Even as parts of the regulatory landscape shift, the pressure on organisations is still very much there.
On 26 February, a diverse group of peers sat down to discuss how to make their businesses future-ready, practically.
What emerged was a picture of how leaders are weighing sustainability in practice: where they see value, where they feel stuck, and what next steps feel both valuable and achievable from where they stand.
Here are some patterns that stood out.
1. Sustainability is still being driven by risk, but leaders are also looking for strategic value
For many organisations, banks, investors, and financial exposure remain a key driver. Even where reporting requirements have softened, the underlying risks have not gone away.
At the same time, leaders are trying to move beyond a purely compliance-led view. They can see that sustainability may affect competitiveness, reputation, customer trust, and even revenue, but these links are not always easy to measure with confidence.
This creates a familiar tension: sustainability is seen as important, but not always in ways that are easy to quantify or translate into clear internal priorities.
2. The real challenge is deciding where to act first
When leaders step back and look at the broad sustainability agenda, the biggest difficulty is deciding what deserves attention now.
A useful way to think about this is through two questions:
- How much value could this area create or protect?
- How difficult will it be to act on it meaningfully?
Some priorities are clearly valuable and relatively controllable. Others may also be highly important, but much harder to move because they depend on infrastructure, suppliers, policy conditions, internal coordination, or market readiness.
3. Some of the highest-value sustainability issues are also the hardest to move
A strong pattern across the discussion was that certain topics — especially those linked to energy, emissions, climate exposure, and value-chain impact — are often seen as strategically important, yet difficult to influence.
Progress may depend on asset ownership, external infrastructure, supplier behaviour, regulation, administrative systems, or policy consistency. In the case of value-chain impact, leaders also face limited supplier leverage, incomplete data, and alternatives that are not always easy to secure.
In other words, the value may be clear, but the path to action is not straightforward. This structural complexity helps explain why some organisations appear slow.
4. Practicality is not the opposite of ambition
Leaders are often best served by starting where value is clearer, control is higher, and measurement is more manageable.
That does not necessarily mean choosing the easiest topic. It means choosing an area where effort is more likely to translate into visible progress, organisational learning, and internal momentum.
A credible first move can build confidence, generate evidence, and make it easier to tackle more difficult issues later. In this sense, practicality is often what makes ambition executable.
5. Sustainability can require difficult strategic trade-offs
One of the more important themes was that stronger sustainability positioning can open doors, but may also close others.
For some organisations, choosing a more values-led or standards-led path can support reputation, differentiation, and access to new markets. But it may also mean stepping away from certain revenue streams, client types, sectors, or geographies.
This is where sustainability stops being a messaging exercise and becomes a real strategic choice. It may require not only better sustainability planning, but also stronger commercial thinking around how revenue will be protected, replaced, or reshaped as positioning evolves.
6. Communication is becoming part of the sustainability challenge
A particularly interesting thread was that sustainability is not only an operational challenge. It is increasingly a communication challenge.
Leaders are asking: how do we explain the value of what we are doing? How do we position ourselves clearly in the market? How do we make longer-term benefits visible to customers who mostly see short-term cost?
Doing the work is not always enough. Organisations also need to communicate it credibly if they want it to translate into trust, differentiation, and commercial value.
7. Climate risk is still under-interpreted
The conversation on climate risk surfaced another important pattern: many organisations are beginning to acknowledge risk, but not yet fully interpret it. They may report on it. They may map it. They may recognise that stakeholders are asking questions.
But a more difficult question often remains underexplored: what is the data actually telling us, and what decisions does it require?
This is where the maturity gap seems to lie. Climate risk is not only about fines or compliance. It is about continuity, resilience, supply chains, insurability, operational disruption, and the ability to continue delivering under stress.
That requires organisations to move from reporting risk to managing it.
8. Leaders benefit from spaces where they can think out loud before they act
Perhaps the most important takeaway of all was not tied to sustainability content directly, but to leadership itself.
When leaders are given the opportunity to think out loud with others, compare how they are framing the problem, and pressure-test what is genuinely feasible, the conversation becomes far more practical.
Peers do not provide ready-made answers, but they help each other separate what is important from what is urgent, and what is difficult from what is impossible.
Then the next steps can begin.
Final reflection
If there was one message running through the session, it was this:
Sustainability progress becomes achievable when organisations can prioritise well, make sense of complexity, and turn broad ambition into credible action.
The question is:
Where do we focus first, what trade-offs are we willing to make, and how do we turn intention into momentum?
