Does your strategy consider the risks in front of you, or the ones you wish were?

On Wednesday, eleven leaders from Old Mill stood in front of their board and other influential stakeholders and presented a strategy for winning new clients, protecting against a growing recruitment risk, and capturing real commercial opportunity. The context they built that strategy in was the climate and nature crisis - but the strategy itself was unapologetically positive, commercial, and forward-looking. Building resilience wasn't the headline. It was what happened as a result of thinking properly about growth and risk in the world as it now is.

It was the final module of year one of a two-year leadership development programme - a capstone designed to put the group in front of a genuine, complex, real-world strategic challenge, so they could practise everything the programme had built in them: their own leadership, their collective leadership as a team, and their strategic thinking under real conditions. The climate and nature context wasn't the subject of the programme. It was the case study sharp enough to test what they'd learned.

What happened in that room tells us something important about how organisations actually move from acknowledging a risk to acting on it.

From "little old me" to commercial reality

Before yesterday, the audience had been prepared. The board and other influential stakeholders had watched the National Emergency Briefing - the public livestream that laid out, in stark terms, how climate breakdown and nature loss are converging into compounding risks. They'd been given other reading too from all sorts of sources. By the time they sat down to hear the strategies, most of them had personally absorbed the scale of what's happening.

That's usually where it stops. Watch a briefing like that, read the reports, and the natural response is a kind of helpless resignation. A little hope, a little dread, and a nagging question: what can I, one person, actually do about this?

What we saw yesterday was different. As CEO Mark Neath put it afterwards, there were "aha, now that's an idea!" moments - points where the room stopped processing this as a moral or environmental issue and started treating it as a commercial one. A risk, like any other risk. The kind organisations are supposed to plan for when the world changes underneath them.

On a break, Satori co-founder Juliet made a comparison that's stayed with us: HMV. The retailer resisted appointing a head of internet to its board because leadership believed people would always want to buy CDs. They didn't mitigate against the risk the internet posed to their business model. They made, in effect, a strategic decision to be the last man standing on the high street - a slow death, dressed up as loyalty to what had always worked.

It's not the only example. Xerox's own researchers built something close to a tablet computer decades before the iPad existed, and the company shelved it because its business was photocopiers, not computing - or paper, not digital. Kodak invented the digital camera - and buried it, because Kodak saw itself as a film company, and digital photography threatened the thing it believed itself to be. Both companies went on to face the consequences of protecting an identity rather than adapting to a risk that was already visible to them.

That's the pattern. It's rarely that organisations don't see the risk coming. It's that they decide, consciously or not, to protect what they currently are rather than face what's actually in front of them.

Lt General Richard Nugee, who has spent recent years pushing the UK's defence and security establishment to treat climate and nature loss as a core national security issue, put it more bluntly than we ever could in a leadership context: "Face the threat that is in front of you, not the threat as you would wish it to be." It's a military framing, but it's exactly the discipline that separates organisations that adapt from the ones that quietly become extinct.

That framing has weight behind it now that goes well beyond one Lt. General's opinion.

A redacted assessment compiled with input from the Joint Intelligence Committee - the body that oversees MI5, MI6 and GCHQ - has concluded that globally significant ecosystems are on a pathway to collapse, and that this now needs to be treated as a core UK national security threat.

Whatever you make of the politics around its publication, the fact that the UK's most senior intelligence assessment body is naming ecosystem collapse as a security risk, in the same register normally reserved for military and geopolitical threats, is hard to wave away as a "personal passion project" or something you address by switching off a few more lights.

Two strategies, two instincts

Back in the room on Wednesday, the eleven leaders split into two groups, and what they came back with revealed two genuinely different, and both credible, instincts about how to respond.

One group proposed a real shift in Old Mill's proposition. They felt it aligned with the organisation's existing values, but were honest that it would take real work to make it credible rather than performative: shifts in mindset, education, leadership buy-in, process and systems, and some genuinely difficult decisions along the way. This was a group prepared to change what the organisation says it is.

The other group took a subtler route. Rather than repositioning the organisation, they looked at how to weave greater responsibility and support for clients into how the organisation already runs - treating it less like a rebrand and more like a new piece of regulation, or a tax change: something you absorb into how you already operate, without making a song and dance about it. This was a group focused on changing what the organisation does, quietly, without changing what it claims to be.

Neither is more "right" than the other. But the fact that two intelligent groups of leaders, given the same evidence, arrived at two different, and equally commercial, answers tells you something: there isn't one correct strategic response to this. There can't be - its a complex challenge.

There's a decision every organisation has to make about its own appetite, credibility, and starting point.

What actually moved the room

The board's reaction told us as much as the strategies themselves. There was real appreciation for the work, and some genuine moments of commercial realisation - helped by the fact that both groups had done proper research into competitors, and the cost of inaction, not just the aspiration of action. The board responded with sharp, engaged questions, and in the hours afterwards, board members were emailing each other and the teams with what can only be described as a bias to action.

We think three things had to be present together for that to happen.

First, personal motivation. People don't change unless they genuinely want to, genuinely want a more positive impact, not because they're told to.

Second, commercial logic strong enough to make the case obvious: high risk in not acting, high benefit in acting. Pair those two together and it stops feeling like a "should" and starts feeling close to a no-brainer.

But the third piece is the one that's easiest to miss: they weren't doing this alone. People rarely change in isolation - we take our cues from the people around us. Had these eleven leaders been shown the same evidence individually, in separate one-to-one conversations, it's far less likely they'd have arrived at the same place. Seeing their peers engage, question, and commit gave each of them permission to do the same. And likewise the board. Change, in a room like that, is as much a social phenomenon as a personal one.

That's not incidental to how we think about this work.

It's the whole idea: real, durable strategic shift rarely comes from individuals quietly deciding to care more. It comes from the shift from me to we - personal conviction, commercial reality, and collective momentum, all present in the same room, at the same time.