A serious ambition that only showed up in the showcase buildings.
The ambition was genuine, and in a handful of flagship projects, single buildings, standout retrofits, it produced work that was genuinely cutting edge. But that was the whole of it. Everywhere else, across the portfolio and the way the business ran day to day, sustainability wasn't touching the decisions. Portfolios carried the idea of "green" without anything that would actually drive it.
A few brilliant buildings aren't a strategy. The ambition wasn't reaching the place where the real decisions get made.
So we treated it as a transformation, not an awareness campaign.
You don't change an organisation by telling it to care more. You change how it works. We went after the operating model: how the business is structured, where decisions are made, where power is held, and who, across the organisation, backs sustainability and who quietly resists it. Culture, structure, decision-making, awareness, each one a thing you can understand and then move, one by one.
We ran the exploration, and found the belief that was holding everything still.
Underneath it all was a conviction that nothing could really be done. In portfolio management, the economics lead every decision, and sustainability was read as a cost pulling against them. So we stopped arguing with the economics and started following them.
Across the portfolio, two levers did the work:
- Follow the economics. Find the places where sustainability and returns already pull the same way. Long-lease, large-footprint assets, warehouses, data centres, where renewable energy stacks up. Sites with land around them where nature has somewhere to go.
- Follow the churn. Everything coming in and out of the portfolio. New acquisitions are the cheapest moment to build sustainability in, so that's where you intercept.
We also surfaced the problem under the problem: the central data was poor enough that the business couldn't reliably say how many buildings it held, or their size and scale. Hard to manage a portfolio toward anything you can't yet see.
Sustainability stopped being a showcase and started being a portfolio question.
The business could see where its decisions, and its resistance, actually lived.
Priorities set where returns and sustainability already agree.
The foundational problem, knowing what you own, put on the table to fix.