What we learnt from two closed-door roundtables on turning sustainability ambition into action, with senior sustainability leaders across 12 businesses
23 October 2026
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Most organisations no longer struggle with setting sustainability ambitions. Targets are in place, strategies are published, and the sustainability team knows what needs to happen. The challenge, according to most sustainability leaders, is turning those commitments into action across the business.
How do we make sustainability everyone’s business?
That was the question at the heart of two recent Ambition to Action roundtables in which we brought together senior sustainability leaders across tech, telecoms, retail, construction, insurance, hospitality, private equity, and entertainment. The sessions were intentionally kept small and closed-door, designed for candid, open conversations.
Each leader chose one initiative they wanted to land in 2027, the teams they need to bring with them, and the barriers standing in their way. We then used our Ambition to Action framework to explore the levers they had already pulled, the ones they were considering next, and the advice their peers could offer.
Our Ambition to Action framework is based on a simple idea: the dial on sustainability only moves when the people who have to deliver it are Engaged, Equipped, and Empowered to act.
For the purposes of the conversation, we broke each dimension down into a set of practical levers, helping participants identify which barriers they were facing and which levers might be most effective in overcoming them. So, what did we learn?
The initiatives we discussed covered a wide range of sustainability priorities with CSRD readiness, supplier engagement, and leadership engagement coming up most frequently. Yet the same barriers kept surfacing, and most weren’t technical. They were human.
Leaders consistently described challenges with securing colleagues’ attention, navigating competing business priorities, and building motivation for change. Regardless of who they were trying to influence, the obstacle was the same: getting people to care, prioritise, and act.
When we mapped leaders’ current activity against our Ambition to Action framework, one trend stood out: most effort was concentrated around Engagement. Specifically, engagement of key stakeholders through relationship and coalition building was, by far, the most common lever.
This is understandable – engagement is often the easiest place to start. Sustainability teams can build relationships and communicate their plans without needing sign-off or investment. However, despite the time and energy being spent engaging stakeholders, sustainability leaders were still struggling to secure attention, compete with other business priorities, and motivate people to act.
The lesson here isn’t that engagement doesn’t matter, but rather that it needs to be more strategic, and coupled with clearer governance, stronger incentives, and the right tools and support to make change happen.
Engagement wasn’t working, but not through lack of trying. While relationship-building dominated current activity, leaders were doing far less engagement through strategic communication and commercial positioning. In other words, they were spending time building connections, but less time thinking about who they were trying to influence, what mattered to them, and how their message would land.
Yet, when we asked what had worked well in the past, the answers shifted noticeably towards strategic communication – timely, tailored messages delivered to the right audience. The leaders who had successfully shifted behaviours weren’t necessarily talking more about sustainability, they were talking more about what mattered to the people in front of them.
For many, what matters most is a clearer commercial case. Commercial positioning showed one of the biggest jumps between what leaders are doing today and what they plan to do next. Participants repeatedly spoke about the need to position sustainability as a driver of business value, backed up by credible evidence and data.
Why else might Engagement not be landing? The answer – it is not enough on its own. If people lack the mandate, incentives, accountability or capability to act, awareness rarely translates into action. Engagement must be supported by Empowering and Equipping teams. Let’s start with Empowerment.
When we asked leaders to plan what they would do next to land their sustainability initiative, their plans were far more evenly spread. While Engage still featured heavily, many participants planned to strengthen the Empower dimension by introducing clearer governance and accountabilities and more robust KPIs and performance. In fact, KPIs and performance showed the biggest jump between what leaders are doing today and what they plan to do next.
This is an encouraging shift. Yet there are two Empowerment levers that were completely overlooked: incentives and recognition and culture and trust. When we reflected on the barriers raised – low motivation, competing priorities, limited capacity and perceptions that sustainability is “someone else’s job” – it became clear that these levers could be game-changers.
Why have they been overlooked, if they might be so powerful? We observed a common tendency to reach for the levers that feel most tangible and familiar: governance structures can be redesigned and KPIs can be introduced, but culture and incentives are often treated as fixed constraints rather than factors that can be actively shaped. This means that leaders are creating an environment where people have accountability, but not the motivation and confidence to act.
A similar story emerged when we looked at the Equip dimension.
Awareness and training was one of the levers leaders already relied on most, but they felt it often failed to translate into action. Data and insights were also commonly relied upon. Given the growing demands of CSRD and other reporting requirements, that’s perhaps unsurprising. Organisations are investing significant time and effort into understanding, measuring and reporting sustainability performance.
However, Tools and technology (the systems and software that make sustainable choices easier) and Support and expertise (access to specialist sustainability skills and advice) were consistently overlooked. This matters because, while training and data can help organisations understand a problem, it doesn’t necessarily help people solve it. The levers that make sustainable choices simpler, faster and easier to incorporate into day-to-day work often sit elsewhere: in processes, systems, guidance and access to expertise.
If we want sustainability to become part of everyday decision-making, we need to equip people not just with information, but with the tools, support and ways of working that help turn that information into action.
Interested in exploring how your organisation can better engage, equip and empower teams to deliver sustainability outcomes? We’d be delighted to discuss the framework, share additional insights from the round tables, or invite you to a future session.
Before embarking on your next sustainability programme, take a step back and assess it through the lens of our Ambition to Action framework:
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