of a business, challenging companies to be accountable in five key areas:
Governance –Ensuring our mission, ethics, and transparency guide our decisions and that we hold ourselves accountable at every level.
Workers –Supporting the financial, physical, professional, and social well-being of our team by providing safe, fair, and meaningful opportunities.
Community – Contributing to the economic and social well-being of the communities where we operate, through local engagement and responsible practices.
Environment – Measuring and actively reducing our environmental footprint, including energy use, waste, water, emissions, and the impact of our products and services.
Customers –Enhancing the value we deliver by offering products and services that create a positive impact, promote public benefit, and demonstrate strong customer stewardship.
B-Corp looks at everything, from our supply chain to our employee policies, our offices to the transparency of our impact. It’s rigorous, and that’s exactly why we chose it.
Accountability is Everything
Getting certified isn’t a tick box system; it forces you to prove what you claim. We have so many of the certification requirements baked into our DNA, and we do a huge amount of good in our communities, but in many cases, we haven’t codified it into our brand manuals or don’t fully track it. For example: Are we measuring our carbon footprint beyond our customers? Have we fully documented our supply chain sustainability? How do we track the long-term impact of our incredible community programmes?
We know we were making a difference, now we need to quantify it.
Our Report Card
Workers
- Our strongest area.
- We employ 95% local staff, champion female leadership, implement extensive staff training programmes, and run education and infrastructure projects that uplift communities. This needs to be written into our corporate charter.
Governance
We have always prioritised people and planet over profit and are now writing it into our legal commitments too. Our corporate governance must reflect the impact-driven decision-making that has always been integral to how we do business.
Customers
We do everything we can to share local culture and tradition while supporting the resilience of rural communities. Giving people a taste of local life, supporting local restaurants, handicrafts, or the launch of “Kaura”, our eco-conscious retreats. Tracking, measuring and reporting this impact is essential.
Environment
We help our customers measure their emissions. As a service business, we must consider our own environmental impact too. Not all our offices, for example, have water-saving taps, or optimised and measured energy outputs. We have fleets of EV vehicles, which is great, we must now measure this positive impact on our carbon footprint.
B Corp isn’t just a badge; it’s a powerful reflection tool that challenges us to look beyond our business boundaries and deeply consider our impact on communities and guests, prompting us to ask:
“If Discova ceased to exist tomorrow, what legacy would we leave behind?”
Getting Certified
It turns out, getting B-Corp certified takes a lot of work!
It will take us up to two years, pulling together a mountain of paperwork and plenty of self-reflection. Even companies with years of sustainability initiatives struggle to make the cut. The process is about proving and improving at every step.
Here are some of our key actions – hopefully they’re great tips for you too:
- Measure Everything: In grassroots projects, you might not have a hard and fast metric or outcome. Document your “Theories of Change” cycle, the learning, decisions, expected and unexpected outcomes, so you can share them amongst your team and the industry.
- Get Some Expert Advice: Someone who can understand your industry and business, and join the dots between that and the criteria.
- Change Your Frames: Look at your business through a strict lens: “How does this action benefit People, Planet and Profit?”
- Tell Your Story: We were already doing amazing things, but if we don’t document it, it doesn’t count. So, we’ve been publishing monthly Community Impact Reports to showcase how our work benefits communities (see our latest edition)and will be looking at more ways of documenting every impact.
The Qu. You’re All Asking… Is It Worth It?
Before we started this process, I asked the B-Corp team, “If companies like Unilever and Nespresso can get certified (both not known for their sustainable products), does it really mean anything?!”
I think that’s a fair question, and I don’t think I’m alone in asking it.
The truth is, we’re dealing with wicked problems. Messy, complex, global challenges without one right answer. Over-tourism, cultural erosion, environmental impact … there’s no quick fix. We could ignore them and carry on with business as usual, or we can try harder.
Certification doesn’t mean a company is perfect; it means they’re committed to progress. B-Corp isn’t perfect either, but it will hold us accountable; it’s forcing us to improve, and that’s why we’re doing it.
What’s Next?
Our goal is to validate our impact areas by the end of 2025. Discova already set the bar high, but we’re committed to pushing ourselves even further. That means examining our practices, asking tough questions, engaging in meaningful discussions, and clearly documenting our commitments as we continue to raise the standard for how we operate. It’s a big investment in time and resources; not easy, but worth it.
We’re not chasing perfection; we’re focused on progress. Every day, we’ll strive to be a little better than we were yesterday, because small, consistent steps are what lead to lasting change. If we want to create a better future for our people and our planet, this is where it all starts.
I hope you’ve found this useful for your own B-Corp journey. Please get in touch if you’ve got any advice for me.
Nat.
Want to learn more about our B-Corp certification process?
We’d love to hear from you!
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