Most sustainability strategies get approved. But most of them also stall (in one way or another).

It’s rarely immediate. The stall is usually subtle and slow instead. The functional leads who were supposed to embed it into their team plans don’t prioritise it. The cross-functional working group loses momentum after the second or third meeting. The targets that seemed agreed upon become negotiable when they start requiring actual resources, actual budget, actual behaviour change from people whose KPIs don’t mention sustainability at all.

And when that happens, the instinct is to mark it down as an execution problem. We need better governance. Clearer accountability structures. More regular reporting. A steering committee with teeth. And sometimes those things help, but they’re only treating a symptom. The strategy was set to stall long before execution — it happened at the moment it was built. Because it was built in a way that created endorsement. Not ownership.

Endorsement is when someone says yes to a finished thing you’ve presented to them.

Ownership is when someone has enough stake in the process that they feel responsible for the outcome.

These feel similar from the outside — both result in approval, both feel like progress. But they produce completely different outcomes once the meeting ends and the real work begins.

An endorsed strategy lives in the sustainability team. The sustainability team is accountable for it, monitors it, reports on it, and follows up when it stalls. Everyone else participates when asked and deprioritises when busy.

An owned strategy lives across the business. The sustainability team still leads it — but the functional leads feel genuine stake in the outcomes because they had a hand in shaping them. When it stalls, they notice. When resources are needed, they advocate.

The difference between a strategy that moves and one that doesn’t is almost never the quality of the strategy itself. It’s the ownership built — or not built — in the process of creating it.

Most sustainability strategy processes are designed to produce a good strategy. One that’s smart, relevant, and maybe even validated through engagement. In many cases though, these strategic development processes are not designed to produce ownership.

A materiality assessment, a gap analysis, a benchmarking exercise, a series of executive interviews — these are inputs to strategy development. They’re valuable, but they’re not the same as the kind of deep, bilateral engagement that creates genuine investment in outcomes.

Genuine ownership comes from participation — from people feeling like their perspective shaped what landed on the page. Not just that they were consulted, but that they contributed. That when they read the final strategy, they can see their own priorities, their own language, their own constraints reflected back at them.

And that requires a different kind of process. Not a longer one, necessarily. But a more relational one.

Before the strategy is written, you’re in conversations — not to explain what sustainability needs, but to understand what each function is already navigating. What they’re accountable for. Where they see risk. What would make sustainability feel like an asset to their work rather than an additional burden imposed from another team. You’re mapping paradigms. You’re building relationships. And you’re gathering the intelligence that will make the strategy land differently when it arrives.

Then, as the strategy develops, the people who will have to deliver it aren’t surprised by what’s in it. Because elements of it came from conversations you had with them. Because they’ve been brought into the thinking, not handed the conclusion.

When the strategy reaches the executive table, the informal buy-in is already there. The approval becomes almost a formality — because the ownership was built in the process of creating it, not sought at the end.

Take a cross-functional initiative — let’s say reducing packaging waste across a product range.

The sustainability team has the data. They know what materials need to change, what the environmental case is, what the alternative options look like. They could write that strategy in a room by themselves and it would be technically excellent.

But the people who actually need to act on it — product design, procurement, manufacturing, marketing — weren’t in that room. So when the strategy arrives, product design sees a constraint on their creative brief. Procurement sees a supplier transition they haven’t budgeted for. Manufacturing sees a process change nobody consulted them about. Marketing sees a sustainability story that doesn’t align with their calendar.

Everyone has a reason to slow it down. Nobody has a reason to accelerate it.

Now run the same process differently:

Before anything is written, you sit with each of those functions. You ask what they’re already navigating. You understand their constraints and their pressures. You learn that procurement has actually been looking for a reason to review that supplier relationship anyway. You learn that marketing has a campaign coming up where a credible sustainability story would be genuinely valuable. You learn that product design has ideas about material innovation they’ve never had a forum to explore.

Now the strategy you write reflects all of that. It solves for their constraints. It creates opportunity where it previously created burden. And the people who need to deliver it feel like they helped build it.

That’s not a longer process. It’s a more intentional one.

Before your next strategy development cycle — or your next significant cross-functional ask — it’s worth being honest about a few things.

Who will need to deliver this, and were they part of building it?

If the answer is no, you have endorsement risk. The strategy might get approved and still stall when it needs those people to act.

Does this strategy reflect their priorities, or just yours?

A strategy written entirely from the sustainability team’s perspective will feel like an imposition to everyone else. The more it reflects the language, concerns, and incentives of the people delivering it, the more it will feel like shared work.

Have you built the relational infrastructure for this ask?

The conversations that create ownership happen before the strategy is presented — not in the presentation itself. If those conversations haven’t happened, the best pitch in the world is still a cold ask.

This is not an argument for endless consultation rounds or design-by-committee strategy processes that dilute ambition and take years to complete.

You can hold a clear strategic direction and still build participation into the process of developing it. You can know roughly where you need to land and still bring people into the journey of getting there in a way that creates genuine investment. The sustainability team’s expertise, values, and strategic clarity still matter — enormously. The goal isn’t to outsource the strategy to people who don’t understand it. It’s to build it in a way that means the people who need to deliver it feel like it’s theirs too.

That’s what makes this influence design, not compromise. And it’s the difference between a strategy that gets approved and a strategy that actually moves.

Endorsement is built at the end — through a good pitch, a credible strategy, a well-timed ask.

Ownership is built through the process — through the conversations, the participation, the relational work that happens long before anyone is asked to approve anything.

You don’t build buy-in at the end. You build it through the process. And if your strategies have been stalling after approval, that’s probably where to look.

Hit reply and tell me — does your current strategy have endorsement, ownership, or both? I’d genuinely like to know.