The end of the either/or?

Sustainability is becoming an increasingly commercial conversation.

Instead of focusing on the environmental gains, conversations increasingly focus on protecting supply chains, managing future costs, reducing exposure to risk, responding to regulation and making businesses more resilient. The environmental outcome still matters, of course, but increasingly the things that are good for the planet and the things that are good for the business are pulling in the same direction.

And the numbers suggest this isn't just a change in the conversations I'm hearing.

Deloitte's latest C-suite research puts sustainability alongside technology and AI as a top-three business priority. More interestingly, revenue generation was the most commonly reported business benefit from sustainability activity.

That's quite a shift from sustainability being seen predominantly as a cost or a commitment.

It’s something I've seen before with CSR.

I've worked on charity partnerships at different points in my career, and there was always an interesting tension around the value they created.

The donation was easy to count, as were the funds raised. The value of customers feeling differently about a business was harder to pin down, along with the effect on employee pride, reputation, trust or somebody choosing one organisation over another because they liked what it stood for.

That didn't mean the value wasn't there. We just weren't particularly good at measuring it.

Some of those previously harder-to-quantify things are now becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss as commercially soft.

Edelman's latest global research found that 88% of people consider trust in a brand important or a deal breaker when deciding what to buy. That's almost exactly level with quality and value for money.

If trust influences whether people buy from you to broadly the same degree as price and quality, the things that build or damage that trust have to be part of the commercial conversation.

What are we not counting?

I wonder if we're now seeing something similar play out on a much bigger scale.

For years, doing the right thing has often been treated as a cost to the business. Part of the reason may simply be that the cost was easier to see than the value.

Spend £1m making an operation more sustainable and the £1m is immediately visible. The value of greater resilience over the following decade is much harder to put in a spreadsheet.

But some of those previously hidden costs are becoming much more visible.

McKinsey recently looked at the public communications of major US and European companies and found mentions of climate resilience had increased by 55% between 2021 and 2025. It also points to insurers increasingly reflecting changing climate risk in their pricing.

Resilience is no longer an abstract future benefit when there can be a very real price attached to not having it.

And I think the same principle applies beyond sustainability.

We can count the cost of investing in communities more easily than the value of the goodwill it creates. We can measure what a charity partnership costs more easily than the trust or employee engagement it builds, just as we know the price of improving a supply chain today more readily than the potential cost of that supply chain failing tomorrow.

Businesses naturally make decisions using the information available to them, so it's perhaps unsurprising that the things we could count most easily have historically carried more weight.

What's changing is how much more of the other side of the equation we can now see.

That doesn't mean every sustainable decision will pay for itself or every social initiative will drive growth. There will continue to be genuine trade-offs, and doing the right thing sometimes means accepting them.

But the commercial calculation is getting broader.

Risk, resilience, trust, reputation and the way customers and employees feel about an organisation all have v