The Hardest Part of Sustainability Is Not Knowing What to Do. It Is Knowing Why We Want to Do It Together.

By Tammy HU, Co-founder and Chief Sustainability Officer, DOMI Earth

Over the past 12 years, as I have worked alongside companies on sustainability, one question has stayed with me. We already know so much.

We know climate change is happening. We know businesses need to decarbonize. We know supply chains need to change. Biodiversity, circularity, net zero, disclosure and governance have all become part of the conversation. Inside companies, there are also far more people today who understand carbon accounting, data, standards and sustainability reporting than there were just a few years ago. That is real progress.

And yet, in company after company, I still encounter a very similar moment. When sustainability moves beyond the sustainability team and into other functions; when it moves from headquarters into teams, and from senior management to people on the front line, someone will eventually ask:

But what does this actually have to do with me?

I have heard this question many times. It is not always resistance. And it is not necessarily a lack of care. Often, the connection simply has not been made yet.

Recently, I read Mariana Mazzucato’s work at UCL on Climate Change and Culture. One idea stayed with me. If energy systems, transport and digital networks are part of the technical infrastructure required for a green transition, then culture is another form of infrastructure that matters just as much: social infrastructure.

When I read that, I did not think first about theory. I thought about faces I have seen over the past decade.

• People sitting in meeting rooms who initially felt sustainability had very little to do with them.
• People entering a farm, forest or community for the first time, sitting down with the people who live there, and realizing that behind an “ESG issue” are real lives.
• And people who had originally joined an activity simply because their company sent them, but who later began asking: “What else could our company do?”

Over time, I have come to believe that what happens in that space is culture.

We often assume that change requires more knowledge

I used to wonder whether people simply did not understand enough. Perhaps, I thought, if we explained more, people would act. So we added another training session. More data. Another report. Another case study. All of these are important. But the longer I do this work, the more I realize: knowing and wanting are not the same thing.

• A person can understand how serious climate change is and still feel no personal reason to change.
• A team can understand that ESG matters and still see it as the responsibility of the CEO or the sustainability department.
• A company can achieve a long list of sustainability targets without really understanding how they connect to the business, or where all of this work is ultimately supposed to lead.

This is why we have often described the situation as an ESG Puzzle.

• One piece is carbon.
• Another is DEI.
• Another is biodiversity.
• Another is philanthropy.
• Another is supply chains.
• Another is employee engagement.

And then there are many more pieces: new concepts to learn, new standards to understand and new requirements to implement. The puzzle keeps growing, and so does the workload. But if nobody can see what the completed picture is supposed to look like, people eventually become tired, confused, disconnected from the reason behind the work—or simply give up.

The longer I work with companies, the more I return to very basic questions

Over the past few years, when facilitating sustainability roadmaps, leadership alignment sessions and internal conversations, I have increasingly started with questions that sound almost too simple:

• What kind of company are you?
• What are you genuinely good at?
• For whom does your existence create meaningful value?
• If your company is still here ten or twenty years from now, what do you hope it will have left behind?
• Are there values you would want to hold onto even if the rules around you continue to change?

These are not questions people answer quickly. Sometimes the room becomes very quiet. But something interesting often happens once the conversation begins. Sustainability efforts that previously sat separately across different departments begin to connect. People start to realize that perhaps they are not working on biodiversity simply because “biodiversity is the latest topic.” They are not reducing emissions only because customers are asking them to. They are not organizing employee engagement simply because it is a KPI. All of these things may connect to a much deeper question: What kind of company do we want to become?

This is where I believe purpose becomes powerful. Purpose is not a sentence on a wall. It is a starting point for judgment. It helps us decide what deserves investment and where we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. It helps us recognize the things we would still choose to do even if nobody required them. And it gives us the courage to look at practices that the market currently treats as normal and ask: Does it really have to be this way? Could there be a better way? Could we bring more people into the process of changing it?

I have also come to understand that culture does not mean “everyone believing the same thing”

When we talk about corporate culture, it is easy to think about shared values, slogans or internal communications. Today, I think about culture somewhat differently. To me, culture is what happens when a group of people gradually develops a shared understanding of how to make choices.

• What do we care about?
• How do we define success?
• What can we compromise on? What can we not compromise on?
• Where do we choose to put our resources?
• And when nobody gives us a standard answer, how do we decide?

Culture is therefore not about convincing everyone to believe exactly the same thing. It is about giving a group of people the ability to face a complex problem and find direction together.

This is also why I was so drawn to Mazzucato’s idea of collective imagination. Much of the sustainability conversation tells us what the future must contain less of. Less carbon. Less plastic. Less waste. Less consumption. All of that matters. But if our picture of the future consists only of “less,” it is difficult for people to look forward to it. So perhaps we should also ask a different question:

If the transition succeeds, what do we want more of?

This question became much more real for me when I began spending more time in communities

In recent years, I have accompanied companies into forests, farms, Indigenous communities and rural places. I often feel that these places have taught me more than I originally intended to bring to them.

When a company first enters a place, it is natural to begin with the language it already knows: How many trees can we plant? How many employees can participate? What data can we collect? Can this become an ESG result? These are reasonable questions. But if you stay a little longer, you begin to see something else.

A piece of land is not simply a “site.” It may also be someone’s work. A family’s income. A place remembered by elders. A place where children grow up. And a place where a culture may—or may not—have the chance to continue. At that point, the questions begin to change. We stop asking only: What does the company want to do? And begin asking:

• What does this place actually need?
• What does the natural environment need?
• Where does the company have something meaningful to contribute that can create lasting value?

And eventually: Could we create something together that none of us could create alone?

For me, this is one of the most compelling things about sustainability. It is not about sacrificing business in order to do an additional good deed. Very often, it is about bringing different needs together and creating a possibility that did not exist before.

This is why I increasingly believe that one of the most important capabilities in sustainability is imagination

Not fantasy. The ability to see a future that does not yet exist, but could be created together.

• A company can move beyond simply selling more products and rethink what value its products genuinely create for customers.
• A budget originally allocated to an employee activity can become a shared team experience, generate income for a local community, contribute to ecological restoration and help employees understand what their company means when it talks about sustainability.
• A corporate gift can become more than a purchased item. It can reconnect to a piece of land, to the people caring for it, and to a local economy that has a chance to keep growing.
• A supply-chain initiative can become more than asking suppliers to complete another form. It can become an invitation to ask together: Could our industry work in a better way?

None of these begin with a standard answer. They require people to sit down together, understand one another, experiment, and gradually make a new possibility real.

So today, I no longer think of sustainability culture as simply “raising sustainability awareness”

I think it means gradually building three things inside an organization.

• The first is Purpose. We understand why we are doing this.
• The second is Meaning. People can see how it connects to their own work.
• The third is Technology. We use technology, data, systems and professional expertise to turn what we want to achieve into reality—and to do it better.

All three matter. Without technology, many good ideas can never reach scale. But technology alone can easily remain just a tool. Without meaning, even the best strategy can remain the work of a small group of people. And without purpose, it becomes difficult to know where we are going in the first place.

Perhaps true transformation is the journey from “we should” to “we want to”

After all these years of working with companies, the moments that give me the most hope—and, frankly, the most joy—are usually not when a company announces an ambitious new target. They are when someone begins asking the next question on their own.

• “If that is true, could we rethink our product design and processes as well?”
• “Could procurement or logistics become part of this?”
• “Could we bring our suppliers into the conversation—not simply penalize them, but work together on how to improve?”
• “What would happen if we kept doing this for three years? What would it make possible for them?”

When questions like these begin to emerge, I know something has shifted. Change is no longer being pushed only from the outside. Someone on the inside has started wanting to move forward. There is a small breakthrough. A different possibility has become visible.

And so I keep wondering: after all these years of talking about the climate transition, perhaps what we need next is not only better technology. Perhaps we also need more spaces where people can participate, imagine and find meaning. Spaces that allow us to move beyond “We cannot continue like this.” and begin to see: “Another future could actually be good.”

• More healthy land.
• More forests that are genuinely cared for.
• More livelihoods that can remain in local communities.
• More children who know where their food comes from.
• More business expertise being used to solve real problems.
• More people who know that their work is not only about completing a task, but about using their capabilities to take part in something worth doing.

These are not distant ideals. Many people are already building pieces of this future. Perhaps what we need is to make these scattered possibilities more visible, connect them, and allow more people to help them grow.

That is also why I still love the work I do. Because every time I see a genuine sustainability transformation begin, it rarely starts with a new ESG checklist. It starts with a group of people talking, imagining, and asking together: How could we do this better? And when a group of people becomes willing to genuinely ask that question together, culture has already begun to change.