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In the early days of business sustainability, I had the good fortune to work at a major multinational fast-moving consumer goods company for two decades.
I worked in a variety of technical and business roles, zig-zagging my way through quality control, packaging and process design, regional R&D management, and product marketing management. I test-marketed one of the earliest “green-positioned” cleaning products in the UK market.
I could contribute my thoughts on sustainability and environmental matters even before sustainability became a corporate buzzword. The company’s Chairman was an early supporter of business sustainability, and I was asked to move from the UK to the USA to help start one of the first corporate sustainability departments.
The company has a Credo, “This We Believe”. Everyone knew the Chairman sincerely believed business sustainability was an important consideration. It removed the first obstacle that typically stops business sustainability conversations before they begin.
But importantly, it does not guarantee a more sustainable outcome. That always has to be earned.
We were discussing a new product concept one time. I had inserted myself in the ideation stage of some product development teams to help get the sustainability perspective on the table.
Around the table were the usual suspects. Intelligent, experienced people represented R&D, marketing, purchasing, manufacturing, and communications. We had expertise, resources, and executive expectations for a successful new product introduction.
As I participated in the dialogue and planning for ideation, I could sense that the range of outcomes was narrowing right from the start. Not a deliberate attempt to undermine the process, but simply a natural result of each participant bringing the assumptions and beliefs of their specialism to the table.
Purchasing insisted on trusted suppliers that delivered on cost. Finance expected a sustainable product to cost more. Manufacturing wanted to optimize around existing manufacturing assets. Marketing needed a proposition that customers would value and select over a competitor’s product. Communications wanted to tell a greener story, and legal wanted to defend any claims made.
All reasonable, natural expectations based on their roles. That’s when I realized we had a sustainability strategy layered on top of an existing operating system.
The silent operating system determined what sustainability could mean, not the sustainability strategy.
The hidden decision-making logic for each function connects, incentivizes, defines, and assumes things before the strategy even becomes an outcome.
Our new product development team implemented the sustainability strategy. They faithfully implemented the beliefs and assumptions already present in the business.
The tensions that exist when innovating and changing like this can be resisted by the existing business organization as a defensive, protective routine.
The difficulty sustainability professionals face isn’t simply making a new innovation more profitable and meeting the company’s financial goals. It is more structural, hidden inside the operating system whose assumptions and beliefs are rarely challenged.
And now AI enters the scene. A language model can absorb yesterday’s assumptions, present them as today’s knowledge, and return them in a form that is authoritative enough to shape tomorrow’s decision.
The risk is not simply that AI occasionally invents a fact. It is that it can reproduce an unexamined belief perfectly. As my book title says, Perfectly Wrong.
So now we have two connected issues to deal with.
First, getting sustainability and circularity correctly understood and embedded in the company’s operating system, and second, mitigating the business risk that AI brings with it when we assume AI knows everything and we blindly confirm nothing.
If an important strategy, investment, or AI-supported decision is producing confident answers but persistent uncertainty, the missing work may not be another analysis. It may be an examination of what the organization has already assumed and believes.
That is the diagnostic work I now do with executives. I just opened up five confidential, 30-minute Assumption-Risk Conversations on my calendar.
I am opening up five confidential, 30-minute Assumption-Risk Conversations after the Real Circularity Summit in London on September 17th. Book a date and time if you want one of the conversations: BOOK HERE.