The Era of Orchestration: Why Sustainability Work is Organizational Work
This post was originally published on LinkedIn. I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments.
Orchestration is emerging as a potential theme for sustainability, climate, and technology leaders alike. Let’s poke at it a bit.
“The era of selling insight is over. The future is about orchestrating on-the-ground impact at speed.” ~ Matthew Bell, Chief Executive Officer, Anthesis Group
“To maximize impact and expedite transformation, sustainability leaders must pivot the role they play from portfolio owner to strategic orchestrator.” ~ Liam Walsh, Chief Commercial Officer, ERM
Yes to both! But here’s the rub: orchestration requires willing participants with aligned incentives. From what I’ve seen, most sustainability leaders are still working hard to position their work within existing incentive structures: cost savings, financial gains, new market opportunities, and so on. Learning to speak the language of finance, as so many thinkpieces have pushed for.
But the existing incentive structures are what got us into this mess in the first place: quarterly profits, growth for the sake of growth, short-term thinking at long-term expense, etc. While the wonderful sustainability people I know strongly desire to disrupt business as usual and change entire systems—myself included—they’re largely hamstrung by the very system they’re operating within, stuck fighting for resources and continually positioning the value of sustainability work, all while taking on more and more responsibilities like mandatory reporting.
As I think through this, I’m exploring the idea that orchestration isn’t just about coordinating sustainability initiatives—it’s about enabling businesses to transform by rewiring business models and organizational operating systems to get us out of this overconsumption, overproduction, short-term-thinking mess we’re (still somehow) in together. All while earning more money than spending, because hashtag capitalism.
While sustainability work has always been cross-functional, calling it orchestration makes that explicit. The job isn’t just knowing what needs to happen, it’s implementing systems and aligning incentives in ways that enable the necessary organizational changes actually happen.
“To succeed, CSOs and their teams will need to strengthen the facilitation, influence, and cross-functional collaboration skills required to navigate and guide complex organizational dynamics.” You nailed it, Liam: sustainability work is organizational work. One could have all the technical chops in the world, but in absence of understanding org dynamics and how change actually happens, nobody will greenlight your projects.
As 2026 takes off and orchestration becomes a rallying cry, make sure you’re keeping in mind the criticality of doing the cultural work necessary to enable people, teams, and organizations to be orchestrated.