Sustainability is now a business imperative — driven by rising regulations, shifting consumer expectations, supply chain pressures, and the undeniable reality of the planetary crisis. A solid sustainability strategy helps you stay compliant, competitive, and credible. It aligns your vision with long-term value, reduces risks, and unlocks opportunities for innovation and resilience.

But here’s the problem: most sustainability strategies still fail. Not because people don’t care — but because the process is broken.

Let’s name the elephant in the room: most strategies fail because they’re…

• Too high-level. Broad ambitions with no link to operations.
• Too siloed. Sustainability lives in one department while the rest of the org carries on as usual.
• Too reactive. Built for compliance, not opportunity or competitive advantage.
• Too static. The world changes — your strategy should too.
• Too focused on symptoms, not root causes. Measuring emissions is useful — but if you don’t rethink what’s driving them, you’re just managing the problem, not solving it.
  

And often, they fail because they weren’t built with the people who are supposed to implement them.

At Quest, we help organizations design sustainability strategies that are bold, actionable, and embedded. Here’s what that looks like:

1. Start with Systems Thinking: Don’t jump to solutions, but instead zoom out — mapping the full system around your business. Explore dependencies, impacts, leverage points, and feedback loops. Our Impact Scan is our indispensable tool to ensure that all factors are kept in mind.

2. Engage People Early: Real change happens when the whole organization is involved. Work with your teams — not just top leadership — to understand what’s possible, what’s blocking progress, and where the energy lies.

3. Ground It in Materiality: It is essential to use double materiality to find out what really matters. Not just to regulators or investors, but to the health of your business, your communities, and the planet. This is where risks meet opportunities.

4. Design for Action, Not Just Aspiration: You can’t stop at the vision. It is about co-creating roadmaps with clear roles, milestones, and resources — built to be embedded across teams, not shelved in a PDF.

5. Keep It Alive: A good strategy isn’t static — it listens, learns, and grows. It is crucial to build in feedback loops and capacity-building moments to keep momentum going, ensuring you to constantly evolve and adapt.

6. Build Accountability from the Top Down: Did you know that, according to Planet Tracker, over a quarter of companies have no link between executive pay and sustainability performance? Sustainability must be owned — by everyone. That’s why we always work with leadership to align ESG goals with governance, decision-making, and even incentives. Visible commitment from the top creates clarity and credibility across the whole organization.

You don’t need another “strategy document.” You need a process that helps your organization shift its mindset, engage its people, and take smart, systemic action.

That’s what we do at Quest.

We guide teams through materiality, co-creation, and systems thinking to build strategies that don’t just tick boxes — they create real impact.