Is protecting nature and natural resources antithetical to growing the economy? These vital goals don’t have to be at odds.
“Expanding areas of nature conservation and increasing investments is often seen as limiting job creation, but this tradeoff is often false,” says Duko Hopman, a McKinsey partner who focuses on nature conservation and natural capital innovation. “Entire communities’ economic activities rely on intact ecosystems and healthy natural capital.”
Duko works on nature conservation projects from Fiji to Africa, and recently in Central America. One aspect of this work is expanding protected lands, which—while good for the environment—can restrict local economic activity, such as fishing.
Alejandra Carson, a McKinsey business analyst based in Bogota, Colombia, traveled to various communities to understand their needs. She explained that through use of geospatial data from McKinsey, local authorities would be able to target areas that are most in need of conservation to protect fish populations. By opening specific areas for fishing, local communities can report their catch numbers, helping with monitoring and ensuring the optimal plan for preventing overfishing is in place.
“These communities came in with a scarcity mindset, that this land and their livelihood would be taken away from them,” says Alejandra of her workshops with local communities and government stakeholders. “But they left understanding that this plan makes them part of a solution that ensures there will be fish for their children and grandchildren.”
McKinsey’s team of scientists, based in Belgium, uses analytics to determine where issues such as deforestation and natural resource depletion is most acute and then creates maps that outline where to plant trees or create conservation areas, calculating cost and risks to the area as the climate changes.
“This use of analytics not only protects local communities and natural environments, but many corporate supply chains, which the data shows would see major disruptions without investments in the health of natural capital,” says Duko.
We have the data now to show how important natural capital is and what the solutions are—it can no longer be ignored.
Duko Hopman, McKinsey partner
Maintaining healthy ecosystems—forests, biodiversity, waterways, and more—is essential to sustaining communities, businesses, and the planet itself. It’s also key to fighting climate change. Yet while about 80 percent of global Fortune 500 companies have targets for carbon emissions reductions, less than 5 percent have the same targets for biodiversity and nature-related loss, says Kartik Jayaram, a McKinsey senior partner based in Nairobi, Kenya.
“That is a very stark difference,” says Kartik. “Our research shows that companies can take actions on their own that can address many issues around nature conservation, particularly in retail and agriculture. We continue to work with them to move the needle.”
The scale of repair to nature is large and the work ahead won’t be easy. But Duko is optimistic about what lies ahead.
“It’s still possible to reverse this trend of natural capital degradation and keep the world economy within planetary boundaries. We have the data now to show how important natural capital is and what the solutions are—it can no longer be ignored,” says Duko.
“McKinsey has a catalytic role to play,” Duko adds, “because we are in the privileged position of working with leaders across geographies and sectors to help scale the solutions and act now.”
Generation’s impact has been remarkable since its 2014 inception. A global nonprofit, it provides high-quality job training and placement for people of all ages. What began as a small organization has now grown to operate in 17 countries, including Mexico, Italy, India, Kenya, the United States, and Brazil.
To date it has trained more than 77,000 learners and placed 81 percent in jobs within three months of graduation with more than 11,000 employers. Together, Generation graduates have earned more than $630 million in salaries that can support them and their families.
McKinsey helped found the organization and has since supported it with funding and people, including staff members who have joined Generation as short-term fellows and pro bono engagements to develop and strengthen the nonprofit. As May marks the beginning of graduation season in many countries, we take a moment to highlight this important work.
“Generation is a model for tackling the global unemployment crisis,” says Lucy Pérez, McKinsey senior partner. “McKinsey is thrilled to partner with them to continue to expand their impact.”
A people-centered approach
To reach and engage so many, Generation relies on its digital ecosystem, a set of tools, platforms and user experiences, and the backend system that supports it. Candidate applications, volunteer recruitment, the learner portal, and mechanisms for learners to interface with teachers and employers, all hinge on the functionality of this operation. To be effective, it must be thoughtfully designed.
Generation had been on a multiyear journey to embed human-centered design and improve its digital ecosystem so it can better serve the needs of learners, staff, and employers and fulfill its mission: to transform the way the education to employment system works around the world.
“Automation and a well-designed user experience is critical to scale the country teams’ ability to reach more learners”, says Sergio Gutiérrez, McKinsey engagement manager. “Their processes were reliant on manual work and not standardized across geographies. This led to inefficiencies like the lack of consistent data collection and a huge burden on staff when engaging learners and employers.”
McKinsey worked with Generation to accelerate its improvement, digitize more of its operation and overhaul its data architecture and user experiences—focused on learner and staff modules—with tangible results. For example, mentors now spend roughly 50 percent less time reviewing documentation ahead of mentorship sessions because of streamlined user experience and information and data consolidation about learner status.
Revamping digital, data, and cloud systems is complex. Beyond the technical work, it required a deep study of the organization’s and stakeholders’ needs to successfully develop tools like the learner portal, the mentorship experience, and the employability platform that helps match learners with jobs.
“We don’t have researchers on staff,” says Alma Angela Merino Cedeño, global director of digital at Generation. “McKinsey took the time for robust user-experience research across our channels, which had to be done before any line of code could be written. This also trained our team to do that job.”
Where McKinsey was incredibly helpful was in defining our broader strategy and methodology and in working with us —it fundamentally changed how we operate as a team.
Alma Angela Merino Cedeño, global director of digital at Generation
Uniting a global organization
A key element of this approach was building user profiles. With Generation’s operation spread out over 17 countries, its digital needs are not one size fits all. McKinsey gathered feedback from country stakeholders and uncovered distinct pain points, which included data access, data quality, and not having tools to share analysis.
To address these, we took information from the profiles and business use cases, broke them up into technical capabilities and used these to assemble a cloud native architecture that could meet the needs of the global team.
“We made sure that the new data architecture was designed for people first, for everyone in the ecosystem to come and use,” says Prasoon Sharma, a McKinsey partner.
Generation had relied on manual surveys to refine its programs, which offer limited insights. McKinsey built feedback mechanisms into the learner platform for automatic seamless data collection.
“Our program and impact data is not only more in-depth now, but we are able to gather it more often,” says Goldie Chow, global director of data & impact at Generation. “This is a game-changer for our ability to improve learner experience, learner support, and job placement.”
The portal also included features for teachers, such as automating attendance tracking and communicating with students.
Building enduring capabilities
A central goal of the engagement was to embed these change methodologies throughout Generation to ensure they would last. Creating technological changes rippled to functions such as contracting, implementation teams, communications, finance, and operations.
“Where McKinsey was incredibly helpful was in defining our broader strategy and methodology and in working with us—it fundamentally changed how we operate as a team,” says Alma.
Besides working along with the McKinsey team, Generation’s digital team went through several McKinsey Academy programs to help embed their new practices. This has resulted in Generation moving to a full agile methodology and process, which, in addition to a new design system— has increased the speed of product development by 70 percent.
All these elements make Generation’s operation more efficient, bringing them closer to their goal of transforming the lives of young people.
“We’re all about connecting people to dignified work and a living wage, so the better we can understand how to operate, how to serve our learners, the better we’re achieving our mission,” says Goldie. “In McKinsey, we’ve had a partner who took this to heart as much as we do.”