4 March 2026 - In this blog, we explore the challenges facing business leaders today and how these are reflected in the Business & Sustainability Programme (BSP) – CISL’s flagship executive programme – designed for leaders who need to make hard choices that carry long-term consequences – across geopolitics, technology disruption and systemic climate and nature risks while keeping commercial performance on track.
Businesses, and those who lead them, are between a rock and a hard place. Tariffs, tech disruption and political turbulence are driving an ever-sharper focus on short-term survival. Yet leaders can increasingly see the growing, potentially existential, risks of kicking the can down the road on climate, nature, and societies disrupted by new technology, as well as growing economic inequality. Awareness of these risks has never been higher. The capacity to act on them has rarely felt lower.
For leaders who are concerned about the future (and frankly, anyone who is paying attention must be concerned), the challenge is how to be effective in driving positive change in such a disrupted and challenging context, when the story hasn’t played out as many anticipated. As Helena Norrman, EVP at SSAB, a Swedish company making a major long-term investment in green steel, put it recently: 'This is not a situation for the faint-hearted. It would be a lot easier to stop and say this is not working, but we don't have that option. You need to stay the course, and that takes guts.' Pulling back to focus only on the next quarter won't transform anything. But ignoring the moment is not an option – leaders also need to keep delivering results now, because that is what creates the capital and market confidence to invest in the future. As Helena put it, the old leadership paradox of managing both the short and long term still stands – you don't get to choose. What you can't afford to do is become paralysed by the uncertainty. You don't know how it plays out. You still have to move forward.
How do we, practically, break out of this impasse and build a commercially viable pathway to a more resilient future?
Relative to the froth and hype of the ESG bubble era, there is now a pretty good understanding of a few fundamentals: what is at stake is not just reputation but commercial survival; while accurate data and disclosures are important, we won’t tick-box our way through a necessary clean industrial revolution; no business can future-proof themselves in a world in chaos – market wide change is in their own interest; many of the underlying tech solutions to carbon constraints and resource scarcity already exist and need commercialising and developing – but to unlock this the challenge is one of scaling in markets that favour dirty incumbents and damaging activities; and we can't phase out what is harmful until we have built something better. So, the focus must be on building better solutions, quickly and at scale.
The BSP explores three routes through which leaders are making this happen: disruptive innovation to build and deploy solutions that meet societies’ needs in smarter ways; market making and aligning incentives to create the conditions in which those solutions can scale; and political influence to build the enabling environment that no single business can create alone. Across these routes, the programme draws on Cambridge insight and practitioner experience to help leaders navigate the intersecting forces shaping strategy now: geopolitical volatility, the “tech reckoning” around AI and digital power, and growing polarisation, populism and social instability in many Western economies.
Disruptive innovation
Cambridge knows something about this. From the discovery of DNA's structure to the development of the jet engine, the University has a long track record of ideas that looked unlikely until they reshaped the world. Alongside inspiration from some of the most promising AI-enabled energy, materials, and social innovations, the programme benefits from the experience of leaders working at the frontier, who share hard-won lessons about what it actually takes to deploy innovations at scale.
As Katie Fergusson, SVP of Development at Anglo American, shared with us recently, this starts with being grounded in genuine business logic from the start. Fergusson points to a nickel operation in Brazil, where waste slag is being repurposed into fertiliser inputs that improves yields, while attracting downstream buyers for durable carbon removals, creating a circular model with a credible route to revenue, not just impact. She also highlighted the need to recognise that innovation and implementation are entirely different challenges: you can have fantastic innovations that teams are excited about, then find it hard to integrate them into existing industrial systems. You need people who really understand the operating context – passionate, tenacious champions on the ground who will problem-solve until it is done.
The most important lesson from leaders working at the frontier is this: you cannot innovate your way out of a broken market. Building better solutions is necessary, but the conditions under which those solutions can reach scale have to be built, too.
Market-shaping across sectors and value chains
This involves building the demand signals, risk-sharing mechanisms and practical alignments that turn a good solution into a bankable, scalable proposition. From scaling green building retrofit to food system innovation, to decarbonising heavy industry, progress rarely comes from one firm acting (and carrying the cost and risk) alone – but from suppliers, customers, technology providers and energy systems moving in step, aligning ambitions, incentives and capabilities.
Through the programme, we share proven examples and live projects. In the UK, building retrofit, banks and insurers are starting to change the rules that shape household decisions, for example, by supporting “build back better” when properties are repaired after flooding and by working towards clearer standards that make improvements easier to finance and insure. In Bristol, City Leap has taken many small decarbonisation projects and packaged them into a long-term programme with a delivery partner, giving investors and suppliers confidence that there is a stable pipeline rather than sporadic work.
Even when businesses and value chains move together, the hardest barriers can still sit outside any one organisation or even a sector’s control. Permitting, infrastructure, standards, and public confidence can stall progress, even where the commercial logic is sound.
Policy and social influence
How do we build the conditions in which investment becomes – and stays – possible? Through the BSP, we support leaders to crystallise what has to be true to create the conditions in which their firms can confidently invest in the future, and then to be laser-focused on designing the actions and alliances that make it achievable. The BSP brings this to life with current examples of how business can create political space – by making the case for actions that strengthen competitiveness and resilience, while showing how costs and benefits will be shared. CISL’s Restoring Human Progress report is blunt that durable action depends on public confidence and consent, which requires a credible story of improvement in daily life and visible progress people can believe in. We saw this logic applied in Europe last year, when businesses and investors built momentum behind a clear, specific ask, calling for an EU 2040 emissions-reduction target of at least 90% and linking ambition to investment, competitiveness and energy security.
Many businesses take pride in staying out of politics, yet recognise that everything is politics now, and are working out how to be a positive voice for effective and pragmatic political action to secure the societies and resources on which they depend. This is a core focus of the BSP.
This is a leadership challenge
Technical solutions, investable projects and credible policy asks all matter, but none of them move without leaders who can hold purpose and performance together, who recognise that context is everything, and who recognise that their role is to keep moving forward to make decisions in uncertainty. That is why the BSP focuses explicitly on leadership capabilities in practice: testing strategy against plausible futures, connecting productively with critical stakeholders; getting big things done quickly, building pre-competitive coalitions to move the market, and being courageous enough to hold the line in the face of political pressure.
Participants leave with clearer strategic direction, practical decision-making frameworks they can use immediately, and a stronger ability to mobilise colleagues, partners and policymakers around a credible pathway. They also join a peer network of senior leaders facing the same pressures and working through similar trade-offs.
The job now is to be relentlessly focused on what is possible and disciplined about what it will take to make it real.
