Corporate sustainability consulting: Where is its jackpot opportunity in the 2020s, actually? (Part 1)

Corporate sustainability consulting: Where is its jackpot opportunity in the 2020s, actually?

Corporate sustainability consulting is up for an unprecedented disruption, from which current market leaders may come out victorious or fade into oblivion. What changes must the industry undertake to harness the opportunity?

Series Introduction

If you come from a traditional consulting background, it may surprise you to read that the corporate sustainability consulting arena is about to experience unprecedented disruption. Where will the disruption come from? In short: the real world we are hired to protect.

Commanded by the doctrine of perpetual near-term growth, human activity has altered and continues to alter natural systems, and our economic system keeps exacerbating social injustice - both at an ever accelerating pace. Already, tipping points tied to ecological ceilings are being hit. All areas of our existence - our economy, consumption patterns, access to public goods, our professional lives, health and general well-being - will soon be affected so severely that social tipping points will be hit too. The result will be turmoil.?

Unlike some industries that will see demand plummet as we recalibrate to a (real) new normal, there will be more, not less, requirement for corporate sustainability consulting and solutions, representing a considerable business opportunity - at least for those who can demonstrate alignment between their advisory services and the emerging reality.

It follows that the disruption also represents a threat: in their current setup, most large and mainstream consultancies are likely unequipped to capitalize on this opportunity. Unless they awaken and adapt to a market increasingly aware of impending realities, they stand to lose credibility and authority, an essential component of their value proposition, and in turn market share. The good news: it is possible to adapt and ride the wave of imminent change - and the time to start adapting is now.

In this 4-part article series, I will:?

1. explain how consultancies must newly view their purpose*, in order to be able to reinvent themselves around future-fit systems ethics, value propositions and offerings;?
2. dig deep into what client needs will look like in the late 2020s, to which consultancies will need to deliberately adapt said value propositions and offerings;?
3. elaborate on the capabilities and skill sets that sustainability consultancies must develop or acquire in order meet new client expectations, on how they might choose to go about that within the context of their hitherto indirect competitors, and on the success metrics they ought to move towards to drive profound change;
4. suggest a specific approach for triggering and mastering a continuous adaptation and innovation for future-readiness within a sustainability consultancy.

*When I say purpose, in the context of this series, I do not mean a calling or a higher mission, but rather more prosaically what outcomes its clients expect a consultancy to deliver; building on this meaning, we can investigate the fitness-for-purpose of current practices, capabilities, skill sets, mindsets, and so forth.

How can sustainability consultancies prepare to ride the wave?

First of all, by changing how they see their role.

In their June 2022 report “Enough: A review of corporate sustainability, in a world running out of time”, EY Oceania authors Adam Carrel et al. put forward a thought-provoking assertion: “[T]he corporate sustainability community [...] still recoil from the proclamation that we want to change the world. And yet [...] we must, and if we don’t, perhaps we need to make space for those that will”. In an abbreviated form: if we are not in sustainability to change the world, we should make room for those who are. While the provocation may have been intended as a (notably inspiring) manifesto for passionate sustainability champions, on another level, it can be seen as a (likely unwitting) prophecy of the disruption the industry will see in the 2020s, and a hint at how to successfully navigate the wave of change.?

As I will argue in this piece, viewing one’s firm’s purpose and principal value proposition as enabling corporations to ‘change the world’, and building corresponding offerings and capabilities, has become mission critical.?

Sustainability consultancies that are not in the business of changing the world will likely lack:

1. Fitness-for-purpose, in the sense of an ability to meet (shifting) stakeholder expectations and to deliver relevant value propositions;
2. Future-readiness, in the sense of commercial growth prospects in late 2020s and an ability to avert risks to business continuity; and a
3. Radical-innovation-capability, meaning a designated forward-looking function that would enable them to grasp and retain a significant market share in a disrupted market and beyond.

Needless to say, the majority of market leading corporate sustainability consulting firms are not, ostensibly, in the business of changing the world, and hence likely manifest all the above three deficiencies.?

In Part 1 of this series, I will focus on the foundation: the definition of our purpose, as a necessary starting point for grasping the nature of upcoming disruption and a precondition for harnessing the inherent opportunity. In order to examine our fitness-for-purpose, we must first ask ourselves… What is the purpose of corporate sustainability consulting?

What do I bring to the table that is new?

I am admittedly not the first to critique the current mainstream in sustainability consulting practice. Ed Gillespie ’s “The Omerta of Consultancy” from August 2021 has had 400+ engagements to date on Medium, Paul Abela ’s “Five Reasons Sustainability Consultancies Are Not Making Companies More Sustainable” from April 2022, also on Medium, has reached nearly 400 “claps” to date. EY’s June 2022 “Enough” Report was widely circulated around LinkedIn in dozens of posts by sustainability champions. How do I go beyond what has already been said??

In his piece, Abela pinpoints relevant internal barriers that prevent consultancies from delivering real-world sustainability, but remains short of clarifying whether, in his view, consultancies might change and why. Gillespie is implicitly adamant they ought to change, and presents a success metric conducive to a change (assessing absolute emissions reduction across one’s client portfolio), but neither does he elaborate on why such a change is not only inevitable but also in sustainability consultancies’ best interest (mind the business opportunity and risks I alluded to in the series’ introduction), nor does he expand on what such an internal transformation might look like, nor on how to drive the shift. Carrel et al too believe a change is necessary - and have taken a broad and inclusive approach, calling on like-minded change agents to join forces in finding a recipe for transformation (a process I hope to contribute to in the future and one I eagerly observe). They highlight attaining ‘strength in numbers’ will enable mission-driven consultants to drive said transformation. However, the answers are yet to be collated and shared with the rest of us. (I will return to EY’s influence on the market in Part 3 of this series).

This article series adds the hitherto missing practical considerations. I contrast current mainstream sustainability consulting practice against the evolving outer context, which will rewrite the ‘rules of the game’ and outweigh current internal barriers. I describe (or prescribe?) the specific changes consultancies must undertake. (Like Gillespie, I too suggest a novel portfolio-wide success metric, but expand its scope to all planetary boundaries and social foundations, and account for changes in portfolio over time - in Part 3).

In case the above enumeration of topics to be covered does not sufficiently clarify my intent, let me reiterate it bluntly: Much like Gillespie and Carrel’s, my intent in this series is not calling anyone out, but calling all of you in (1). May these thoughts help us drive meaningful change.

Part 1: CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY CONSULTING: WHAT MIGHT ITS REASON-TO-BE BETTER BE?

Allow me to open with an anecdote:

In a recent conversation with a senior member of the ESG practice of a Big 4 consulting firm, I could not help but inquire about the level of their future-readiness by asking: “What is [your firm’s] plan for contributing towards averting global collapse scenarios?”. The question received a rather defensive answer, which we can use here to illustrate our starting point, from which we need to evolve to be able to grasp the ‘jackpot opportunity’:

“It is not our job to make clients believe in science, [...] it is to meet them where they are and nudge them [in the right direction]. If [making clients take on science-aligned action] is what you want to do, you should become an activist.”?

This statement may represent widespread beliefs in the industry. (Afterall, mainstream sustainability consulting has been capitalizing on science-defying green growth narratives or on productising the concept of net zero without clarifying that, in isolation, it does not have the potential to avert global collapse scenarios). I take three principal issues with it:

1. It demonstrates that intentionally or not, and I believe rather not, some sustainability consultancies have been monetising popular yet utterly ineffective solutions to the real world sustainability crisis, rather than monetising the enablement of clients to solve the crisis (here Abela, Gillespie and Carrel et al would agree);
2. It underscores a continued lack in awareness that in order to deliver real world sustainability, sustainability consultancies and professionals in fact must:?i) engage in activism and advocacy, precisely because the average client is so under-informed about what sustainability action levels are necessary (again, Gillespie would nod), and?ii) primarily focus on transformational offerings, driving system interventions on levels higher than that of a single business or even that of an industry.
3. It lays bare a lack of sufficient familiarity (and/or alignment) with the growing body of sustainability science, due to which some of those in senior sustainability consulting roles remain unaware of (or aware yet unwilling/unable to act on) the severity and urgency of our predicament as a global community. This leaves them particularly unequipped to: (i) foresee impending and long-term impacts (a necessary foundation for relevant internal and client roadmaps), and to (ii) meet client needs and expectations as they will be radically redefined later in this decade (the focus of the upcoming Part 2 of this series).

As they become exposed to sustainability science, clients will increasingly sense that ‘changing the world’ must be everybody’s job. And therefore, I argue, it must be our job, as sustainability consultants, above all. Why??

What the purpose of sustainability consulting ought to be?

The purpose of corporate sustainability?

You might agree with me that, normatively speaking, the raison-d’etre of corporate sustainability ought to be to identify and orchestrate the action required for businesses to play an appropriate, proportional role in attaining real-world sustainability, along with other contributing stakeholders and their proportional roles (e.g. sustainable finance ought to define investors’ proportional role, urban sustainability a proportional role of municipalities, etc). Before I apply this understanding to the role of consulting, let me provide a few definitions:

By real world sustainability I mean sustainability of the physical world around us and our activities conditioned by the physical world, with the state of sustainability defined by thriving below ecological ceilings aka planetary boundaries and above social foundations - in layman terms, thriving within our means. (I owe taking a shortcut to this high maturity understanding of sustainability to my exposure to and engagement with r3.0, a pre-eminent global non-profit broadly catalyzing a systems change, and the ecosystem around it. I adopted the expression “thriving within our means”, which I find both pertinent and universally understandable, from Neil Davidson of the systems leadership enabler And Now What).

Sustainability science (more accurately Earth systems and social systems sciences), is an umbrella expression I use to describe the various disciplines that help us define the outer planetary and inner societal boundaries, related carrying capacities, tipping points and budgets, whether or not we are in a state of undershoot or overshoot vis-a-vis these thresholds, by how much, for how long, and the nature, scale and pace of what needs to be done to in order to return to a state that enables thriving within said boundaries. I use this expression in intentional contraposition to widely used climate science, which is a subset of sustainability science the same way that climate breakdown is a constituent factor of the polycrisis and climate action is only a part of all necessary sustainability action; I prefer that we look at the full picture. See Bridget Mckenzie’s “Earth Crisis Blinkers” diagram, illustrating this challenge, below.?

Figure 1: Earth Crisis Blinkers by Bridget Mckenzie

Science-aligned sustainability is nothing but a different label for context-based sustainability (2), a concept originating in the early 2000s and building on top of decades of previous cutting-edge thinking on delivering real world sustainability, which industry thought-leaders including r3.0, the Center for Sustainable Organisations, and so forth have been actively propagating for over a decade. I prefer to say “science-aligned” here as it allows for the clear distinction that it is not some sort of high maturity nice-to-have practice, but the only approach that counts, while all else is simply inconsequential window-dressing, and even detrimental as long as stakeholders are willing to take window-dressing for saving the world.?

Now that we have covered the foundations, let us dive in.

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The purpose of corporate sustainability consulting

The purpose of corporate sustainability consulting is, normatively speaking, applying knowledge of real world sustainability imperatives, as delivered by sustainability science, to specify what action corporations must take in order to play their proportional role, and enabling them and equipping them to play it.        

If the purpose of corporate sustainability ought to be to identify and orchestrate the action required for businesses to play a proportional role in attaining real-world sustainability, then in turn, the purpose of corporate sustainability consulting is, normatively speaking, applying knowledge of real world sustainability imperatives, as delivered by sustainability science, to specify what action corporations must take in order to play their proportional role, and enabling them and equipping them to play it. Companies large and small seek out and hire sustainability consultancies precisely because internally they do not possess a broad and deep enough understanding of real world sustainability and/or sustainability science, and rely on consultants for multi-layered expertise.?

To take this further, we must ask: What should this role of corporations be? The global consensus in sustainability science urges us to see that attaining real world sustainability requires an immediate, radical, globally implemented systems change (3). Hence, the proportional role of business lies in co-orchestrating such a systems change, not merely anticipating it and adapting to it, and consultants have to lead the way.?

Again, in turn, this concretises the purpose of corporate sustainability consulting, to: specifying how corporations must co-orchestrate a systems change and enabling such co-orchestration. IPCC’s commandment that the necessary systems change be globally implemented further points to the fact that our level of intervention must shift above that of a single company, value chain, and even a single industry or a single national government (I write more on this in Parts 2 and 3).

Figure 2: Purpose of Corporate Sustainability Consulting

This logic can also be applied to emphasize what the purpose of sustainability consulting should not be, and that is compliance management and/or perceptions management. As long as regulation around the world continues to lag behind sustainability science, it cannot be an instrument for attaining real world sustainability. Hence, the outcome of providing compliance management services cannot be accurately labeled sustainability. Nor can taking companies beyond compliance but short of science-aligned sustainability action - or, as Gillespie puts it, “providing a polished positional cover for what is broadly business as usual incremental change, whilst simultaneously eroding both the edge and substance of the essential radical shift that is really needed”.

If a corporation’s ambition and action consists of complying with science-non-aligned regulation and/or of perception-driven nudges to business-as-usual, then labeling the outcome of this activity ‘sustainability’ or ‘doing right by one’s stakeholders’ is increasingly called out for greenwashing. Analogically, providing compliance/perceptions management services under the banner of sustainability may soon be widely seen as a business of greenwashing-enablement.?

We may live to see a day when regulation will be reformed and newly science-aligned - we may hit tipping points so impossible to deny that they will make such a radical ramping up of legislation inevitable within this decade. Until then, let us keep in mind that regulation defines the lowest rung of the ladder of? societal and corporate expectations - i.e. the boundary between legally-defined criminal negligence and legal compliance, not the boundary between doing nothing and taking science-aligned sustainability action in the spirit of a culture of integrity with Earth systems. (This shift in norms and culture change are depicted on the below diagram, adapted from Peter Verhezen, via Neil Davidson).

Figure 3: From a Culture of Compliance Towards a Culture of Integrity

Clearly, till now, much of the sustainability consulting business has been generated through compliance/perceptions management. And so far, that was what the market demanded, as the overall awareness levels among clients and other stakeholders had been very low. But it is increasingly obvious that that is not what the future looks like, and we must adjust our playbook accordingly.

In summary, unless our sustainability advisory is propelling clients and the world at large towards real world sustainability - via a science-aligned, immediate radical and globally implemented systems change - in the upcoming disruption, we will be unfit-for-purpose. (Let us however not use this to point fingers, rather to point towards the path forward, the obvious and less obvious solutions.)?

Some might object: this may all be true for once disruption hits, but how are we to make good on this purpose of ‘specifying how corporations must co-orchestrate a systems change and enabling such co-orchestration’ now, if what our clients ask of us is compliance and perception management??

Some might wonder: by the time disruption hits, it will be too late to avert many negative impacts; how can we - the professionals charged with advising others on how to measure, monitor and avert environmental impacts - work to deliver what clients are not asking for?

The answer to both is consulting activism.?

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Consulting activism as an essential mindset for fitness-for-purpose

Approaching consulting as activism is unavoidable given the chasm between what sustainability science says ought to be done and what clients have been happy to do - and what consultants must cease sanctifying with their authority.        

In the exchange I described earlier in this article, I was very much surprised by my counterpart’s delimitation of activists as “the other”, which I find is a stance already fading away into obscurity. We must stay away from viewing activists as “other” altogether. And there are many signs that this is already happening.?

In a first generation of consulting activism, we saw mission-driven thought leaders exit the large consulting setup in order to provide a much needed alternative, fighting the flawed system from the outside. Gillespie did so in 2019, and you likely know an example or two from within your network. Gillespie calls his approach “insultancy” (being “strategically rude to clients” in a humorous way in order to prompt self-reflection and “combat the mediocrity of client ambitions and aspirations”), specifically “[dragging his] clients into the blinding light of what needs to be done, not just what might be possible under existing commercial or political realities. If they are what is holding us back, then they must be changed and challenged with every fiber of our being and soul.”

We are now seeing transition to a second generation, in which activists hitherto on the outside are invited to join sustainability arms of consulting firms, and those on the inside either self-ignite or are encouraged to take on activism while staying within:

• In February 2022, BCG CEO Christoph Schweizer publicly called for climate activists to join the firm, and he clearly meant his words: BCG does have current openings for activists in Europe.?
• Project Drawdown’s Drawdown Lab has introduced its Climate Solutions at Work guide, calling for and enabling “all employees across all sectors” to convert their job into a “climate job”, including through guidance on business model transformation and influencing investors and lenders.?
• It could be argued the EY Enough report itself is a manifestation of blurring boundaries between sustainability thought leadership and activism, and the Project Antithesis’ title itself demonstrates the intent for further departure from the status quo.

A third generation may descend upon us once business schools hear out current calls for reinvention and begin producing ready-made activist business leaders, and once these activist-leaders sufficiently propagate through consultancies and corporations - unlike today, not being an activist would then mean being the odd one out. These stated calls for reform demand that business schools:

• “develop business leaders to be activists” (Jan Foster-Pedley);??
• recalibrate their curricula, replacing outlived Friedmanian notions of perpetual economic growth and unrivaled shareholder primacy in core subjects with 21st century science-aligned approaches (Duncan Austin, Dan Gray);
• deliver a “new breed of global leaders capable of managing the planet as a system” (John Raddall).?

Where we stand now, not only are activists-become-consultants and consultants-turned-activists on the rise and in growing demand. Approaching consulting as activism is unavoidable given the chasm between what sustainability science says ought to be done and what clients have been happy to do - and what consultants must cease sanctifying with their authority.

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Nudging is not compatible with sustainability science

The notion of “meeting clients where they are and nudging them” seems a popular one, but one I argue we must overcome, as it does not render us fit-for-purpose, but rather the opposite. Why?

Think about what such nudging looks like in practice. More specifically, how long would a nudging approach take, on average, to help a client grow from low maturity ESG risk disclosures all the way to science-aligned sustainability targets and action against all planetary boundaries and social foundations, to business and industry transformation towards regenerative value propositions, business models, and value chain arrangements and towards orchestrating a broader systems change??

From my and my colleagues’ observation, historically a company intending to take action would spend 2-3 years per maturity stage, with 5-6 stages to graduate through - resulting in an at minimum 10-year roadmap for a business that’s currently at a compliance stage. Compare and contrast this with sustainability science telling us (to remind ourselves here again) that we need an immediate radical globally implemented systems change in order to avoid global collapse scenarios and secure a liveable planet (a precondition of a planet and economy capable of sustaining business). Hence, by nudging clients without opening eyes and doors, without applying some push, knowingly or not we are co-creating the conditions for a future collapse and an unlivable future.

This simple point should sufficiently illustrate that nudging is not compatible with what the purpose of corporate sustainability ought to be. On top of that, it leaves us unprepared for the future: As I argue in this series, nudging, same as compliance and perceptions management, will become less relevant and likely shunned for its failures in the foreseeable future. Coming back to the point I made in the introduction, as per sustainability science, not only are we consistently on the trajectory towards a global collapse (which was established with robust scientific modeling as early as in 1972 with the Limits to Growth), we keep accelerating on that trajectory. As collapse scenarios continue to unravel, a tipping point will be hit, probably later in this decade, of mass awakening leading to unprecedented stakeholder pressures and notably a dramatic shift in the perceived must-haves for corporations vis-a-vis sustainability. I describe this disruption further in Part 2 of this series.

Keep in mind that even after this near universal sense of urgency and severity sets in, a newly hastened maturation roadmap (towards having adopted science-aligned sustainability practices) will still entail a multi-year exercise, simply because of institutional inertia, the scale of mindset change and internal buy-in generation, of revamping investment plans and of transformation to be undertaken on the client side. Hence, if we prefer orchestrated degrowth over unmanaged collapse, we cannot afford to shy away from having activism-laden conversations with our clients, colleagues, friends, our families and their families.

Moreover, many organizations already contain well-informed, purpose-driven sustainability professionals who have had enough exposure to sustainability science, who do not yet feel sufficiently safe to ‘speak out’ and drive a change. These individuals may be kept awake at night by the cognitive dissonance stemming from the gap between what they feel permitted to do on the day job (nudging) and what they know needs to be done. Consultancies can tap this transformative potential by creating a safe enough space, in line with Verhezen’s suggestions in Giving Voice in a Culture of Silence.?

However, not to merely wait for that to happen, I urge individuals who choose not to suppress the dissonance (and compromise their integrity), to accelerate change by driving ‘guerilla’ systems interventions - by engaging in ‘consulting activism for beginners’, which I describe in the next section.

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Getting Started with Consulting Activism

In order to add some actionable take-aways to this Part of the series, which is admittedly foundational, with most of the practical guidance for consultancies coming in Parts 3 and 4, I add below several suggestions for getting started with consulting activism. These do not go anywhere near as far as Gillespie’s “insultancy”, nor do they expect one to urge the client to adopt science-aligned approaches or revisit ambitions in any way. They merely consist of accurate communication that reduces the amount of confusion in the system, which otherwise inadvertently perpetuates muddying of waters and leads to greenwashing that many would like to avoid. In Donella Meadow’s Tools for the transition to sustainability, this would correspond to tool number 3, Truth-telling. (Also, most would probably agree that accurate communication decidedly is what one’s client is expecting and paying for, as opposed to expecting to be misled).?

Hence, these suggestions are suitable for beginners, they are not objectionable, and can be taken up on even by individual change agents regardless of overall company orientation. I have done all of these before myself, with favorable outcomes.

7 Beginner-Friendly Measures of Consulting Activism

1. At the very initial stage of needs assessment, pre-sales, while clarifying the client’s intent, clearly illustrate the whole continuum of possible ambition and action levels, from low maturity ESG risk management to science-aligned sustainability action. Clearly label which ambition levels are science-aligned and which (most) are not, which ones do lead to attaining real world sustainability and which do not. Unambiguously differentiate between ESG risk and opportunity management as a method for shareholder value maximization, incrementalist sustainability and science-aligned sustainability action levels. (If this is new to you, check out this post for a crash-course). See example of what such differentiation might look like in Figure 5.
2. Apply the same clarity and accuracy when discussing reporting instruments (standards, frameworks, guidelines or rating questionnaires) relevant to the client’s ambition level: clearly differentiate between instruments aimed at financial value maximization (through disclosing ESG risks or disclosing how well a business manages ESG risks and opportunities), those aimed at disclosing the company’s impacts on the world (people, planet and economy) within the “doing less harm” league, and those grounded in science. See example in Figure 6.
3. Strongly recommend that clients accurately describe their materiality matrices as well as final annual non-financial disclosures in order to avoid being called out for greenwashing: Flag materiality matrices that do not clearly identify applied materiality perspective(s), or worse, financial materiality matrices that suggest a double materiality approach was taken (see examples in Figure 7). Analogically, discourage clients from labeling non-financial disclosures based on financial materiality alone as “sustainability reports”, which they are not. Help normalize differentiation between ESG (risk and opportunity management) reports and sustainability reports, or even better, help the client realize that ESG risk and opportunity management is a logical part of their mainstream (financial disclosures).
4. Make sure your visual aids during any of the above possible intervention points reflect the same accurate language and descriptors, especially since these aids are likely to stay with the prospective client and may be seen by additional internal stakeholders later, and may even lead to your competitors being asked some desirably informed questions by the prospective buyer.
5. Apply the same clarity and accuracy during all capacity building - training or workshops aimed at awareness building, buy-in generation, competence development or upskilling, whether internal or with clients, for all audiences from boards and executive leadership down to operational levels.?
6. Leverage the momentum of mandatory compliance requirements being on the rise. With TCFD-aligned disclosures becoming mandatory in many legislations, the ESRS coming into force in the EU with future effects beyond its boundaries, and one day possibly the US SEC Climate Disclosure mandated, there will be a surge in demand for compliance management advice. Repeat steps 1-3 during all these exploratory conversations. Make sure you contextualize the compliance-driven intent against ambition levels that lead to real world sustainability.
7. Systematically add science-aligned context and approaches to newsletters, thought leadership or marketing content, bring it up at events as both speaker/panelist and an audience member, ensure public statements made by leadership (who usually amass great followership by virtue of their designation alone) do not - at minimum - defy or ignore the scientific consensus and science-aligned approaches and preferably endorse them. (This last suggestion may require challenging one’s higher-ups, but keep in mind it is in their own interest - surely they do not want to be called out for being out of touch with the science that our industry’s existence is preconditioned by?)

Figure 4: 7 Beginner-Friendly Measures of Consulting Activism

How does it help drive change with prospective and acquired clients??

• It grows awareness: It helps prospective and acquired clients shed the mistaken notion that ESG risk management approaches and incrementalist sustainability approaches lead to attaining real world sustainability.?
• It plants the seeds for reflection on what they ought to be doing, rather than what they currently have internal buy-in and appetite for, which may trigger personal transformations and create activists on the inside.?
• It points towards the solution: It draws attention to the gaps that need to be addressed: the lack of awareness and mindset behind low appetite and lack of buy-in for sustainability action that could be adequately labeled as such.?
• It can lead to mobilization: It unmasks the cognitive dissonance resulting from the gap between what many intuitively know is necessary and what is actually being done, and leaning into the discomfort of this dissonance (rather than suppressing it) is the starting point of change.?

Mind the above suggestions do not aim to expose or judge the entity you are interacting with. The tone with which this accurate communication can be delivered goes along the lines of “This is where you are, this is where you could be, and this is where it counts. Let’s see what you can gather alignment for”. The more of us that adopt these beginner-friendly consulting activism measures, the sooner we will reach mass sensitisation. I suggest you start doing these today. Approaches suitable for intermediate and advanced activist-consultancies will be covered in Part 3.

Figure 5 - The full continuum of accurately represented ambition levels

Figure 6 - The full continuum of accurately sorted non-financial reporting instruments

Figure 7 - Materiality matrices: Misleading & Accurate Representations

As long as you reasonably credit me as a source, feel free to use the above visuals or variations on them, so you can jump start your consulting activism.

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What is next?

If we accept that the purpose of corporate sustainability consulting is to recognize the role that corporations need to play in driving an immediate, radical and globally implemented systems change and to enable businesses to fulfill this role, thus attaining real world sustainability, then what does this role look like, specifically? And what enablement does it require from sustainability consultancies? Further, what makes a consultancy good at such enablement - and what approach should consultancies take towards securing the necessary success factors? What are some key competitive considerations for advisory firms planning to build fitness-for-purpose and future-readiness?

Parts 2 and 3 of this series will provide answers to these questions. Part 4 will then conclude with proposing a radical-innovation-function that consultancies need to develop in order to be able to capitalize on this opportunity.

Once (some) sustainability consultancies embrace consulting activism and begin to prepare for upcoming disruption, are we likely to see first generation consulting activists find their way back in?

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Required attribution: Alice Kalro, “Corporate sustainability consulting: Where is its jackpot opportunity in the 2020s, actually? (Part 1), January 2023”, + hyperlink to this source + hyperlink to Alice’s LinkedIn profile.

Footnotes:

(1) I adopted this phrase from Gillespie, who was in turn paraphrasing Nova Reid

(2) Further reading: r3.0 Whitepaper No. 1: From Monocapitalism? to Multicapitalism: 21st Century System? Value Creation, 2020

(3) See for example the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report, research by Howard Dryden et al, UN Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR2022), and Pandemics, Climate Extremes, Tipping Points and the Global Catastrophic Risk – How these Impact Global Targets.