It is getting harder to find a sustainability strategy that is still on its original timeline.
The commitments made in 2018, 2020 and 2022 are quietly being pushed back. Net zero by 2030. 50% emissions reductions by 2028. Fully circular by 2027. Re-baselined. Re-scoped. Re-stated. Usually without much commentary, and never with the same press-release energy that announced them in the first place.
One by one, the revisions are quiet. In aggregate, they are not. The Science Based Targets initiative has stripped scores of companies’ 2030 commitments from the register that once validated them. The slippage is now a documented, sector-wide pattern, which makes one question worth asking properly. Why?
This isn’t a story about ambition collapsing. The people leading these programmes still believe in the targets. The boards still want them. The regulators still expect them.
The story is structural. And it is worth telling clearly, because the same pattern is about to play out across the next wave of commitments unless something fundamental changes about how strategies are designed.
There is an explanation on offer: macro headwinds, a harder funding environment, the need to re-baseline against current conditions. That tells us only one half of the story, because it places the challenge outside the organisation. To understand the full picture, you need to look inside. And here is what is happening.
The strategies drafted at the height of the post-COP26 momentum were ambitious by design. That is appropriate. Climate science demands ambition. But they were also written, predominantly, as documents. Statements of intent. Targets, timelines, narratives. They were declared. They were not designed as operational plans.
That distinction matters because of what happens in the first three years.
In any decade-long programme, the early progress is anything you can make tangible, at pace. You commission things. You procure. You change what sits inside your own control: the LED retrofits, the renewable energy contracts, the obvious commercial switches. Real work, visibly done, not necessarily requiring anyone else to operate differently. Then it shifts. Everything past that point requires the rest of the business to change how it works: how it decides, allocates capital, incentivises behaviour, deals with suppliers, talks to customers. By then the early momentum has normalised and the assumptions the strategy was built on have moved. That work isn’t within anyone’s gift to commission. It must be designed.
And design, in many cases, was not what the strategies got. They got publication. They got slide decks. They got board approval. What they didn’t get was an operating model, the work of translating the commitment into how every team in the business really runs.
So the first stages of delivery go well, by the lights of the strategy. The wins you control land. The reports get written. The narrative holds.
Then the next phase arrives and requires the business to change something structural. And nobody has designed how that is supposed to happen.
The strategy was never the sustainability teams to deliver in isolation. It belongs to functions they don’t control: finance, procurement, operations. No team can mandate how another one operates. A strategy can ask those functions to change. Only an operating model puts the commitment in their hands. Without one, they are left holding a goal whose delivery sits everywhere except with them.
That is where the strategies start slipping. 2030 becomes 2032. Then 2035. Then, in the more honest cases, 2050, with new language about “transition pathways” and “credible interim milestones.” The commitment hasn’tbeen abandoned. It has been pushed past the point where current leadership is accountable for delivering it.
For the people who saw this coming, it is frustrating in a specific way. They knew the strategy needed operational design from the start. They said so. They watched it get filed. They are now watching the consequences arrive, three or four years on, with a depressing sense of inevitability.
So here is the thing worth saying plainly. This is not a failure of strategy. It is a failure of what strategy alone can do.
A strategy can name an outcome. It can declare an intent. It can secure board agreement and external messaging. What it cannot do, by itself, is change how a business operates. That is a different discipline: the discipline of design, and specifically service and operational design, applied to the question of how every commitment becomes how every team really works.
The organisations that deliver on their 2030 commitments will not be the ones with the best-written strategies. They will be the ones whose strategies were operational from day one. The ones whose commitments were translated, at the moment they were made, into the language each team already speaks. Procurement people who could act on it as procurement people. Finance teams who could measure it in their own terms. Operations teams who could plan it inside their own cadence.
This is the work that mostly didn’t happen. It is the work that quietly turns 2030 into 2050.
It is also the work that can still be done. Slippage isn’t terminal. Strategies that have stalled can be redesigned at the operational layer. Not by rewriting the strategy, but by building the operating model between the strategy and the business that should have been there from the start. That is a design project, not a strategy project, and the discipline behind it is more available than most organisations realise.
What it requires is honesty about why the existing strategy isn’t moving. Not the comfortable answer we started with. The structural one: the strategy moves the document. It does not move the business. Until those two are designed to operate as one thing, no amount of additional strategy will produce additional delivery.
That is the work Lantela was built for. And it is the work that, done now, can still close the gap before 2030 quietly becomes 2050.
We would be glad to talk to anyone wrestling with this, whether you have already started the redesign, or are still trying to find the language to name what has gone wrong.
The gap is real. The design discipline that closes it is real. The window to close it is narrowing.
There is still time.