Shared Doorways to
COMPETITIVE SUSTAINABILITY
Helping leaders accelerate corporate sustainability and competitive advantage
Find the shared doorway where “doing good” becomes doing better
Shared Doorways help organisations stop treating sustainability like an add-on—and start building advantage through trust, resilience, innovation and measurable impact. They seek to address the inherent conflict between Business-as-Usual growth and sustainability, focusing on shared goals that lead to innovative solutions.
Competitive Sustainability explores how sustainability can be utilized to gain a competitive advantage and work in tandem with the key drivers of a successful
business. It acknowledges the failure of the sustainability community to drive real corporate change and lays out a new and necessary path for successful business, one that both sustainability and business leaders can share.
The Harry belafonte challenge
Looking back at the 1960s, when the civil rights movement was gaining momentum in the USA, Bobby Kennedy was elected Attorney General in 1961. For many in the movement, this appointment was viewed as a significant setback in the movement’s progress. Bobby Kennedy was known for not wanting to get too close to the Civil Rights movement for fear of reputational damage amongst his other supporters in the South, some of whom were still considered supporters of slavery. At one particular meeting deciding how the movement could overcome this hurdle, the famous singer-activist Harry Belafonte famously said to Martin Luther King and the rest of the movement ‘“Gentlemen, I’m releasing you into the world to find one positive thing to say about Bobby Kennedy, because that one positive thing will be the door through which our movement will have to pass” (Bono, 2022). The lesson, as U2’s Bono put it, was a “lightbulb moment” that “you don’t have to agree on everything if the one thing you do agree on is important enough” (Bono, 2022).
Shared doorways
Explore some of our thought leadership and open source resources
The 9R carousel
of progress
what we do
Finding doorways and creating invites to step through them
consulting, training & inspiration
Consulting: Set strategic direction that breaks “business as usual”. Embed that direction into the core operating system so sustainability becomes how the business runs—not a parallel programme.
Training: Equip teams with the frameworks, language and tools to act confidently. Develop practical capability: evidence discipline, decision heuristics with real-world exercises that stick long after the session.
Speaking: Shift leadership narratives from “cost and compliance” to “advantage and resilience” using Shared Doorways that make the logic obvious. Move audiences from inspiration to action with memorable models, sharp stories, and a clear next-step challenge they can take back to work.