Between sips of coffee you realize that a torrential downpour has formed outside.  An air of acceptance washes over you and with a resigned calmness you shuffle to the shoe closet to collect all your sandals and flip flops.   After you place them in the waste bin you remember to cancel your tropical vacation.  After all, it’s raining here and now, so it will surely be raining there and then.

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The allegory is absurd for self-evident reasons.  Daily weather changes are a part of a larger dynamic system that oscillates between cycles.  We all have deep instincts that decipher weather signals and in parallel, we use our ability to adapt by grabbing an umbrella or wearing rain boots. 

Weather is certainly not the only cyclical phenomenon.  Social movements and trends are beholden to similar dynamics.  Lately sustainability has also revealed its own cyclical nature.  Emissions disclosure rules have debuted as Federal mandates that were then stayed, morphed into state rules, and yet again subjected to litigation.  The United States pulled out of the Paris Accords, rejoined, and again exited.  Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) incentives arrived and injected vast quantities of funds into renewables but the essence of the IRA has since eroded. 

Climate change mitigation and sustainability has always been an uphill battle. Activists, sympathetic policy leaders, sustainability officers, and scientists have been working diligently for decades to redirect systems that were never designed to measure environmental or social externalities properly. To sustain that effort, the movement developed narratives that helped mobilize capital, attention, and institutional change. One of the most prominent narratives, particularly in corporate sustainability, is that progress accumulates permanently. Each regulatory win, each market shift, and each technological breakthrough is treated as a milestone that makes the next step easier and inevitable.

That narrative has been powerful and, in the long run, largely correct. But in the short run it has created a mismatch between how sustainability progress is described and how it actually unfolds. When progress is framed as linear and irreversible, every policy change, market signal, or cultural shift is interpreted as final. Companies respond accordingly, scaling up aggressively when conditions appear favorable and retreating just as aggressively when signals reverse. The result is not steady momentum, but repeated cycles of acceleration and pullback that waste capital, erode capability, and ultimately slow climate change mitigation.

The challenge is not how to react to a suddenly volatile sustainability field. It is instead that volatility has always been a defining characteristic, but our dominant narrative left little space for such instability. To continue progressing, corporate sustainability must move beyond a narrative of permanent victories and adopt one that reflects a cyclical reality. This requires two distinct capabilities. The first is the ability to recognize when conditions are changing before the change becomes unavoidable. The second is the ability to adjust intensity without dismantling the underlying system each time signals reverse.

The goal is no longer only to conquer each sustainability hill, but to remain stable and effective as the terrain itself shifts underneath.