Why meaningful sustainability starts with redesigning the system, not adding another layer to it.
The myth: sustainability can simply be bolted onto an existing business.
It is an attractive idea, and it is easy to see why boards keep buying it: Hire a Chief Sustainability Officer, commission a materiality assessment, publish a report with a forest on the cover, leave the incentives, the capital allocation logic and the procurement criteria exactly where they were. The business carries on, and sustainability sits beside it like a conservatory on a Victorian terrace. Lovely to look at. Structurally irrelevant to the house.
I have led and advised sustainability strategy at FTSE 100 and Fortune 100 companies, and I have watched this design fail with remarkable consistency. Not because the people in the role lacked conviction – they were often the most systemically literate people in the building – it failed because of what they were handed: a remit that touched everything and authority over nothing.
Why the myth survives
The academic record is clearer than most executives realise. Bansal and Roth’s typology of why firms go green (competitiveness, legitimation, ecological responsibility) has held for a quarter of a century, and in practice most corporate environmental activity is legitimation. It exists to satisfy external audiences, not to change what the organisation rewards internally. Banerjee called the sustainability function a boundary object: it performs sustainability for the outside world without requiring the organisation to revise its operating assumptions.
The CSO role has followed the script. First communications, then compliance, as CSRD and IFRS S1 and S2 turned sustainability into a disclosure obligation. Genuine integration into commercial strategy and capital allocation is where only some organisations have arrived. Each phase was progress. Each also became a comfortable place to stop. None of this is hypocrisy. It is a rational response to an architecture that rewards the appearance of commitment at the lowest cost to the operating model.
A ramp bolted on at the end
The quickest way to see the bolt-on is to walk into a corporate office and feel the temperature. The standard most offices still run on was set in the 1960s around the metabolic rate of a man in a suit, roughly 35 percent higher than that of most women. Nobody designed those buildings to be hostile. They were designed for someone, and everyone else was expected to bring a cardigan.
Reporting changes what organisations document, and documentation is often where change starts.
I have spent my career on the margins of rooms like that, and the margins taught me the design lesson sustainability keeps missing. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls it misfitting: disability is not inherent to a body but produced by friction between a body and an environment not built to receive it. The environment is the variable. Once the architecture is set, any request to change it stops being a design question and becomes an accommodation request. Accommodation is the old model with better language: the assumed centre, with a ramp bolted on at the end.
That is exactly what most corporate sustainability is. A ramp bolted onto a business designed for cheap carbon, stable supply chains and predictable weather.
Designing from the edge
The alternative is not generosity. It is a better method. Sheila Xu, whose work sits at the intersection of space systems and accessibility, makes the case most counterintuitively: “Space is more accessible than Earth.” Not because space programmes set out to be inclusive. They set out to survive. When an error can be lethal, communication has to be designed for the most constrained communicator in the room: clear vocabulary, confirmation loops, shared mental models, redundant channels, nothing left to cultural shorthand. When I asked her what that design produces, she was decisive. It produces inclusion, not as the goal but as the by-product of precision.
Weick and Sutcliffe’s research on high-reliability organisations, from aircraft carriers to air traffic control, finds the same pattern. Protocols built for the highest constraint produce more reliable systems, not slower ones. The constraint becomes the quality standard. The commercial record agrees. OXO Good Grips began with a peeler that hurt arthritic hands and became a bestselling kitchen brand. Kerb cuts built for wheelchair users serve anyone pushing a buggy or a bike; Angela Glover Blackwell calls it the curb-cut effect. Designing for the edge does not produce edge outcomes. It forces the precision that average-centred design can afford to skip.
This is where the margins argument becomes a sustainability argument. Heat, flood, supply shocks and regulatory volatility are turning more of every market into edge conditions. A business built for the assumed centre performs adequately only for customers with enough redundancy to paper over its failures, and that market shrinks every year the climate shifts. Allbirds illustrates the limits of relying on a company’s stated sustainability purpose: in 2026, it sold its footwear brand and assets, pivoted towards AI infrastructure, briefly adopted the name NewBird AI, and amended its charter to remove its public-benefit status and environmental-conservation purpose. You can attack a label in a news cycle. It is far harder to dismantle a governance structure or a supply chain redesigned from the component up.
What this means, and for whom
For builders of products and services, change the brief before the room fills. Ask whose experience, at its most constrained, shows you where your system breaks. That person is not your edge case. They are your quality standard. Ask before the MVP, the roadmap and the first investor deck. Ask afterwards and you are no longer designing. You are writing an accommodation request.
For investors, the bolt-on is an underpriced risk. Sixty-one percent of CFOs still view sustainability primarily as a cost. Reporting and pay run on a two-year horizon; sustainability, modelled properly, compounds over seven to fourteen. Change the diligence questions. Not whether the company has a sustainability policy, but whose constraints defined the product brief, and whether the sustainability committee’s findings have ever changed a commercial decision.
For educators, you already practise this. The student hardest to reach is not the problem but the signal. Business schools that attach ESG electives to an unchanged core are bolting on. Those redesigning the core, as INSEAD has across all fourteen core MBA courses, are rewriting the brief.
The honest caveat
None of this makes the bolt-on worthless. Reporting changes what organisations document, and documentation is often where change starts. The evidence for edge-first design is strongest in products and services; applying it to whole operating models is a well-grounded extension, not a settled finding. And redesign is slow. Embedding ecological and social factors into incentives, capital and hiring is probably another decade of institutional work, and anyone promising it in one planning cycle is selling the vocabulary. The real test is direction of travel: does each decision move sustainability into the brief, or leave it parked by the door?
Design is a values statement. It always was. The only question is whether you make it consciously.
References and further reading
Bibliography
Banerjee, Subhabrata Bobby. 2008. ‘Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.’ Critical Sociology 34 (1): 51–79.
Bansal, Pratima, and Kendall Roth. 2000. ‘Why Companies Go Green: A Model of Ecological Responsiveness.’ Academy of Management Journal 43 (4): 717–736.
Blackwell, Angela Glover. 2017. ‘The Curb-Cut Effect.’ Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2011. ‘Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.’ Hypatia 26 (3): 591–609.
IFRS Foundation. 2023. IFRS S1 General Requirements for Disclosure of Sustainability-related Financial Information; IFRS S2 Climate-related Disclosures. London: IFRS Foundation.
Kearney and We Don’t Have Time. 2025. Staying the Course: Chief Financial Officers and the Green Transition. Chicago: Kearney.
Kingma, Boris, and Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt. 2015. ‘Energy Consumption in Buildings and Female Thermal Demand.’ Nature Climate Change 5: 1054–1056.
Weick, Karl E., and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. 2001. Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
