What ESB Learned About Embedding SustainabilityÂ
Most organisations say sustainability is everyone’s responsibility. Far fewer can show what that looks like in practice.
For ESB (Electricity Supply Board), Ireland’s leading energy company, embedding sustainability meant much more than launching new initiatives or meeting reporting requirements. It meant helping more than 9,000 employees understand what sustainability meant in their role and equipping them to make different decisions every day.
Bronwyn Hall McLoughlin, Lead for the Change Management Institute Sustainability Special Interest Group, recently interviewed Ciaran Doran, ESB’s Sustainability Transformation Programme Manager, about the organisation’s three-year Sustainability Transformation Enablement Programme (STEP). His experience offers valuable lessons for change practitioners leading complex organisational transformation.
From Champions to Navigators
One of the most distinctive aspects of STEP was how ESB chose to distribute ownership.
Rather than creating a traditional network of sustainability champions, ESB redefined the role entirely. They introduced Sustainability Navigators – employees embedded within the business whose focus was not on promoting initiatives or acting as subject matter experts, but on enabling better decision-making in real time. Their role was to help colleagues interpret what sustainability meant in their specific context, challenge assumptions, and integrate sustainability into everyday choices rather than treating it as a separate agenda.
It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one. Instead of relying on a central sustainability function, ESB built capability and ownership across the organisation.
A quiet milestone for the change profession
Another aspect of STEP caught our attention. Having reviewed many sustainability reports over recent years, it’s rare to see an organisation explicitly acknowledge the role of change management in delivering its sustainability strategy. ESB did exactly that.
The STEP roadmap published in ESB’s Sustainability Report maps the programme against the ADKAR® model, showing how the organisation approached the journey from Awareness through to Reinforcement.
For Change Practitioners, this is significant. It demonstrates that change management wasn’t simply supporting the programme behind the scenes; it was recognised as a core enabler of sustainability transformation and visible enough to feature in the organisation’s public reporting.
What you’ll find in the full case study
The full case study explores how ESB:
- Built sustainability capability across a workforce of more than 9,000 people.
- Secured executive sponsorship across the organisation.
- Used change management to support capability, governance, reporting and culture.
- Invited external challenge from sustainability pioneer John Elkington rather than seeking validation.
- Captured lessons learned from both the Programme Team and Programme Board to inform future sustainability transformation initiatives.
Sustainability transformation is one of the most significant organisational changes of our time. Whether you’re leading sustainability, digital transformation or organisational change, ESB’s experience offers practical insights into building capability, creating ownership and embedding change at scale.
This is the fifth resource in our member only Sustainability in Change series published by the Change Management Institute’s Sustainability Special Interest Group.Â
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