DRIVING VALUE FOR NATURE AND BUSINESS

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Ideas on business, nature and making change happen

Most sustainability challenges are not caused by a lack of frameworks, targets or technical knowledge.

The harder questions are often about how organisations make decisions, how people work together, where responsibility sits, how resources are allocated and what happens when environmental ambition meets the realities of running a business.

Water has been the thread running through much of my career and remains my deepest area of expertise. But it has also given me a window into much bigger questions about business, nature, leadership and organisational change.

This is where I explore some of those questions.

Business, Nature & Transformation

Sustainability must change decisions, not just strategies

Companies have become increasingly sophisticated at setting sustainability ambitions, targets and commitments. The harder challenge is translating them into the everyday decisions that determine how a business actually operates.

Who owns the risk? Who controls investment? What changes in procurement? How are suppliers engaged? What incentives influence decisions? And what happens when environmental priorities compete with commercial ones?

This is increasingly where I believe sustainability professionals need to focus.

Technical expertise remains essential. But lasting change also requires an understanding of organisations, incentives, culture, finance and how decisions get made.

Water Stewardship

Think catchment, not site

Water is fundamentally contextual.

The significance of a cubic metre of water depends on where it is withdrawn, when it is used, who else depends upon it and the condition of the surrounding freshwater system.

That simple idea has shaped much of my work.

Over the years I have explored contextual water targets, corporate water strategy, water risk, stewardship standards, collective action, net-positive approaches and the growing ecosystem of corporate water frameworks.

But the question I keep returning to is relatively simple:

Are the actions companies are taking actually responding to the water challenges of the places in which they operate?

That requires moving beyond efficiency and operational performance alone towards understanding catchments, shared challenges and the resilience of the wider systems on which businesses and communities depend.

Collective Action & Partnerships

Environmental problems rarely respect organisational boundaries

Some of the most difficult sustainability challenges cannot be solved by one company, NGO or government acting alone.

Water makes this particularly obvious.

Companies operating in the same catchment can depend on the same resource while sharing that resource with communities, ecosystems, agriculture and other users. Improving the resilience of that system therefore requires organisations to work beyond their own operational boundaries.

That sounds straightforward. In practice, collective action is difficult.

It requires governance, funding, trust, facilitation and a willingness to work with organisations that may have different priorities and incentives.

Increasingly, I am interested not only in how collective action starts, but what keeps it going once the initial enthusiasm has passed.

Leadership & Organisations

The difficult part is often not technical

One of the things that working in sustainability has taught me is how often apparently technical problems turn out to be organisational ones.

A technically strong water strategy can still fail if nobody owns it.

A good sustainability target achieves little if investment decisions ignore it.

Public-policy engagement can appear in a strategy without the sustainability team ever developing a meaningful relationship with the colleagues responsible for government affairs.

And resistance to an idea does not necessarily mean disagreement. People can simply be looking at the same problem through very different lenses.

This has made me increasingly interested in leadership, organisational culture and the ability to influence across boundaries.

Much of my own work happens in environments where hierarchy provides relatively little leverage. Progress depends instead on credibility, relationships, curiosity and the ability to create enough shared purpose for people to move together.

Meandering Mondays with Water

A space for asking better questions about water

Meandering Mondays with Water started as a way for me to explore questions that I was encountering through my work.

Rather than trying to provide definitive answers, the idea was to put a question into the water community and see where the conversation went.

Those questions have covered everything from contextual targets and water metrics to collective action, corporate responsibility, standards, resilience and the role businesses should play in responding to the freshwater crisis.

Over time, the conversation has expanded.

Many of the questions that start with water quickly become questions about business strategy, organisational behaviour, collaboration, leadership and how change actually happens.

That is probably why I still enjoy writing them.

Join Meandering Mondays with Water on LinkedIn

From the Archive

Context has always mattered

Before Meandering Mondays, much of my writing focused on an idea that was then still developing within corporate sustainability: environmental targets need to reflect the context in which a company operates.

That work explored contextual water targets, science-based approaches, corporate water metrics and how businesses could move beyond incremental performance improvements towards strategies informed by the condition of the systems around them.

Selected publications include:

Looking back, the underlying question was very similar to the one that continues to shape my work today:

How do we connect environmental science with the way organisations actually make decisions

An Ongoing Conversation

I don't write because I think I have all the answers.

Writing helps me work through difficult questions, test assumptions and learn from people who see the problem differently.

That is particularly important in water and sustainability, where technical, environmental, social, political and commercial perspectives frequently collide.

If these are questions you are wrestling with too, I would be interested in hearing your perspective.

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