A topic close to our hearts: integrating corporate strategy with sustainability.

We've long been frustrated by the lack of true integration between the two. Most businesses treat sustainability as a parallel track — a separate workstream with its own strategy, its own reporting cycle, and its own people. The result is duplication, confusion, unnecessary cost, and missed opportunity.

Evolving these five steps of the strategy-setting process will help — and save a lot of wasted effort in the process.

Step 1: Start with a double materiality assessment. Before setting any strategic priorities, understand how your business affects the world and how the world affects your business. This is the foundation — not a compliance exercise but the most useful strategic tool most businesses have never used.

Step 2: Build your theory of change. Start from the long-term impact you want to have and work backwards to what needs to change. This reorients strategy from "what can we do more of?" to "what needs to be different?"

Step 3: Set one strategy, not many. If you have a sustainability strategy, a technology strategy, a people strategy, and a commercial strategy — you don't have a strategy. You have a collection of plans that will create tension and confusion. Integrate sustainability into the core business strategy, not alongside it.

Step 4: Build for uncertainty, not prediction. Use scenario planning to stress-test your strategic bets against multiple plausible futures shaped by the four societal forces: AI, planetary boundaries, ageing demographics, and deglobalisation.

Step 5: Make it a living system. Set targets and accountability structures that persist beyond the strategy project. Build early warning indicators that signal when your assumptions are shifting. Review regularly enough to adapt — but not so frequently that you chase every noise.

The businesses that do this well don't just have more credible sustainability credentials. They have better strategies, clearer priorities, and more resilient organisations.

Get in touch if you'd like to explore what this could look like for your business.