How to Survive and Thrive Right Now as a Sustainability Professional

To save you and I both some writing and reading time, I could summarize my point this way: make it a business meeting, not a sustainability meeting.

But you would wonder what I meant....fine. Here's what I mean:

Several years ago, I was helping a large pharmaceutical distribution company establish a sustainability committee. I was working with the new--and first ever--sustainability officer, an excellent natural leader. She had done great work establishing a committee of well-respected leaders from across the company. This is not an easy thing to do. She had spent time studying the company, the competition, and understanding relevant sustainability frameworks and regulations. She was set for a great kick-off meeting. People were in their seats. Anticipation hung in the air. She cleared her throat and welcomed everyone to the meeting. Then she made a critical error: she opened the meeting talking about sustainability. I winced.

No one else noticed. It was a sustainability meeting after all, right? You are supposed to talk about sustainability...aren't you? The fact that a sustainability meeting is expected to be about sustainability is exactly the problem she was feeding into. By meeting this expectation she was, ironically, making her work in the future to mainstream sustainability at the company that much harder. She was splitting sustainability away from core business, a dislocation that can take a long time to mend.

At the time, I had been in sustainability for over 25 years and knew the topic teetered on a razor's edge between the ethical and the strategic, the nice-to-do and the must-do, between social responsibility and fiscal discipline. It easily becomes a sideshow while the main event plays on. A significant part of my life's work has been to get sustainability in the big tent, but they talk differently in there and they don't let just anyone in.

Getting Clear on Means and Ends

If you are working on sustainability, you are working on the wrong thing. You should be working on the business. Sustainability is the means by which you are working on the business. Getting this turned around can be disastrous and I know of good sustainability professionals who have lost their jobs (sometimes the whole department) in part due to this problem.

In the same way that R&D, HR, IT, IR, marketing, etc. are means for realizing business objectives, sustainability is in service to the business. That may seem obvious but after working in sustainable business for decades I can assure you that it is often missed and puts the whole field--and perhaps your job if you have sustainability in your job title--at peril.

Sustainability professionals must constantly demonstrate the strategic value of their work. Those who succeed are the storytellers, the data-sharers, the connectors who translate sustainability efforts into tangible financial gains, cultural cohesion, and operational effectiveness.

The Strategist, Bridge-Builder, Collaborator, and Risk Analyst

It is my contention that the best sustainability professionals bring irreplaceable value to companies, and they do so when the fulfill four critical roles: as Strategist, Bridge-Builder, Collaborator, and Risk Analyst.

The Strategist

Perhaps most crucially, the best sustainability professionals link their initiatives to business performance. They highlight how smart sustainability can reduce costs, mitigate risks, drive revenue through new products and markets, and enhance brand reputation. This not only can lower capital costs but also attract and retain talent, contributing to long-term value creation.

Consider an example that illustrates sustainability's strategic value. We helped a publicly-held payment systems company calculate their GHG emissions. After a presentation about their Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, the CEO zeroed in on an aspect of Scope 3: the GHG emissions of customers using their software. "Why do we need to know that?" the CEO asked.

Great question, I thought. This is the moment great sustainability officers rise to the occasion. The unskilled sustainability professional might respond: "Because Scope 3 emissions are 80% of your GHG footprint" Or "Because some acronymed organization says you should" or "Because your peers are doing it". The CEO would smile, nod and our well-intentioned friend would have achieved irrelevance.

The response of the Strategist (who wants to be invited back to meetings with the CEO) would be about the business first, not about sustainability. Since consulting is a listening profession, she would first ask questions:

Excellent question. Let me ask you: "what are your goals when it comes to engaging with your customers?"

The CEO might answer:

"the best thing for us is to retain our customers through competitively priced excellent products and reliable service. Then as opportunities arise, we look sell them additional services and increase our revenue per customer."

She might say:

"Exactly. So the question is how can this information about your customers support this business objective. Scope 3 information is just more information about your customers and information is power: power to understand customers, power to understand how they use your product, and power to understand variances in electricity demand, consumption and prices across your customer base. Then what? That's up to you but perhaps the insights provided by Scope 3 data leads to new products and services, maybe a premium priced offering or a new service to help customers measure or reduce their emissions. Or it reveals an opportunity to work with others who share your data centers to combine electricity demand and buying power to switch to cleaner sources of energy, thus hedging against price volatility. Here's the point: with this information, these business opportunities exist. Without it, they do not."

The Bridge-Builder

Internally, the best sustainability professionals are the nexus of dynamic networks that facilitate the flow of vital information, resources, and insights across corporate structures. It is common for sustainability professionals to create such networks, formally as committees or working groups or informally. They become incredibly well connected and able to bring an agility and responsiveness to their organizations. In this way, their work transcends environmental and social performance, offering strategic advantages that ripple through all facets of the business.

A client in personal and homecare products is fortunate to have a superb sustainability team that has earned the respect of senior leaders across the company. They have effectively leveraged this trust to assemble a highly effective cross-functional team from research and development, legal, marketing, supply chain, and retail sales.

When this group meets, a powerful neural network lights up. I recall these dynamic meetings during a sustainable procurement project focused on shea butter, guar gum, aloe and a range of other ingredients. The conversation flowed across functions, combining into what we can only call a unique form of organizational intelligence. Circulating and accumulating naturally in such an environment is proprietary knowledge that is the source of competitive advantage.

Will the bridges between people built by the sustainability team improve sustainability performance. Yes and it already doing so. But the network, once created, functions just as well around any other topic that comes up and needs a cross-enterprise perspective. The sustainability team sits at the center of a web of knowledge that can be brought to bear on a range of issues and opportunities.

The Cross-Industry Collaborator

The best sustainability professionals are engaged in robust networks such as associations, working groups, conferences, consortia, and roundtables. In such groups and at such events, they mingle with competitors and value chain partners. This interconnected web provides a stream of strategic insight that companies can harness to understand their industry, their peers, consumer behavior, and to vet technological innovations.

Antea Group USA (full disclosure: my employer) has facilitated industry consortia for over two decades. We've had a front row seat to the insights spun up and distributed through these networks. Today we support networks involving over 100 companies around the world: the Inogen Alliance, the Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable (BIER), Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC), and the Data Center Safety Council (DCSC).

Imagine being in one of these pre-competitive spaces, governed by Chatham House Rules, surrounded by counterparts facing your same challenges. It's like strapping your learning to a rocket ship. It's not unusual to pick up ideas that save you months or years of effort, and to save an untold amount of money. You get to "paint the wheel instead of reinventing it" as a former colleague used to say.

The results range from the headline catching Charco Bendito watershed preservation work focused on 355 hectares around Guadalajara, Mexico made possible by BIER, to the more mundane, but no less important, like standardizing safety training in data centers--a DCSC project--where demand for capacity is growing 20% per year.

Such collaborations advance sustainability in their respective industries but also act as information highways between the member companies. Sustainability professionals have exclusive access to some of the greatest sources of information in the world through these groups.

The Risk Analyst

The best sustainability professionals present the facts, translate them to business relevance and help their companies prepare for the future. They keep their eyes above the waves of today's volatility to see the trends and act as translator of those for different audiences.

It is easy to get lost in the second and third order effects of sustainability– things like sustainability reports and acronyms like CSRD, CDP and ISSB--and forget about the first order drivers. Sustainability, at its core, is a response to a set of existential environmental and societal risks made possible by--and continuing in spite of--incredible technological and economic growth (see the recent EY report "The New Economy" and its concept of the "polycrisis"). Without these severe risks, we wouldn't need sustainability. Think about it. If slave labor didn't exist in rare earth mineral supply chains and carbon emissions weren't reaching 430ppm, we wouldn't need a concept that brought our attention to those risks, since they wouldn't exist. In that world, we would just need your basic business, economics, government, education, healthcare, etc.

But sustainability signals that we do face very real risks to human flourishing on this planet. The best sustainability professionals are able to point this out and make it actionable.

Two global trends are worth flying over briefly to reinforce this key role of environmental and social risk analyst. As you review the following bullets, consider the business value of having a savvy leader at your company helping you track and make sense of these risks for your business:

An Environmentally Constrained Future

Planetary Boundaries Crossed: Six of nine planetary boundaries*, critical for Earth's stability, have been transgressed. (See Planetary Boundaries https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html)
Accelerated Warming: The world has already warmed by 1.2°C, and is on track for 2.5°C–2.9°C warming this century. The past 10 years have been the 10 hottest on record (EY The New Economy)
Massive Ecosystem Alteration: Over 70% of land and 80% of oceans have been altered by human activity (EY The New Economy)
Extreme Loss of Life: The Living Planet Report tracks the average change in observed population sizes of 5,495 vertebrate species. It shows a decline of 73% between 1970 and 2020. We are losing insects at 2% per year and they pollinate more than 75% of global crops, a service valued at up to $577 billion (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services).
Plastic Pollution Crisis: Over 140 million tons of plastic have accumulated in aquatic environments (EY The New Economy)
Insufficient Action: Current national commitments are insufficient, with emissions projected to drop by only 2% by 2030, far below the 43% reduction needed to limit warming to 1.5°C compared to 2019 levels. (EY "The New Economy")

A Future of Dramatic Social and Cultural Change

Widespread Lack of Access: Hundreds of millions, possibly billions, lack affordable access to essential services like safe drinking water, sanitation, and clean energy.
Falling Real Wages: Average real wages are declining globally, while the wealth of the richest individuals and corporations continues to increase (EY "The New Economy")
Dire 2030 Projections (at current rates):
- 84 million children out of school (that's twice as many students in primary and secondary school in the United States)
- 300 million children leaving school without basic literacy and numeracy
- Nearly 2 billion people reliant on unsafe cooking fuels (a quarter of the world population)
Extreme Poverty: About 700 Million people (9% of global population) will still live in extreme poverty with less that US$2.15 a day (EY "The New Economy")
Rising Inequality: The COVID-19 pandemic caused the largest increase in between-country inequality in 30 years, and within-country inequality has also risen sharply (EY "The New Economy")

Here's the point: the politics or cultural to these issues don't alter their existence or trajectory. There are biophysical changes happening to our planet. There are sociological, demographic and economic changes happening to our human world. The best sustainability professionals track these developments, foresee and forecast implications for the business and society, and keep decision-makers apprised of the risks (and opportunities).

Climate Risk for Oil and Gas: Heresy or Strategy?
Let's consider the risk of climate change to an investor in oil and gas. We have a client operating in this space and last year held a visioning session with the C-suite. The CEO kicked off the meeting with a refreshingly candid and courageous description of the situation. He acknowledged climate change. He acknowledged pride in supporting domestic energy production. He pointed to the historic change in geopolitical power made possible by the U.S. changing from a net importer to a net exporter of natural gas. And he shared personal stories of his kids and family being maligned for being in a "dirty industry" that is harming the planet.

Climate change is clearly a risk to our client's business. It is what observers have called a Gray Swan event (as opposed to "Black Swans" defined by Taleb). Gray Swan events are known to be possible, have potentially significant consequences, but their exact timing, magnitude, and specific impacts are uncertain. Complicating the picture are Green Swans, a concept coined by John Elkington, "systemic solutions to global challenges, solutions that tap into positive exponentials.”

As the workshop, continued these various swans hovered overhead. The walls were soon covered with Post-it Notes of every color. Conversation settled into a big question asked by the Chief Legal Counsel: "what will our business look like in 10 years? 20 years?" As if walking on ice, the executives moved uncomfortably and carefully toward discussing novel business models, ideas of new kinds of investments in carbon sequestration or clean energy. "If we provide the same or better ROI, would it matter what aspect of the energy industry we were invested in?" Was this heresy or long-term strategy? Perhaps both.

Traditional enterprise risk management (ERM) is designed to manage risk that can be quantified. Gray Swans like climate change represent uncertainty, where probabilities are unknown or unknowable. This fundamental difference makes them difficult to incorporate into short-term oriented ERM frameworks. Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England has called this disconnect the "tragedy of the horizon":

We don’t need an army of actuaries to tell us that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors – imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix. (Speech at Lloyds of London, 2015)

The best sustainability professionals help to enhance ERM by incorporating scenario planning and stress tests for long-term, uncertain impacts like climate change. Finally, they get this risk analysis embedded into governance and strategic decision-making at the highest levels.

The less effective and sophisticated do not look beyond politics, short-term trends, fads and "vibes". They get swept up in the cultural and economic moods of the day and do not pay attention to the broader trends. They become reactive agents forced to make the case for their job by jumping from issue to issue, shapeshifting as fits the moment: CSRD or not CSRD, DEI or no DEI, ESG or "sustainability" or "responsibility", and on and on.

This is the kind of inane activity John Maxwell was referring to when he talked about activity being different from accomplishment: one can be busy without doing anything meaningful.

Today, our client continues to invest in oil and gas, strengthening the U.S.'s hand in a high-stakes geopolitical landscape. Honestly, I am grateful for their work. They have hired a sustainability person and continue to track the risks and opportunities we discussed. Hopefully they are helping them to identify and navigate around risks and opportunities whether gray, black or green.

Make it a Business Meeting, not a Sustainability Meeting
How should the sustainability officer at the pharmaceutical company have kicked off her meeting? In short, like a CEO.

Imagine how an effective CEO would open and frame any important meeting. She would talk about strategy, the company's vision and values, competitive pressures, and the market dynamics the company is seeking to leverage. She might mention the current stock price, the last board meeting, the next quarter's financial goals, and investor pressures. This sets the tone and sends the message: this is an important meeting about the business.

In other words, this is NOT a sustainability meeting but a meeting about strengthening the competitive position, winning culture, and operational excellence of the enterprise. In this framing, sustainability is rightly positioned as a means to achieving business goals.

Sustainability is not just about the environment but about a better way of doing things

Too often sustainability is approached as an end in itself. Discussion is about reporting and disclosure requirements, a range of acronyms and voluntary reporting frameworks, and a range of other paper-pushing, administrative hoop jumping amounting to little. Such an approach puts the sustainability officer and team at great risk. After all, such frivolity might be permitted in good times but will be dispatched in bad.

Sustainability professionals are the corporate crystal ball gazers, constantly scanning the political, economic, social, and technological horizons. Their insights are a treasure trove of future-proofing strategies, addressing not only environmental and social impacts but also providing solutions to the most pressing business challenges of the day.

When they put the business first, sustainability professionals can be the architects of resilience and innovation. Their work is not just about safeguarding the planet—it's about securing the future of the companies they serve.