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 defining ideas of our age.
Yet despite all that attention, the world enters 2026 facing many of the same challenges that gave rise to the modern sustainability movement in the first place.
That observation is not a criticism of the thousands of people who have devoted their careers to this work. I count myself among them.
It does, however, invite a simple question.
Have we ever been sufficiently clear about what we mean by sustainability?
A surprisingly incomplete definition
Most dictionaries define sustainability in some variation of these words:
The ability to continue something over time.
It sounds straightforward.
But it immediately raises two questions.
What are we trying to sustain?
For how long?
Those questions are rarely asked explicitly.
Yet without answering them, the definition remains incomplete.
A business can sustain profits.
An industry can sustain production.
A government can sustain policies.
A society can sustain patterns of consumption.
The dictionary definition tells us that something continues.
It tells us nothing about whether that something should continue.
The definition is structurally neutral.
The responsibility lies with us.
The questions we stopped asking
Over many years I came to believe that these two questions are not academic.
They are foundational.
Until we answer them, sustainability becomes almost infinitely flexible.
It can mean almost anything.
And when a word can mean almost anything, it eventually loses the precision needed to guide meaningful decisions.
The question is not simply whether an activity can continue.
It is whether it can continue without undermining the conditions upon which it depends.
That distinction changes everything.
Beyond sustaining activities
My own understanding of sustainability has gradually shifted.
Today, I no longer see it primarily as the ability to continue an activity.
I see it as something deeper.
Sustainability is the remembering of humanity’s responsibility to steward the conditions required for life to exist and continue across generations.
Required.
Not preferred.
That understanding is not new.
It appears, in different language, across religious traditions, philosophical schools, Indigenous knowledge systems, and increasingly within modern science.
The work is not to invent a new principle.
The work is to remember one we quietly set aside.
Before strategy comes definition
Businesses often begin with strategies.
Targets.
Frameworks.
Roadmaps.
Reporting.
These all have their place.
But they all assume we already know what sustainability means.
If our definition is incomplete, every strategy built upon it inherits that incompleteness.
That realization has guided much of my work over the last decade.
Not because definitions are more important than action.
But because action follows understanding.
The inquiry continues
This essay is not intended to settle the question.
It is intended to reopen it.
Over the coming months, through The Inquiry, I’ll continue exploring why business sustainability has produced so much activity—and yet so little transformation.
Along the way we’ll examine assumptions, language, leadership, artificial intelligence, and the hidden patterns shaping organisational decisions long before strategy is ever discussed.
Every inquiry begins with a question.
This one begins with two.
What are we trying to sustain?
For how long?
I believe the answers determine far more than we have yet realised.
Continue the Inquiry
This essay is part of The Inquiry, an ongoing exploration of one question:
Why has business sustainability produced so much activity—and yet so little transformation?
If you’d like to receive future essays as they are published, you can subscribe on Substack.
If these questions reflect challenges your own organization is facing, I’d be delighted to continue the conversation.