For Bain, the challenge was not simply to help consultants know more about sustainability. It was to strengthen their ability to engage clients confidently as sustainability moved from the margins of corporate responsibility into strategy, investment and value creation.
The development therefore started further upstream than conventional ESG education. Participants examined what sustainability meant to them personally, the societal issues they cared about, the assumptions through which they viewed those issues and where their own knowledge was strongest or weakest. External perspectives and lived experience helped disrupt familiar professional frames and brought the human consequences of sustainability into the room.
From there, the focus moved deliberately towards the client. Participants explored why different environmental and societal issues become material in different sectors, how sustainability choices connect with competitive strategy, and how leaders can distinguish between issues they need to defend against and those through which they can create distinctive value.
MJA worked with Imperial College Business School and others to create a journey connecting self, society and business. Climate, the low-carbon transition, circularity and wider societal questions were not treated as separate subjects to master, but as contexts in which consultants could practise judgement, curiosity and influence. Peer learning helped extend that inquiry beyond individual sessions.
The shift was from knowing about sustainability to being able to lead a useful conversation about it: combining evidence with a point of view, understanding a client’s context and helping leaders make choices where commercial value, societal impact and organisational reality intersect.
The work showed why unfamiliar leadership territory requires more than transferring expertise. Consultants needed to examine their own assumptions, encounter perspectives outside their normal world and then put that expanded perspective to work on consequential client questions.