There is a moment in every cross-sector workshop when someone from government looks at someone from advertising and says, “Wait—you’re dealing with the exact same thing?”
This happened repeatedly on November 21–22, 2025 at The Astbury during Sustina Lab’s Design Thinking for Sustainability Workshop. A museum architect described staff insisting on wet signatures. A finance professional nodded—their operations team does the same thing. A climate organizer talked about young farmers dreaming of leaving. A CSR specialist recognized it immediately: their volunteers sign up, then disappear. Different contexts. Identical dynamic.
Leaders from government, finance, non-profits, e-commerce, sustainable agriculture, architecture, and creative industries came to the workshop to solve their own sustainability problems using design thinking. But what they discovered, instead, was the human reality beneath those problems. The barriers were not budget, awareness, or technology. They were relational and psychological.
This report captures what surfaced when we listened to the people inside these challenges. Three insights about the human dynamics shaping sustainability work. Three tensions that reveal the gap between what organizations optimize for and what people actually need.
Insight 1: Bureaucracy functions as insurance against institutional punishment.
Participants choose established processes over efficient alternatives because of the legal and professional protection they provide when outcomes fail. In cultures that penalize error more severely than reward innovation, compliance becomes a defensive posture.
Staff prefer wet signatures over digital alternatives not because of technological illiteracy, but because physical documentation carries greater evidentiary weight in accountability reviews. Design professionals exclude the Green Building Code from their work—not because they disagree with sustainability principles, but because deviation from employer mandates introduces personal liability.
Frontline operations consistently optimize for avoiding internal repercussions rather than solving client problems. The “safe” choice—organizationally speaking—is the unsustainable one.
The bottom line:
- Software upgrades and policy updates cannot resolve behavior driven by institutional fear. Solutions must address the underlying psychological contract: redesigning accountability structures to make adaptive behavior safer than rigid compliance.
Insight 2: By removing friction, organizations inadvertently remove meaning.
Organizations optimize for frictionless experiences—one-click sign-ups, concise content, streamlined processes. But participants revealed that the friction itself often contains the meaning. Feeling personally recruited rather than pooled, wrestling with complexity rather than scanning summaries, investing time rather than saving it—these are not inefficiencies to eliminate but experiences that create commitment.
Volunteer management systems that aggregate individuals into “pools” achieve high sign-up rates but fail to convert interest into action. The ease of joining is precisely what makes it meaningless. Media strategies prioritizing brevity were consistently described by audiences as lacking substance—users explicitly requested “rabbit holes” and depth, contradicting the assumption that removing friction creates value.
The bottom line:
- The challenge is not to make participation easier, but to make it matter more. Sustainability messaging, for instance, framed through functional benefits (durability, price) fails to compete with the emotional and identity drivers that govern purchasing decisions. Current touchpoints optimize for rational persuasion in a fundamentally emotional decision space.
Insight 3: Leadership treats disengagement as a motivation problem when it is a system design problem.
Across finance institutions represented in the cohort, leadership identified staff disengagement with brand and customer experience initiatives. In both cases, the proposed solution involved external incentives—gamified award systems and certification programs.
Yet the deeper issue at play here is that organizations have not asked. The disconnect between leadership perception and staff motivation is treated as a communication gap rather than a listening gap. Solutions focus on incentivizing desired behavior rather than understanding existing motivations.
The pattern repeats in government. Museum staff’s preference for manual processes was initially categorized as resistance to change. Deeper exploration revealed it as a calculated response to an accountability structure that provides no protection for digital workflows. The behavior is rational within the existing system; the system itself requires redesign.
The bottom line:
- Organizations cannot incentivize their way out of systemic misalignment. When leadership optimizes for metrics they control (KPIs, awards, efficiency) while staff optimize for outcomes they can defend (protection, proven processes), no amount of gamification will close the gap.
The work is to redesign the underlying system so that individual success and organizational goals align structurally, not motivationally.
Tension 1: Organizations are caught between the mandate to follow established protocols (compliance) and the urgent need to address evolving environmental and market realities (adaptability).
Legacy systems—whether outdated building codes, rigid project workflows, or operational hierarchies—prioritize safety through standardization. However, the actual challenges have evolved beyond what these standards were designed to handle. Stakeholders find themselves forced to choose between being “compliant” with the rules or being “relevant” to the problem they are trying to solve.
Approximately half of the participants described their internal processes using defensive language: “organizational protection,” “fear of repercussions,” “employer requirements.” Staff are not failing to serve the client; they are succeeding at protecting the organization from liability. Following the “official” rules often leads to outcomes that are professionally safe but practically ineffective—doing the right thing professionally means doing the wrong thing contextually.
This creates a perverse dynamic where the “correct” internal procedure actively hinders the “correct” external solution, and staff are rewarded for one while being held accountable for the failure of the other.
The bottom line:
- Current structures mitigate the risk of non-compliance—breaking a rule or violating a standard. Organizations increase their risk of irrelevance the more they continue to act safe. The organization that successfully avoids all procedural violations may simultaneously be failing at its core mission.
Tension 2: Organizations treat human motivation as a measurement problem when it is fundamentally a relational and identity problem
Organizations measure “extra money” while the actual drivers are “engagement” and “pride”—qualities that cannot be aggregated, tracked, or optimized like financial metrics.
This stands in direct contradiction to the prevalent strategy of addressing behavior change through rational frameworks (environmental impact calculators, cost-benefit analyses, ROI projections). Organizations treat motivation as a logic problem in what is fundamentally an emotional and identity-driven decision space.
One-third of participants referred to the people they serve using inventory language—”volunteer pool,” “talent pool,” “database of contacts.” This is not just imprecise terminology; it reflects a fundamental category error. Organizations are managing relationships with the same logic they use to manage inventory: counting, storing, optimizing for availability. People disengage precisely because they are treated as fungible resources rather than specific individuals with unique contributions.
Proposed solutions were consistently centered on extrinsic motivators—”gamified award systems,” “perks,” “incentives,” “recognition programs”—to address problems that participants themselves diagnosed as rooted in cultural disengagement, lack of meaning, and identity disconnection. The proposed mechanism (external reward) fundamentally mismatches the diagnosed problem (internal purpose). You cannot incentivize someone into caring; you can only create conditions where caring becomes possible.
The bottom line:
- Measurements are operationally necessary but motivationally insufficient. Organizations that rely exclusively on metrics they can measure and control will consistently lose to the emotional and identity-based drivers of behavior—including unsustainable behavior.
Tension 3: People propose interventions in the layer where they have agency, not necessarily where the problem lives.
This creates a gap: those who understand root constraints lack authority to redesign them, while those with authority focus on perfecting execution within existing rules. It reflects one’s proximity to consequence. Participants from advertising, coconut industry, and the arts proposed optimizations: treat sustainability as a budget line item comparable to revenue-generating activities, convince CEOs that regenerative agriculture delivers ROI, and make administrative platforms feel like creative work.
Farmers live inside the contradiction: invest in soil you do not own, adopt technology you cannot afford to lose, increase productivity without price protection. They cannot optimize their way out. A development sector participant named the structure as the problem: land tenure insecurity, credit access, risk distribution.
Structural diagnosis comes from the edges. Participants with least institutional power named constraints precisely. People embedded in corporate and creative structures proposed modifications to messaging and presentation.
The bottom line:
- These are accurate assessments of constrained agencies: the opportunities chosen reveal what people believe they’re allowed to touch. But the paradox is this: those who see the structure clearly can’t change it, while those who can change it don’t see it as changeable. If we treat budgets, incentives, and tenures as “the environment” we must survive in, our design work is limited to surface-level optimization. We might end up making a hostile system more tolerable rather than correcting the hostility itself.
To apply design thinking at the structural level, we must reclassify these artifacts. Budgets, incentives, and tenures are not laws of nature—they are poorly designed products ripe for iteration. The question isn’t whether people understand the problem. It’s whether they believe the foundation is theirs to redesign. The challenge now moves beyond persuasion: ‘How do we convince the CEO to invest in sustainability?’ shifts to the structural design question: ‘How might we redesign the CEO’s incentive structure so they don’t need convincing?
Email editor@sustina.earth to access the report for free.
