Changing the story in the age of disruption
10 November 2025 - In today’s era of profound disruption, the strategic landscape for sustainability has shifted irreversibly and businesses face unprecedented complexity and risk. In this blog, Phil Hazell discusses why sustainability must be woven into core business strategy, with leadership embracing disruptive innovation and radical collaboration across supply chains.
The landscape of strategic risk and opportunity in relation to sustainability has changed, profoundly and forever.
In 2025 the geopolitical landscape is characterised by growing volatility: conflict in the Middle East, changes in global power dynamics, and policy uncertainty, presents an unprecedented degree of complexity and risk for business, much of which is interconnected.
Cyber attacks, natural disasters, and biodiversity loss are creating sudden and wholesale disruption with cascade impacts through the tiers of increasingly long and global supply chains.
An increase in both regulatory requirements and transparency, driven in the EU by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), and a move away from voluntary towards mandatory reporting requirements, represent an increased compliance burden on organisations, with deepening regulatory and consumer expectations of transparency and accountability.
As our CEO Lindsay Hooper and Fellow Paul Gilding outline in CISL’s recent report, Competing in the Age of Disruption, these changes are systemic, global, and accelerating. They add up to a fundamental shift in the landscape, which means the question Boards and executive teams must ask has changed from ‘how can we do less harm?’ to ‘how can we create sustainable value, throughout our value chain and industry, in a fundamentally changed world?’.
Yet despite this new reality, many businesses are still focusing sustainability activity on their internal operations, approaching it as a peripheral issue, and prioritising reporting over action.
This is not the approach which is needed in the age of disruption. It’s time to change the story.
Rather than treating sustainability as a compliance burden, business must seize the opportunity to shape the financial and consumer markets they operate within. This includes engaging in policy advocacy, focused on the issues most material to their business, with others, anticipating future regulation and legislation.
Disruptive innovation is core to this approach: interconnected risk implies interconnected opportunity, with the Business and Sustainable Development Commission (BSDC) estimating that incorporating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) could open up $12tn / year of economic opportunity by 2030.
This means the work is no longer the preserve of often small and overstretched sustainability teams. Sustainable value creation is everybody’s business.
But it is equally, if not more, important to continually lift the gaze beyond the organisational boundary.
Effective action necessitates new kinds of partnership: radical collaboration both up- and downstream through the supply chain, including mutual learning with suppliers, pre-competitive collaboration with peers, and shaping consumer demand.
At CISL, I have the privilege of working with leaders who are grappling with these challenges head-on, in a huge variety of operating contexts and industries. What I am often struck by is that those who are most effective in driving and accelerating transition, weave sustainability seamlessly into business strategy and everyday decision-making. They demonstrate leadership individually and collectively within their organisation, as well as humbly and intentionally assuming an industry- and sector-leading position beyond it. My experience working with these businesses is that it is those who have fully understood this who will thrive: they will not only win competitively, they will shape the markets and systems of the future.
They are deeply internalising the reality of systemic disruption, embedding sustainability risk and opportunity at the heart of business strategy. This involves re-imagining their products and services, business models, and value chains, in response to the need for a just, regenerative and nature-positive economy. Rather than waiting for regulation to catch up, they actively seek to shape the rules of the game in tomorrow’s markets.
- They deeply understand the specifics of their heritage, brand, and organisational culture, and use these to identify unique, purposeful and congruent opportunities for leadership.
- They continually raise the gaze beyond their own business operations, considering their impacts and opportunities throughout the value chain and out into wider society.
- They have the courage to say, in the words of one of our recent clients, ‘if there are businesses which can do this, we are one’.
This is why, for CISL, building business leadership means empowering companies to lead market transformation through strategy, advocacy, collaboration, and innovation.
In empowering their teams, they can assume a leadership position within their industry and sector, build competitive advantage and resilience, and shape the markets and systems of the future.
Phil will be speaking on the topic of creating an environment for collective action in a live webinar on 26 February 2026. You can sign up here.