Why Business Leaders Miss the Real Sustainability Challenge
I once sat in a boardroom where executives debated their company's approach to sustainability. The CFO waved a stack of reports in the air, clearly frustrated.?
"Everyone talks about sustainability,” she said, “but what does it mean for us beyond the usual green initiatives?"
It's a question I've heard countless times as an ecologist turned business advisor. The challenge isn't a lack of information—it's making sense of everything.
When I worked in Africa as a soil ecology researcher, I would spend hours digging holes 30cm x 30cm x 30cm to find soil animals hiding among the sand, silt and clay. There was plenty of time to contemplate as I sifted out and counted all the ants, beetle larvae, termites and the occasional earthworm.?
I wanted to prove that these critters were crucial to soil fertility and that everyone along the food supply chain, from farmers to consumers, should be aware of this. Soil biology is vital to our present and future, but nobody cares.?
I explain more of the details in this Mindful Sceptic Guide…
Through the sifting, I learned something crucial about complex systems—they're rarely as complicated as they first appear but never as simple as we'd like them to be.?
This is tantalising. It tends to set up a polarity. Some assume they know how it all works, while others realise the complexity makes understanding elusive.?
Some will say they know what sustainability means and others…?
well, we tend to follow them.
The Missing Piece
The truth is that most sustainability conversations in business start backward.?
We begin with solutions—solar panels, recycling programs, ESG metrics—before truly understanding the challenges we're trying to solve. It's like prescribing medicine before diagnosing the illness.
Let me share a powerful example…
At first glance, SDG2 Zero Hunger may seem irrelevant to your business unless you're in the food industry.?
But let's consider a few numbers.
The world produces enough food to feed everyone, yet 768 million people face hunger—an increase of 118 million since 2019.?
One in ten people are undernourished.?
This isn't just a humanitarian crisis; it's a business sustainability challenge that affects every sector because hunger creates systemic risks that ripple through the global economy…
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But here's where most business leaders go wrong. They start with solutions before understanding the system. They jump to CSR initiatives or supply chain tweaks without grasping the interconnections.
Just as soil fertility depends on countless invisible interactions between organisms, business sustainability relies on understanding complex system dynamics.
The CFO, waving reports, couldn’t articulate why she felt uneasy. It was most likely that the company’s initial sustainability focus was purely environmental—carbon footprint, waste reduction, energy efficiency.?
However, their most significant sustainability impact lay in their agricultural supply chain's effect on food security.
It was bigger than a green initiative.
Like the grand goal of zero hunger, each business needs to understand connections, and when they do, it transforms their approach to those ‘green things’.?
Instead of turning off the lights and labelling a bin ‘recycling’ there might be…?
The result will be more resilient supply chains, stronger community relationships, and yes, better financial performance.
This is real sustainability—not just checking boxes or implementing random green initiatives, but understanding and working with system dynamics.
For business leaders serious about sustainability, I recommend starting with these questions…
Because here's the truth.?
Sustainability isn't about solar panels or recycling programs. It's about understanding and adapting to complex system dynamics. Just as soil organisms create the conditions for life to thrive, businesses can support or undermine the systems they depend on.
Want to explore how this applies to your organisation? Subscribe to the Mindful Sceptic newsletter, where we regularly unpack these challenges and share frameworks for addressing them. Because in the end, real sustainability isn't about following trends—it's about understanding systems and creating lasting value.
The business leaders who grasp this will thrive in the decades ahead.?
The rest will find themselves increasingly vulnerable to system shocks they never saw coming.
What 'green initiatives' has your organisation implemented that didn't deliver the expected impact? What systems-level factors might explain why?