I recently attended a conference virtually as a panelist in Addis Ababa and was asked a deceptively simple question: “How should we redefine success in African development projects?”
The question may appear operational, yet it is fundamentally strategic, because how we define success determines what we measure, what we reward, and ultimately what kind of future we construct.
For decades, development frameworks applied to Africa have been shaped by models originating in the global North, where success has often been measured by extraction, capital deployment, infrastructure output, and short term growth indicators. While these metrics are not irrelevant, they are insufficient for a continent whose demographic structure and growth trajectory are unlike any other region in the world.
Africa is extraordinarily rich in minerals such as gold, lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements, and the global transition to renewable energy depends heavily on what lies beneath African soil. Yet the more important strategic question is not what Africa can extract, but what it can cultivate.
The most valuable resource on this continent is not underground. It is above it. It is the youngest population on the planet. In many African nations, more than sixty percent of the population is under the age of twenty five. That reality represents not merely a demographic trend, but a structural advantage in a global economy increasingly constrained by aging populations and workforce shortages.
However, when we evaluate development projects across energy, transport, housing, digital infrastructure, and agriculture, we still tend to measure success primarily through megawatts installed, kilometers constructed, units delivered, and budgets respected. These measures capture execution efficiency, yet they do not capture whether the project strengthened the long term resilience of the society in which it operates.
Success must include empowerment.
Did the project transfer knowledge rather than merely import expertise? Did it strengthen local supply chains instead of reinforcing dependency? Did it build leadership capacity in engineering, governance, and project management? Did it expand opportunity for young professionals and entrepreneurs so that they become builders of the next generation of projects rather than observers of them?
If infrastructure is delivered without embedded capability, the model remains extractive even if the commodity changes. If projects do not deliberately cultivate local leadership, then their long term value remains fragile.
Quality and sustainability are inseparable in this context. Quality traditionally means conformance to requirements, yet in an era of climate volatility and resource stress, true quality must also include endurance. A project that meets technical specifications but fails under environmental pressure, degrades ecosystems, or generates long term social instability cannot honestly be called high quality. Sustainability elevates the definition of quality by extending it through time.
Redefining success also requires confronting institutional realities. Short political cycles often prioritize visibility over longevity. Procurement systems frequently reward lowest initial cost rather than lifecycle value. Fragmented governance structures make systems thinking difficult. These barriers are not uniquely African, but their impact is magnified in rapidly growing economies.
Redefining success also requires a shift in daily leadership behavior. Sustainability does not fail because of lack of strategy. It fails because of lack of disciplined execution. Leaders must Manage perceptions by reframing sustainability as economic resilience rather than ideological preference. They must Own success beyond delivery metrics and accept responsibility for long term outcomes. They must Relentlessly reassess assumptions as climate volatility and market conditions evolve. And they must Expand perspective beyond project boundaries to understand system level consequences.
These behaviors are not abstract ideals. They are practical disciplines that determine whether sustainability remains a reporting exercise or becomes embedded in project governance.
The response is not confrontation but alignment. Sustainability must be framed in economic terms that resonate with decision makers, including risk exposure, infrastructure durability, energy sovereignty, insurance cost, and competitive positioning. When sustainability is positioned as long term economic resilience rather than ideological aspiration, resistance decreases.
The transformation does not depend solely on large flagship projects. Mid sized projects, which constitute the backbone of most economies, provide significant leverage. When sustainability metrics are embedded into procurement criteria, stage gate reviews, and executive dashboards, behavior shifts. When lifecycle cost analysis replaces lowest bid thinking and impact assessment becomes standard practice, cultural change begins to take root.
Africa is building forward rather than retrofitting aging systems. That absence of legacy can be a strategic advantage if used intentionally. Renewable integration, climate smart agriculture, regenerative urban design, circular material systems, and youth centered capability development can be embedded from the outset rather than layered on later.
The world often looks to Africa for its resources, yet it should be looking to Africa for its leadership in demonstrating that development and sustainability are mutually reinforcing. Growth rooted in human capital, institutional strength, and regenerative thinking is more durable than growth rooted solely in extraction.
Project professionals are not merely managing timelines and budgets. They are shaping the economic and ecological architecture of the fastest growing region in the world.
Long term prosperity does not emerge from concrete alone. It emerges from competence, resilience, and leadership embedded within the population.
That is how development becomes truly sustainable, how quality becomes enduring. and how we stop mining the wrong gems. Dr. Joel Carboni Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact. As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery. Recognition In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
JC
GPM Founder P5 Standard PRiSM GRI Forbes Contributor SKEMA Business School Thinkers50 UN SDGs
Most organizations still celebrate leaders for the number of projects they start and the speed with which they push them through the pipeline. In a world of climate disruption, eroding trust, and compounding social risk, that definition of success is not just outdated—it is dangerous. If sustainability and social impact are among the strongest predictors of project success, the most regenerative act a leader can take is to stop more projects, earlier, on purpose.
Walk through any portfolio labeled “successful” and you will find projects that hit time, cost, and scope while quietly degrading resilience somewhere else. A “smart” infrastructure upgrade that locks in high emissions for decades, a “cost‑effective” outsourcing initiative that destabilizes local livelihoods, a “transformational” digital project that increases surveillance and erodes community trust. On paper, they are wins. On the ground, they are withdrawals from the very systems those organizations ultimately depend on.
This is what happens when green lights are cheap and red lights are taboo. Approval gates become throughput checkpoints, not integrity tests. As long as the business case clears the financial hurdle, sustainability is allowed to decorate the slide deck but not decide the outcome. In that environment, the “right to refuse” is not a principle; it is a career risk.
The question worth asking is brutal in its simplicity: how many of your “successful” projects would still be approved if the people absorbing the long‑term impact had a binding vote?
Regenerative leadership is often described in soft language—stewardship, care, systems thinking. All true, but incomplete. At its core, regenerative leadership is defined by the courage and the structural power to say “no” when a project’s benefits depend on exporting harm. It is less about being the hero who delivers more, and more about being the guardian who refuses to trade short‑term wins for long‑term damage.
That kind of leadership is not just a personal stance; it requires protection. A project sponsor who blocks an initiative because it violates social or ecological thresholds needs governance that backs them, not a culture that quietly sidelines them. Without that protection, most people will do the rational thing: comply with a narrow definition of success and hope the consequences arrive on someone else’s watch.
So the hard question becomes: in your organization, what happens to the leader who says “this project should not go forward as designed”?
For years, sustainability has been smuggled into project management as a KPI—another metric to track, optimize, and report. Regenerative governance demands something much sharper: sustainability as a kill switch. If a project cannot meet a minimum standard for people, planet, and long‑term resilience, it does not proceed, no matter how attractive the NPV or how politically important the sponsor.
This is where frameworks like GPM‑b point in a different direction. By embedding people, planet, and prosperity criteria into the very fabric of project definition and approval, they move sustainability from “aspiration” to “condition.” Sustainability is no longer a story told after the fact; it becomes a set of thresholds that capital cannot cross without triggering redesign, delay, or refusal.
If your sustainability metrics vanish from the conversation the moment a project hits an approval gate, they are not thresholds; they are theatre.
Most approval processes are excellent at interrogating cost, schedule, and scope. They are far less rigorous when it comes to interrogating who and what is being put at risk. A regenerative gate review would start with three uncomfortable questions:
Who carries the risk we are externalizing?
Name the communities, ecosystems, and future budgets that will absorb the downside if assumptions fail or externalities materialize.
What threshold or limit are we crossing, and how do we know?
Specify the social and ecological boundaries involved—emissions budgets, water use, land impact, equity implications—and what science or lived experience informs those limits.
If this were happening in our own backyard, would we still approve it?
Remove the abstraction. If the impacts landed on your kids’ school, your city’s air, or your own utility bill, would the business case still feel “compelling”?
If those three questions cannot be answered clearly and publicly, a regenerative system does not push the project through with a “to be refined later” note. It stops, redesigns, or walks away.
So, pick one live project. How different would the decision look if these questions were mandatory, on the record, and binding?
Most transformation programs still treat growth as “more”: more initiatives, more features, more digital, more data, more everything. The real growth edge now is in what you are willing to stop. In a world already breaching planetary boundaries and social thresholds, the portfolios that thrive will not be the ones that did the most, but the ones that refused to lock in stranded assets, fragile communities, and brittle systems.
That means measuring leaders not just by what they deliver, but by the harmful projects they prevent. It means reporting not only on carbon reduced or communities “impacted,” but on business cases rejected because they depended on offloading risk downstream. It means turning the “no” from a whispered objection into a visible, celebrated act of governance.
Here is the challenge: over the next year, could your organization name even one project it proudly refused to deliver—for sustainability and social impact reasons—and explain that decision publicly?
Until the answer to that question is yes, “regenerative” will remain branding. The right to refuse is where it starts to become real. Dr. Joel Carboni Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact. As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery. Recognition In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
JC
GPM Founder P5 Standard PRiSM GRI Forbes Contributor SKEMA Business School Thinkers50 UN SDGs
What is now visible, and increasingly uncomfortable, is that execution is lagging intent.
This is not because Asia-Pacific lacks ambition or capital. It is because the region is confronting a skills gap that has been obscured for years by strategy, policy, and narrative.
For much of the last decade, sustainability in Asia-Pacific was framed as aspiration. Targets could be announced without immediate consequence. Reporting could improve without operational disruption. That phase is over.
Sustainability has crossed from intention into obligation. Power systems are being re-engineered. Supply chains are being scrutinized. Financing terms are shifting. Regulatory expectations are tightening. Boards are no longer debating whether to act, but how quickly.
The friction appears when those expectations reach the operating level.
According to Ecosystm’s Global Sustainability Barometer, more than 70 percent of organizations in Asia-Pacific now describe sustainability as strategically important. Fewer than 30 percent consider themselves operationally mature or data-driven in how they execute it.
That gap explains much of what we are seeing. Organizations know where they want to go. They do not yet have enough people who know how to get there under real-world conditions.
Renewable energy expansion and cross-border power integration are often discussed as technology challenges. In practice, technology is not the constraint.
According to the International Energy Agency, Asia-Pacific already accounts for roughly half of global energy demand and more than half of global emissions, while carrying the largest share of new infrastructure investment through 2030. The region is where the global energy transition will succeed or fail.
The difficulty is not deploying solar or wind. It is coordinating policy, regulation, investment sequencing, risk ownership, and long-term accountability across jurisdictions. These are systems problems, not engineering problems.
Many organizations still staff these initiatives as if they were conventional projects. Engineers are asked to resolve governance conflicts. Project teams are expected to absorb political and financial risk without authority. When progress slows, it is labeled complexity rather than capability.
ESG in Asia-Pacific is no longer a communications exercise. It is now embedded in budgets, procurement, product design, and talent decisions.
This shift is necessary. It is also revealing.
Operational managers are being asked to make decisions that hold environmental, social, and financial constraints simultaneously. Most were never trained to do this. When pressure rises, they default to cost, speed, and optics. ESG becomes a secondary filter applied after decisions are already made.
The result is not resistance. It is dilution. Commitments survive in language while outcomes degrade in practice.
Regulatory pressure across Southeast Asia is increasing. Reporting and due-diligence expectations are expanding. The problem is not a lack of frameworks.
The problem is that many organizations cannot generate reliable, decision-grade sustainability data from their own operations and projects.
Data remains fragmented. Assumptions are rarely challenged. Estimates are treated as facts. AI tools are deployed without governance. Assurance is treated as a final hurdle instead of a design constraint.
Regulators are not asking for better stories. They are asking for credibility. Without people who understand sustainability data architecture, materiality, and risk integration, compliance will exist on paper while exposure accumulates in reality.
Sustainable finance in Asia-Pacific is no longer niche. Physical climate risk—flooding, heat stress, water scarcity—is increasingly priced into assets and financing decisions.
According to global energy and finance assessments, this repricing is occurring faster than many organizations can translate risk signals into operational change. Financial models adjust quickly. Delivery systems do not.
When organizations lack people who can connect climate scenarios to asset design, project sequencing, and long-term maintenance, risk does not disappear. It is transferred—to insurers, to communities, to future balance sheets.
The market has adapted. Capability has not.
AI is now embedded in sustainability work: Scope 3 estimation, supplier screening, climate modeling, and real-time dashboards.
Most organizations deploying these tools cannot clearly explain where data originates, how assumptions are set, or under what conditions outputs should be ignored. Models are treated as neutral instruments rather than opinionated systems that amplify whatever logic they are given.
This is not a failure of technology. It is a failure of governance skills. Automated outputs are gaining authority faster than organizations are developing the competence to challenge them.
Across Asia-Pacific, physical climate risk is now a board-level topic. Insurance availability, asset exposure, and resilience are regularly discussed.
Yet resilience is not built in boardrooms. It is built in projects.
When project teams lack the skills to integrate climate projections into design, scheduling, and lifecycle decisions, assets are delivered that meet specifications but fail under foreseeable conditions. Climate data exists. The missing link is applied competence.
National sustainability strategies across the region are increasingly coherent. Direction is clear.
What is missing is human capacity.
When policy ambition outpaces delivery capability, organizations slow down, outsource responsibility, or quietly lower standards. None of these outcomes are aligned with the urgency that policy reflects.
Asia-Pacific is rich in forums, alliances, and cross-sector initiatives. Collaboration is necessary. It is not sufficient.
Without shared competence, collaboration produces alignment statements rather than outcomes. Meetings replace decisions. Consensus replaces accountability.
Capacity building is the missing layer. Not awareness. Not vision. Skills.
If Asia-Pacific’s constraint is skills, then the response cannot be another framework, pledge, or roadmap. It has to be professional capability that holds under pressure.
This is precisely the gap GPM’s Certificate in Reintegrative Leadership was designed to address.
The program is not about sustainability literacy or awareness. It is about developing leaders who can operate across systems, refuse work that fails integrity thresholds, and reintegrate social, environmental, and economic realities into real decisions—before those decisions harden into assets, contracts, and risk.
For leaders, project professionals, and executives who recognize that execution failure is now a skills problem, this is not optional learning. It is foundational.
Those responsible for delivering Asia-Pacific’s sustainability commitments should not be asking whether they agree with the direction. They should be asking whether they are equipped to deliver it.
Learn more about GPM’s Certificate in Reintegrative Leadership here:
Because the next phase of sustainability will not be led by those who speak most convincingly about change—but by those who are trained to deliver it without breaking the system.
I came to sustainability in the 1980s. It wasn’t a career move. It wasn’t a framework. It was simply part of the world I grew up in.
Back then, sustainability was not aspirational. It was about limits. Acid rain. Ozone depletion. Toxic waste. Nuclear fallout. The lesson was straightforward. Some damage cannot be undone. Once you cross certain lines, the system does not negotiate with you.
That understanding never left me.
So when sustainability entered business and project management years later, I did not experience it as a new idea. I experienced it as an overdue one. What surprised me was how quickly it was translated into language that could live comfortably inside systems that had no intention of respecting limits.
That is why the PMI Project Success research is so important. Not because it introduces something radical, but because it unintentionally tells the truth.
Only 7% of project professionals consistently practice M.O.R.E. Seven percent!
Not occasionally. Not when it’s convenient. Consistently. That number is not a capability gap. It is a design outcome.
This was not a lightweight study. PMI surveyed thousands of practitioners across industries and regions, supported by interviews and modeling. They were not asking about sustainability specifically. They were asking a more basic question.
What does project success mean now. Their answer was a shift. Project success is no longer defined as execution alone. A successful project is one that delivers value worth the effort and expense. That definition matters. It breaks the assumption that time, cost, and scope are sufficient proxies for success. From there, PMI introduced M.O.R.E. as the behavior set required to deliver that kind of success. Manage perceptions. Own success. Relentlessly reassess. Expand perspective.
Then they measured how often that actually happens. Seven percent. The rest of the report explains why that number is not accidental.
One of the strongest findings in the research is also the most uncomfortable. Sustainability and social impact are among the strongest predictors of perceived project success. Stronger predictors than schedule performance. Stronger than budget adherence. Stronger than scope control. Projects aligned with social good consistently score higher on the Net Project Success Score. They are more likely to be seen as successful by intended beneficiaries, executives, and stakeholders.
The data does not say sustainability is nice to have. It says sustainability works. And yet, sustainability remains optional in project governance. That contradiction explains the seven percent better than any maturity model ever could.
This is not a motivation problem.
Most project professionals I know understand that delivery metrics are not the same thing as outcomes. They see the assumptions. They see the risks being deferred. They see the trade-offs being quietly made. What they lack is permission. Most operate inside systems where success is defined at approval, not at impact. Where reassessment is encouraged rhetorically but constrained structurally. Where stopping or reshaping a project is treated as failure, regardless of what the evidence says.
A project can reassess endlessly and still proceed unchanged.
A project can expand perspective without having authority to act on it.
A project can “own success” while success is narrowly defined.
That is not hypocrisy. It is survival inside a delivery-first system.
Seven percent are the people operating with enough authority, insulation, or institutional backing to challenge that system. Everyone else is executing rationally inside the incentives they are given.
Sustainability does not fail in strategy decks or annual reports. It fails at approval gates.
It fails when climate risk is acknowledged but downplayed because redesign would delay delivery.
It fails when social impact is noted but scoped out because it complicates procurement.
It fails when long-term operational consequences are excluded because they sit outside the capital budget.
None of this requires bad intent. It only requires a system that rewards completion and treats consequence as someone else’s problem.
Projects close. Metrics look clean. Impacts surface later.
By the time the cost shows up, the project is already considered a success.
M.O.R.E. correctly names what modern project success requires. It does not change the structure that prevents most people from practicing it.
Managing perceptions without the ability to stop work becomes messaging.
Reassessment without authority becomes ritual.
Expanded perspective without enforcement becomes commentary.
This is why adoption stalls where it does.
Seven percent is not resistance to change. It is the boundary of what the system currently allows.
I have reviewed projects that met every delivery target and quietly transferred risk to operations, communities, ecosystems, and future budgets. The project teams did their jobs. The systems did what they were designed to do.
The consequences arrived later. When they did, they were described as unforeseen, even when they were clearly traceable to assumptions that were never allowed to be challenged once the schedule was locked. Over time, this erodes trust. Not because people are cynical, but because experience keeps contradicting the story being told. The PMI data does not describe a future problem. It documents a present one.
I built the GPM-b because I stopped believing sustainability could survive as a theme, a KPI, or a section in a report.
It has to be part of the project's DNA.
GPM-b treats sustainability as something a project must satisfy to proceed, not something it aspires to improve later. It embeds people, planet, and prosperity into the decisions where capital is committed and risk is locked in.
Most importantly, it legitimizes refusal.
Refusal of projects that meet delivery targets by exporting harm.
Refusal of business cases that look efficient only because costs are displaced.
Refusal of success definitions that collapse once boundaries widen.
Seven percent already operate this way informally. The rest need systems that protect them when they do.
PMI frames seven percent as an opportunity for growth.
The more important question is structural. What happens when ninety-three percent of projects continue to be approved under success criteria that ignore long-term impact, cumulative risk, and distributional harm. The answer is not abstract. It shows up in assets that underperform under stress. In communities that carry costs they never agreed to. In institutions that lose credibility one “successful” project at a time.
Seven percent is not a maturity curve. It is a warning signal.
In the 1980s, sustainability was about limits. About recognizing that some lines matter even when crossing them is legal, profitable, and convenient. Somewhere along the way, we taught ourselves that progress could be measured without reference to thresholds. That belief made its way into projects. The data now shows the result. Seven percent are the people still working as if limits are real.
The rest are delivering exactly what the system rewards. Until project governance treats refusal as a legitimate outcome, sustainability will remain something we talk about while continuing to do something else.
I learned that as a kid.
The report just put a number on it. Can we do something about that? GPM-b the change! Dr. Joel Carboni Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact. As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery. Recognition In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
JC
GPM Founder P5 Standard PRiSM GRI Forbes Contributor SKEMA Business School Thinkers50 UN SDGs
Regeneration is not achieved through better intentions. It is achieved when the project’s decision rules change. Regeneration begins when the project is governed so that it cannot proceed while exceeding normative thresholds, and cannot declare success by externalizing deficits into people and place.
This is also where most “P5 adoption” quietly fails. P5 identifies what must be surfaced. It forces the impact scan to be complete. It prevents the selective blindness that lets a project celebrate a greener product while ignoring an extractive process, or celebrate community benefit while normalizing unsafe labor conditions. But identification is not enough. Without thresholds, P5 becomes another catalog of impacts with no pass/fail logic attached.
That is why the ecosystem matters. P5IA creates the impact register. Materiality filters what must be governed. Context-based assessment sets the denominators the project cannot negotiate away. The SMP becomes the audit trail that ties commitments to evidence, not language.
PMBOK® Guide, 8th Edition is converging on the same direction in its own vocabulary—holistic view, integrating sustainability across the life cycle, value delivery beyond deliverables. It’s useful validation. It’s not the engine. The engine is still the same: impacts must be contextualized against limits, or “value” is just a story told by the capital that gets counted.
Regeneration is the state where the project stops being a conversion machine—turning living systems, human time, and community tolerance into deliverables—and becomes a restoration mechanism that rebuilds capitals that have been depleted. That is a design condition. It is enforceable. It is governable. It is measurable.
The biggest lie the comfort industry sold was that sustainability is progress you can describe without changing what you approve. It created an assurance layer that “made us feel responsible without requiring us to be.” It trained people to translate uncomfortable facts into acceptable language, then called that leadership.
A regenerative profession treats refusal as competence. Not rebellion. Not idealism. A practiced, rehearsed capability to stop a project when it cannot meet integrity conditions under real operating pressure.
This is not theoretical. Drift is predictable. Pressure grows. Exceptions become normal. The real damage happens years before the crisis, in quiet rooms with tidy slide decks. Regeneration requires stop rules that still function when careers are on the table and “efficiency” is being used as a weapon.
Here is the line that has to become operational: no project gets to borrow from future carrying capacity to buy present-day performance. No project gets to degrade one capital to optimize another and call it trade-off. No project gets approved on “improvement” when it cannot demonstrate threshold alignment and credible restoration where depletion already exists.
If the work cannot hold inside the thresholds of the capitals it touches, it can no longer be justified, funded, approved, or delivered.
During the holidays, I took a rare moment to step back. I write constantly, and when I don’t, I get restless. My brain doesn’t sleep unless ideas are put somewhere. I told myself I wouldn’t work until after January 1st. 2025 has been a blistering year, and the pause was overdue. Yet here I am on December 29th, back at my desk. Last night, I was doomscrolling on social media and came across a post from the UN Secretary-General urging the world to “get the Sustainable Development Goals back on track.”
I laughed out loud.
Not because the SDGs don’t matter. They do. They are among the most comprehensive and morally necessary commitments the global community has ever articulated. But the language in that post assumed the problem was one of momentum, not permission. As if the SDGs were briefly derailed by bad luck, geopolitical turbulence, or insufficient effort, and could be nudged back into place with renewed urgency.
That framing is not hopeful. It is wrong.
The SDGs are not failing because we are not trying hard enough. They are failing because we are pursuing absolute goals through systems that only authorize incremental change. That approach has a name: sanctioned incrementalism. And until we confront it directly, no amount of acceleration rhetoric will save the goals we claim to care about.
The SDGs are threshold commitments. End extreme poverty. Halt biodiversity loss. Stay within climate limits. Ensure access to clean water, health, safety, and dignity. These are not directional aspirations. They describe conditions that must be met, not trends that merely need to improve. Either the world reaches them, or it doesn’t.
Yet almost every mechanism designed to deliver the SDGs treats them as trend-management exercises. Governments celebrate percentage reductions. Corporations report year-over-year efficiency gains. Institutions publish dashboards filled with green arrows and “on track” indicators while the underlying systems continue to deteriorate.
Effort increases. Outcomes do not.
Credibility erodes.
This is not a data problem. We are drowning in metrics, frameworks, disclosure regimes, and dashboards. It is not a commitment problem either. Public endorsement of the SDGs is nearly universal. Conferences are full. Reports are glossy. Statements are sincere.
It is a governance problem!
Sanctioned incrementalism is the formal approval of incremental improvement in situations where decision-makers already know that operating within ecological or social limits is not achievable in time. It is not denial. It is not ignorance. It is permission. Permission to continue harm while promising that improvement will eventually arrive.
This is how it plays out in practice. Leaders publicly acknowledge system limits—climate budgets, biodiversity thresholds, social minimums. The science is clear. The warnings are well established. Then, in the same decision cycle, they approve projects, investments, and policies that continue to violate those limits, justified by the promise of gradual improvement. The activity is allowed to continue because it is “getting better,” even when everyone involved knows it is still making the goals unattainable.
This is not transition.
It is delay with a moral gloss.
Incremental improvement is not inherently wrong. Incrementalism is exactly what you do when you are already operating within a safe space and want to optimize performance. But when you are operating outside limits—and much of the global economy already is—incrementalism becomes an evasion strategy. It avoids the one decision that actually matters: refusal.
Some activities must shrink.
Some must stop.
Some must never be approved in their current form.
The SDGs quietly assume this. Their implementation machinery almost never allows it.
That is the structural contradiction at the heart of the SDG enterprise. The goals describe a world that requires sufficiency, while the systems tasked with delivering them are designed to avoid saying no. Approval processes reward continuity, not correction. Sustainability programs are built to manage harm, not to end it.
So we accelerate. We scale. We finance. We innovate. We announce new initiatives and longer roadmaps. And we keep authorizing what cannot be made sufficient in time.
Then we act surprised when the targets slip and declare the goals “off track.”
You cannot achieve absolute goals with relative permission.
As long as leaders are allowed to approve incremental progress where sufficiency is already known to be required, the SDGs will remain a global performance theater. Language will improve. Reports will thicken. Stakeholder engagement will deepen. The outcomes will continue to miss.
This is why so many sustainability professionals feel trapped. They are asked to optimize within constraints that guarantee failure, then explain why the goals remain elusive. They are praised for effort and blamed for outcomes they were never empowered to control. The problem is not their competence. It is the authorization logic above them.
A sustainability program without a stop condition is not a transition strategy. It is an extension strategy. It exists to make unsustainable activity governable for longer.
Calling the SDGs “off track” obscures this reality. It suggests we are moving in the right direction, just not fast enough. In many cases, that is simply untrue. We are moving in a direction that remains incompatible with the goals themselves, and we are doing so with full awareness.
Sanctioned incrementalism is a choice. It is the choice to continue harm while hoping improvement arrives before the system fails. When that hope is knowingly unfounded, the choice is no longer pragmatic. It is complicit.
If the SDGs are to mean anything beyond aspiration in the second half of this decade, this has to end. Not with better messaging. Not with more urgency language. Not with another round of indicators.
With fewer approvals.
Refusal must be restored as a legitimate governance outcome. Not as an act of moral purity, but as a basic requirement of decision integrity. Until leaders are willing to say “this cannot proceed,” sustainability will remain a story we tell ourselves while the conditions it depends on continue to unravel.
Governments, institutions, and corporations must decide—now—whether the SDGs are constraints or slogans. If they are constraints, sanctioned incrementalism has no place in sustainability governance. If they are slogans, we should say so openly and stop wasting time, money, and credibility pretending otherwise.
January 1 is a good moment to choose.
Dr. Joel Carboni Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact. As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery. Recognition In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
JC
GPM Founder P5 Standard PRiSM GRI Forbes Contributor SKEMA Business School Thinkers50 UN SDGs
The Three Horizons model owes its existence to the pioneering work of Bill Sharpe and colleagues in the International Futures Forum, who offered a simple but profound way to understand how systems change. Sharpe didn’t set out to create a management fad; he gave us a language for recognizing when our thinking is trapped in the present, when we’re tinkering at the edges, and when we’re genuinely designing for a different future. His contribution is one of those rare pieces of foresight that becomes more accurate with time, and it continues to guide everyone who works at the intersection of strategy, transformation, and long-term value. If we’re serious about building projects that outlast the turbulence of the moment, we stand on the shoulders of Sharpe’s insight.
Three Horizons, in normal human language
Think of the Three Horizons as three different “worlds” existing at the same time:
Horizon 1 (H1):
The world we’re living in right now. Fossil-heavy, wasteful, fragile. Projects are judged mostly on time, cost, scope, and maybe a carbon line at the end.
Horizon 2 (H2):
The transition zone. Pilots, prototypes, “green initiatives,” innovation labs. Some of it keeps H1 on life support, some of it points toward something genuinely different.
Horizon 3 (H3):
The world we actually need if we want to stay within planetary boundaries and maintain any kind of social stability. Regenerative, fair, low-carbon, risk-aware by design.
If you’re doing sustainability in projects, the question is simple:
Are you polishing Horizon 1, tinkering in Horizon 2, or deliberately building Horizon 3?
Most standards and guides still live firmly in H1. They don’t say that out loud, of course. They use all the right words: climate, equity, resilience, circularity. But look one layer down and you see the same pattern: mitigation, not transformation.
You can recognize an H1-era guide in a few seconds. It usually has four giveaways:
It treats sustainability as something to “consider,” not something that constrains decisions.
You’ll see language like “take into account environmental and social issues.” Sounds reasonable. But if there are no defined thresholds, limits, or “this is not acceptable” lines, then nothing really changes. Sustainability becomes a nice-to-have, not a non-negotiable.
It piles everything on the project manager’s shoulders.
The message is: “If you’re a good, ethical PM, you’ll integrate sustainability.” That might sell training courses, but it’s not how systems work. You don’t fix structural problems with individual heroics. If governance, portfolio selection, and incentives don’t change, the PM is being asked to swim against the current with a smile on their face.
It loves narratives but avoids mechanisms.
Older guides are full of thoughtful explanations and good intentions. They talk about responsibility, stakeholders, SDGs, the Triple Bottom Line. But there’s no real operating system underneath: no way to measure whether a project is inside or outside safe limits, no way to compare options beyond “less bad than before.”
It stays focused on impact mitigation, not impact generation.
The best it aims for is fewer emissions, less waste, smaller harm. Horizon 3 asks a different question:
What positive condition are we building, and how do we know we’re contributing to it?
If you recognize your favorite guide in that list, that’s not an accident. A lot of well-meaning work is still anchored in a worldview where the current system is assumed to be basically fine, and the job of sustainability is not to question it too hard.
That’s Horizon 1.
Then there’s Horizon 2, where most organizations like to live.
This is the land of pilots, proofs of concept, and glossy case studies:
A “net zero by 2050” promise with no binding 2030 plan.
A slightly greener fuel for the same destructive model.
Better dashboards for tracking damage we still intend to cause.
Some of these innovations are what I’d call H2-: they make the old system more efficient, less embarrassing, more palatable. You still get the same outcomes; you just feel better about them.
Others are H2+: early signals of Horizon 3. Regenerative agriculture. Community energy. Circular materials. New governance models. They’re fragile, small, and often under-resourced—but they actually point somewhere new.
Most project “sustainability guidance” doesn’t distinguish between the two. If it has a leaf icon and mentions the SDGs, it’s treated as progress. That’s how Horizon 1 keeps winning inside Horizon 2.
Now contrast that with the P5 Standard: People, Planet, Prosperity, Processes, Products & Services.
On the surface, P5 looks simple. Underneath, it’s doing something very different from the usual checklists.
P5 doesn’t ask, “Did you think about sustainability?” It asks:
People: Who is affected, now and later? Workers, communities, suppliers, future generations. What does “do no harm” actually look like in this context? Where can we improve lives, not just avoid complaints?
Planet: Are we operating within ecological limits, or just slowing down the damage? How does this project interact with energy, materials, water, biodiversity, and land use across the whole life cycle?
Prosperity: Who benefits, and who carries the risk? Is this project simply extracting value for a few, or strengthening resilience and shared prosperity?
Processes: Are our ways of working transparent, ethical, and accountable? Or are we relying on hero PMs to patch over structural gaps?
Products & services: Does what we’re delivering actually move the system toward Horizon 3, or are we just making Horizon 1 a bit cleaner and more digitized?
That’s Horizon 3 territory. It doesn’t assume the current model survives. It assumes the opposite: that the current model is why we’re in crisis, and projects are one of the main levers we have to move beyond it.
If you’ve spent years writing or promoting traditional project guides with a sustainability layer pasted on, P5 is annoying. It doesn’t play along.
It refuses to keep sustainability vague. It pushes you toward thresholds, not slogans.
It doesn’t flatter the profession with heroic language. It quietly asks where governance, portfolio selection, and decision rules need to change.
It exposes the limits of “optimization.” You can’t schedule, risk-log, or offset your way out of a broken system.
And because it’s structured as an operating standard—not a coffee-table essay—it makes a lot of Horizon 1 material look like what it is: beautifully written, structurally harmless.
That’s not an attack on individuals. Many of the people behind those guides care deeply and work hard. The problem is the horizon they’re working in, not their intentions.
If you sponsor, design, or manage projects today, you’re not neutral. You’re shaping the future operating system, one portfolio decision at a time.
You have a choice:
You can stay in Horizon 1, using frameworks that treat sustainability as a consideration to be weighed against “real” project constraints. You’ll keep delivering projects that look successful on paper and fail in the world.
You can sit forever in Horizon 2, running pilots that never threaten the core business model. You’ll have great stories, exciting panels, and very little structural change.
Or you can start operating in Horizon 3, using tools like P5 to treat sustainability not as a bolt-on, but as the design brief.
That doesn’t mean every project becomes a regeneration manifesto. It means:
You stop calling harmful-but-slightly-less-harmful “sustainable.”
You align projects with real limits, not marketing language.
You measure what actually matters, not just what’s easy to report.
You treat People, Planet, and Prosperity as core performance domains, not as afterthoughts.
Some guides will keep re-packaging Horizon 1 thinking. They’ll add new buzzwords, refresh the graphics, and talk about megatrends. They will sound current and feel familiar.
But they’ll still be asking the same old question:
“How do we keep doing what we already do, with a bit less damage?”
P5, and Horizon 3 more broadly, ask a different one:
“What kind of projects belong in a world that has to stay within hard limits and still be worth living in—and how do we design, select, and run those projects on purpose?”
That’s the line.
You don’t have to name anyone. You don’t have to attack an association, a credential, or a particular book. You just have to be clear about the horizon you’re choosing to work in.
And if that makes a few authors of old Horizon 1 guides uncomfortable?
Good. Discomfort is what happens when the future walks in and starts asking real questions.
Dr. Joel Carboni Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact. As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery. Recognition In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
JC
GPM Founder P5 Standard PRiSM GRI Forbes Contributor SKEMA Business School Thinkers50 UN SDGs
There’s a moment in every profession when the evidence becomes impossible to ignore. A moment when the data stops whispering and starts shouting. In project management, that moment has arrived—and the message is unmistakable:
Projects that integrate sustainability are 2.58 times more likely to succeed.
This isn’t speculation. This isn’t ideology. This isn’t a “nice-to-have.”
This is PMI’s own research, laid out plainly in the Maximizing Project Success report. And yet, only 23% of projects include sustainability in their KPIs.
Let me repeat that!
We have a proven, measurable, statistically validated predictor of success—and the profession is shrugging it off.
Imagine if a report showed that projects using risk registers were twice as successful. Or that project managers who communicate weekly have three times the success rates. The industry would reorganize overnight. Certifications would update. PMOs would mandate the practice. LinkedIn would flood with “10 Ways to Integrate Risk for Instant Wins.”
But sustainability?
Suddenly everyone gets quiet. Suddenly the conversation becomes “political.” Suddenly the most reliable predictor of project success is treated like a controversial elective instead of a professional obligation.
Why?
Because acknowledging sustainability as a key driver of success requires us to confront the uncomfortable truth that projects are not just technical endeavors—they are interventions in living systems. They reshape landscapes, communities, supply chains, and futures. And if you measure only time, cost, and scope, you are measuring the scaffolding, not the building.
Project managers have always prided themselves on being objective. Neutral. Process-driven. But neutrality is not possible when your work has impact. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make you neutral—it makes you negligent.
The public sector has already figured this out. Investors have figured it out. Even customers have figured it out. The only group still dragging its feet is the very profession responsible for delivering the work that shapes the world.
And that brings me to the real crisis—the one buried beneath the numbers.
We are preparing the next generation of project professionals to work in a world that no longer exists.
Only a handful of universities and colleges teach sustainability as a core project competency. Most students can walk out of a project management degree program knowing how to build a Gantt chart but not how to assess the ecological or social impact of the very projects they will be asked to manage. They can run a critical path but cannot recognize when a project is eroding long-term value for the organization that commissioned it.
It is an educational gap, yes.
But more than that, it is an ethical one.
Students deserve better.
Organizations deserve better.
And frankly, the world deserves better.
Sustainability is not an ideological position. It is not a political stance. It is not a branding exercise. According to PMI, it is the single strongest predictor of whether a project will be seen as worth the effort, worth the investment, and worth the trust stakeholders place in it.
So why are we still treating it as optional?
The truth is that integrating sustainability into projects forces us to ask harder questions:
What will this project damage?
What will it restore?
Who benefits?
Who bears the cost?
And perhaps the most important question of all:
What are we really here to deliver?
This is where the profession finds itself divided. There are those who believe project management is a neutral executor of scope statements, and those who understand that executing scope without consciousness is how we ended up with poisoned rivers, fractured communities, and infrastructure that collapses under the weight of its own short-termism.
The future does not belong to the neutral project manager.
It belongs to the project manager who recognizes that every deliverable has a footprint. That every project creates ripples far beyond the edges of the charter. That outcomes are more important than outputs, and value is more than the absence of variance.
So here is the uncomfortable but unavoidable conclusion:
If you claim to care about project success, but ignore sustainability, you are not managing the project—you are gambling with it.
The data is in. The evidence is clear. PMI has handed the profession the key.
Now the question is whether we are bold enough to use it.
We have the frameworks.
We have the methodologies.
We have the tools.
We have the proof.
What we lack is the courage to treat sustainability not as an add-on, but as a standard of practice—one rooted not in virtue, but in verifiable success.
Project managers love to say, “What gets measured gets managed.”
Well—it's time to measure sustainability.
It’s time to manage it.
And it’s time to stop pretending that success is possible without it.
Dr. Joel Carboni Founder, GPM · Standards Builder · Regenerative Business Advocate Joel is widely recognized as a sustainability disruptor, standards builder, and global advocate for regenerative business practices. For more than three decades, he has worked at the intersection of sustainability, strategy, and governance, helping organizations translate ambitious sustainability goals into measurable, lasting impact. As the Founder of GPM (Green Project Management), Joel introduced the P5 Standard for Sustainability and the PRiSM methodology — pioneering frameworks that redefine how projects deliver value by integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into project delivery. These models have since become recognized standards within leading global institutions, including the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Joel also contributes to the global sustainability agenda through his work with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), where he is involved in developing the new Pollution Standard, and through contributions related to the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond his work as a practitioner and standards developer, Joel is a Forbes contributor, a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and an advisor to governments and multinational organizations on how to embed ethics, sustainability, and regenerative thinking into business strategy and delivery. Recognition In 2025, Joel was recognized by Thinkers50 as a finalist for the inaugural Regenerative Business Award for his book Becoming Regenerative.
JC
GPM Founder P5 Standard PRiSM GRI Forbes Contributor SKEMA Business School Thinkers50 UN SDGs
Perspectives · Competence
The 2025 Pulse of the Profession moves the definition of project success past schedule and budget to value: value worth the effort and cost, value that lasts beyond delivery, and value that holds up within the wider system a project operates in. Practitioners on the sustainability side of the field have argued for this for years, and it is now in PMI's own data.
PMI also reframed accountability. Its Maximizing Project Success report introduced the M.O.R.E. framework — Manage perceptions, Own success, Relentlessly reassess, Expand perspective — and Pulse 2025 builds on it, treating business acumen and sustainability as strategic capabilities that shape whether a project delivers value.
PMI's global data shows that projects integrating sustainability and social-impact goals are 2.6 times more likely to succeed, the strongest predictor of success in the dataset. Only 23% of projects are currently aligned to those goals, which leaves value unrealised in roughly three of every four projects.
Sustainability-aligned projects report 55% customer satisfaction, against 33% for the rest. On PMI's numbers, sustainability operates as a performance strategy with measurable returns.
The value of M.O.R.E. is behavioural. Manage perceptions: stakeholders who do not see value do not credit it, so perception is part of the outcome. Own success: accountability extends past the requested deliverables to the outcomes they were meant to produce. Relentlessly reassess: plans degrade on contact with a changing system, and a static plan stops describing reality. Expand perspective: every project sits within social, environmental, and economic effects that exist whether or not the team accounts for them.
The framework names what sustainability practitioners have worked with for years: projects are business activities with social and ecological consequences.
Pulse 2025 found that 18% of project professionals demonstrate high business acumen, and that group outperforms on every major metric: meeting business goals (83% against 78%), budget adherence (73% against 68%), and fewer failures (8% against 11%).
The gap describes a profession still optimised for outputs. Many project managers know the mechanics of delivery and have had little reason to develop the judgement that connects a project to the value it exists to create. Across three decades and 55 countries integrating sustainability into delivery, I read this as a systems problem. The profession has trained project managers to control variance and given them far less to work with when the task is creating value.
High-acumen professionals also measure more. They track an average of 9.1 success factors per project, against 6.3 for the rest, adding strategic alignment, customer satisfaction, stakeholder trust, and ESG indicators to the traditional iron triangle. A project can meet schedule and budget and still erode trust, damage ecosystems, or exhaust the people who delivered it, and those effects belong inside the definition of success.
Sustainability supplies the reason a project matters, and business acumen supplies the means to deliver it. Together they move the work from compliance to contribution.
Read together, the report describes a profession that has the tools, the frameworks, and the evidence to treat sustainability as a driver of success, alongside a habit of managing projects as though their surroundings do not affect the result. M.O.R.E. gives a practical correction: manage perceptions honestly, own outcomes beyond delivery, reassess as conditions change, and widen the frame from the project to the system it affects.
The profession has defaulted to measuring activity, which is easier than measuring value. The work that holds up regenerates more than it consumes and leaves the organisation stronger than it found it. That is the standard the 2025 Pulse points toward, and it is worth reading in full.
About the author
Dr. Joel Carboni is the founder of GPM and the architect of the P5 Standard™ and the PRiSM™ method, used by governments, global firms, and universities across 145+ countries to deliver climate-aligned, regenerative outcomes. He is a member of the Global Reporting Initiative working group for the new Pollution Standard, and has contributed to work connected to the Paris Agreement and the SDGs, and to advisory work that aligns projects with science-based targets and emerging regulation.
He consults with financial institutions and regulators on sustainable project delivery, teaches as a visiting professor at SKEMA Business School, and writes as a Forbes contributor.
Perspectives · Principles
I spent this past weekend tent‑camping with our scouts—our last nights in tents before we switch to cabins for winter. Two new youth came out for their very first campout. They learned how to tie knots, light a fire, and cook outdoors.
When I arrived at the site, in the afternoon, the fire pit was packed to the brim with cold ash. We wouldn’t be able to start a new fire without first dealing with it. So I did what any scouter would do: I shoveled it out, disposed of it responsibly, and then, when we broke camp, we made sure anything that wasn’t from nature went back out with us.
That small act has a big lesson for leaders: it’s not enough to avoid making a mess—we have to clean up the one we inherited and leave the place better than we found it.
I’ve been “walking the talk” on sustainability since I was a 10‑year‑old scout. Back then, I learned the seven principles of Leave No Trace (LNT): plan ahead, travel on durable surfaces, dispose of waste properly, leave what you find, minimize campfire impacts, respect wildlife, and be considerate of others. They’re simple, memorable, portable. As an Eagle Scout, I understand that these principles don't expire and must extend to everything I do in life.
In business, we’ve spent decades translating “do no harm” into policies and reports. That’s sustainability. It’s essential—but incomplete. The world we’re operating in now demands regeneration: leave things better than you found them. That means restoring trust, repairing ecosystems, rebuilding capability, and creating net‑positive value for people, planet, and prosperity.
And yes, it’s good business. When you design whole systems, you often cut waste and cost at the same time—a counterintuitive pattern long documented in operations: the bigger, smarter savings are frequently cheaper than the small, incremental ones when you optimize across the whole system, not one component at a time.
Here’s how I teach LNT on the trail—and how I practice it in the boardroom.
Plan ahead and prepare → Anticipate material impacts.
On the trail, planning avoids risky weather and bad campsites. In business, planning means scenario analysis, capacity mapping, and setting “guardrails” for people and planet, not just budgets. Build dual‑materiality thinking into plans: what affects your business (outside‑in) and what your business affects (inside‑out). This isn’t a nice‑to‑have—it’s the logic of modern disclosure and risk.
Travel and camp on durable surfaces → Build on durable platforms.
Choose architectures, suppliers, and data foundations that won’t erode under growth. Favor standards, interoperability, and lifecycle serviceability so your “trail” doesn’t fragment into fragile, redundant systems.
Dispose of waste properly → Design out waste; own your end‑of‑life.
“Pack it in, pack it out” becomes extended producer responsibility, circular material flows, and clear de‑commissioning plans for products, facilities, and data (yes, data—ghost databases waste energy and create risk).
Leave what you find → Preserve social and natural capital.
Don’t strip the campsite. In business, resist extractive practices that diminish communities or ecosystems. If you benefit from a watershed—biological or social—invest in keeping it healthy.
Minimize campfire impacts → Right‑size your energy burn.
Stoves and small, hot fires are more efficient than bonfires. Likewise, right‑size energy use, electrify thoughtfully, and prioritize efficiency first. Whole‑system design routinely yields lower operating cost and lower emissions.
Respect wildlife → Respect living systems.
Secure your “food” so animals don’t acquire bad habits; in business, prevent perverse incentives in your supply chain. Map the human and ecological systems you touch and set explicit boundaries: no forced labor, no deforestation, no greenwashing.
Be considerate of other visitors → Optimize for shared value.
Keep noise down, give other hikers space. In business, that’s authentic community engagement, fair competition, privacy by design, and product safety as a first principle.
That clogged fire pit was a metaphor for the legacy issues most organizations inherit:
Operational ash: deprecated systems, idle assets, over‑spec’d processes that consume energy and attention.
Supply‑chain ash: upstream labor risks, biodiversity loss, and emissions you “can’t see” but still own.
Reputational ash: past commitments that were never retired or remediated, and the trust deficit they leave.
Try this 30‑day Ash Test:
Make the invisible visible (inventory waste, idle capacity, orphaned data).
Shovel—fund the clean‑up first (retire, remediate, repurpose).
Re‑light with care (apply the efficiency‑first rule before adding new “fuel”).
You’ll free up cash, reduce risk, and make room for regenerative investments.
If LNT is the operating ethic, then good standards are the map and compass. Two practical anchors:
P5 (Product, Process, People, Planet, Prosperity).
Use P5 as your everyday lens. It connects what you make (product) and how you manage (process) to social, environmental, and economic outcomes. With P5, biodiversity, health and safety, anti‑corruption, energy, water, and waste aren’t checkboxes; they’re integrated decision criteria across projects and portfolios.
CSRD & CSDDD (and dual materiality).
If you operate in or sell into the EU, you’re moving quickly from voluntary storytelling to assured disclosures and due diligence duties. Translate that into plain leadership English: directors are on the hook to know and show both how sustainability affects performance and how performance affects people and planet. Build the processes now; you don’t bolt this on in Q4.
Together, these tools shift you from “less bad” to net positive by making regeneration the normal way you plan, prioritize, and measure.
Quarter 1 — Walk the site.
Do executive “trail walks” in your highest‑impact operations and top 10 suppliers. Validate reality. Create a visible log of “ash piles” with owners and dates.
Quarter 2 — Embed the seven translations.
Add a one‑page LNT‑for‑Leadership checklist to every project charter: planning, durable platforms, end‑of‑life, preservation, energy, living systems, shared value. Align with P5 elements so teams can score impacts and tradeoffs consistently.
Quarter 3 — Make it measurable.
Stand up dual‑materiality metrics and dashboards that feed both ESG disclosures and management decisions. Capture the outside‑in (risk, resilience, cost of capital) and inside‑out (community impact, biodiversity, labor rights) so strategy and reporting are finally the same conversation.
Quarter 4 — Fund the flywheel.
Lock in an “efficiency‑first” capital rule: whole‑system retrofits get priority when they reduce operating expense and emissions. Reinvest a portion of the savings into regenerative projects—habitat restoration where you source, workforce upskilling where you operate, local economic multipliers where you sell. The compounding returns—financial and non‑financial—are how you pull ahead.
Two first‑time campers were with us this weekend. Their faces lit up when the fire caught; it always does. What we pass down matters.
Pass down an ethic: We leave places better than we found them.
Pass down a method: simple principles, consistently applied.
Pass down a mindset: we clean up what we inherit and design so others won’t have to.
Business is its own kind of campsite. Customers visit. Communities live nearby. Teammates come and go. We all share the trail.
When we plan ahead, tread lightly, manage our waste, preserve what’s precious, right‑size our fires, respect living systems, and consider others—we do more than “avoid harm.” We create the conditions for people, ecosystems, and enterprises to thrive.
That is regeneration. And it’s not abstract. Sometimes it looks like a shovel in an ash‑filled ring, a clear view of the coals, and a small, efficient fire that warms many hands.
Let’s lead like that. Let’s leave it better.
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