Sustainability efforts can unravel quickly without strategic agility. Between 2020 and 2022, for example, lithium prices surged nearly 900%, sending shockwaves through the electric vehicle industry. From April 2025, evolving tariffs on critical imports — in addition to US executive actions targeting climate technologies and prioritising coal and a noticeable backtrack on environmental, social and governance language — have forced companies to rethink how the energy transition will evolve around the globe.
Regardless of the political sentiment and challenged supply chains, sustainability is at its heart about ensuring your company is set up for long-term success and taking a holistic perspective on the risks, disruptions and opportunities available.
Indeed, as this Executive Insights highlights, companies that have embedded sustainability successfully and considered their Scope 3 emissions are likely to have better traceability and understanding of their supply chains, enabling them to more quickly grasp the impact of disruptions.
Companies face shifting regulatory landscapes, volatile supply chains, technological disruption and consumer demands that change as swiftly as a trending hashtag. Traditional strategies simply don’t work in this new reality. If businesses hope to thrive, adaptability must become second nature.
The stakes are undeniably high. Organisations that master agility position themselves to seize emerging opportunities, smoothly navigate disruptions and outperform competitors that are slower to adjust. Agility is a strategic capability, strengthened through scenario planning, modular thinking, digital transformation, decentralised decision-making and purposeful collaboration across ecosystems. Companies that embed these capabilities gain stability along with the flexibility to lead rather than follow.
To fully appreciate agility’s value, it’s crucial to first understand the sustainability challenges organisations face, from regulatory volatility to fragile supply chains.
Current landscape: Challenges in achieving sustainability
Organisations pursuing sustainability find themselves navigating an increasingly turbulent environment, marked by unpredictable regulatory swings, fragile supply chains, complex stakeholder expectations, rapid technological change and intense economic pressures. The path towards meaningful progress is rarely linear — success requires a sophisticated understanding of the multifaceted challenges involved and the agility to address them swiftly.
Stakeholder alignment
Sustainability is complex, partly because it involves much more than internal commitments alone. It requires engaging a vast network of stakeholders — from government regulators and suppliers to customers, industry enablers and investors — each with distinct agendas, maturity levels and definitions of success. This tangled web makes coordinated progress challenging at best; aligning diverse interests and expectations across these groups becomes a delicate balancing act.
Regulatory volatility
Businesses today grapple with policies that shift without warning. Consider the rapid-fire changes in US emissions regulations: ambitious targets under President Joe Biden and then substantial rollbacks and policy reversals under President Donald Trump (including targeted executive actions set to prevent state-level climate change policies), along with tariffs targeting some of the main exporters of climate technology to the US.
Similarly, the UK’s deadline shift from 2030 to 2035 for banning new internal combustion engine vehicle sales, Germany’s abrupt policy reversal on nuclear power, and the EU’s Omnibus package delaying sustainability reporting requirements and reducing the reach and impact of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive highlight how swiftly regulatory landscapes can transform.
This unpredictability forces businesses to frequently recalibrate their investments, making long-term planning feel like navigating through fog.
Supply chain disruptions
As reliance on China for rare earth minerals and battery production intensifies supply chain risks globally, with geopolitical tensions threatening continuous disruption, companies need to actively manage and fortify their supply chains. These uncertainties stall sustainability projects, forcing businesses into reactive rather than proactive positions.
Market and consumer dynamics
L.E.K. Consulting’s Global Consumer Sustainability Survey found that customers demand sustainable products, yet they’re hesitant when faced with higher prices and are often uncertain about which aspects of sustainability they should prioritise.
Likewise, companies developing sustainable packaging encounter resistance in passing the premium costs to consumers. Bridging the gap between sustainability aspirations and practical affordability remains a significant challenge.
Technological advancements
Technologies like AI-driven renewable energy grids, carbon capture and advanced recycling offer enormous potential — but implementation costs and the complexity of integrating them into legacy infrastructure remain daunting barriers. To compete effectively, organisations must rapidly integrate these solutions, despite economic and logistical challenges.
Economic pressures
Economic uncertainty and potential downturns frequently compel businesses to prioritise immediate profitability, putting critical long-term sustainability initiatives at risk. Yet agility provides a pathway through this turbulence, offering organisations the strategic tools to navigate disruption and turn uncertainty into opportunity.
Agility’s role in achieving sustainability
To effectively manage today’s sustainability challenges, businesses need practical strategies for translating agility into tangible outcomes. L.E.K.’s agility framework (see Figure 1) illustrates how agility enables organisations to transform sustainability challenges into strategic opportunities.
