Navigating the Future of Sustainability Strategy

At the Aspen Business & Society Summit, corporate sustainability leaders gathered to discuss how to best manage an increasingly volatile business landscape with challenges ranging from supply shocks and extreme weather to shifting political priorities. While today’s context is unique, the skill set required to manage it is not. Sustainability leaders are already adept at cutting across business silos, building external relationships, and turning environmental or social risks into operational improvements.

As the scale and speed of change accelerates, these same skills must be applied in new ways to keep pace with a shifting landscape. Doing so will require leaders to reorient their teams, refresh their strategies, and experiment with approaches that match the moment. As one speaker noted, “We shouldn’t make sustainability so different from other business challenges, which are always fraught with complexities, trade-offs, and competing priorities.”

Read on to learn the six key actions that can help sustainability leaders stay strategically relevant within their organizations: