Stop defending the budget

Start telling a better story.

Every sustainability, social value and impact leader I know has the same recurring meeting. It is the one where they have to justify the team’s existence. Sometimes it is dressed up as a budget review. Sometimes it is a strategy session. Sometimes it is just a corridor conversation with the CFO that goes a bit sideways.

The shape is always the same. You arrive with evidence of good work. They arrive with a spreadsheet. You leave having defended your seat at the table for another quarter.

I want to suggest, gently, that you are walking into the wrong meeting.

The reframe

The teams that have stopped having this meeting did one specific thing. They reframed their work, in their own heads first, from a cost the business tolerates to a return the business depends on. Not as spin. As a literal change in how they show up.

Instead of “here is what we spent and here is the impact we created” they walk in with three things, in this order:

1. Here is what changed for our people, our customers, our communities and our planet.

2. Here is what that value is worth in pounds.

3. Here is the story behind the numbers, because the numbers on their own will not move you.

   
   

What finance has known all along

That third bit is the one most people miss. Finance teams have been winning the budget argument for a hundred years not because their numbers are better than yours but because they tell better stories with them. They explain what the numbers mean. They make the listener care.

The whole profession of management accounting is, at heart, a storytelling profession dressed up in spreadsheets.

We need to learn the same trick. Hard numbers, real stakeholder outcomes, told as a story your CEO would happily repeat in the next board meeting. Once you do that, you are not defending a cost centre. You are presenting a value-creating function that happens to also do the right thing in the world.

Monday morning challenge

Walk into your next internal meeting and lead with what changed, what it was worth and why it matters.

See what happens.

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Further reading: Sir Ronald Cohen’s Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change is the best book I have read on how this shift plays out across the global economy. Sir Ronnie is widely regarded as the godfather of impact investing, and the book makes the case for why measuring and valuing impact is the change the system actually needs.