Impact Interview: Tabea Soriano

Name: Tabea Soriano

Role/Function: Partner, The Ready

What are you working on these days?

At The Ready, our purpose is to change how the world works - from business as usual to brave new work. As we head into 2023, we're working on both broadening and deepening our impact within and across different segments of people who work. While this is much more (that is to say, entirely) industry-agnostic than my prior focus on sustainability strategy in the retail and apparel space, I am personally excited about shaping a couple of our initiatives, one of them being the future of sustainability.

Across the board, sustainability (among many other functions, certainly) sits as a siloed, oftentimes stand-alone initiative, either as part of legal or marketing, to be checked off and dealt with singularly. A lot of us have the best intentions! But I believe that in order for something as cross-functional, complex and urgent as sustainability to root and both accompany and be accompanied by behavioral change, companies need to change their way of working alongside it. 

That has implications on structure (how we organize and team), information (how we share and use data) and strategy (how we plan and prioritize) among many other things. And that's the kind of work that our company has been doing for nearly seven years!

However, it's my belief that tying organizational design explicitly to the tensions and opportunities witnessed among sustainability and impact practitioners will allow us to get to work with those teams and companies in a more accelerated and intentional way.

What was the “aha” moment that sparked your interest in social impact?

The Ready is an org design and transformation consultancy, which in itself is a departure from the sustainability (people/planet/profit) work I had been doing with my consulting company, Futuremade. That, in turn, had been a pivot from the product and operations work I had done prior at The Reformation. 

I've been able to crystallize the motivation behind my professional evolution as "leave it better than you found it." 

I can't pinpoint an exact moment in time… Or rather, there have been many moments in time since childhood in which the thought "there has got to be a better way" has driven an action - for better or worse. Working within supply chains early on elucidated both the interconnectedness of the global population touching product and the externalized cost of which individuals and the planet were expected to bear the brunt. 

On the flipside, working with a number of start-ups and legacy organizations laid bare the often mundane, sometimes painful existence of employees within structures and systems that no longer serve the work and stated purpose.

How did you break into the social impact space?

I had started my career in the apparel industry. At some point, about five years in, there were murmurings of fashion brands looking to become more sustainable. This was 2012 and “sustainability” was definitely a niche pursuit concentrated primarily in the outdoor apparel and food industries. 

That was also around the time of the tragic Dhaka garment factory fire which brought working conditions into the international conversation (once again). I had an editor friend who essentially gave me an outlet to research and start writing about sustainable fashion. It was a short run of a 12 week column, but it set the tone for my years to come. 

Mind you, I’m not a writer per se - my editor did the heavy lifting. And that would be my tip for job-hunting in this space: social impact and sustainability aren’t skills, they’re interests, motivations and worthwhile pursuits. So, what are you good at? What do you do (or want to learn how to do) that you can bring to the table in this pursuit? 

For me, ultimately it was product management, technical design and organizational skills back then. Today, it’s strategic advising, coaching and facilitation. For others, this can be coding, project management, design, research, data analytics - today, almost any skill can be useful to make an impact. 

Figure out what that is for you, get started, get good at it and work for companies that align with your values (or build your own)!

Working in social impact is often about driving change. What is the skill or trait that has been most important for your work as a change agent? How did you learn or hone it?

My work currently is absolutely about driving change! On a personal level, what’s helped me in ways immeasurable has been my coaching education. There is a way to ask questions that allows for more space and creativity for the other to answer, which in turn allows for more dialogue, curiosity and opportunity for co-created change. This is a useful skill regardless of where in the organization we sit. 

At the end of the day, we’re problem-solving - systemic and engrained problems that require this idea of co-creation of solutions that might be novel or that might be as old as time. And to get there, we need to be able to ask open-ended questions and listen deeply.

What most excites you about the social impact space right now?

I don’t know that there is only one thing. There’s this race against the clock of human existence that always shows up for me when consuming news - that’s excitement, but not necessarily of the positive sort…

Data for good is something I’m excited about. My colleagues over at Open Supply Hub (formerly Open Apparel Registry) are doing great work within global supply chain data transparency. Visibility, knowledge and collaboration are power.

Those are also core tenets of our work - how do we make work in organizations more visible, how do we manage knowledge in a way that enables equity and agility and how do we collaborate to break down silos in order to align on urgent outcomes? 

It's imperative that we work globally as well as locally. We as individuals, our systems and our structures are in a period of significant overhaul. And where there are people, there’s work to do - with and for others. So perhaps that’s the arc of what keeps me going.

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