27 Feb Why Do Smart Leaders Keep Rejecting Perfectly Good Sustainability Proposals?
The difference between the sustainability language and the pitch impact
Hello and welcome back to Frayed Not!
Our mission is to remind you that change doesn’t need to be perfect, just possible!
Whether you are a sustainability advocate or sustainability specialist, we are here to support those that carry the real weight of change so sustainability moves from strategy to execution.
Today we’re covering:
- Why technical language is actively working against sustainability investment, not just failing to help it
- How to strip a sustainability case down to something every function can act on
- A practical guide to having the budget conversation with leadership in a way that actually produces a decision
Are you ready to build change?
CONTEXT
Lately, we have been following sustainability advocacy creation and it’s…overwhelming. Somewhere in-between ethical advocacy and regulatory technicality, sustainability has become a mix of a painted mathematical formula.
Most sustainability advocates equip themselves with a thorough case study, full of evidence and figures to prove why sustainability is worth investing in. Metrics that will bring return on investment long term, scope emissions breakdowns, life cycle analysis, certification comparison. The pitch is accurate and the methodology is bullet-proof.
It took sweat and tears and weeks of overtime spent in the office to ensure the business case is the most complete leadership has ever seen before.
And it’s sitting there. In the inbox of three people who were supposed to make a decision three weeks ago.
BEHAVIOUR
The document is not the problem. But the language in the document is your own. You, as the expert, have the deepest understanding of the complexity. The rest? Get overwhelmed
The Marketing Manager is interested in the story they can extract from the heavy methodology, the Buying director who needs to approve a material switch cares about the risk in his reputation rather than the scope breakdown. The finance lead still daydreaming about spreadsheets is half distracted and needs to understand one thing: what does it cost, what does it return by when, and what is the risk of not doing it. Everything else, however accurate and important, is noise at the moment of decision.
This is the jargon problem. The one perfect presentation that reaches the audience at different levels, or bypasses some. Sustainable expertise is build on technical knowledge. But the part that gets forgotten is how to translate it to each individual. Fact are important, stats matter. But decisions are made by humans and are led by emotions.
For some that already have technical understanding, this expertise will come across as predictable and disengaged. For those who don’t, has the potential to create distance by making it feel inaccessible and their position inadequate.
The most important role of a Sustainability professional to ensure initiative success is understanding the interconnectedness between how people process the information and what their unique motivation is, with the backing of having a commercial perspective and budget sensibility.
This doesn’t mean simplifying the complexity of sustainability initiatives and impact, but minimising decision fatigue and de-risking the unknown. They need to understand in a simple language, how it impacts their position and what responsibility falls on it, as well as your proposal to make it easier for them to implement.
AUDIT YOUR PITCH
Before the budget conversation, before the campaign brief, before the supplier meeting, the most useful thing a sustainability advocate can do is audit their own language.
The words that almost always need replacing are the ones that feel neutral inside sustainability but are genuinely technical outside it.
Scope three emissions. Life cycle assessment. Circular economy. Greenwashing. Carbon intensity.
These are not universally understood. In a room of commercial, design, and logistics professionals, some of them will know these terms precisely, some will have a rough idea, and some will not know them at all but will not say so. The ones who do not know but do not say so will disengage from the document without the advocate ever knowing it happened.
THE REPLACEMENT
The replacement does not need to be a definition. It needs to be a consequence.
- Life cycle assessment becomes a map of where your product generates impact, from the raw material to the skip
- Scope three emissions becomes the carbon produced by everything your suppliers do on your behalf
- Circular economy becomes designing product so the materials can be used again rather than thrown away
Each of these is less precise than the technical term. Each of them is infinitely more likely to produce a useful conversation with someone who needed to act on the information.
MAKE IT EASY
For the marketing team preparing a campaign: what the product does differently, what that means for the customer, and why it is credible.
Not the full certification rationale. Not the supply chain context. Three sentences they can add to the brief without needing to understand everything behind them.
For the buying team reviewing a material: what the material is, how it differs from the current choice in terms they recognise (price, performance, lead time) and what the sustainability outcome is in a single, concrete phrase.
Not a comparison of five alternatives. The one recommendation, with enough context to make a decision.
For leadership approving a project: what the business is currently spending or risking that this project addresses, what the project costs, and what it produces in terms the finance function recognises.
One commercial outcome. Everything else can be answered in the questions that follow.
THE FRAMING
Discussing finances, especially when it comes to sustainability which has a shaky infrastructure, reduced funding and a long-term return on investment can be the hardest one in an organisation.
Leading with the sustainability rationale in a business context of economic fragility, almost guarantees you a rejection. Putting pressure on leadership because of upcoming regulations will create action, but it will also instil fear and rushed decisions when having to decide budgets that are already limited.
The conversation starts with the commercial problem, not the sustainability solution. What is the business currently spending on, what are they risking. Example the overproduction cost that is generating a write-off cost in the face of Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which bans the destruction of unsold stock.
Or maybe it is a supplier dependency that creates cost volatility, a customer expectation that is unmet and will become a requirement in the tender process.
SYSTEMS THINKING
The jargon problem and the budget problem are the same problem expressed in different rooms. In both cases, the sustainability function is communicating in a language optimised for internal coherence rather than external impact. The technical report makes sense to the person who wrote it and the people who share their expertise. The budget request makes sense in the logic of the sustainability strategy. Neither is designed around the person who needs to receive and act on it.
This is a systems problem because it is self-reinforcing. Sustainability teams develop technical language because that is the language of their professional community and their regulatory environment. The technical language creates distance from commercial functions. That distance means sustainability is less embedded in commercial decision-making. Less embedding means less commercial evidence that sustainability produces value. Less evidence makes the budget conversation harder. A harder budget conversation means the sustainability team has less resource. Less resource means less capacity to do the translation work that would close the distance. The loop runs.
The translation is not supplementary to the work. In an organisation where sustainability cannot yet fund itself, it is the work.
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