From Certainty to Caution

Only a short time ago, ESG carried a sense of inevitability. Targets were announced. Frameworks multiplied. Public commitments became routine. Sustainability appeared embedded in corporate direction.

That certainty has since eroded. Political pressure has sharpened. Language once treated as neutral now carries risk.

Acronyms themselves have become contested. Some companies have softened how they speak. Others have fallen silent.

Yet the conditions that first drove sustainability have not eased. Supply chains remain exposed to water stress, land degradation, and labour instability. Climate risk continues to surface through insurance markets, regulation, and capital allocation. The contradiction is clear. The work persists, even as the confidence around it recedes.

A Career Built Inside Brands and Systems

Jonathan Hall is Managing Partner of Kantar’s Sustainable Transformation Practice. Over more than two decades, he has worked inside global brand and consulting organisations, observing how businesses respond to social and economic change.

Trained in modern languages at Oxford, Jonathan entered marketing through a fascination with culture and behaviour. His career took him across Europe and the United States, leading innovation, strategy, and consulting teams for multinational clients. Over time, sustainability moved from a peripheral concern to a central one in those conversations.

After returning to the UK, Jonathan chose to deepen his formal understanding of sustainability, completing postgraduate study at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. He then proposed the creation of a dedicated sustainability practice inside Kantar.

“I pitched the idea of launching a practice to the leadership,” Jonathan said.

“The exec signed that off, and very quickly we were off to the races.”

Launching Sustainability in a Crisis

The Sustainable Transformation Practice launched in March 2020, as the pandemic spread globally. The timing tested more than commercial viability. It tested whether sustainability inside a large organisation was a strategic commitment or a fair-weather initiative.

For Jonathan, the experience clarified what internal change requires.

“You are on amber alert all the time,” he said. “You’re constantly having to make the argument.”

Client demand proved decisive. Companies dependent on global supply chains were forced to confront fragility in real time. Sustainability ceased to be abstract. It became operational, material, and immediate.

What the Practice Does Now

Jonathan now leads Kantar’s Sustainable Transformation Practice, integrating sustainability into consumer insight, brand strategy, and organisational decision making. The work focuses on how people relate to brands not only as consumers, but also as citizens and employees.

Alongside client work, Jonathan advises academic institutions at Oxford and Cambridge, sits on the board of the water charity Water Unite, and works with global industry bodies. Across these roles, his view is consistent. Sustainability cannot remain a specialist function. It must operate horizontally across organisations.

Why Commitment Has Gone Quiet

Jonathan does not dismiss the ESG backlash. In his experience, a minority of companies are genuinely stepping back. These tend to be organisations whose commitments were fragile to begin with. At the other end, a smaller group is accelerating, treating sustainability as a source of long-term growth and competitive advantage.

Most companies sit in between. They continue investing, but speak less publicly about it.

“The language has changed,” Jonathan said. “Moving from morality and values to materiality, resilience, and being future fit.”

This shift reflects caution, but also maturity. Sustainability is increasingly framed as a business discipline rather than a moral position.

The deeper problem, Jonathan argues, lies in how sustainability has been communicated beyond specialist audiences. Technical terms, acronyms, and distant metrics have failed to build broader legitimacy. Meanwhile, opponents have framed powerful counter-narratives around cost, risk, and personal impact.

“When things come into my world,” he said, “that’s when behaviour changes.”

What the Backlash Is Really Testing

Jonathan is sceptical of incremental fixes. The pressures facing business are systemic, affecting insurance markets, infrastructure, regulation, and trust. Addressing them will require new business models, closer collaboration with government, and leaders willing to accept risk.

“We don’t have time for tinkering around the edges,” Jonathan said. “Systems will need to change fundamentally.”

The ESG backlash, in that sense, is not the end of corporate sustainability. It is a test of whether businesses are prepared to move beyond slogans and treat responsibility as a core operating reality.

Why This Conversation Matters

Most professional firms now publish long sustainability reports. They measure travel, electricity, and waste. But Jeff Twentyman says that’s only a fraction of the truth.

“The biggest part of a professional firm’s footprint is what its advice leads to,” he says.

“If the outcomes of that advice make the world worse, you can’t hide behind a green office or a recycling policy.”

It’s a simple idea, but one that cuts deep. Because it means law, finance, and consulting firms are not neutral. Their work shapes decisions that echo far beyond their buildings.

Jeff has spent more than three decades in that world. A former partner at Slaughter and May, he helped build the firm’s sustainability practice and responsible business programme. Today, he teaches at UCL, is chair of Blueprint for a Better Business, sits on the board of the Green Finance Institute, and supports purpose-led entrepreneurs. His focus is always the same: how responsibility becomes real.

From City Law to Public Purpose

Jeff didn’t plan to become a governance adviser. “I started out as a deal lawyer,” he says. “It was all about getting transactions done.”

But over time, he began to ask tougher questions. “I realised we never talked about what those deals actually meant,” he says.

“We looked at legality and efficiency, but not whether the outcome was good for society.”

That shift in perspective eventually led him to lead sustainability and responsible business at Slaughter and May. It also connected him to organisations like A Blueprint for Better Business, which challenges companies to serve the common good, and the Green Finance Institute, which pushes financial systems toward climate alignment.

His current work, he says, is about “helping people make sense of what responsibility really looks like in practice.”

Seeing the Real Footprint

In the early 2000s, law firms began to focus on their carbon emissions. “We all looked at the easy stuff,” Jeff recalls.

“Recycling, energy use, travel. And those things matter. But they’re small compared to what your advice enables.”

He offers a blunt example. “If a firm helps a client structure a deal that prolongs fossil fuel extraction, then your real footprint is that project’s emissions. You can’t offset that by switching to LED bulbs.”

This way of thinking — linking a firm’s ethics to its influence — remains rare in professional services. It’s uncomfortable. It asks firms to take moral ownership of their role in the system, not just manage their own operations.

But Jeff insists it’s where the real opportunity lies.

“Once you start looking at the impact of your work, you can choose differently. You can ask: is this something we’re proud to enable?”

Doing, Not Saying

Jeff’s career now blends boardroom work with teaching, coaching, and mentoring. He advises leaders on governance and sits with early-stage founders trying to scale responsibly. “I like variety,” he says with a smile. “I need a bit of turmoil in my life to stay interested.”

He’s also quick to challenge empty talk. “There’s a lot of saying and not enough doing,” he says.

“Firms make big claims about purpose, but integrity is what you do when no one’s watching.”

Jeff believes progress depends on honesty about trade-offs. “Sometimes you can’t please every stakeholder. Responsibility isn’t about being perfect; it’s about being transparent about what you’re choosing and why.”

The Hard Part of Change

The episode’s discussion centres on a research paper about the attitude–behaviour gap — why people who care about the planet still fly, eat meat, or overconsume. Jeff finds the topic fascinating, but warns against easy answers.

“Information doesn’t automatically change behaviour,” he says.

“People know what’s right, but we’re built for comfort and convenience.”

The paper links self-awareness, or “dispositional mindfulness,” to better choices. Jeff agrees it helps. “Mindfulness gives people a pause button. It lets you notice what you’re about to do before you do it.”

But he adds, “That’s not enough on its own. We also need incentives and rules. Sometimes governments have to make the hard calls people won’t make individually. We can’t rely on everyone becoming a monk.”

Hope and Momentum

Despite his realism, Jeff remains hopeful. He sees evidence of cultural change in daily life. “Look at diet,” he says.

“Ten years ago, vegetarianism was fringe. Now it’s mainstream. Electric cars, the same story. Change starts quietly and then tips.”

He also sees frustration among companies that want clearer direction. “Many businesses actually want stronger regulation. They’re tired of guessing what ‘good’ looks like.”

And while politics can feel stuck, Jeff believes people are moving ahead anyway. “Citizens are often braver than their leaders. You see it in communities adapting to droughts, floods, or energy shocks. They don’t need to be told it’s real — they’re living it.”

A Simple but Radical Idea

When asked what single change could make the biggest difference, Jeff doesn’t hesitate. “I’d choose equality,” he says.

“If we valued every human life equally, we’d act very differently.”

He explains that inequality fuels fear and mistrust. “When some people have too much and others have nothing, it’s very hard to cooperate. Climate change needs collective effort, but inequality makes that impossible.”

It’s a striking answer — less about technology, more about values. “We have to start treating fairness as part of sustainability,” he says. “It’s not a side issue. It’s the foundation.”

Responsibility Starts with Reality

In the end, Jeff’s message is practical, not idealistic. He wants professional firms to own the influence they hold and align their work with the outcomes they claim to support.

“For me, responsibility starts with being real,” he says.

“Look honestly at what you do. Be clear about your impact. And if you don’t like what you see, change it.”

It’s the kind of clarity that cuts through policy talk and brand language. Responsibility, as Jeff defines it, is not about saying the right thing. It’s about choosing the right thing — and accepting the weight that comes with it.

When Emma Scott joined Kent as Vice President of Sustainability, she walked into a century-old engineering company built on oil and gas. Her brief was simple on paper: make it sustainable. In reality, it meant rebuilding trust, inside and out, in an industry many no longer believe can change.

A Blank Page, Heavy with History

Emma’s role didn’t exist before she arrived. Kent’s leadership had decided the company needed a sustainability strategy, but not much else.

“There were good things happening,” Emma recalls, “but there was no strategy. Everything was in isolation.”

The CEO’s response was to give her complete freedom. “He said, ‘I trust you. Go and do what you need to do.’ It was empowering,” she says, “but also a little scary.”

That trust became both an opportunity and a burden. Building sustainability “from scratch” meant taking a hard look at an organisation still tied to fossil fuels, and at how much it would take to change that.

Finding the Facts Before the Promises

When Emma started, Kent didn’t even know its global emissions baseline. “We had no real insight into where the big impacts were,” she admits.

Her small team, just two people, spent months collecting data from projects across dozens of countries. What they found confirmed what many suspected: one large Middle East site accounted for most of the company’s emissions.

“It was sobering,” she says. “But at least we knew where to start.”

The project became their pilot for change, swapping diesel for solar, tracking every tonne of carbon, and sharing what worked and what didn’t. “We can’t boil the ocean,” she says. “So we picked the biggest beast first.”

Why She Stays Inside the System

Kent’s deep roots in oil and gas invite scepticism. How can a company built to serve fossil fuel clients claim to be part of the transition?

Emma doesn’t dodge the question. “I’d rather be inside, helping to make change, than outside throwing stones,” she says.

“The lights still need to stay on. The question is: how do we do it better?”

She knows that balance is fragile. Kent now invests heavily in renewables and low-carbon work, but it still depends on the old energy system to survive. “We choose both,” she says. “But we choose to do both more responsibly.”

The Myth of ‘Net Zero’

Emma’s thinking sharpened when she read Digging to Zero, a Reuters investigation into decarbonising mining. She quotes a line from Fortescue Metals’ CEO: “The word ‘net’ is killing us.”

“I completely agree,” she says. “We need real zero — cutting emissions, not offsetting them.”

Kent’s own progress mirrors that stance. Rather than buying offsets, it’s testing new solar systems for its high-emitting sites. “One of them’s basically a container full of panels and batteries,” she laughs. “You pull it out of the truck, and it replaces a diesel generator.”

It’s practical, small-scale work, but real. “It’s not perfect,” she says. “But it’s honest.”

The Price of Transparency

If there’s one principle Emma refuses to compromise, it’s honesty. “We don’t want to be accused of greenwashing,” she says.

“Everything we say has to be true and clear.”

That sounds simple, but she knows how uncomfortable truth can be when progress is slow. “We’ve had to publish data that isn’t flattering,” she admits. “But hiding it would be worse.”

She works closely with Kent’s communications team to keep sustainability updates factual. “There’s a lot of jargon in our field,” she says. “People confuse sustainability with ESG. I want to make it simple and real.”

From Awareness to Ownership

Emma wants sustainability to become everyone’s job, not a specialist’s. “Education is the biggest priority,” she says.

“People need to understand how it helps them do their work better.”

She’s also pushing inclusion and well-being as part of the same mission. “Belonging is sustainability too,” she says. “It’s about people as much as carbon.”

Her long-term goal is to make herself redundant. “When sustainability’s fully embedded, I’ll have worked myself out of a job,” she smiles. “That’s success.”

Let’s Get Real

If she could change one thing about business overnight, it would be forced honesty. “Give every corporation a dose of truth serum,” she says.

“Be honest about your impacts and what you’re doing to improve.”

She wants sustainability reports to stop pretending. “They should show the good and the bad,” she says. “If they were truly honest, the world would look very different.”

For Emma, responsibility starts with reality. Her journey isn’t about perfection, it’s about staying in the uncomfortable middle, where progress depends on truth more than image.

What does it take to lead a life shaped not by convention, but by values? For Mark Goyder, the founder of Tomorrow’s Company and a lifelong advocate for responsible business, the answer lies in embracing failure, resisting conformity, and holding fast to a sense of purpose that transcends profit.

Speaking on The Responsible Edge podcast, Mark reflects on a career that has spanned politics, business leadership, and decades of work pushing companies to rethink their role in society. His story is less about climbing a straight ladder and more about weaving together experiences—volunteering, factory work, political campaigns, and boardroom debates—into a philosophy of leadership rooted in human values.

From Quaker Roots to Cambridge Disillusionment

Mark’s early influences were profoundly shaped by family. His mother, of Quaker origins, embodied calm resilience, while his father campaigned for responsible business long before it was fashionable. Sent away to boarding school, Mark witnessed the racism and elitism of the system, sparking a radical streak.

But it was through community service volunteering—working with Punjabi communities in Shropshire and later with young offenders—that he discovered his ability to lead, persuade, and organise.

“Suddenly,” he recalls, “I found I could communicate, I could persuade people to do things.”

It was a turning point that revealed leadership as service, not authority.

Failure as a Teacher

Mark’s career, by his own admission, was not a linear path. After roles in HR and general management, he entered politics with the Social Democratic Party, standing for parliament twice and serving on Kent County Council. Despite tireless campaigning, he saw little electoral progress. Personally, he also faced the devastating loss of his infant son—an experience that reframed his sense of failure.

“Nothing succeeds like failure,” Mark says.

The lessons he thought were distractions—writing press releases, building grassroots campaigns, persuading people on limited resources—later became the foundations for his work with Tomorrow’s Company. Failure, in his words, is never wasted.

The Birth of Tomorrow’s Company

In 1990, Mark was invited by Charles Handy to direct a programme at the RSA that asked the radical question: What is a company for? The resulting Tomorrow’s Company inquiry brought business leaders together to explore the role of purpose and relationships in corporate success. Its landmark 1995 report introduced the concept of “enlightened shareholder value,” later enshrined in UK company law.

For Mark, this was a pivotal moment: a chance to translate years of hard-won lessons into a new vision for business.

“Human business is effective business,” he argues.

Purpose and values, once seen as “soft” add-ons, are now recognised as central to success.

Protecting Purpose in a Corporate World

One of the central questions Mark wrestles with today is how companies can retain their values once they grow or are sold. He points to the Ben & Jerry’s-Unilever saga as a cautionary tale. Founders can write protections into agreements, but ownership structures and market pressures often erode original purpose.

“The idea that you can talk about a purposeful company independent of talking about ownership is for the birds,” he insists.

True purpose requires governance that ties values to decision-making at every stage—what he calls the “seven ages of the company.”

Reinventing for the Next Generation

Now, Tomorrow’s Company is turning its attention to education, working with schools to help 14- and 15-year-olds discover their potential and imagine new ways of engaging with work. It’s a return to Mark’s own formative experiences with community service, completing a circle that began in Shropshire decades ago.

At the same time, he is championing “game-changing ideas” with networks of responsible business organisations—from new governance models to place-based investment. The goal is not just incremental change, but systemic reform.

A Rebel’s Advice

If there’s one message Mark offers to young leaders, it’s this: don’t let conventional definitions of success box you in.

“Be a rebel, be a pirate if that’s what it takes to reconnect with the real soul inside you,” he says.

For someone who has combined politics, business, and activism into a restless, values-driven career, the advice rings true. The future of responsible business, as he sees it, belongs not to those who follow the rules, but to those willing to challenge them.

Her answer is deceptively simple: follow the money.

“If we can quantify the financial impact of aspects of sustainability, it will get the attention of the people that make the decisions,” Rebecca explains. “It pains me to say it, but money makes the world go round. So why don’t we try and make it work for us?”

This pragmatic, almost clinical recognition—that the path to impact runs through balance sheets—sets Rebecca apart from many in her field. For her, leadership isn’t about inspiring slogans or glossy ESG reports; it’s about building a language that boards and CFOs can’t ignore.

From Science to Strategy

Rebecca’s path into sustainability was neither linear nor preordained. A geophysics degree at Durham gave her the tools to interrogate the natural world—from the mechanics of California wildfires to the physics of the Earth’s core. But it was the undeniability of climate science, laid bare by her lecturers, that sharpened her resolve.

“These lecturers were able to describe it and put out the evidence in such a way that it felt so undeniable that I just couldn’t ignore it basically.”

Yet her first job, in a manufacturing firm, revealed a different frontier: gender inequality. Just 25% of the workforce were women. Rebecca threw herself into a gender balance working group, pushing back against everyday microaggressions and building awareness. Responsibility, she realised, is as much about culture as carbon.

The Double Materiality Moment

Today, Rebecca works at the cutting edge of “double materiality”—the idea that sustainability is no longer just about a company’s impact on the planet, but also the planet’s impact on the company. The EU’s CSRD regulations have made this dual lens unavoidable.

For Rebecca, this shift represents both a professional opportunity and a philosophical pivot: finally, the environmental crises of our age are being translated into the one language corporations fully understand—risk and return.

But she warns against complacency. Reports, she notes, can often feel like sterile artefacts of what’s already happened. The challenge is to make them drivers of change—spotlights that illuminate failure and possibility in equal measure.

Women in STEM, and the Power of Storytelling

Rebecca is also passionate about who gets to shape these narratives. Having studied in male-dominated science departments, she has seen how representation—or its absence—matters.

She lights up when discussing a recent article celebrating women scientists whose contributions have been forgotten, their names erased from the textbooks.

“If we want to get more women and young girls interested in science and then studying it, potentially then having a career in it, they need to see the role models and feel inspired by them.”

Here, communication is as critical as science. The stories that stick—the ones that change who sees themselves as a “scientist”—are often told not through reports, but through film, books, even TikTok reels. Sustainability, in other words, is as much cultural as it is technical.

Leadership at the Edge

What does it take to lead responsibly in this environment? For Rebecca, it is the ability to hold two ideas in tension: optimism and realism.

“Some of the clients I work with make me feel better about it. Some of them don’t… but I think you have to remain optimistic in this job, or what’s the point?”

That pragmatism is a lesson for leaders everywhere. Hope without realism is naivety; realism without hope is paralysis. The responsible edge lies in the uncomfortable space between.

As Group Director of Marketing and Sustainability at Stahl, a global leader in coatings for flexible materials, Laura isn’t trying to save the planet with slogans. She’s trying to shift one of the most complex industrial ecosystems on earth — from the inside, and with both feet on the ground.

“Unless the customer can open up a new market or sell and expand their business, there’s no way,” she explains.

“It has to match the financial models we’re used to. And that is growth. That is margin.”

In a sector where performance isn’t optional and price is still king, Laura is proving that embedding ESG doesn’t have to mean abandoning commercial sense. In fact, it may require doubling down on it.

From Forest Hikes to Factory Floors

Laura’s leadership isn’t rooted in management theory. It’s shaped by childhood hikes in the Dutch forests, dinosaur-themed booklets sold for WWF donations, and a pragmatic curiosity about how the world works. That early pull — to both storytelling and environmental protection — never really left her.

It’s what later drew her into marketing roles in the chemical industry, an unusual path for someone with a deep connection to nature. But it wasn’t a contradiction. “You need chemistry to make everything — the car, the phone, the infrastructure. The question isn’t whether the industry is flawed. It’s how we use its strengths for the transition we need.”

This isn’t naivety. It’s realism, sharpened by years of procurement and commercial experience. And it’s exactly this worldview — simultaneously systems-aware and market-savvy — that defines her approach at Stahl.

Can Brand and ESG Coexist?

Sustainability often gets siloed, shoved into compliance or PR. At Stahl, Laura’s dual role as head of both marketing and sustainability raises eyebrows. But she sees it differently.

“The brand is an expression of our strategy. And ESG is central to that strategy,” she says.

“It means I can avoid greenwashing — because I understand the business, the factory, the customer.”

This is ESG as substance, not surface. Under Laura’s watch, the sustainability message isn’t painted on — it’s pressure-tested against margin, materials, and market dynamics.

Transparency Is Not a Tool. It’s a Culture.

Responding to a Financial Times article on AI and supply chains, Laura is clear: data alone won’t save us.

“We have a data overload. Tooling isn’t enough. We need value chain collaboration and we need to educate the consumer.”

The bottleneck isn’t technical — it’s human. It’s our inability to align incentives, share data meaningfully, and build trust between players who, until recently, competed on opacity.

The most compelling example? The fashion industry’s Zero Discharge initiative — a rare show of consensus that allowed sustainability standards to become visible and functional. Laura wants more of that: one outcome, one standard, one clear signal to the consumer.

Is It Really Possible to Lead Responsibly?

It depends what we mean by “responsibly”. If we mean sacrificing growth for virtue, then no — at least not yet. But if responsibility means balancing commercial outcomes with environmental and social integrity, and doing so transparently, then yes.

“You need belief,” Laura says.

“And a few brave companies to step back and ask: where do I want to be in ten years’ time?”

It’s a leadership model that doesn’t demand sainthood — just a strategic patience, a willingness to collaborate, and a refusal to let perfection kill progress.

In a world shouting for silver bullets, Laura Willemsen is offering something rarer: a blueprint for change that’s incremental, integrated, and real.