One of my biggest frustrations in Sustainability is the reliance on wishful thinking. When people talk about the ESG backlash, it is often about organisations that have set ridiculously ambitious targets then failed miserably to work out deliver on those targets and/or to provide any resource to do so. I sometimes talk about ‘the magic step’ which many people blindly assume will propel them from ambition to success. They need to wake up and smell the coffee.

There is a huge amount of work to do before setting a target to get the necessary organisational understanding of what targets mean to the business. Once the targets are set, an embedded strategy is required to deliver on them along with resources (human and financial) to address them. When I listened back to my appearance on the Manufacturing Leaders podcast, once I’d got over the cringe factor I realised that almost everything I talked about was change management, not the technicalities of Net Zero.

Change is difficult, but it can be made much easier using some pretty simple techniques:

Theory Y: people embrace change if they’ve designed the ‘new’;

Backcasting: a wonderfully powerful but much neglected technique perfect for getting key decision makers to design a proper strategy in place of the magic step (ie Theory Y in practice);

Alignment: ensure those with authority to make change happen are given the responsibility to do so.

Yes, all that data gathering and reporting is necessary, but it is ancillary to the change process and cannot drive it. As the old farmer’s saying goes “a pig never got fat by weighing it”.