Yet another windowless room, lit by fluorescent lighting, cooled to a chilly 18ºC to keep the audience awake. Hard plastic chairs fixed in neatly arranged rows of ten, all squarely facing the stage.

There the main panel of the event unfolds in all too familiar patterns. The second panelist just got handed the microphone to answer the moderator's question. A well-structured monologue follows. Fellow panelists use the time to look at their own note cards again, occasionally interrupting themselves for a polite nod at the speaker when a brief pause in the speech seems to demand it.

After five minutes, the speaker leans back seemingly satisfied with their delivery. And so seems the moderator as she hands the mic to the next panelist.

The pattern repeats.

Two more rounds of this, and each panelist is asked to deliver their closing statements, for cinematic effect this time in reversed order. A round of applause concludes the performance and releases the audience of their polymer seats. A small number of them heads eagerly towards the panelists, business cards in hands, while others, equally rushed, hurry out of the arctic breeze of the humming aircon they've sat under for the past hour.

The default we came to accept

I’ve been part of many such sessions, in every one of these roles: freezing in the audience, eagerly networking with the speakers, moderating through a well-rehearsed flow of signed-off questions, or responding to these within my allotted speaking time.

No matter where in the world the event took place, I observed these same patterns again and again. They felt inevitable, like universal laws governing the way events are to be run.

Many of these laws emerge from the self-imposed constraints of the event’s aspirations: A must-attend summit of thought leaders and industry experts promising key insights any CXO must know. With that kind of promise, you don’t want to leave things up to chance. So you book space in an exhibition center or an impressive downtown office, secure high-profile speakers and sponsors, and pack the agenda with as many parallel-run sessions as the venue can hold (content pre-submitted and signed off, of course).

Familiar choices, predictable outcomes.

Always slightly overwhelming in the setup and underwhelming in the results. Intriguing on paper and exhausting in reality. This setup feels like a safe bet for organizers, the commercially straightforward and established model.

And so it does for participants, too.

For organizational leaders, used to overscheduled diaries and back-to-back commitments, the default event structure is a natural extension of their habitual modus operandi. Anything else, say, white space of unstructured time, would feel wasteful, almost indulgent.

That’s how we got stuck with this design as the default, despite it barely yielding any genuinely new insights or significant breakthroughs.

When things go off script

As I did my rounds through the halls, pavilions, and congress centers, going through the well-rehearsed motions of the well-trodden conference path, I started to notice brief moments in which the familiar patterns got interrupted.

In between the carefully curated sessions and outside of the official agenda — actually mostly outside of the venue altogether — people just happened to meet. And talk. And connect.

At the restaurant right next to the main entrance of the exhibition center — Oh, your organization too has experienced this issue? While queuing for an over-prized (but much needed) cup of coffee — I’ve never thought about it that way but now that you say it… Or during an improvised picnic lunch, stealing oneself away from the noisy halls — That’s so interesting, why has nobody ever tried this approach?

Soon, these rare moments stood out as the most memorable ones of all the conferences I attended. Often, they were the beginning of new collaborations, projects, and partnerships.

For instance, at one of the UN COPs, I happened to be early for an evening reception, wandering the rooms of a (inappropriately luxurious — think golden eagle bathroom sink faucets) villa where it was being held. There, I bumped into another seemingly equally lost guest. Having time to kill before the reception began, we started to chat. Not knowing anything about each other’s backgrounds or current workplaces, we had a refreshingly candid conversation about what we believed is truly at the heart of the environmental crisis.

We have now been working together for over two years in a non-profit whose purpose is to address exactly those foundational, structural deficits we discussed that evening.

During another week-long climate summit, my colleague and I found our way to a local restaurant, after an exhausting day of running from one panel and roundtable to the next. The place was packed, but a stranger was kind enough to let us join him at his table, and we naturally started to chat. While I thought I had no more energy left inside me after that day (and prior to some food), I suddenly found myself deeply engaged in the exchange with the stranger. As it turned out, he moved to this town a few years back and is managing the local office of a major international financial institution. While he had nothing to do with the climate summit, his organization was doing work in the space. The perspective he shared from inside the industry was eye-opening, and completely absent from the rooms I’d been in all day.

That single exchange had me rethink some of the most dearly held beliefs about why things are stuck in the industry and, most importantly, how they can get unstuck. Years later, I am still in touch with that stranger, acting as honest sounding boards for each other’s work.

Experiences like these, which offered new perspectives and led to breaking through barriers that seemed insurmountable before, made me wonder two things: One, what makes these encounters work? And second, how could we create more of these — not by accident, but by design?

From accidents to intention

Let’s start with what makes them work. The answer I’ve found is surprisingly simple. These moments work so well because they catch us off guard. When we are outside of our known professional environment. Physically and mentally.

They happen when we are in a Liminal Space.

Liminal Spaces exist on the threshold between the familiar and the unknown. We enter them when the patterns of our everyday are interrupted and things that tend to occupy our working memory are temporarily forgotten.

Leaving the conference halls, the meeting rooms, the place we associate with work, we lay down the armor of organizational identities that we’re otherwise wearing all day and the rather rigid thinking that comes with it. In these moments — strolling the streets of a foreign city or visiting a new restaurant after the last session has closed — our minds are not set to work mode anymore. We open up different channels of thinking and behavior.

Ironically, these are exactly the ones we need to tap into for some of our most important work to progress. And Liminal Spaces are where they become accessible.

Naturally, unhurriedly, effortlessly.

Which brings me to the second question: Can we move these moments from being rare fortunate accidents to intentionally designed encounters? Not as an afterthought of events or as another item on their agenda. What if we skipped the big venues, the uninspiring rooms, the predictable panels altogether? What if the event actually were these encounters?

Designing Liminal Spaces

Just as we can intentionally enter Liminal Spaces ourselves by interrupting our familiar patterns, so we can also intentionally design them for others to enter. If the goal is to create such Liminal Spaces that allow for meaningful, honest connections to emerge — like the serendipitous encounters described above — we have to think about the container that’s supposed to hold them. Three dimensions shape this container:

1. the physical environment around us,

2. the mental frame inside of us, and

3. the people alongside us.

Conferences address two of these by offering a physical environment that’s different from your office and bringing you together with different people. But while they check these two boxes on paper, the majority of conferences do not turn them into a setup conducive to real connections and meaningful encounters. They do not open up a Liminal Space but rather dress up familiar patterns in new clothes.

Crucially, they rarely trigger a shift in your mental frame, which remains rigidly fixed in familiar territory. Locked in like this, you could sit next to your (professional) soul mate or listen to a breakthrough idea delivered on center stage, while you remain blissfully oblivious to either as your mind is occupied with all the things it’s been ruminating on since you left your office the day before.

The key insight is that the three dimensions need to come together in a very particular way. They all need to click, simultaneously. If and when they do, they form a Symbiotic Container: the Liminal Space in which people feel safe enough to show up as actual, vulnerable humans, not their corporate identities.

In this Liminal Space, people trust to genuinely connect with one another, to address challenges that normally remain unnamed, and, without even being prompted, create new paths forward.

1. Your physical environment

You have certainly experienced yourself how the physical space you’re in — the light in the room, the noises around you, the smells, the air — can profoundly shift every aspect of your being. There are spaces that immediately make you feel comfortable, safe, that put you at ease. They feel inviting, warm, inspiring. And there are those that elicit just the opposite reaction in you: they put you on alert, they feel cold, your body contracts, they feel draining.

Decades ago, researchers have already found that our attention is a finite resource.1 It depletes over the course of a day. But it can be restored: Walks in nature, with effortless, wandering outward attention let your brain’s attention system rest and restore. While nature is the most direct path to this, the same mechanism can be triggered by other environments that let the mind stay engaged without draining its attention resources: strolling through places of art or history, enjoying a calm moment in a cozy café, watching people pass by on the street.

Most of our office spaces, let alone conference venues, are rarely designed with this research in mind. While dozens of workplace studies demonstrate the importance of unstructured social spaces for creativity and innovation, in practice, they seem to hit their ceiling of imagination at ping-pong tables and a few comfy chairs.

Carefully designed unstructured spaces for informal encounters, and deliberate breaks in nature, are the two longest, most accessible levers you can pull to set the conditions for progress on your stuck points and long awaited breakthroughs on your knotty problems.

2. Your mental frame

Closely related to the physical space you find yourself in, it’s easy to see how a room not only affects you physically but also mentally. Your body and mind are inherently interconnected. If the former contracts and shifts to fight-or-flight mode (constant noise-scape of city traffic and construction sites; freezing, window-less room with glaringly bright lights), your mind will do just the same.

The opposite holds true, too: If your body is at rest and open, your mind suddenly starts to open up. Creativity flows, new connections are made, inspiration sparks. The physical state of your body, influenced by the physical space you’re in, and your mental frame are in a symbiotic relationship with one another, constantly checking in on each other: are we safe?

Once there’s a clear yes, anything is possible.

What this can look like in practice was shown by a team of Harvard researchers:2 They told one group of hotel housekeepers that their daily cleaning already met the Surgeon General’s exercise guidelines, while a second group was given no information. Four weeks later, with no change to their actual work, the informed group’s weight, blood pressure, and body fat had all measurably dropped, just from believing differently about what their bodies were already doing.

Create the conditions for your inner frame to shift, and you can suddenly enter into places you were never even aware existed.

3. The people around you

The symbiotic relationship does not end there: the third dimension of the container, the people alongside you, significantly shapes the energy of the room you’re in and has profound effects on your mental frame.

Remember the last time you got together with a group of friends or colleagues who just naturally vibed together, conversations flowing effortlessly? Chances are, you left that table, room, or restaurant feeling uplifted and inspired, a little lighter and calm.

Now, think of a situation where the opposite was true: An uncomfortable business meeting or negotiation with a partner or manager, where all options seem to be win-lose scenarios. Or the seemingly endless argument with a naysayer who keeps listing all the reasons why your idea just cannot work.

The exhaustion, and possibly relief, you felt when leaving those rooms and people behind is real, mentally and physically. Being in situations like these with these types of people depletes your capacity for clear thinking and effective doing. They put you on constant alert, with no emotional safety in sight.

Compare that to the first scenario: When you are feeling safe in the company of the people around you. When you are feeling heard and seen by your peers. That’s when you and they open up, when you are having honest conversations, and dare to bring your true self to the interaction.

You are not only shaped by the five people you spend the most time with generally. You’re shaped by the five people with you in the room right now.

Dare to design for outcomes

When a Symbiotic Container opens up, things feel effortless. There’s no thought of work though you might just be working through some of your knottiest problems.

Designing Liminal Spaces to create these conditions is not easy. It requires clarity about the purpose of the container one wants to create, awareness of how its three dimensions can be shaped to serve this purpose, and energy to bring them to life.

That’s why they are so rare.

They are expensive, not necessarily in monetary terms, but in the time and effort one spends designing them. They require intention and devotion. Both by those designing them and those entering them. For someone whose value is tied to visible output, as is the case for most organizational leaders, an hour that produces no deliverable feels like failure even when it’s the most productive hour of the trip.

I’ve given a few examples of Symbiotic Containers emerging as serendipitous encounters — those that happen once conference lanyards are stashed away and strangers bump into each other while decompressing at a local restaurant.

But we have the opportunity to create these intentionally, too. And I strongly believe we need more of them, urgently. Not as an escape from the real world, but as a catalyst for real progress. Both for the individuals entering the Liminal Spaces and those outside of them who will be at the receiving end of the new potential and outcomes created inside of them.

If you are leading a team, an organization, or a community of some kind, I’d encourage you to experiment with the three dimensions of the container — the physical environment, mental frame, and people. For instance, before your next off-site or full-day team meeting, ask what in the room is actually working against the conversation you want to have.

If you’re gathering people for creative brainstorming, can you do that elsewhere than in a large, sterile meeting room? Or, if your aim is for the team to grow closer and open up about what’s actually not working, would a longer walk outside do more for that conversation than another hour in the office?

Change one thing about the physical space on purpose. Discover what combination of space, mental state, and people can open up a Liminal Space, where all three dimensions are in sync with each other and feed off of one another.

After my own experiences, and experiments, with Liminal Spaces, I became convinced that they are the missing piece for many leaders who feel stuck on a problem.

You don’t have to wait for the next serendipitous encounter, though. You can decide that the windowless room isn’t good enough anymore.

Continue with…

Deep dive

Practical

What’s the business case?

This question can become a trap.

One that keeps a company stuck in mediocrity bordering on irrelevance, as it clings on to outdated metrics and beliefs.

The problem here arises not from the question itself but from how it is answered. Mostly in quarters. Quarterly optimization will get you to a local maximum: top of that small hill in front of you — while there’s a huge mountain just out of view. But you’ll never get to climb that mountain if you don’t invest in changing the lens through which you scout the landscape.

To rethink — and recalculate — your business case.

We’ve successfully fooled ourselves for decades.

Without knowing exactly what kind of business you’re in, what product or service you’re selling, and where you’re located, there’s one thing I do know:

Your business strategy is flawed.

It’s flawed because it is based on a fundamental mispricing. Now before you storm into your VP of Sales or CPO’s office though, hear me out. This has nothing to do with your sales strategy or procurement practices. Rather, the mispricing is baked into our economic system.

Our global economy is running on silent subsidies worth more than $125 trillion per year1 — a sum larger than all the value of all the goods and services produced in 2025, combined2. These subsidies are, generously, offered by the planet’s ecosystems to support virtually everything we rely on in our modern world: the food we grow depends on fertile ground, pollinators, and stable weather patterns; the buildings we live in wouldn’t exist without raw materials such as timber and limestone, and without sufficient supplies of freshwater, many manufacturing processes wouldn’t be possible at all — oh and we wouldn’t have anything to drink.

Add to these the less obvious ecosystem services such as climate regulation, flood and storm protection, and soil formation, and you get an idea of their breadth and relevance.

These ecosystem services are the asset base capitalism has been running on, off the books, since the Industrial Revolution. At first, we were blissfully unaware of their existence. Everyone took them for granted and they fueled our rapid economic growth. Then, as awareness of their existence grew, barely did anyone think about investing in preserving this steady flow of subsidies. Rather, corporations smelled in them their opportunity for a free lunch and developed an even more voracious appetite for them.

Which brings us to now.

As the reality of the finitude of these ecosystem services sinks in, we find ourselves helplessly trapped in the downward spiral of more that our incentive structures built. But instead of more, we start to experience less. And with less, the underlying mispricing now becomes painfully clear.

Between 1997 and 2011, land-use change destroyed an estimated $4.3–20.2 trillion per year in ecosystem services value. 2021 estimates of listed companies in the S&P Global Broad Market Index suggest that public companies generate annual environmental costs worth roughly $3.71 trillion3. And the IPBES Nexus Assessment estimates $10–25 trillion annually in unaccounted costs from current business practices damaging biodiversity.

The gap between the $125+ trillion value in annual ecosystem services and the $0 price the market got used to paying for them is the largest mispricing in economic history.

We have been treating nature as free in our economic accounting — a fundamental error equivalent to drawing down capital while booking it as income, as the economist Partha Dasgupta describes it in his 2021 review.

Which brings us back to why your business strategy is flawed.

For decades, businesses’ earnings reports and boardroom decisions ignored the subsidies they enjoyed and the drawdown on nature they caused. But the costs are real. And as the numbers above show, the bill is adding up. The physical consequences of decades of extractive behavior are already becoming too tangible to ignore. What was once an abstract externality will now need to be a core element of any business strategy.

What this actually means for businesses.

Impressive as these trillion dollar figures read on paper, they suffer from the same curse as most macro-economic models (or climate scenarios): too abstract and too detached from the reality organizations are facing on the ground. So let’s have a look at how these numbers translate to the operational realm:

1— Insurance market

As we’re breaching boundary after boundary of the planet we depend on and are racing towards irreversible, physical tipping points, markets take notice. 2023 had 28 separate billion-dollar weather disasters, surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2020. The consequences of these are most felt in the insurance market. Somewhat ironically, given the current political climate, this can be best illustrated by the US market: Allstate and State Farm have stopped writing new home policies in California; AAA, Citizens, and dozens of others have withdrawn from Florida; First Street Foundation estimates 35.6 million US properties — one-quarter of all US real estate — face rising insurance prices and reduced coverage due to climate risk. Insurers don’t withdraw because of any ideological agenda. They do so when the math is broken.

2— Capital access

Financial markets are increasingly pricing nature risk. ESG-driven capital allocation, sustainability-linked loans, and disclosures according to frameworks such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) will be the new norm.

Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund — the largest pension fund on the planet, managing over $1.5 trillion — has made ESG integration mandatory for all external asset managers, who also must become signatories to the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). When the world’s biggest pool of patient capital decides your climate risk profile is a screening criterion, “we’ll get to it eventually” stops being a strategy and starts being a termination notice.

3— Regulatory and compliance costs

The uptick of regulations we’ve seen over the past few years is another expression of externalities starting to be priced in. Carbon pricing schemes, such as the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), mirrored by the UK with its own CBAM, as well as the recently introduced EU Deforestation Regulation are on the rise — and of global relevance. They require increasingly granular disclosure of the externalities caused — in the form of carbon — by the products imported into the EU and UK.

Another way in which governments are catching up on the freeriding on nature that became our business as usual is the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). Under EPR schemes — already law across the EU, UK, Canada — if you made the product, you own the end of its life. The packaging your product ships in, the battery in your device, the tire on your car: all coming back to you, legally and financially. The logic is elegant and the implementation is merciless. You either design products for circularity now, on your timeline and budget, or regulators design your cost structure for you.

4— Supply chains

Businesses depend on them. Raw materials are the backbone of our global economy. Shortages of these lead to massive disruptions: water stress, soil degradation, and pollinator collapse are already increasing the cost of business for farmers, manufacturers, and retailers. Supply chain vulnerabilities to these disruptions are no longer CSR footnotes but material risks to be flagged in investor filings.

5— Stranded assets

Coastal real estate and infrastructure are the obvious and imminent ones, in particular in the context of the insurance market. Agricultural land is next in line, closely linked to the disruptions to water, soil, and pollinators we start to experience. Another often neglected category is tourism: ski resorts without snow? Reef-adjacent hotels with bleached reefs? And summer vacation in the Mediterranean region in over 40ºC? None of these sound very appealing to me.

These are just five examples of costs previously borne by ecosystems now being rerouted back to the businesses that either actively contributed to the degradation or were passive beneficiaries of it.

From sticks to carrots: the ROI of Symbiotic Leadership

When previously freely enjoyed subsidies — and barely thought about externalities — start to get priced in, they will naturally be perceived as a burden. In response, leaders will tend to do just the bare minimum to clear the bar and get rid of them. Their mindset is damage control, not opportunity mode.

But that’s exactly how businesses get stuck — and ultimately left behind in the transition.

The important realization that shifts the mindset (and business approach) is this: These risks and costs have always been there. You have just not accounted for them. When signing up for a buy-now-pay-later offer, you should not complain about the interest that’s added when the pay-later date comes. It’s been written in the fine print when you opted in, whether you’ve read it or not.

Granted, most businesses have likely not even been aware they’ve signed up for such a scheme, but that doesn’t offer them the option to ignore the real cost of their business operations either. They do, however, have one choice: damage control — incrementally adjusting to avoid just the worst outcomes — or opportunity mode — proactively constructing a business strategy that leans into the symbiotic relationship with the subsidies our ecosystems offer.

The companies that thrive in this massive transformation aren’t those that merely reduce harm. They are those that understand their business as a node in a living system. The premise is that individual wellbeing, organizational performance, and planetary health are not competing priorities — they are expressions of the same underlying system. That’s Symbiotic Leadership in action.

Here’s what this opportunity mode can look like in practice:

1— From supply chain disruption to resilience and efficiency

The Suez Canal. The Strait of Hormuz. The Panama Canal. Three chokepoints carrying a disproportionate share of global trade — and three places where climate risk is materializing faster than most boardrooms have noticed. In 2023, drought reduced the Panama Canal’s water levels to historic lows, forcing months of shipping restrictions that rippled through supply chains worldwide. That’s not an anomaly. That’s a preview.

The companies that respond by merely rerouting shipments miss the point. The ones that use disruption as a forcing function to audit their entire supply chain find something more valuable than a new shipping lane: water waste at production sites bleeding money; labor practices creating reputational — and increasingly legal — liability; single-source dependencies that can be engineered out of existence. What starts as damage control becomes a competitive intelligence operation.

The flipside of disruption is always efficiency. The companies that figure that out first don’t just survive the transition — they emerge from it with a leaner, more resilient operation than the competitors still waiting for things to go back to normal.

2— From regulatory costs to leadership and market access

This one most leaders already see coming, especially those with significant operations in the EU, where environmental regulation tends to be strongest. Running a full materiality assessment — as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) mandates — often unveils a treasure trove of insights into risk exposure and opportunities for value creation.

Take the case of Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk. When it ran a full climate materiality assessment, it discovered that water scarcity at its insulin production sites in Denmark represented a material operational risk — not in 2050, but within the decade. It responded by engineering closed-loop water systems across its facilities. The result: water costs dropped, regulatory risk evaporated, and the company is now held up as a procurement benchmark by sustainability-screened institutional investors. They didn’t do it because regulators forced them. They did it because someone actually read the materiality report.

When it comes to regulation, the cost of inaction by now far exceeds the cost of proactive leadership.

3— From restricted capital to preferred access

The financial sector, just as the insurance industry, is among those most exposed to the systemic mispricing that’s been going on for decades. But as we started to quantify the resulting gap and thus risk, they quickly caught on. The work on designs of sustainability-linked loans began long before most boardrooms knew what TCFD stood for. So while it is true that access to capital is narrowing, lenders are rewarding companies that show they are prepared. And for good reasons.

• Improved financial performance from ESG becomes more noticeable over longer time horizons — short-term quarterly measurement systematically under-prices sustainability investment. For example, McKinsey found long-term oriented companies grew economic profit 81% more than short-term peers over a 13-year period4; and the ESG-financial performance correlation in academic literature was most pronounced in studies using 3–5+ year measurement windows, near-absent in quarterly ones5. The quarterly obsession isn’t just philosophically wrong — it is empirically, measurably, leaving money on the table.

• Science-Based Targets (SBTs, approved by the initiative of the same name, SBTi) are shown to unlock ESG-screened capital pools categorically unavailable to non-SBTi companies, lowers cost of capital, and qualifies you for B2B procurement at large buyers with Scope 3 commitments.

• Green bonds and sustainability-linked debt have grown from a novelty to a $4 trillion asset class in under a decade — and they come with a catch. Issuers who miss their sustainability KPI commitments face automatic coupon step-ups, meaning the loan gets more expensive if you don’t perform. This is the market repricing your cost of capital in real time based on your sustainability trajectory.

4— From constraints on strategy to source of innovation, talent, and brand value

Companies with a clearly articulated, operationalized purpose make faster decisions, attract better talent, and command stronger customer loyalty.

• Patagonia doesn’t spend much on recruiting. Neither does it spend much convincing customers to pay a premium. The brand does the work, because the brand means something — and that meaning is backed by decades of consistent, costly, uncomfortable decisions to actually do what they say.

• 58% of corporate studies showed a positive relationship between ESG and financial performance; only 8% negative6.

• During the 2008 financial crisis, B Corps — companies certified by the nonprofit B Lab for meeting rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency — had a 50.48% revenue growth rate, significantly higher than matched public firms7.

The bottom line

The wellbeing of our economies and the wellbeing of us humans is deeply intertwined with that of nature. We thrive on a healthy planet and have been enjoying ecosystem subsidies that vastly exceed the combined value of everything we produce — for decades now.

When things are seemingly offered for free, they tend to get taken for granted and eventually exploited. That’s an unfortunate reality, which, for good reason, became known as the tragedy of the commons.

Fortunately, in a sense, it’s not that tragic after all. There is a cost to the commons, to the ecosystem services provided by nature. They come at the cost of respecting our symbiotic relationship with them and making sure we reinvest enough to keep the balance.

That’s an entirely fair price to pay.

While there’s a crucial role for national governments and, more importantly, global governance to ensure we do pay a fair price for these services, businesses should not wait around until their hands are forced by the regulators or, even worse, by irreversible changes to the physical environment their business depends on.

On any dimension relevant for a long-term thinking shareholder, sustainability makes sense. In fact, I’d argue the word should be understood quite literally: the ability to sustain one’s business in the future.

We thrive with a healthy planet because we are part of the same system, not because it’s the ethical thing to do. We depend on it more than it does on us.

Continue with…

Deep dive

Practical

Realizing that one does not have all the answers can feel scary. This holds especially true when others are looking to you for guidance. All of us have been there — with our children, with a trusted friend asking for advice, or as the leader of a team during a difficult season.

And yet, when we are the ones looking for guidance ourselves, we somehow forget this fact and expect the people in charge to know exactly what to do. The higher the stakes, the more we expect and rely on their clear guidance.

As we’re plunging into a period of unprecedented change and disruption in our lives — from geopolitical instability and AI acceleration to a rapidly declining environment — our need for guidance is stronger than ever before. And with it our need for leaders showing us the way.

I have seen many such leaders over the years, deeply committed to addressing the fundamental challenges we’re facing. They led with the kind of high ambitions that this period calls for. But they also felt the pressure of expectations weighing heavier by the day. And without a release valve — space to openly share and work through their unanswered questions — they invariably reached a breaking point.

Either that of their ambitions or their very own.

We desperately need more of those leaders to succeed though. To lead with conviction while not having figured things out fully themselves yet. This requires courage. And while none of the change-makers I have witnessed lacked courage, most did not persist and deliver.

In my previous article, I made the case for ground-up action rooted in a new form of leadership that I call Symbiotic Leadership — a combination of mindset and toolset that embraces the interconnectedness of our human and economic wellbeing with the health of our planet.

But how does the theory translate into practice? There is certainly no shortage of leaders committed to drive systems-level change ground up. But then why does progress seem slow and why do most initiatives fail altogether? To me, this comes down to one thing:

Scaffolding.

Or rather, the absence of it. The scaffolding for leaders to persist and deliver on their commitments. Scaffolding that’s built on a mindset of collaboration and cross-pollination and rises high through shared tools and community support.

Here’s my take on the design of this scaffolding and how I am planning to build it.

Mindset: Laying the foundation

Leaders of change-making initiatives are locked in by design, deeply committed to their theory of change, their piece of the puzzle. That focus is their strength. That tunnel vision is what draws many people in to support them on their mission.

But it can also become their kryptonite.

Anyone working on a project with systems-level change ambitions is inherently interconnected with other parts of the system they seek to change. While their focus lies exclusively on the part of the system they have set out to change, real change at the systems level will only happen when multiple parts start to move together.

Fighting a crosscurrent in your rowing boat will exhaust you and you won’t get far; when the tide shifts though — when the system around you moves in the same direction — the same effort suddenly carries you three times as far.

Change-makers need cross-pollination, peer vulnerability, and a broader perspective. Only then can they accelerate and succeed individually, and that series of individual successes in turn trigger systems-level change.

This is a fundamental shift in mindset when compared to the celebrated stories of single-minded innovators, who, heads down, relentlessly worked in isolation and against all the odds eventually changed an entire industry.

Dig a bit deeper though, and you’ll often uncover that these stories of lonesome heroes are actually woven from thousands of threads of quiet collaboration. Solar panels did not become one of the most cost-effective ways to generate energy due to the technological innovation of one brilliant researcher or start-up company. It only happened as policy, finance, manufacturing scale, and consumer demand all started to move in tandem. Remove any one and solar would still be a niche technology.

The same holds true for the massive systems-level change required to move away from our current extractive, buy-now-pay-later behavior. It won’t be one solution, one initiative, one single push that changes the system. No single business leader or bold infrastructure project that holds the key. No standard setter, policymaker, or academic who singlehandedly creates the change.

As much as any one of them might think they do, none of them has the full picture. Rather, they all hold distinct pieces of the puzzle. On their own, rowing against the tide. Together though, they can shift the tide.

This shift happens by competition.

Not the type of zero-sum competition over scarce resources, funding, talent, and data. No, we need competition in the original sense of the Latin root of the word: com-petere, to strive together.

This fundamental reframing of competition is the shift in mindset that’s needed to shift the tide. And this is what Symbiotic Leadership is built upon: Individual thriving, economic performance, and planetary health are not competing priorities but expressions of the same underlying system.

Symbiotic Leadership does not want to take away the focus and dedication of any of those committed change-makers. Rather, it provides them with a different mindset that offers a more solid foundation on which to build the change they seek to make.

Toolset: Rising high

The mindset is the foundation. From here, we can start to build the scaffolding. Together.

While a new mindset alone does not suffice to ease the pressures of unresolved obstacles, it opens up new possibilities. When we work in siloes, we often get stuck. Progress is incremental, answers often slow to emerge.

Paradoxically though, when you bring together people who are each deeply involved in a subject but stuck on their own unanswered questions, collective intelligence kicks in — producing answers much clearer and more impactful than anything any single one of them came into the room with. With everyone holding a piece of the puzzle, there is new potential unlocked when we come together and share what we see, what we know, and, crucially, what we have not figured out yet.

Picture a tool shed. A tool shed does not prescribe answers. But it offers options to solve the problem you’re working on. The more diverse the set of tools it carries, the more options you will have to find a solution that works for your problem. The more diverse the set of tools you get to know and use, the more skilled a carpenter you’ll become and the more ambitious the projects you can tackle.

A tool shed equipped with only a hammer offers limited options. This is where most leaders are today. Fixed on what they know from the past, what they’ve used for decades. Trying to overcome new challenges they encounter with the old tools they are familiar with.

But these challenges are rapidly evolving. And so do the tools.

What Symbiotic Leadership offers is a shared tool shed. One where leaders share tools that worked for them in the past, get shown new tools, and bring tools “for repair” — workshopping stuck points with peers and expert facilitators.

Retreat to progress: The community scaffolding

Concepts and metaphors are not enough though. We need real-world outcomes. We need concepts to translate into actions and metaphors to become felt experiences.

It’s easy to get lost in one’s own writing, thinking, and philosophizing, and I am as prone to that as anyone publishing “thought leadership” pieces — or at least a lot of thought pieces. But if none of these lead to outcomes, then what’s their use?

Building things, in the digital realm, is now easier than it ever was. AI can draft your strategy deck, model your scenarios, and optimize your operations. But as technology increasingly handles the analytical and operational “how-to” of strategy, human sense-making of the what and why — and the trusted relationships needed to act on it — become the scarce resource.

What needs to be built is time and space to hold both mindset and toolset of Symbiotic Leadership. Time and space that leaders need to get familiar with them, to fully internalize them. Time and space to step out of their day-to-day, physically and mentally, to take a step back and gain a fresh perspective. All in order to then find new ways forward.

What needs to be built is a retreat to progress.

This is not to be confused with a wellness retreat nor with executive education. I am not envisioning lectures on theoretical frameworks nor keynotes held under fluorescent light. Rather, the retreat brings together committed people in leadership positions. It connects them as humans to think through the what and the why of their commitments.

The retreat is where they share their piece of the puzzle with peers who hold different pieces, acknowledging that no one has the full picture. Producing new perspectives, clarity, and courage to take concrete action.

It’s the place for shared striving against the complexity of the problems they’re trying to solve.

This is how Symbiotic Leadership comes to life. It’s where competition is reframed. It’s where a shared tool shed is created. It’s where community begins.

The Retreat to Progress concept is currently shaped and informed by the very people I want to start to bring together this fall on the Swedish west coast, both as participants and as facilitators. Chances are that you are one of them. So if you’re a leader working on sustainability, climate, or systems change – and you recognize that your piece of the puzzle needs other pieces to complete the picture – I’d like to hear from you.

Not because I believe I have the answers. But because I’m convinced we can find them together.

Continue with…

Copernican shifts

Deep dives

Practical

Theories of change, to me, always seemed to be reserved for those big visionaries among us. The Walt Disneys, Steve Jobs, or Nelson Mandelas of our times with their ideas of how some specific, large-scale change would occur, and why it should do so in the first place. Meanwhile, I felt that my own time was surely better spent focusing on the actual work I saw in front of me: Amplifying the signal – those big, bold, ambitious ideas that I believe have the potential to make a meaningful difference – instead of adding more noise and getting lost in theories of my own.

Or so I thought.

Ironically, after having worked for other people’s visions and ideas for most of the past, I slowly began to wonder: Could it be that I am somehow avoiding the actual work? Sure, I was working on something all the time and that felt productive (read: busy), but was this work actually making a meaningful difference? Unable to answer this question, the actual work became painfully obvious: To un-busy myself, zoom out, and figure out what making a difference really meant to me.

Put differently, getting clear on my theory of change.

What follows is the answer I have found. And while I certainly hope that it resonates with you, an even greater achievement might be that this piece inspires you to get clearer yourself about the change that you seek to make in the world. And how to bring it about.

The meaning of a meaningful difference

For the past several decades, we humans have pursued economic wellbeing and our individual conveniences while generally ignoring their interconnectedness with the much wider, collective human wellbeing and that of our planet.

As we busied ourselves with building higher, shipping faster, and consuming ever more voraciously, we largely forgot that we live in a symbiotic relationship – not only with each other as individuals, nations, and economies, but, crucially, also with the planet.

Granted, this extractive, buy-now-pay-later behavior resulted in rapid growth of our economies, impressive technological advancements, and unprecedented standards of living. But while many people are still acting on buy-now strategies, collectively, we’ve already entered the pay-later phase. The disruptions we’ve started to experience in our private and professional lives, from the economic and human costs of less predictable, more extreme weather events to severe supply chain disruptions and wild energy market swings, are only the first few items on the long bill that’s due soon. And our credit cards are already maxed-out.

Unless we find a way to recognize and take care of the symbiotic relationship between us and the planet, we’ll keep borrowing from tomorrow. If we don’t manage to restore a balance between our pursuit of wellbeing and the health and integrity of the planet, we risk eradicating any form of wellbeing for either. We’re literally setting fire to the ground on which we stand and depend.

Making a meaningful difference, to me, means offering an alternative to the prevailing buy-now mindset and behavior. To help create the conditions for us humans, our economies, and the planet to thrive together.

Naturally, this begs the question: How can we create these conditions and restore the balance? The answer, to me, lies in two words already written above: mindset and behavior.

While there’s a role for governance and policy – and we will get to these later – the biggest obstacles we face are our ingrained ways of thinking and acting. Luckily, these can be changed. In broad strokes, I see the change unfolding by:

1. becoming aware of our symbiotic relationship with the planet (we depend on it);

2. realizing we’re on a self-defeating trajectory (pay-later with maxed-out credit cards);

3. rethinking how we create value (from short-term extractive to long-term generative);

4. collectively committing to take responsibility and act (strive together to thrive together).

This new mindset and behavior is what I call Symbiotic Leadership. And how I believe the change I seek to make will be created.

Let’s unpack this theory of change together.

Three first principles

Every good theory seems to come with some baked-in underlying assumptions. Take those away and see the beautifully constructed theory crumble. Mine is no different here. But instead of shaky assumptions, let’s build this one up from first principles that we can all agree on.

1– People care about their individual wellbeing.

While your definition of wellbeing will differ from mine, fundamentally, I’d argue, we’re in agreement. From the basic needs for shelter and food all the way up Maslow’s hierarchy to self-actualization and, for the really ambitious among us, self-transcendence. While it’s tempting to get stuck somewhere along this climb, obsessing over wellbeing proxies such as the number shown on one’s bank account, the bathroom scale, or whether your car (house, yacht) is more expensive than your neighbors’, ultimately, they all express the same quest for one’s individual wellbeing.

None of us is an island, though – as much as the current cascade of geopolitical conflicts, environmental degradation, and head-spinning advancements in AI sometimes make me long for such a peaceful, sane place to retreat to for just a while – which leads to the second first principle underlying my theory of change:

2– Individual pursuits of wellbeing cause externalities.

If we’re sharing the same household, this principle will be very obvious – pick your favorite from the list of undone dishes, whose turn it is to take out the trash, and who gets to pick the movie. Sharing physical or emotional space with someone implies friction and compromises. But even at a distance, our individual pursuits of wellbeing will always affect, negatively or positively, the wellbeing of others.

The food you decide to buy or eat has to be grown, harvested, shipped, and prepared for you by someone somewhere in the world; the work you do and how you decide to do it will impact your colleagues, the partners or suppliers you negotiate prices with, and the customers who you serve or that serve you.

But not only are people, organizations, and communities affected by our individual pursuits of wellbeing. Our striving for wellbeing inevitably also interacts with our wider environment, ecosystems, and the planet as a whole. Crucially, the reverse holds true as well. This is captured in the third first principle.

3– Our wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of the planet.

The intersections between our circles of us – the things, people, and ideas whose wellbeing we care about – often become invisible amidst the busyness of our everyday lives. This holds especially true for our professional lives, which are increasingly disconnected from the physical and emotional realms. It is mostly only when there is friction between them that we’re reminded of our inherent interconnectedness with and dependency on the people and environment around us. Put differently, of the symbiotic nature of these relationships.

Symbiotic relationships require a certain balance and reciprocity between giving and taking of all parties involved to a mutually beneficial outcome. Your food supply depends on the farmer’s livelihood; their livelihood depends on stable weather patterns; those patterns depend on a planet in balance.

Temporarily, there will always be imbalances. But if any one party exclusively pursues their own wellbeing in disregard of the wellbeing of other parts of the symbiotic ecosystem (friendship, household, company, trading partners), this imbalance will catch up with them.

Sadly, this is exactly what we humans have been doing over the past several decades in our most fundamental symbiotic relationship with the planet.

From principles to theory

So far, we’ve established that we (1) all want to be well, (2) recognize that our own pursuit of wellbeing has effects on the people and world around us, and (3) realize that we can’t be well at the expense of the planet that we depend on. With these three principles in mind, let’s return to our current moment and how I believe change is possible.

The theory of change that I propose does not require people to give up their pursuit of wellbeing, to renounce their earthly possessions and go back to living as hunter-gatherers – though, ironically, this might be where we’re heading to if we don’t manage to turn this ship around soon. What I instead believe is needed is actually much simpler: a collective awareness of and decisive action based on these three principles.

Simple does not mean easy though. Legacy extractive ways of thinking and acting – those buy-now-pay-later strategies from earlier – are deeply ingrained in and even incentivized by our current systems. To change these systems, we have to work with the systems. To do so, there are three levers available to us. Let’s have a look at each of these in turn.

Lever 1: Global governance

This is arguably the most ambitious, slowest-moving lever, yet also the essential one for sustained long-term change. The environmental challenges we face are global. They are interconnected with technological, security, and societal challenges, and form an unprecedented polycrisis. No single sovereign state can overcome these challenges alone. In fact, the current system disincentivizes any single nation from even attempting to do so, as it would put itself at a competitive disadvantage (e.g., businesses moving operations to another country to evade national carbon taxes). The tools available to national governments are inadequate to respond to a crisis of global dimensions. Effective global governance mechanisms are essential to overcome the prisoner’s dilemma national governments face and to ensure any system change can endure in the long term.

Lever 2: Policy, standards, and regulation

While I’ve just pointed out the inability of any single government to meet the environmental crisis on its own, policymaking does remain a vital and faster-moving lever of change. Take the requirements under the EU’s initial Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD): It legally obliged over 50,000 businesses to comprehensively disclose their environmental impact and transition plans. This would have massively improved environmental data quality and availability for informed, principle 3-aligned decision-making – for businesses, their customers, and policymakers. The disclosed data would have also been an excellent foundation for redirecting financial flows from organizations built around shaky buy-now strategies towards long-term value generating businesses.

As if to prove the prisoner’s dilemma referred to above, severe pushback from various political and non-state parties led to an almost complete dismantling of the CSRD requirements in 2025. A promising regulation with the potential to create sweeping change was quickly turned into one that represents an incremental step forward at best. And yet, it shows that if political will achieved escape velocity, this lever would be an important contributor to the change we need.

If global governance is essential for lasting systems change but moves at the pace of consensus among nations and if national policies, standards, and regulations are important instruments but require political will that follows rather than leads public sentiment, is there another lever we can pull right here, right now to change the systems? I believe there is one. And it starts ground-up.

Lever 3: Ground-up action

Decisive, collective action of influential nodes in the existing system, to me, is the longest lever for rapid change that we have. Firstly, collective commitment neutralizes the competitive risk and can thus escape the prisoner’s dilemma pointed out above. Secondly, we have successful proofs of the concept, such as the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders, who are continuously lowering their emissions while flourishing as businesses, and there’s clearly appetite for more communities of commitment and knowledge sharing as shown by the increasing uptake of the Sustainable Procurement Pledge or The Climate Pledge. Thirdly, ground-up action can be the catalyst for change in both national policy and global governance. Community action can create the facts on the ground that give policymakers permission to act.

The CSRD rollback is clearly a negative example of this mechanism in action. It is now up to us to show how it can be a driver of the change we truly need.

From theory to practice

To sum up the theory, it’s based on the recognition that we all want to be well, but none of us will if the planet is not; it identifies effective global governance as essential to safeguard the conditions for both human and planetary wellbeing in the long-term, with national policies, standards, and regulations as important steps in that direction; but since neither global governance nor national policies can respond to the urgency of the situation, it proposes ground-up action as the longest lever available to us right now to create the conditions for systems-level change.

While ground-up action can take various forms, such as grassroots activism and protests, lobbying and movement building, or forming new coalitions, the particular form I envision is a new form of leadership. A fundamental shift in mindset and behavior that I call Symbiotic Leadership.

The foundation: a new mindset

The shift into a symbiotic form of leadership starts with a change in mindset. We need influential nodes of our current systems to embrace their roles and responsibility as custodians of the symbiotic relationship with the planet. A sense of responsibility not limited to climate and sustainability, but for creating the conditions for collective long-term thriving, for restoring balance.

Symbiotic Leadership means intentionally opting out of the buy-now-pay-later approach to business that currently has many leaders racing to the bottom. It means having the humility and courage to admit one alone does not have all the answers but that together we can find them.

This new mindset is not to be misunderstood as a call against competition and for a kumbaya-denialism of reality. Rather, it’s a reminder of the original meaning of the word: Com-petere, to strive together. That is what genuine, healthy competition does. It lifts all boats by demanding higher standards, higher quality. It demands expanding the circle of us to benefit not just yourself and your shareholders, but all of your stakeholders – including this planet that you’ve literally built your business on.

Adopting this new mindset will require guidance and practice. Both are best done together.

The community: a new toolset

One recurring theme throughout the theory section was the prisoner’s dilemma that any single actor faces who opts for change. No matter how wholeheartedly one embraces the new mindset of Symbiotic Leadership, these leaders will be tilting at windmills. For the new mindset to achieve new outcomes at scale, it will take a community. A community of leaders who translate the new mindset into a new toolset for Symbiotic Leadership that spreads within their organizations, industries, and communities. That’s the community I want to build.

A community in which corporate badges are checked at the door and leaders show up as individuals who have not yet figured everything out – but want to find the answers together. Who are honest about the very real pressures of quarterly earnings reports and shareholder expectations, but equally about their concerns for their children’s or grandchildren’s generations. Who are genuinely committed to a new form of leadership that recognizes these tensions and collaboratively finds an integrated response – the toolset to drive systems-level change.

This toolset will cover the four fundamental challenges that cut across core parts of every organization and community: finance, supply chains, carbon markets, and policy and governance mechanisms. The tools will involve:

• rethinking finance mechanisms and products to redirect capital,

• addressing supply chain data and accountability bottlenecks,

• carbon accounting expertise and carbon market insights, and

• understanding and proactively shaping policies.

The toolset of Symbiotic Leadership will help leaders to develop a cross-cutting understanding of how all four interact with each other and an interconnected approach to address their implications.

Perhaps most importantly though, the community will give leaders time and space to breathe. To step out of their day-to-day setting, (re-)connect with people outside of their own organization, and gain perspective to recalibrate their leadership.

The beginning

This is an invitation to leaders to become part of this community. As the Symbiotic Leadership concept is taking shape, we will start organizing seminars, workshops, and a first retreat in 2026. These will be primarily in-person interactions that bring back physical and emotional connection among professionals and, most importantly, humans. They will build the foundation for a community that provides the space to share challenges openly, to learn committedly, and to drive change rapidly. Not at the expense of their economic wellbeing but to their benefit. To strive together. To thrive together.

With the planet.

Continue with…

Copernican shifts

Deep dives

Practical

Last year around this time, I summarized the state of our climate through the lens of the Stockdale paradox: Facing the brutal facts while keeping an unwavering faith that we can and will solve this crisis.

While this framing still feels highly appropriate, both sides of the equation — the brutal facts and the reasons for an unwavering faith — deserve an update after a turbulent 2025.

When deep-diving into brutal facts which just got a little more, well, brutal, there’s the risk of quickly spiraling down into a lot of doom and gloom. To avoid losing you in these depths before getting to the unwavering faith part, I want to focus this year’s state of the climate update on practical insights and actionable takeaways.

Note: If you are new to the topic and not yet familiar with terms such as the 1.5ºC limit, the Paris Agreement, or the Planetary Boundaries concept, I’d encourage you to read last year’s state of our climate before reading on.

Before we begin…

There’s actually another risk besides sliding into doom and gloom: to lose oneself (or one’s dear readers) in facts and figures. Or rather, to lose the context for why these matter. So upfront, here’s why, plain and simple:

There is no economic — let alone human — wellbeing without a healthy planet to be well on.

The food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink. Earth provides all resources we humans and our economies need to not only survive but thrive. That’s part of the reason we’re not on Mars yet (or dare I say will ever be) — The red planet’s constant high-dose radiation sneaking through the thin atmosphere is just not very inviting for us fragile humans.

With Earth, in contrast, there’s a symbiotic relationship. Earth provides and asks us to take care of it in turn to create a mutually beneficial equilibrium. We can violate this tacit agreement at our own peril:

Overfish the oceans and fish populations collapse (such as the Grand Banks cod stocks in the 1990s), drain down freshwater reserves excessively and agricultural systems crumble (see the Ogallala Aquifer beneath the US Great Plains), heat up the oceans and corals bleach, fish disappear, and coastal protection against storms, erosion, and flooding weakens (as was the case for 84% of our coral reefs during the last El Niño).

We need this planet and we need it in a healthy state. More than it needs us, to be honest.

So let’s be clear: When I write about the need for decisive action, it is not about hugging trees (no offense, shinrin-yoku lovers) or sacrificing ourselves for the sake of animals and other species.

This is about us humans. Conquerors of the planet.

We now have to show that we’re equally capable as guardians of the planet. Otherwise we risk mimicking the unconscious behavior of a locust swarm that devours the foundation of its own livelihood.

Our current climate: Three facts and what they mean

1 — Seven out of nine Planetary Boundaries are outside of their safe operating zone

With the 2025 Planetary Boundaries update, Ocean Acidification has joined the unglamorous ranks of six other breached Planetary Boundaries — Climate Change, Biosphere Integrity, Land System Change, Freshwater Use, Biogeochemical Flows, Novel Entities (synthetic chemicals/plastics).

Translation: The planet’s health is deteriorating.

Think of these nine Boundaries as the biomarkers of Planet Earth. Just as the biomarkers of your own health scan (blood pressure, resting heart rate, blood glucose, or your cholesterol levels), the planetary biomarkers signal the overall vitality of the planet. While your biomarkers summarize your body’s current overall health, so too do the planetary biomarkers indicate how well the planet can sustain the conditions necessary for life on Earth.

Implication: Decisive action is needed, now.

Think back to your own body: If your recent health check showed almost 80% of your biomarkers in the “danger zone” that would probably worry you wouldn’t it?

And what if your doc told you you’re at the risk of crossing potentially irreversible tipping points, for example, into type II diabetes or permanent organ damage? That would likely shock you into action.

You would vow to change your diet, exercise more, take supplements and any recommended medication or other lifestyle intervention. Because you realized that you only have this one body to support you.

Unless you are betting on Mars within your or your children’s lifetime, the same holds true for our planet.

2 — The Earth’s buffer systems we rely on appear to weaken

Here’s an often overlooked fact: So far, we actually got really really lucky. While we were busy industrializing our economies over the past few decades, Earth has been an amazing sparring partner and economic growth engine.

As the carbon that fueled our global industrial development increased rapidly since the 1960s, Earth’s natural carbon sinks — think oceans and forests — played ball and absorbed more and more of the carbon that we put out there.

Until now that is.

Data of recent years (see Figure 2 below) show a gradual degradation of the very systems that have been cushioning us, with some carbon sinks on the verge of tipping into carbon sources.

Some reasons for this are not yet well understood and subject of ongoing scientific research, but others are obvious: wildfires increasing in frequency and severity (reducing both carbon sinks and actively emitting carbon), thawing ice sheets (leading to more heat being absorbed by the ocean instead of reflected back out by the ice), oh, and us chopping down more and more trees to make space to grow our food (or the food that feeds our food) certainly doesn’t help either.

Translation: Less of the CO2 we put out there is getting absorbed by the planet

Weakening carbon sinks means more of our emissions will stay out there in the atmosphere, accelerating those self-reinforcing feedback loops that could put us right on a hothouse Earth pathway.

The logical consequence then, especially in light of the Planetary Health Check results summarized above, must be that we are doing our utmost not to put more of that treacherous carbon out there, right?

Well, not quite.

First estimates for 2025 indicate yet another increase in fossil CO2 emissions by about +1.1% from 2024 (to an overall 38.1 billion tons). The year has now also officially been deemed the third-hottest year on record, despite being influenced by a La Niña — a cooling of the ocean surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, which usually leads to an overall lower average surface temperature globally.

Implication: More extremes until we stop putting more CO2 in the air

Just like the pre-diabetic patient who despite the doctor’s warnings cannot resist the sweet temptation of desert, our current systems and incentives will reliably produce more of the same results without outside intervention.

3 — Current commitments and policies put us on track for +2.3ºC

Okay, I admit this one is a slight scope creep as it’s looking at the political not actual physical climate. A summary of 2025 would seem incomplete though, if I was to ignore critical developments in climate policy. Plus policy, if effectively deployed, is one such outside intervention referred to before that has the power to reshape incentives.

So then, let’s start with the UN, or rather those 196 parties that in 2015 committed to limiting the temperature increase to well below 2ºC, targeting 1.5ºC.

Ten years after the commitment, countries were due to update their targets or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). And it was a mess.

Not only did almost all countries (95%) miss the initial February deadline — and the subsequent extended September deadline — but once NDC updates dripped in around the UNFCCC’s annual climate conference (COP30 last November in Belém) the results were, well, utterly disappointing.

If followed through, the updated NDCs would put us on a +2.3ºC trajectory, clearly missing the ambition set out in 2015.

National climate policies have not shone particularly bright last year either. The EU Commission voted in December to exclude around 90% of companies originally in scope of their comprehensive climate disclosure regulation CSRD and simplified (read: watered down, with a complete removal of mandatory climate transition plans) reporting requirements for those remaining in scope when they concluded their Omnibus Simplification Package I.

Yes, I agree, the requirements of the original CSRD were ambitious, but look again at points 1 and 2 above: Maybe ambitious is exactly what is called for right now?

And then we’ve got the US, second largest fossil CO2 emitter behind China. The administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in early 2025 was not a surprise. But the systematic dismantling of their own (climate) scientific institutions throughout 2025, exiting the UNFCCC and IPCC in early 2026, and in February 2026 even repealing the legal foundation that links GHG emissions to negative effects on human health (the EPA’s endangerment finding), that’s an impressive list of actions testament to a level of climate backtracking not many have seen coming.

Implication: Policy is unlikely to come to the rescue (in time)

Insufficient NDCs, rollback of national policies, and a US retreat from (bordering on active sabotage of) the (inter-)national climate stage leaves the planet exposed to a continuation of worsening conditions and misaligned incentives.

Those actors committed to change will increasingly lack access to crucial information and data when companies don’t disclose and/or scientific institutions stop providing critical climate data.

Reasons for an unwavering faith

Alright, let’s take a quick breath.

The health and resilience of our planet is undoubtedly in rapid decline and our current policy measures pale in comparison with the scale of the challenge. So much for the brutal facts.

And yet…

1 — We are making progress

Policy is slow. Global governance mechanisms are even slower. While the parties of the Paris Agreement are often criticized for not having made enough progress since 2015, that is actually not quite true. In 2015, we were on track to >3ºC warming by the end of the century. Now, under current NDCS, we’re at least looking at about 2.3ºC.

While this temperature increase, if realized, will still have disastrous effects on our lives, economies, and the planet as a whole, every percent of a degree matters.

We’re moving in the right direction. While winning slowly is the same as losing, when it comes to climate (hat tip to Outrage and Optimism), these numbers show that it’s absolutely possible to change our temperature trajectory.

What’s needed now is more ambition and pragmatism to further and rapidly bend the emissions curve through decisive action.

Policy is inherently reactive, seldomly proactive.

But we can raise political ambition through community action. Ground up. Because…

2 — The solutions exist and are increasingly attractive

Economic shifts and declining cost curves naturally push the market more and more towards clean energy — much more efficient than rules could have done alone.

In the EU, wind and solar power overtook fossil fuels for the first time in 2025, generating 30% of electricity compared to 29% from fossil fuels.

Related, and often hidden in aggregated figures: The pace of growth of total CO2 emissions (fossil plus land-use change emissions) has slowed in the past decade (0.3% per year), compared to the previous decade (1.9% per year).

Importantly, these developments did not come at the expense of our economies or businesses: More and more countries and companies show signs of decoupling — They continue to grow their economies or businesses while plateauing or even reducing their emissions.

3 — Siloes are breaking down

Despite the political setbacks of 2025, there’s undeniable momentum building, ground-up.

And here I am not referring to isolated cases of do-gooders and philanthropists. Business leaders increasingly recognize that it’s simply good business.

For any organizational decision maker with a reasonably long horizon over which they want to secure and increase their shareholder value, there’s a clear ROI case to be made for sustainability.

While the politicalization of the word has made it an unlikely candidate for word of the year anytime soon, its core meaning rings more true than ever:

The ability to sustain your business in the future.

If I was an investor, an employee, a stakeholder of any kind, I would certainly want the organization I’m involved with to show this ability. More so, I would not only want to see it sustain its business, but to thrive in the future.

Supply chain disruptions are already here. The physical risks of a changing climate started to manifest in increasing cost at best, wiped out harvests and shattered existences for those less fortunate.

Stakeholders critical for a business’s success, from those giving the money to those doing the work, demand to see a sound corporate strategy that is apt to respond to these challenges.

And so the flow of capital, labor, and opportunities is being redirected towards businesses that can not only survive but thrive in light of a changing environment.

Bottom line

So what then stands below the line we can draw underneath all of the above?

Two types of change.

The first type of change is inevitable: The climate will keep changing. Faster than before. More unpredictable than before. With greater consequences than before.

The other type of change is up to us: The opportunity to create a thriving future for us, our economies, and the planet.

This path is still completely open to us. We can choose to take it. We’ve got the blueprints and we have the means to execute. Not you or I alone, no, that’s true.

But community action can create the conditions for human, economic, and planetary wellbeing.

Continue with…

Copernican shifts

Deep dives

Practical

There’s a certain beauty in simplicity. A simple system that simply works. And if anything breaks, the problem is quickly identified. The cause-and-effect relationship is obvious. Think bicycle: If it stops working, you check for a popped tire or a broken chain; there are only a few things it could be.

Complex systems, on the other hand, easily elicit a feeling of overwhelm. They are composed of various elements that all somehow interact with each other. From your bean-to-cup coffee machine to your phone, organization, public transport, or your immune system — complex systems are all around us and our lives would be unimaginable without them.

Admittedly, there’s beauty to be found in complex systems, too. How the separate parts work together to create something bigger than any individual element would be capable of on its own.

That is, for as long as the system works as intended. If it stops, we’re left staring cluelessly at a bunch of wires and tubes inside our coffee maker, the black screens of our devices, or the dire projections for the once thriving business.

Complex systems require experts

Luckily, there are experts who understand those systems better than we do. Those are the heroes who can save the morning coffee, help our organizations and bodies to recover, and get trains back on schedule (or let’s say back to normal).

And so we happily accept complex systems whose cause-and-effect relationship we don’t fully grasp, knowing that there’s always an expert somewhere who understands and, if needed, fixes them so that we can carry on with our morning coffees, daily commutes, and lives at large.

Complex systems interact

Let’s make things, well, a little more complex. Complex systems often interact with other complex systems. For example, sudden, heavy snowfall (weather as complex system A) impacts public transport (complex system B). Likely, this further impacts local businesses and schools (complex systems C, D), as people struggle to get to where they are supposed to be on time.

This is still a fairly simple example of complex systems interacting, as they do so in a linear cause-and-effect relationship: Weather impacts transport impacts businesses and schools. So as soon as our public transport experts can adjust to the changing weather conditions, all systems downstream should work just fine again.

What helps further in this example is that all experts can be expected to work towards a common goal: Coping with the weather disruptions and making all systems work again. There are no conflicting interests among experts nor systems as such (assuming no intent on the side of the weather).

But that’s not always the case.

When complex systems collide

Sometimes, different complex systems thrive under different conditions. Different is no problem per se but if those conditions are mutually exclusive, there is a problem indeed. Think, an organization demanding 16-hours work shifts at their assembly lines (→ complex system organization optimizing for productivity and cost), which risks workers’ health and safety (→ complex system workers negatively impacted).

Tellingly, our commonly chosen solution for when two of our complex systems collide is to throw another, third complex system into the mix: The regulatory system.

Experts from the regulatory system have a quite unique ability: They interact with and can set boundary conditions for one or multiple of the colliding complex systems. In our example, experts from the regulatory system could introduce minimum wage and working time directives, creating a mediating layer that protects the interests of the workers system.

This is how our societies and markets have learned to function – through regulatory systems whose experts are equipped with the ability and authority to resolve collisions: The referees at a hockey match calling a penalty, the judge in the courtroom declaring guilt or innocence, the public health authority deciding for a lockdown, and central banks imposing capital requirements and liquidity ratios.

While the solutions imposed by experts from the regulatory system are not always uncontested or effective (think of the debate around content moderation for social media platforms), they have proven remarkably successful in managing our multiple complex systems that interact with each other and, inevitably, collide.

That is until now.

The limits of regulation

Climate change, economic inequality, environmental degradation, food and energy shortages, geopolitical conflicts, political instability, supply chain disruptions, lingering effects of a pandemic — what reads like a things-to-avoid-at-all-costs list is, sadly, our reality as we’re kicking off the new year. Importantly, this is not just a list of individual issues we are grappling with. It is a list of highly complex systems which are interacting — and colliding — with one another.

Going through this list, you can literally draw connections between each of the listed systems in any order you like: climate change exacerbates economic inequality and environmental degradation; inequality incentivizes more resource exploitation and thus worsens environmental degradation; this leads to more food and energy shortages, which are further worsened by climate change and incentivize turning even more of untouched nature into land used for agriculture.

On and on goes the downward spiral. So rather than thinking of the list as a collection of separate issues, they should be understood as a messy web of interconnected and interdependent systems. Colliding systems.

So what about our default solution? There must be some regulatory system and its experts that can come to the rescue.

Well, we kind of tried that.

In fact, not just one system but a bunch of them: Climate change? UNFCCC. Economic inequality? OECD, UNDP, and IMF. Food and energy shortages? WTO and IEA.

Over the past decades, we’ve built up an impressive list of acronyms — new regulatory systems and their experts — each of which is tasked with finding a response to a point of collision between the various complex systems. And to be clear: Equally impressive as the length of that list of regulatory systems are their achievements over the past decades.

The relatively safe and reliable global flow of goods, services, and money, the eradication of smallpox, access to essential services for health, education, and water for over 160 million people, and the 2015 Paris Agreement would not have been possible without the relentless work of the experts behind the OECD, WTO, WHO, UNDP, UNFCCC, and many more. Things would look much worse without these experts. And their work must continue.

It also becomes increasingly obvious that we cannot regulate our way out of this polycrisis. In fact, we seem to be sliding deeper into it with every passing month.

A crisis of our own making

Albert Einstein once supposedly said:

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

This polycrisis was not brought unto us by some external force. We created it. Our expert, siloed thinking created it.

Over time, as we were drifting further and further into complex systems of our own making (economic and financial markets, political systems and global trade, food production and land management systems), things became, well, a little too complex.

The systems we created and thought we controlled by regulations increasingly started to collide with other complex systems beyond our influence – both human actors ignoring regulations (invading neighbors, kidnapping presidents) and natural systems following immutable laws (Earth’s climate system).

While we keep throwing more experts and regulatory systems at these points of collision (that increasing list of acronyms from above), those seem to have reached their limits. Worse, they are now increasingly colliding with each other, or have simply become dysfunctional.

It might be time to rethink.

From experts to boundary crossers

We need experts to help us navigate within complex systems and regulatory systems to help mediate conflicts between complex systems. But a cascade of colliding complex systems, some of which are outside of our influence, requires a new actor in the mix. I call these boundary crossers.

Boundary crossers have the ability to take a step back, to look at a situation holistically, unbiased. They understand the various systems involved reasonably well but do not sit inside them and do not associate with any single one of them.

This position allows them to, well, cross the boundaries between them. And to build bridges. Bridges between experts of different systems. Bridges that create awareness, overcome points of collision, and offer a path forward.

They ask the questions experts don’t: How does optimizing your supply chain affect your access to capital and align with regulations? How can carbon accounting standards shape policy negotiations? How do financial incentives drive supply chain decisions?

Boundary crossers engage in multidisciplinary thinking. They see the chess pieces on both sides of the board. Through this, they can question the default assumptions experts take for granted, probing the status quo.

Boundary crossers alone will not get us out of the polycrisis. But boundary crossers working with experts just might. The former create new, integrated perspectives on how to address issues simultaneously. The latter have the expertise to translate these into actions within their complex systems.

Boundary crossers help us to move from siloes to synergies and empower experts to lead their respective domain out of this polycrisis.

Back to simplicity

A Stoic at heart, I often remind myself to distinguish between the things we can control and those which we cannot — and to focus on the former.

Let’s wind our way back up from the depth of complexity to a fresh breeze of simplicity.

1. We live in a world of complex systems (your smart phone, an organization, society, financial markets, Earth’s climate system).

2. We need experts to help us understand, navigate, and maintain the complex systems we are surrounded by (technicians, market analysts, meteorologists).

3. When complex systems collide (organizations’ profit maximization exploiting human or natural resources) experts of regulatory systems can be a useful mediating layer (imposing laws and regulations).

4. There are, however, complex systems that cannot be governed by this experts-and-regulations approach (as anyone knows who has tried to impose restrictions on when a baby cries or the sun sets).

5. A polycrisis is a series of collisions between interconnected, complex systems, some of which are outside of experts’ control. More experts and regulations are not able to resolve a polycrisis.

6. Our ability to respond effectively to the current polycrisis with an integrated mindset is hampered by vested interests and intellectual lock-ins — the experts and regulations approach — keeping decision makers attached to dysfunctional regimes.

7. To break out of these lock-ins, we need multidisciplinary thinking. We need boundary crossers who inform our experts to shape and realize integrated responses.

What this means for you

If anything, this exploration into systems thinking in times of a polycrisis should make one thing clear: We need to think and act differently.

Experts – and I would count many of you readers among them – see the operational manifestations of the systemic crises and know where transformation must happen. But their view is also naturally incomplete. It is almost as if they were playing chess and can only see half of the opponents’ pieces on the board. Sure, you can make educated guesses for what a good next move might look like based on your experience and expertise. But you’ll inevitably miss half of the story and will eventually be caught off guard.

Let boundary crossers help you. Help you to understand the lay of the land, to see the complete board with all its pieces. To shed light on your blindspots, to shape your integrated response together.

Bottom line

The bad news: This polycrisis affects all of us.

Whether you walk the Geneva halls of the UN or the floors of an office building in London’s Square Mile. The polycrisis will manifest for each of you differently, but oh manifest it will.

In my previous article, I’ve outlined four specific domains where the polycrisis manifests operationally: how capital flows (finance), how goods and services move (supply chains), how we measure impact (carbon accounting), and how rules shape reality (policy and governance). These aren’t random choices – they’re the critical junctions where colliding complex systems meet organizational decision-making. They’re where boundary crossing matters most.

The good news: All of us can decide to think and act differently.

You can decide to cross boundaries or work with those who do. To inform your next move on the board, without blindspots.

Continue with…

Copernican shifts

Deep dives

Practical

We need more of you now. More of you in numbers, more of your ambition, and more impact. We need your awareness of the challenges, your understanding of their implications, and your courage to face them together—now.

Four fundamental challenges

This is the beginning of a period of unprecedented change — technological, societal, and environmental. The interconnected nature of these results in four fundamental challenges that cut across core parts of every organization and community. They form an interconnected system that no organization can ignore:

1–Finance: Financial markets are undergoing a profound rewiring. The physical reality and limitations of a finite planet with finite resources and a rapidly changing climate force us to rethink current incentive structures. New finance mechanisms and products to redirect capital are required to bring market interests into alignment with our Planetary Boundaries;

2–Supply chains: Behind every financial transaction stands an exchange of a good or service, virtual or digital. The inevitable changes to our financial markets paired with those already occurring in our climate system will put pressure on global supply chains. At the moment though, we’re utterly unprepared. There exist critical bottlenecks to accessing reliable, decision-grade information, stemming from a lack of traceability, interoperability, and accountability in supply chain impact data;

3–Carbon accounting and carbon markets standards: At the heart of the accelerating change to our climate system, which causes both the pressure on financial markets and supply chains, stands one particular kind of impact data: carbon – or rather our greenhouse gas emissions. The fragmentation of standards and methodologies for quantifying carbon impact has created costly inefficiencies and continues to delay our most important work: rapidly minimizing new emissions and maximizing ways to bring already released carbon back under ground;

4–Policy and governance: All of the dynamics described above are exacerbated by the failure of global governance and national policy to create clarity around the necessity to “turn off the tab” first, i.e., phase out fossil fuels. We will need to bridge the gap between the negotiations of policymakers and intergovernmental organizations and the reality of markets and businesses. Only with an enabling policy and standards environment, informed by private sector reality and backed by effective global governance, can financial markets be properly rewired and will businesses have the necessary information and means to lead the global decarbonization through their supply chains and investment decisions.

Those of you who are aware of, understand, and prepare for these four fundamental challenges will be in a position to take ownership and proactively shape their future trajectory. Those who fail to do so will find themselves fully exposed to the currents of a rapidly changing physical, financial, and trade environment.

These challenges are your challenges

From this brief overview two core characteristics of the four fundamental challenges become obvious:

1. They are inherently interconnected: you cannot treat one of these challenges in isolation but have to understand and address them holistically;

2. They are cutting across geographies, nations, sectors, businesses, and disciplines: no single organization can isolate itself from these or face them alone.

That’s why these four challenges are your challenges. Whether you have so far been unaware of them or are already experiencing the first ripple effects – The decisions and actions that you take today will have a profound impact on the future trajectory of your organization, communities, and lives at large.

What’s needed to respond to these challenges is a cross-cutting understanding of how all four interact with each other and an interconnected approach to address their implications for your organization. What’s needed is an integrated response.

An integrated response lens

Integrated responses are well-established in the context of international crises management and have been used by the UN since the early 1970s to respond to, for example, humanitarian emergencies or public health crises. They led to the formation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and crucially informed the strategies and international agreements resulting from the Earth Summit in 1992.

An integrated response recognizes that interconnected challenges cannot be solved in isolation but only by involving multiple stakeholders, organizational functions, and disciplines. Rather than working in siloes, an integrated response aims to address the various, specific impacts of the issue holistically and collaboratively.

In light of the breadth and depth of the four fundamental challenges, I believe that the approach of an integrated response is exactly what’s needed on an organizational level now to face, overcome, and eventually thrive amidst the rapid change.

Integrated responses succeed where conventional approaches fail

Integrated responses are decisively different from the way that organizations conventionally attempt to overcome large-scale, interconnected challenges. I have seen many such attempts falter before they could reach their full potential for one of two reasons:

1. The proposed response appeared too difficult to be realized though everyone agreed that the aspired outcome would be worthwhile;

2. The chosen response was reinventing the wheel instead of pushing the cart faster and further together.

In both cases, the responses were based on and assessed through a much too narrow lens. Siloed thinking in problem solving leads to perceived limitations — either “it cannot be done with what we have here now” or “only we have the answer and we have to do this alone”.

With an integrated response, you can avoid both of these two traps. For them to be successful though, you will need not only outside-of-the-box thinking but acting as well.

How to find your integrated response

The complexity and scale of the four fundamental challenges can easily feel overwhelming, which, ironically, oftentimes leads to inertia and inaction. You will need a diverse set of stakeholders to come together, you will need the right people from the right disciplines to engage, to be inspired, to help you inform, shape, and realize your initiative.

Crucially, you will need a cross-cutting advisor, someone in the middle, with subject-matter expertise yet thorough, holistic understanding of how everything connects. Someone to walk the boundaries, to facilitate across teams, organizations, and disciplines.

This is exactly what I am offering to you.

Phase 1: Inform. Finding your integrated response starts with a well-informed assessment of how the four fundamental challenges relate to your organization or project. This is the goal of Phase 1.

• Context. The challenges will show up differently depending on your specific context – where you are, what you do, and how far you are in finding your response. For example, if you are developing solutions to the challenges for other organizations (think software, tools, or transition frameworks), we will focus on very different contextual information than if you were an organization whose business model is dependent on its global, physical supply chain operations. I want to get to know you and your circumstances really well first to then inform your integrated response.

• Awareness. With your context in mind, I can provide you with my context in turn – relevant information from across the wider ecosystem that the four fundamental challenges cut across: How the four fundamental challenges intersect with your project or organization; What related experiences, solutions, or standards you can build on, learn from, or expect to be developed next; Where I see dependencies, blindspots, or unrealized synergies in the cross-cutting ecosystem.

• Understanding. The process of Phase 1 is designed to be a dialogue. As I learn more about your context, we will increasingly raise your ecosystem awareness, challenge your current thinking or solutions, and help you reach a well-informed understanding of your situation, challenges, and choices at hand. This is the foundation on which to build an integrated response and make well-informed decisions about how to proceed.

If you want to continue our work, we will move from informing your integrated response to Phase 2: Shaping it. This means identifying the enabling conditions, stakeholders, and processes for a successful integrated response. With this roadmap in hand, you are ready to proactively respond to the fundamental challenges, taking ownership of the future trajectory of your organization (Phase 3: Realize).

From challenges to solutions

It’s 85 seconds to midnight and we have no time to waste. The good news is, we have everything we need to face and overcome these four fundamental challenges. Even more than that: We actually have everything we need to turn these into opportunities for long-term thriving of our organizations, communities, and planet.

All that’s needed now is you. You are given the mandate to lead. Let me help you to act on it.

Find your integrated response

I’ve recently returned from New York, where the UN General Assembly (UNGA) held its 80th session, this year under a theme emphasizing the urgency of delivering on the Sustainable Development Goals and reinvigorating global cooperation. In a year that has seen some major setbacks in climate policy and action, this felt like a welcome rallying cry — though whether delegates would match the rhetoric with action remained to be seen.

It was thus a much-welcomed surprise to see a parallel event to the UNGA, Climate Week NYC, experiencing its largest installment yet: in over 1,000 events spread across town, business leaders, civil society, policymakers, and academics came together to discuss how they can be (and already are) part of the solution.

I’ve only had the chance to join a handful of these events (the logistics of which already caused headaches) and will leave it to others to compile key takeaways and expert analyses of everything that happened that week. What I do want to offer, though, are a few reflections on and implications of the conversations I’ve witnessed and had myself while in New York, as I left the Big Apple feeling both the building momentum that the UNGA has called for (a few minor distractions aside) and the closing window of opportunity for decisive action.

De-siloing standards and regulations

Let’s start with an encouraging observation: People are increasingly talking and collaborating with each other. Obvious as this might sound when you’re trying to solve a global challenge like climate change, this has not always been the case. I’ve seen too many panel “discussions” during past events in which participants would just deliver their pre-scripted speeches, one after the other, and that was it. They were not really talking with each other as much as at each other.

I’d argue that this lack of open discussions is part of the reason why we are currently dealing with an (impressively large) patchwork of misaligned standards, frameworks, guidelines, playbooks, regulations, and paywalled databases. The absence of honest conversations in which challenges are proactively shared and addressed in search of collaborative win-win outcomes has become a real barrier to progress. It has led to organizations spending an outrageous amount of time and resources to figure out which guidelines to follow and how to comply with which framework, ultimately sacrificing real action for “getting ready” and ticking disclosure boxes.

Luckily, New York has shown that this is set to change. Not only were there a much higher number of smaller, intimate roundtables, in which organizations spoke openly about challenges, shared best practices, and forged new alliances, but there were also some of the biggest standard setters coming together to discuss and share their plans for providing more clarity and alignment between their work in the future.

The long and winding road of policies and standards

While the week has shown promise for standards and regulation to become clearer, more aligned, and transparent for businesses, this will be a long and winding road.

Long, as these processes can take years to conclude, which is to a large extent inevitable to ensure proper due diligence and holistic stakeholder alignment. But a multi-year horizon for “the one standard that rules them all” does not promote much-needed action now.

Winding, because we have already seen many turns and even steps back taken on the journey. Besides the impressive retreat of the US from the global climate stage, the EU, historically the poster child for climate policy, has started to roll back, delay, and/or water down some of its landmark regulatory frameworks such as its (previously far-reaching) corporate sustainability disclosure (CSRD), deforestation (EUDR), and supply chain (CSDDD) regulations.

I strongly believe that policies and standards will get there, eventually. But as I’ve recently heard in a highly recommended podcast, winning slowly is the same as losing when it comes to climate.

So what then shall we do in the meantime?

Ground up: the best we can, where we are, with what we have

Action and implementation can’t wait. We can’t wait for the perfect policies to be in place that properly incentivize and regulate individuals’ behaviors and businesses’ actions. We can’t wait for the perfect set of aligned standards to effectively guide businesses and inform consumers. And we can’t wait for a perfectly transparent and accurate data infrastructure that allows for the trusted sharing of impact data across supply chains and products.

Don’t get me wrong — we do need to work on all of the above. But we don’t need them all to be in place in order to take action and make progress today. We need to start now. And we can. Where we are, with what we have. As a business and as an individual. We can all step up to fill the leadership void in our community, sector, or jurisdiction and do something today.

So what could that look like in practice?

1 — Don’t burden yourself with perfection

The first piece of advice I’d give is to start with imperfection. I’ve seen too many people and businesses giving up before even getting started just because they realized they won’t get everything perfectly right — so why even bother trying?

There’s so much dormant potential for every one of us to make a small difference in our lives and organizations, which, summed up, would have a huge impact. The decision to vote for your local green party, to advocate for internal sustainability policies in your organization, or daily decisions such as cutting down on single-use plastics, reducing your beef consumption, or taking more public transport. Small actions, yes, but in aggregate they do matter.

Importantly: they don’t have to be perfect. You do not have to go fully vegan and march in the streets to have an impact. You do not have to get your corporate greenhouse gas inventory perfectly right down to the level of product-level EPDs before starting to take informed action. These things are not at all required of you to make a difference. It is not an all-in or do nothing decision. Put pragmatism over perfection. What’s the one thing you could do today that will have a small impact? Just take it one action at a time.

2 — Give up busywork, focus on results

This is especially true within businesses. I’ve seen this again and again. People are being swamped with work in understaffed sustainability departments to the degree that they are “too busy” for the things that actually produce results.

There’s no judgement here in this statement. I’ve got a lot of empathy for all of you (sustainability professionals) who are feeling snowed under by CDP questionnaires, CSRD data sheets, or supplier surveys. This is also not to say that those tasks count as meaningless busywork per se. Often they are an inevitable part of your job. But they cannot take away your ability to zoom out and think about impact over to-do lists.

Even the most tedious disclosure exercises can hold opportunities to drive meaningful outcomes. For example, disclosing your data via CDP or going through CSRD’s double materiality assessment can be extremely helpful tools to get a holistic view of your organization’s risk exposure, to identify gaps in your sustainability strategy, and to disclose crucial information to investors and other stakeholders.

Just don’t fall into the trap of merely jumping through the compliance and disclosure hoops to then forget about the whole topic for the next 12 months — that would indeed be pointless busywork.

3 — Please don’t reinvent the wheel, again

Your situation is unlikely to be unique. There is so much good material out there to guide individuals and organizations on their paths to making a positive difference that it pains me to see when people get stuck in inaction not knowing where to start, or organizations pouring precious resources into ineffective programs and come up with tailor-made solutions characterized by siloed thinking and disconnected actions.

The wealth of information and material out there might actually be one of the biggest challenges and highlights the aforementioned need for more convergence and standardization to remove the confusion. And yet we cannot wait for this process to conclude. Instead, focus on the basics, the obvious and well-tested steps others have already taken before you.

To break it down for an organization, this could mean:

1. Start with the fundamental principles of greenhouse gas accounting and target setting as laid out by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and Science Based Targets initiative, respectively;

2. Plan your transition leaning on guidance offered by the Transition Plan Taskforce or the Exponential Roadmap initiative;

3. Find proven solutions as collated by Project Drawdown, WBCSD’s Climate Drive, or in the recently launched Granary of Solutions;

4. Disclose progress through CDP and assess and report financial risks via ISSB/TCFD frameworks;

5. Join collective action initiatives like the UN Race to Zero or sector-specific commitments like RE100.

Bottom line: Digging the tunnel from both ends

In a previous article, I’ve outlined three layers of change that I believe need to come together in order to address the rapid environmental decline and its implications for human, economic, and planetary wellbeing: We need (i) ground-up action from individuals and businesses, (ii) net-zero policy at national and international levels, and (iii) effective global governance for the environment. New York provided a brilliant opportunity to take stock of where we are in this endeavor. It left me feeling hopeful that there is movement across all three of these, while recognizing that there’s much more work ahead of us.

We need to work on further convergence in standards and policy to create clarity and a solid foundation for well-coordinated action. At the same time, we need to take decisive, bold action now with the imperfect information and coordination mechanisms available to us. What’s needed is a both-and approach: We need both the bottom-up work and leadership by businesses and individuals that create results today and the top-down work on policies, standards alignment, and effective governance that will pay off tomorrow. In a sense, we need to dig the tunnel from both ends. And as is clear to anyone who has attempted to do so with their kids (or tunnel-digging partner in crime) at the beach or in the sandbox, this requires teamwork, coordination, and patience. Miss one of these, and you’ll end up with two separate holes—isolated silos instead of a connected path.

But get it right, and those siloes become synergies: two efforts meeting in the middle to create something neither could achieve alone. That’s the journey ahead of us.

Continue with…

Copernican shifts

Deep dives

Practical

When I’ve made the conscious choice to devote my time and energy to improving planetary and human wellbeing, I was well aware that feeling overwhelmed from time to time would come along for the ride. There’s a lot that needs to happen to create a truly sustainable future. One in which our economies flourish not at the expense of but in harmony with thriving nature and ecosystems. With no shortage of opportunities that one can pour one’s energy into to get us closer to such a future, I often find myself oscillating between a state of excitement over the variety of promising projects and one of paralysis caused by the towering mountains that will have to be moved.

Have you ever heard the phrase “don’t be a donkey”? I believe I first came across it when reading Derek Sivers. The parable of the donkey, who is standing equidistant from a stack of hay and a bucket full of water but collapses from both hunger and thirst as it can’t decide whether to drink or to eat first, hit home for me in several ways. Firstly, it reminded me of the importance of being decisive. Often, making a decision and shifting into action is more important than making the “right” choice — especially with rather easily reversible decisions. Secondly, just as the donkey could have had both the hay and the water, I realized that many choices I encounter are not necessarily either or decisions, but offer a both and option.

I was reminded of this parable as I came to what felt like a crossroads in my life. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been working with businesses on their net-zero journeys in my full-time position at a carbon accounting provider. Through various partnerships, and my tendency to blur the lines drawn by any conventional job description, I also found myself collaborating closely with academia and non-profit initiatives to shape standards and policies, as well as participating in all kinds of sustainability events, from procurement conferences and finance gatherings to the annual UNFCCC COPs. It became increasingly apparent to me that there was so much to be done in this space, in all of these projects and collaborations — and I suddenly felt a little bit like that donkey.

On the one hand, I felt that thirst for ground-up action, to work on emissions reductions now, helping individuals, businesses, and society at large to make tangible progress against their targets and towards a sustainable future for us all. At the same time, I felt an intense hunger to foster the much needed alignment of net-zero policies, to unlock more synergies in the non-profit sector, and to recalibrate economic incentive structures and governance mechanisms.

So there I was, looking to my left and then my right, not knowing which way to turn. Luckily, I recalled the parable of the donkey just in time before collapsing. This was not an either or decision that I was facing. There was a both and solution.

The rapid environmental decline, with all its negative implications for human, economic, and planetary wellbeing, requires a truly holistic response. Such a response has to include both the hands-on work on the ground with businesses and individuals and at the same time a relentless dedication to reshaping economic incentives and political environments to create the supporting conditions for a successful, rapid transition. And while things are happening in each of these areas, I noticed again and again a lack of coordination and collaboration that leaves so much potential for progress unrealized and risks creating silos instead.

Put differently, I realized that the best way for me to maximize my impact and contribution would, in a sense, mean to both quench my thirst and still my hunger. And that I’d better get moving now.

So I decided to leave my full-time position in order to fully commit to unlocking synergies across the following three layers:

1. Ground up
   We need to take even more decisive action on the individual and corporate level to create the sustainable future we all say we want. Both our daily choices and decisions made by businesses have a huge impact on the trajectory of our global climate and wellbeing at large. While there exist some inspiring case studies of individuals and businesses taking action, there's a lot of work to be done to make the sustainable choice the default choice. This includes creating the basic conditions for trust and transparency around environmental impact data of the products we buy and raw materials we import, but also a certain cultural and behavioral shift, realizing we can’t divorce human from planetary wellbeing.

2. Net-zero policy
   At the same time, we cannot escape the fundamental prisoner's dilemma we are currently in without clear, fair, and aligned ground rules that provide the required incentive structure for a net-zero economy. This is where net-zero policy and standards alignment play a crucial role. For these to be successful, we need to bridge the gap between what we know from a scientific and research point of view, the current policies and policymaking processes, and the reality businesses face.

3. Global governance
   The third layer that needs to be addressed is concerned with global coordination and governance. Through my participation in several UNFCCC COPs, I realized that our current governance processes for the environment are not fit for purpose. One could argue that, at its core, the environmental crisis is a crisis of global environmental governance. While change on this layer is likely to progress the slowest, I believe that effective global governance mechanisms are a requirement for sustaining the progress made on the other layers in the long term.

As I’m embarking on this new chapter of my life, I will be diving deeper into each of these three layers in subsequent articles. I will share case studies of organizations and initiatives working on change in their respective layers and illustrate how I’m involved in and working with a portfolio of projects and organizations, helping them to become aware of unrealized potential, to set the intention to act decisively, and to realize their full potential through coordinated execution.

The complexity and urgency of the current state of our climate, fueled by a heightened sense of geopolitical uncertainty, risks inducing a kind of collective inertia, where in light of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles nobody is taking any meaningful action at all. Let me propose a way to break out of this inertia and to get moving together. Let me take you with me on my journey, from hay to water so to speak, and hopefully inspire more collaborative action along the way.

Continue with…

Copernican shifts

Deep dives

Practical

A few weeks ago, I was asked to contribute an opening keynote on “the state of our climate” - a review of some key developments in climate, policy, and the economy with an outlook on what lies ahead. I’d love to, I responded immediately. With much going on in the space and us approaching a pivotal period for global climate targets (and action), I felt this was the perfect moment to put together a keynote on the topic. There was only one catch, as I’ve found out after my enthusiastic response was already uttered. The talk should also be uplifting and inspiring, as it set the scene for the two-day event that followed the keynote.

If you have followed recent developments around our global climate, the state of and outlook for climate policy, and implications for the economy, uplifting and inspiring may not be the first terms that come to mind. But I love a good challenge and think I’ve found a way to bridge what initially seemed like an insurmountable gap between the talk’s content and desired emotional response. So here is my take on a brief, honest, and inspiring (?) stocktake of our climate.

Our current climate

Let’s rip off the bandaid first: 2024 was the hottest year on record, yet again, and the first year to have breached the infamous 1.5°C limit in increase of the global average surface temperature. This number — 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels — is such a crucial one, as it’s been established by leading climate scientists as the boundary for the Earth’s safe zone. If the increase in mean global surface temperatures was to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, we risked triggering irreversible climate tipping points. These tipping points, such as permanent ice sheet loss at the poles, are estimated to cause a whole ripple effect across Earth’s systems, resulting in runaway global warming. In light of the potential severity of these consequences, 196 country leaders came together in 2015 and jointly committed to limit global warming to well below 2°C, ideally to not more than 1.5°C, which was captured in the so-called Paris Agreement.

But wait a second — if we’ve now observed an average of 1.5°C temperature increase in 2024, doesn’t that mean we’ve tipped over the edge already? Well, not quite yet. One year of mean surface temperatures exceeding the 1.5°C limit does not mean we’ve permanently and irreversibly left Earth’s safe zone. The limit would only be considered breached if this average was observed over a longer time horizon of about ten years. Now, the climate is complex and several factors seem to have contributed to the record temperatures of 2024. While predictions for 2025 show a slight cooling off again, the overall temperature and emissions trends of the past decades all point in the same direction. The alarm bells are ringing loudly and decisive action is needed now if we want to stand a chance to reach the goal set out in the Paris Agreement.

In light of this, one would expect that the country leaders who have signed Paris are now all working feverishly on a plan to turn this ship around and to avoid the worst-case climate scenarios. Unfortunately, this is not quite what we observe. The political outcomes of last year’s UN Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Baku were described by some as “too little, too late”, referring to the agreement reached on finance and, even more disappointingly, the absence of further explicit language around the necessity to phase out fossil fuels. To many experts in the field, this COP was the last nail in the coffin to declare the UN COP process as broken, inadequate to address the imminent challenges of a rapidly warming planet.

At this point, one might turn to the private sector in search for leadership. After all, it’s not countries per se that can decarbonize, but the businesses in their jurisdictions. With the ever-increasing cost of a changing climate and a projected GDP decline of 18% by 2050 globally, there are clear incentives for the private sector to lead the charge. The data on businesses’ climate actions are, however, disappointing. Only about 10% of corporates show tangible action and only 1% perform at the highest assessment level. In the meantime, the Planet is sending its invoices with devastating consequences such as the recent fires around LA in the US state of California.

Where we are heading

Together, this paints a rather dire picture of our current situation — and the projections for the coming years do not offer much to instill optimism either. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we are firmly on track of consistently exceeding 1.5°C in the coming years if we fail to start to rapidly reduce emissions.

This gives this year’s UN COP30, to be held in Belém, Brazil, in November, even more importance. Ahead of the conference, countries are asked to submit their updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). All of the developments described above urgently call for ambitious new targets that go beyond vague commitments but show real leadership, underpinned by decisive action. And just in this critical moment, in which we need more global coordination and collective action, one of the largest CO2 emitters globally, the US, has announced to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, again. Maybe even more destructive than the signal this decision might send to other nations to lower their own ambitions is the collapse of private-sector commitments we’ve seen already leading up to the change in the US administration. Especially the financial sector has seen a real shakeup when the Net-Zero Asset Managers initiative suspended its activities after major US financial institutions withdrew their support, and the Federal Reserve announced its exit from the global Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS).

What to do about it

So where does all of this leave us then at the beginning of 2025 — with only five years left to half global emissions and thus keep the 1.5°C target in focus? And where’s that uplifting, inspiring part of the stocktake that I promised you?

Well, I could now of course attempt to tout optimism, in a we can do this spirit, trying to instill an anything is possible if we believe in it mindset. But that wouldn’t be quite convincing, I’m afraid, nor very helpful. Instead, I suggest embracing the Stockdale paradox: we have to face the brutal facts and at the same time keep the unwavering conviction that we will solve this crisis. So what does that look like in practice then? Well, as for the brutal facts, they could be summarized as follows:

1. We are heading towards global warming of >2°C with potential disastrous effects on planetary, human, and economic wellbeing.

2. Existing mechanisms of global (environmental) policy coordination are failing.

3. Decisive climate action from the private sector is stalling.

Now on to the unwavering conviction. To me, this comes from three key insights.

1 - The window of opportunity it still open

Despite the alarming state of our current climate, it is still entirely within our power to avert the most dangerous climate tipping points. This, of course, demands drastic transformations across all sectors of the global economy. Crucially, it requires a holistic approach. While I’ve focused mostly on global mean temperatures and the closely related topic of greenhouse gas emissions above, the Planetary Boundaries framework and related first Planetary Health Check from 2024 clearly show that in order to bring the climate change process — one of the nine Planetary Boundaries — back into its safe zone, we also need to address, among others, the integrity of our biosphere and the land-use changes we cause through agriculture and deforestation. But we know how this can be done. We know what such a holistic approach can look like. There exist numerous playbooks and blueprints that offer guidance — be it for businesses or the entire economic system.

2 - Regulation is catching up

Secondly, regulatory pressure on the private sector, especially in Europe, is mounting. Climate disclosure regulation in the UK and the EU are leading globally. With recent additions such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), and future legislation such as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D), essentially every business making business in the EU will soon have to disclose environmental impact data across their supply chains. Encouragingly, the EU greenhouse gas emissions are already showing a downward trend, having decreased by 31% between 1990 and 2022. Globally, we already see 93% of companies reporting at least their scope 1 and 2 emissions, i.e., emissions from their direct operations and purchased energy. While this has to further expand to include a company’s scope 3 — referring to emissions originating from across the supply chain, which can account for more than 90% of an organization’s overall emissions — regulations such as the ones mentioned above will play a critical role in getting us there.

3 - Sustainability is a business driver

Lastly, businesses increasingly realize that sustainability is not just a PR gimmick or nice-to-have. Quite the opposite: sustainability is literally the ability of a business to sustain itself in the future. Any organization that is seriously concerned with its long-term thriving has an intrinsic motivation to make sustainability a core part of their business strategy. As one key driver for business resilience and success, we see more and more businesses joining ranks and embracing sustainable business practices — both to gain competitive advantages but also in pre-competitive collaborations. For example, the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders — a CEO-led community committed to net-zero emissions, representing a combined USD 4 trillion in revenue — reported a collective reduction in emissions of about 10% from 2019 to 2022 while growing their revenues by 18%.

A way forward

So there you go. This is the messy reality we’re finding ourselves in at the beginning of 2025. The state of our global climate is more fragile than it ever was over the past 10,000 years when we entered the Holocene. Human activities brought us to this point at which we are ironically threatening our very own existence. But this also means that it’s entirely up to us to revert this trend. And here’s now where I do find myself instilling a we can do this spirit, I guess, after all.

Yes, the brutal facts cited above are, well, brutal. But they should not discourage us. Quite the opposite. They need to wake us up. Wake us up to the reality of what’s happening and what will happen if we don’t take decisive, collective action now. I will dive further into what I believe a course action can look like in future Deep dives, but let me close by emphasizing that it’s entirely within our own hands to turn this ship around. And while the magnitude of the task at hand can feel daunting, it’s a task we need to tackle head on. Facing the brutal facts and keeping the unwavering conviction that we will overcome this crisis.