A thoughtful post from Bridget Harris got me thinking.
Specifically, her observation that environmental risks often struggle to make the journey from conference stages to boardroom agendas.
I wonder if part of the challenge is that we’re framing climate change as an environmental issue when, increasingly, it may be a stewardship issue.
Not because every board member needs to become a climate scientist.
But because climate-related risks have the potential to affect the conditions upon which organisations depend: energy, infrastructure, supply chains, workforce availability, productivity and growth.
And when the conditions upon which success depends begin to change, stewardship becomes a matter of prudence.
For decades, many organisations could largely assume that certain things would continue to work.
Energy would be available.
Materials would arrive.
Infrastructure would function.
Insurance would remain affordable.
People would be available to do the work.
Customers would have money to spend.
Most leadership conversations therefore focused on improving performance within those conditions.
How do we grow?
How do we improve productivity?
How do we increase shareholder value?
How do we outperform competitors?
Those questions still matter.
But I wonder if another question is becoming increasingly important.
What happens when the conditions upon which performance depends begin to change?
Whether you’re a sole trader buying materials, a multinational managing global supply chains, or a government seeking to secure food and energy supplies, future prosperity depends upon the resilience of the systems upon which we all rely.
Climate change is not the only challenge facing those systems.
Demographic shifts.
Geopolitical instability.
Resource constraints.
Technological disruption.
Workforce shortages.
Social and economic pressures.
All have the potential to affect costs, availability, productivity and growth.
But climate change has the potential to amplify many of them.
That matters because systems rarely respond in neat and predictable ways.
A drought isn’t simply a drought.
It can affect food production, energy generation, insurance costs, transportation networks and migration patterns.
A flood isn’t simply a local event.
It can disrupt supply chains, increase costs and influence investment decisions thousands of miles away.
A heatwave isn’t simply a weather story.
It can affect workforce availability, productivity, public health and infrastructure performance.
The challenge is not the individual events.
It’s how they interact.
Complex systems often produce non-linear outcomes.
Small pressures can create disproportionately large consequences.
Multiple risks can combine to create entirely new challenges.
What appears manageable in isolation can become far more significant when several pressures arrive together.
The result is that conditions we once took for granted can become constraints.
And those constraints are rarely linear.
This is where I think the conversation shifts.
Away from sustainability as a specialist topic.
Towards stewardship as a leadership responsibility.
Because stewardship is not about making organisations less commercial.
It is about understanding the conditions upon which commercial success depends.
It asks different questions.
What assumptions are we making about the future?
Which conditions does our success depend upon most?
How resilient are those conditions?
How resilient are our supply chains to climate-related disruption or geopolitical shocks?
What assumptions are we making about future energy costs and availability?
What happens if the skills and workforce we depend upon become harder to attract, retain or develop?
How exposed are we to rising insurance, infrastructure or resource costs?
Which dependencies represent our greatest vulnerabilities?
What adaptations are we making today?
Where might multiple risks combine to create disproportionately large consequences?
And if the next twenty years prove more volatile than the last twenty, what would we do differently now?
These don’t feel like environmental questions to me.
They feel like leadership questions.
Governance questions.
Shareholder questions.
Because every organisation depends upon a set of conditions that sit beyond its direct control.
The more uncertain those conditions become, the more important it becomes to understand them.
I suspect many boards already recognise this instinctively.
The language may differ.
They may talk about risk, resilience, continuity, adaptation or value creation.
But underneath each of those conversations sits the same fundamental question:
What conditions must exist for our organisation to succeed?
Importantly, this isn’t really about whether any one forecast proves right or wrong.
It’s not about predicting the future with certainty.
It is about prudence.
About understanding the conditions upon which our organisations depend.
About testing our assumptions.
About considering what might happen if those assumptions prove incorrect.
About preparing for a range of possible futures rather than betting on just one.
And about acting before manageable risks become non-linear constraints.
The organisations that thrive over the coming decades may not be those that make the most accurate predictions.
They may be those that ask the best questions.
Those that adapt earliest.
Those that strengthen the conditions that make success possible.
That is why I increasingly see climate adaptation as a boardroom issue.
Not because boards should abandon their focus on growth, profitability or shareholder returns.
But because those outcomes ultimately depend upon conditions that can no longer be taken for granted.
In an increasingly uncertain world, stewardship may be one of the clearest expressions of board and shareholder prudence: understanding those dependencies and acting before they become non-linear constraints on growth, resilience and long-term value creation.
Stefan
—
Stefan Powell is an executive coach and leadership advisor helping good people find agency, create effective forums, and steward in service of meaningful progress.