Nobody buys "green". They buy less risk.

Not whether sustainability matters, we're long past that, but how you move an organisation from caring about it to doing something. I was there to talk through some of our work. The room took it further. Here's the thread that ran through the afternoon.

Cost still wins. Until you change what the decision is about.

For years the pattern was familiar. You take a partner most of the way towards a lower-impact choice, ten emails deep, everything positive, and then the price lands and they go elsewhere. A year ago that was happening most of the time. It's shifting now, and not because everyone suddenly fell in love with the planet.

It's shifting because of risk. Most of the partners we work with make decisions around risk, not cost. Mitigate the risk and the spend tends to follow. So we stopped leading with sustainability. We build it in as standard, then talk about it as efficiency and resilience, the things that protect the business. The green part becomes a bonus you get to mention later, not the thing you're selling.

Worth trying as a reframe. What would this look like if you never said the word "sustainable" and led with the risk you're removing instead?

Policy moves faster than good intentions.

The room kept coming back to government, and for a reason. When you want behaviour to change at scale, financial instruments do the heavy lifting. The landfill tax is the example everyone reaches for. It started at seven pounds a tonne in 1996. From April 2025 the standard rate is £126.15. That climb didn't ask businesses to care. It made landfill the expensive option and behaviour followed, into recycling programmes and waste reduction and habits that stuck.

The same logic sits under the EU's common charger rules. Since December 2024, new phones and tablets have had to charge over USB-C, with laptops following in April 2026. One small mandate, a lot less e-waste, a decade of "they'll never switch" quietly undone.

For a larger organisation, that maths works. For a smaller one, the upfront cost of the sustainable option is still real, and the support to bridge it hasn't caught up. That gap is one of the honest frictions worth naming rather than glossing over.

Influence works in layers.

The through-line of what I shared was influence, and how the same craft works across three layers of a system. Consumer, industry, policy.

At the consumer layer, our Pattern Breaking project let people feel the manipulation baked into everyday design for themselves, because once you can see a tactic you can't un-see it. At the industry layer, Design Declares gave the design world a shared language for holding itself to account. At the policy layer, a five-year partnership on the ocean platform Only One turned individual action, aggregated, into something that reached the people who write the rules.

Three layers, one craft. Make the complex feel simple, give people a clear way to act, then stay long enough for it to compound. Influence is about making the action easy, not being the loudest voice in the room.

The work is quieter than the noise suggests.

That last line comes with a caveat, because there's another kind of noise worth untangling. Not the volume you use to win a decision, but whether you speak up at all.

A lot of people avoid the climate conversation for the same reason they avoid any hard one. To have it, you sometimes have to admit you got something wrong. So we get "green hush", where even the organisations doing the right thing go quiet, wary of being accused of overclaiming.

The reframe that landed for me is about balance. Green hush and green shouting sit at two ends of the same question, and there's a time and place for each. Sometimes the work needs a loud voice, someone willing to name a standard or push for change in the open. More often it needs quiet consistency. You keep doing the work, keep bringing it into conversations, keep offering the one per cent shift that costs you little and compounds for someone else over a year or two. Some of our longest partnerships started exactly there. A bit of useful advice, freely given, no expectation attached. Trust is the thing that outlasts any single project.

Get into the rooms where sustainability isn't the topic.

This is the one I'm still working out. Most of us keep showing up to the same rooms, talking to people who already agree. It's warm. It's also a bit of an echo.

The openings are in the other rooms. Economic growth boards. Policy forums. The places where nobody's thinking about design or storytelling yet, and where a clear explanation of either might change a decision. You get in by understanding what drives the people already there, then talking about their thing, not yours. The sustainability comes baked in.

Underneath all of it is time. Roman Krznaric calls it being a good ancestor, thinking in generations rather than quarters. It's how small, consistent pressures become big shifts. A room full of people asking for a common charger. A sector that quietly stops sending waste to landfill. None of it looks dramatic on the day.

So, a question to leave you with. What's the one percent shift you could make in a room that isn't expecting it?