To quote Eric Clapton: “It’s in the way that you use it.”

The Wal-Mart sustainability index is measuring whether suppliers are measuring their impact on energy usage, greenhouse gas emissions, waste, resource depletion and the communities in which they operate. Essentially it’s binary with annotation. Are you or aren’t you? If you are, please describe what you are doing.

Wal-Mart is gathering data. The key question is “What for?” Wal-Mart has sustainability targets and standards. They can be found here. They are doing good work. Of particular note are their Sustainability Value Networks. In these networks they’re bringing together “leaders from our company, supplier companies, academia, government, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)” to work in categories that are core to Wal-Mart’s business. It is a matter of course that they will compare what they are learning from their suppliers with their own progress, most likely incorporating best practices along the way.

So, how will they use it with the suppliers? In the answer to this question lies the answer to the question in the title of this post. And, to really uncover the meaning in that answer requires us to look at the quality of relationships Wal-Mart forms with the suppliers and the quality of relationships the suppliers form with their network.

What do I mean? First, sustainability is something we do together. Fundamentally local and place based, sustainability depends on the quality of our relationships with the world around us. Reducing impact is good, however, relationship-wise this creates a less bad quality of connection. Imagine a spouse telling you that to strengthen your relationship he/she was still going to be bad but, from now on, less bad than before. A start? Yes. A strong foundation for a long-term relationship? No.

Second, sustainability is long term. What are we trying to sustain? Us. How do we do that? By sustaining what sustains us. One way to conceptualize this is a Value Web. Incremental reduction, though currently necessary is not sufficient. We become the slowly-boiled frog. The quality of relationships in our value web slowly erode, the web disintegrates and less bad leads to very, very bad. Simply, we need more good.

So, back to Wal-Mart and their suppliers. Moving forward, the better they are able to build networks ofCollaboration that strengthen and enhance the Value Web the more sustainable the Wal-Mart sustainability index becomes. This is where those Sustainability Value Networks could really become value-abling. And, the more coherent their approach, the more effective the networks become at being sustainable. Again, it’s in the way that they use it.

So, now, think about this: For a retail giant like Wal-Mart this is a big hairy audacious undertaking that will touch pretty much all of us for generations to come. This matters. So do we.

So much depends on how we are, what we see and what we do now. As we do as we do we get what we get, becoming what we become. So will Wal-Mart. These are interesting times…

This post also appears in the Capacity Evolution blog that I also write.