Enterprise A-Z: Levers
Stop Trying to Hold Everything
If you’re good at your job, people bring you everything that looks even vaguely “sustainability‑shaped”: product questions, supplier issues, facility upgrades, reporting asks, community partnerships, innovation ideas.
Very quickly, you can end up feeling responsible for everything and in control of almost nothing.
Why levers matter
Trying to touch every sustainability‑related decision is a fast path to exhaustion and shallow impact. You stay busy, but the core of how the business makes money and spends money doesn’t really change.
Choosing levers is about getting honest: in this business model, now, which 2–3 mechanisms, if shifted, would quietly change hundreds of decisions downstream? When you know that, you can start saying “yes” and “no” with more intention.
What levers actually are
Levers are the existing mechanisms in your company that scale behaviour without you having to be in every room. They might live in:
Policy and standards – the rules for how things are designed, sourced, operated, financed.
Processes and approvals – what has to be checked before a product launches, a supplier is onboarded, a project is funded.
Platforms and tools – templates, systems, playbooks that people rely on to do their everyday work.
You don’t need a separate “sustainability process” for everything. Often, the most powerful move is to tweak one or two of these existing levers so they quietly embed your priorities into business‑as‑usual.
How to start
Name your 2–3 biggest levers. Looking at your company’s model, ask: where do repeated decisions get made that shape most of our impact? Product development gates? Procurement standards? Capital approval templates? Customer proposals? Pick the few that clearly matter most.
See how they work today. For each lever, sit with the person who owns it and walk through how it currently runs: who uses it, what it optimises for, where there is friction, what they wish worked better. Listen for ways your priorities could make their life easier, not harder.
Design one small, structural tweak. Choose one lever and co‑design a modest change – a required question in a template, an extra check at a gate, a design principle, a non‑negotiable standard for a high‑risk area. Test it in a contained part of the business, learn, and then scale.
You will always be asked to show up in a hundred places. When you are clear about your levers, you can put more of your energy into the few mechanisms that, once shifted, keep working for you whether you are in the room or not.
