CFOs are accountable for well-informed decision making in their organisations, therefore are key to successfully navigating these problems. To fulfil this responsibility in today’s fast-changing and complex world, CFOs need to change their mode of operation.

Consider the approach needed to navigate the challenge of transforming business models to execute sustainability-led strategies of redesigning processes and systems to fulfil fast-evolving sustainability reporting and assurance requirements. Today, such challenges arise against a backdrop of limited financial resources as well as human and natural resources – the long-term survival and success of business can no longer be assured with a narrow focus on financial return alone.

What is a complex multi-dimensional problem?

Complex multi-dimensional problems are problems that often:

• are difficult to define
• involve complex systems
• are difficult to approach, and
• are such that it is difficult to know when you have fully solved them.

This guide prepared by ACCA (access below) explains the five must-have integrative-thinking capabilities of the individual CFO or senior accountancy professional, and details how they are required for impact in navigating complex multi-dimensional problems, which are also explained.

Thereafter, the guide provides insight on the six approaches professionals, organizations and educators should take to develop their integrative-thinking capabilities.

1. Understand your innovating and problem-solving capabilities
2. Challenge the organization’s cultural ecosystem and the profession’s culture
3. Embark on shared learning
4. Explore your capabilities with immersive and challenging exercises
5. Properly reflect in the cycle of ‘plan-do-reflect-plan’
6. Engage in developmental programmes.

CASE STUDY: From one mosquito to a room full of mosquitos

Mark de Lat, a former partner at PrimeGlobal member firm Eshuis Accountants en Adviseurs, sees himself as a temperate radical, disrupting the traditional accountancy system from the inside: ‘a mosquito’, as he calls this. In 2015/16 the firm changed its strategy to pursue its ambition of helping clients to be more successful. Part of what being ‘successful’ meant was to have a positive social and economic impact in the regions where the clients’ businesses operate. ‘We created a long-term vision and asked [our] colleagues and clients [to] join us on this journey’.

Seven years on, although growth was not the main goal, the firm has grown from having around 100 staff to approximately 250. In a time of talent shortages, they have had no problems recruiting new staff ‘because we address our ambition – and on this ambition, our new colleagues come in’. The long-term vision galvanised the staff and made for a committed and happy workforce. ‘One of the learnings is: don’t take care of happy clients. Take care of happy people. Because happy people take care of happy clients, not the other way around’. Eshuis is now a B Corp.

Mark believes that Eshuis has benefited from approaching its strategic transformation as a long-term transition, rather than as a more time-bound changemanagement project. By articulating and pursuing its long-term ambition, Eshuis ‘created a movement, instead of an organisation’.

Mark is now pursuing a PhD, while continuing to drive change within his firm and the accountancy firm network. He has realised that his calling is to create a room full of ‘mosquitoes’, all buzzing together. We spend 80,000 hours working in our lifetime, as he says. How do we want to use this time? ‘I [will] hopefully use the next 20,000 hours that I have available to [teach] my colleagues to ask all the [right] questions, so they can be stewards of a sustainable society’.

Access the Full Report: Integrative thinking: the guide to becoming a value-adding CFO