Where has Goodhart’s law turned your well-intentioned metric into a liability? If you lead a sustainability program, a reporting function, or an executive team that sets targets, the honest answer is probably: somewhere on your board slide already. You just haven’t found it yet. The law In 1975, Charles Goodhart, an economist advising the Bank […]
Author: Ken Alston
The Belief Gap: What an Organization Believes, and What It Can Substantiate
If your leadership team had to write, from memory and with nothing in front of them, what your company stands for on sustainability, and those pages were then set beside what your company publishes, how wide would the distance be? That distance has a name. It is the belief gap, and it can be measured. […]
On September 27th, Your Sustainability Claims Became Illegal
On September 27th, 2026 — the European Union’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, (EU) 2024/825, starts applying. From that day, a set of sustainability claims that have sat unchallenged in marketing copy, on packaging, and across corporate websites become, in plain terms, illegal. This is not a communications problem. It is a legal […]
The Meeting Where I Saw the Sustainability Ceiling Being Built
/ 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 […]
Is ESG the Same as Sustainability?
Short answer: No. ESG — Environmental, Social, and Governance — is an investor-risk lens: a set of criteria used to assess how non-financial factors might affect a company’s financial performance and risk profile. Sustainability, in its original formulation, is a claim about what a company’s activity is doing to the world, independent of whether that […]
Is the Triple Bottom Line the Same as Sustainability?
Short answer: No. The Triple Bottom Line — People, Planet, Profit — is a reporting and accountability framework, not a definition of sustainability. It’s commonly used as shorthand for sustainability itself, but the person who coined the term has publicly said that usage is a distortion of what he intended, and formally called for the […]
What Does the Brundtland Report Actually Say About Sustainable Development?
Short answer: The one-line definition everyone repeats — development that meets present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own — is real, but it is not the full definition. The 1987 report immediately qualifies it with two conditions that are almost never quoted: an explicit priority for the essential needs […]
What Are You Trying to Sustain?
The danger of assuming we mean the same thing. Imagine I invite you to play football after work. As an Englishman, I arrive carrying a round ball. As an American, you arrive carrying an oval one. Neither of us is wrong. Neither of us misunderstood the invitation. We both understood the word football. The problem […]
Why Has Sustainability Produced So Much Activity… Yet So Little Transformation
The first essay in The Inquiry. For more than forty years, one question has guided my work. Why has business sustainability produced so much activity—and yet so little transformation? Circularity Edge Intelligence is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. It is not a […]
What Sustainability Was Meant to Mean
Before we can improve sustainability, we need to know what we mean by it. Few words in modern business are used more often—and defined less carefully—than sustainability. Over the past four decades, it has appeared in annual reports, corporate strategies, international agreements, university courses, government policies, and investment frameworks. It has become one of the […]