The Hidden Blockers to Climate Execution
Transformation lessons from the front line, applied to the climate transition
Author’s note: I first wrote a version of this piece as a straight transformation article. Since then, I’ve seen the same patterns show up again and again in climate work. The strategies are often sound. The intent is there. The plans look reasonable on paper. Then delivery stalls in the middle layers, not because people are malicious or ignorant, but because the system around them makes follow-through hard.
I’ve spent a lot of time leading transformation programmes where the organisation genuinely needed to change. I’ve also worked with brilliant leaders who cared deeply about customers, performance, and their teams, and still didn’t visibly back “business critical” initiatives in the way everyone hoped they would.
Climate transition and decarbonisation are now landing in that same territory. They’re becoming business transformation work. That means the same execution blockers apply, plus a few new twists around uncertainty, data, and cross-functional trade-offs.
A familiar moment
There I was, sitting on a plane, another overnight flight to another strategy launch day in another country. Up until that point everything had been going well, but that night I was worried. I was responsible for the global roll out of a new client engagement model that underpinned a transformational business strategy.
The strategy was strong. The communications were smart. The expectations were clear. The plan was difficult to argue with.
And yet, during the launch session, some leaders and senior managers argued with it and objected strongly. The pushback was emotionally charged. I genuinely didn’t expect the people responsible for leading a clearly important initiative to challenge it so hard.
I saw the same underlying issue play out differently when leading localised digital transformation. In that case, some senior business leaders delegated ownership of implementation and new ways of working to junior managers deep in their teams. They avoided getting involved in the communication or day-to-day management of the changes. They supported it superficially, which sent mixed messages to their teams. They didn’t object, but they didn’t actively back it either.
If you’re trying to drive decarbonisation, resilience, or climate risk integration, you’ll recognise both scenarios. Sometimes you get open resistance. Sometimes you get polite agreement paired with quiet delegation and low energy.
So why does this happen?
When this happens, people often jump to simple explanations.
“Maybe they don’t care.”
In my experience, that’s rarely true. Most leaders care about customers, their teams, the business and performance. Lack of care is not the default setting.
“Maybe they don’t understand.”
Sometimes we could do more to bring changes to life, to make implications concrete, and to explain what the business will look like when it’s working. But in the examples above, misunderstanding wasn’t the root cause.
“Maybe they just don’t buy in.”
That’s possible, but again, often not the main issue. In many programmes there’s been input into direction and plans, plus strong implementation support. And still the support from some leaders and managers is hesitant or inconsistent.
From my experience leading transformation, there are three common blockers. When you apply them to climate execution, they become even clearer.
1) Lack of bandwidth
We ask a lot of leaders and managers. Have you ever worked in a business where they’ve been asked to do less year on year? Me neither.
The pressure is often unbearable. So when you introduce another “business critical” initiative, the response is not always opposition to the goal. It’s the reality of capacity. People don’t have time to understand the changes properly, think through implications, and manage the delivery work in a way that feels responsible.
Climate execution often gets added on top of everything else, and it’s rarely resourced like the material business shift it actually is. Leaders can’t see how their teams will free up the headspace to take on something new. Even when they believe the work matters, they can’t find a believable path through the workload.
If you want climate transition to land, it can’t be an extra layer of work that magically fits into the margins. It needs real trade-offs.
2) Lack of experience
By definition, transformation asks people to work in new ways. Climate transition adds another layer because it often introduces unfamiliar topics, unfamiliar data, and unfamiliar decision trade-offs.
If you’ve spent most of your career working one way, learning to work differently is hard. It’s even harder to lead others through it when you’re still figuring it out yourself.
That can show up as pushback. It can also show up as avoidance. Leaders and managers stay close enough to sponsor the change, but not close enough to own it in public. They delegate the hard bits, then wonder why adoption is patchy.
This isn’t about incompetence. It’s about a capability gap that the organisation hasn’t acknowledged, or hasn’t created safe ways to close.
3) Confidence and perceived risk
Managers feel the pressure to have answers. They worry about making bad decisions, giving bad advice, or looking uncertain in front of their teams. They worry that their uncertainty will undermine belief in the change.
With climate work, perceived risk can be higher because the terrain is still shifting. Targets, regulation, carbon accounting, reporting expectations, supplier constraints, and technology choices can all feel like moving parts. Leaders may fear committing to actions that later look naïve, expensive, or “not the right answer” once the organisation learns more.
So you get hesitation. You get cautious language. You get leaders who support the idea but don’t step into the role of active change leader.
Again, this is understandable. The mistake is pretending it isn’t there.
So what do we do about it?
The good news is that these barriers are solvable. Not with slogans, and not by telling people to “be more committed”, but by changing the conditions around them.
1) Help leaders and managers prioritise, and create space
If an initiative is truly business critical, other work has to stop or reduce.
To quote Michael Porter: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
Climate execution needs the same discipline. If you want business units to deliver decarbonisation actions, integrate climate risk, and build resilience, then something else has to come off the list. Otherwise you’re asking managers to perform impossible arithmetic with their time and attention.
This is a leadership job, not a communications job. Leaders need to make the trade-offs visible and defend them.
2) Support leaders and managers to build understanding and practical skill
This starts with being clear about what managers actually need to know and do.
Leaders might not need to personally run the carbon accounting model or use every system being rolled out. But they do need to understand what it does, what it changes, where the pain points are, and what “good” looks like in practice. If they can’t talk about it authentically, their teams will feel it.
When you pilot new solutions, use the pilot for more than testing functionality. Use it to learn how adoption really works, what behaviour shifts are required, and where the skills gaps are. Then build support around what you learn, not what you assumed.
One practical point that matters more than people admit: create safe spaces for managers to learn. Separate capability-building from public performance. If someone is worried about looking foolish, they won’t ask the questions they need to ask. Pairing and buddying can work well, including reverse mentoring from more junior colleagues who already have confidence in the new tools and ways of working.
3) Provide targeted support to embed new ways of working
We can’t throw big challenges into the business and expect people to work out how to implement them alone.
Readiness assessments help, not as bureaucracy, but as honesty. How much change is really required? What support is needed? Where will the organisation struggle? Where can it reuse assets and learnings from elsewhere?
Support can come from a central team, from within business units, or from external help. The best results usually come from a blend, with strong collaboration across functions so implementation tools and lessons learned are shared rather than reinvented.
There’s a reality check here - the answer can’t always be “more training and more support”. Time and money are limited. At some point, leaders and teams need to take ownership, build capability as they go, and solve problems in the flow of work.
So the question becomes: how do you increase ownership without dumping responsibility?
Participation-led Transition
One practical answer is what I now think of as a Participation-led Transition approach.
It means deliberately involving people from different levels of the organisation in the design, piloting, and roll out of the change. Not as a token workshop. Not as an engagement theatre. Real participation in the work.
Done well, it improves solutions and it changes the psychology of delivery.
When managers and teams help shape the approach, they trust it more. They can see the constraints, the trade-offs, and the intent. They’ve had a chance to point out what won’t work in practice. They’ve influenced the implementation plan. They understand what “good” looks like. They’re more confident talking about it.
It also changes advocacy. People who were at risk of being passive, or cautious, become informed supporters because they have skin in the game. Their visible involvement reassures others. It lowers perceived risk because uncertainty is addressed through learning, not ignored.
Participation can take many forms: briefings and Q&A in team meetings, targeted one-to-ones, design workshops, pilot teams, feedback loops that are actually listened to. The common thread is honest communication of progress and a real desire to learn from what people are experiencing.
When this is done well, change stops being something “done to” the business. It becomes something the business helps build. And simply put, leaders and managers who might otherwise slow progress become the empowered drivers of it.
A final link to integrated planning
Climate execution fails less because people don’t care, and more because planning and delivery systems weren’t built for this kind of integrated trade-off.
That’s one reason I’ve developed The Integrated Value Planning Framework. Not as a new layer of process, but as a way to embed climate as a real variable in strategy, financial planning, and transformation rhythms. When trade-offs, capacity choices, and capability-building are designed into the planning cycle, you rely less on heroics and more on repeatable execution.
For now, the main point is simple. If you want climate transition to land, treat it like serious transformation work. Then build the conditions that allow the middle layers to lead it with credibility.
