By Cory Hughes, Managing Director, Lantela
Almost ten years ago, in November 2016, I stood on stage at a London seminar on digital transformation and told the room they were about to be blindsided by climate change.
I meant it as one of six global trends every organisation needed to take seriously. The question I posed then was how we would adapt when conditions stopped being predictable. The discipline I argued for was design.
Ten years on, the blindsiding has happened. Conditions are not predictable. Climate, regulation, supply chains, energy markets, customer expectations, public trust, even the speed at which technology arrives. Almost none of it is sitting still in the way the strategies of the late 2010s assumed it would.
I am writing today because the observation I made on a London stage in 2016 is now the territory I work in full time. Today I want to introduce you to Lantela, a new design-led sustainability consultancy I am leading as Managing Director, powered by Perago.
Folks working on sustainability know what needs to happen. They have action plans, targets, data, and a hard-won budget. Walk into any sustainability or ESG team in the UK and you will find smart, committed people with a clear-eyed view of what their organisation needs to do.
What they have a much harder time with is a world that refuses to sit still while they try to deliver.
The strategies were written for a world that has changed
Most sustainability strategies were not designed. They were declared.
A declaration is a statement of intent set against the conditions of the moment. A design is something made to deliver in the real world, and to keep delivering when those conditions change. Past commitments to net zero by 2030 were sensible declarations against the conditions of the day. They were not, for the most part, built as designs that could withstand a changing world.
When energy markets reorganise. When regulation accelerates in some places and retreats in others. When supply chains are rerouted, broken, and rerouted again. When AI arrives in the middle of all of it. The world the declarations were made against stopped existing somewhere around the eighteen-month mark.
In Wales, the Well-being of Future Generations Act, a piece of legislation the United Nations has described as a model the world will follow, anticipated some of this. It places a statutory duty on every public body to think long-term, to involve the people they serve, to prevent rather than react. It is a piece of design from 2015 that holds up remarkably well in 2026 for two reasons. It was built to assume change rather than stability, and it was built to be operated across functions rather than inside one.
Most sustainability strategies were built for neither. They were drafted to hold steady, in a single language, often by a single team. Sustainability sits in the sustainability function. Procurement, finance, operations, customer service, technology and HR each carry on in their own languages, against their own pressures, with the strategy nowhere in their day-to-day.
This is a partly a failure of design discipline. Two failures, in fact, that show up together: a failure to design for change, and a failure to translate across the functions that must deliver. This is how you design something that survives contact with a moving world, and how you make sure every team is part of how it lasts.
That is the work Lantela is built to do.
The name Lantela comes from two roots. Tela, the Latin for woven cloth: the fabric that holds because of the relationship between its threads. Lan, the Welsh for rise: the optimism of looking upward.
We look at the fabric of an organisation and weave sustainability into the way it actually works: into the product teams, the delivery roadmaps, the procurement decisions, the everyday requirements. Not alongside the work. Inside it. Thread by thread, until it becomes inseparable from how the organisation operates.
To lift your organisation as you do it. To rise to meet your ambitions.
What Lantela does
Lantela is a sustainability consultancy powered by Perago, the transformation and change consultancy I have been part of for the last four years as Director of Strategic Design. Lantela works in the gap between sustainability commitments and the day-to-day reality of services, systems and decisions. It’s a gap that Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s research on circular design points to: how up to 80% of a product’s environmental impact is locked in at the design stage. The same logic applies to services. The decisions made when a service is being designed set the environmental and social cost of running it for years afterwards. Designing for sustainability later is always slower, more expensive, and less effective than designing for it from the start.
We approach this problem space through three interconnected lenses.
Efficiency simplifies services so they are leaner, cheaper to run, and less resource-hungry. Most organisations are running on a patchwork of legacy systems that costs more in money and energy than anyone usually measures. Simplifying it is the quickest sustainability win available, and it tends to pay for itself.
Transition redesigns how an organisation operates so that sustainable ways of working can take hold under conditions of change, adapting business models towards circularity, nature regeneration and social value
Place brings the communities affected by an organisation’s decisions into the design of those decisions. It treats local wisdom as a source of insight, not a stakeholder to consult, and builds social value into how delivery happens rather than into a separate report.
In practice the three are applied together. Design for the long term, not the quarterly report. Design for change, not for the status quo.
The community we are launching into
Lantela is not arriving at this on its own. The Design Council’s Design for Planet movement, which I am proud to be part of as a Design Council expert, has been one of the most consistent forces in building a community of practitioners working on these questions. Sophie Thomas’s challenge that designers need to “get out of our little design bubbles” sits with me often. So does the Design Council’s Skills for Planet movement, which is asking exactly the right question: what knowledge do designers need to put sustainable design into practice?
The work ahead is bigger than any one consultancy. We are interested in doing it with the people already doing it well.
What happens next
This is the start, not the finished product. Over the coming months we will work with a small number of organisations to test and refine the approach in practice. We will run a series of workshops for sustainability and ESG leaders through the summer. We will share what we learn here, openly, because none of this is solved by any one organisation alone.
If you are working through this in your own organisation, or you can see someone who is, I would love to talk.
Lantela is built to close the delivery gap. We would love to do it with you.