Whoever owns the scoreboard owns the change.

You are hired as the sustainability manager. The job description is expansive. Lead the transition. Embed circularity across the business. Align the organisation behind a credible strategy.

Six months in, the reality is narrower. You update the sustainability page on the website when a new figure comes in. You assemble the annual report by chasing data from teams who do not report to you and have no reason to prioritise your request. You were asked to drive change across an organisation where you own none of the levers that actually move it.

This is the most common failure pattern in the field, and it has almost nothing to do with the person in the role. The structure was built to produce exactly this outcome.

It shows up in the numbers that matter to the people who hire for these roles. Short tenure, high turnover, and burnout that arrives faster here than in almost any adjacent function. People leave because the job they were sold and the job they can actually do are two different jobs, and the gap between them is where the energy drains out.

The mandate gap is a maturity gap

How a market treats sustainability tells you how mature that market is. In an immature market, sustainability is read as a cost to be contained and a compliance box to be ticked. The role exists to keep the company out of trouble and to produce the documents that prove it. In a mature market, sustainability is read as a way to create and protect value, and the work is owned across operations rather than parked in a function.

The mandate gap most sustainability managers describe is really a maturity gap. They were hired with the language of a mature market and dropped into the structure of an immature one. The title says transformation. The org chart says reporting.

Framing decides the budget

Framing comes before mandate, and the wrong framing quietly removes the mandate before anyone argues about it. When sustainability is framed as a cost centre, it loses every budget round, because a cost with no number attached to its value is the easiest thing to cut.

Reframing is not spin. It is locating the real value and naming it in terms the business already counts:

• Avoided cost from material, energy and waste efficiency
• Exposure to volatile input prices and supply disruption
• Supply security as virgin feedstock tightens
• Regulatory and claims risk that carries a real financial number
• Resilience from designing dependency out of the operation

Value that sits inside a number the business already tracks earns a defensible place. Value that floats outside the numbers gets cut by people who are not hostile to it, only accountable to something else.

Siloed, and doing someone else's job

The structure compounds the framing. Sustainability is usually placed in its own box, with a sightline into reporting and almost none into operations. From inside that box you cannot see where the real decisions get made, and from outside it the rest of the business cannot see why you are relevant to theirs.

So the role drifts. You spend your week on the document because the document is the part you can finish alone. The cross-functional work you were actually hired for, the part that needs other teams to change how they operate, is structurally blocked, so it keeps slipping. You end up doing the job you can reach instead of the job you were hired for.

Why the existing KPIs always win

Without formal authority, a sustainability lead is left with influence, and influence loses to a KPI almost every time. If the warehouse manager is measured on throughput, they will optimise throughput. If the buyer is measured on landed cost, they will buy the cheapest input. A circularity ask that sits outside what these people are measured on is, to them, a request to make their own numbers worse.

The game philosopher C. Thi Nguyen gives this dynamic a precise name. In a June 2026 Tegenlicht film, he describes value capture: the moment an individual or an organisation lets a clear, legible metric stand in for the messier thing it was supposed to represent, until climbing the scoreboard becomes the goal in itself. The danger, he argues, is not the measuring tools. It is how seductively clear a good metric is. That clarity is what makes the number win.

Nguyen takes it one step further with what he calls value collapse. Because the people who chase the number hardest are the ones the system rewards, they rise. The people still asking what is actually worth doing fall behind. It shows up wherever a legible number stands in for a harder judgement, in schools ranked on pass rates or media measured on reach instead of impact. Napoleon put the same observation more bluntly two centuries earlier: a soldier will fight long and hard for a small piece of coloured ribbon.

For a sustainability manager, this is the whole problem stated cleanly. The organisation has already been captured by its existing scoreboard. You arrive with a value that is real but not yet on that board, and you ask people who are captured by the board to act against it on the strength of your argument. You lose, not because you are wrong, but because the scoreboard is doing its job.

Culture is the foundation, the drivers are the lever

If the scoreboard decides what gets done, the obvious move is to change the scoreboard. That is half right, and the half that is wrong is what trips most people up.

KPIs are downstream of culture. A metric dropped into a culture that does not understand or want it gets gamed, ignored, or quietly resented, which is value capture arriving from the other direction. The foundation is shared understanding: a common picture of why the change matters and what good looks like, held widely enough that the metric lands on prepared ground.

Culture is not a poster or an away-day. The most reliable way to move it is to change the drivers, the things people are actually measured and rewarded on, because behaviour follows incentives and culture follows behaviour. So the two work as a loop. Shared understanding makes a new driver legible and welcome. The new driver makes the behaviour routine. The routine behaviour settles into culture, which then carries the change without needing to be pushed.

This is also why the durable solutions almost always come from the bottom. The people closest to the work see the waste and the workarounds before anyone in a function does. What they lack is rarely awareness. It is a method to act on what they see, and the standing to use it. Give a line team the right methodology and the permission to apply it, and the solution arrives from the floor, owned by the people who have to live with it, rather than handed down from a function two levels up that they have no reason to trust.

Internal marketing earns its place here, in its real form rather than the slogan version. It is the work of dialogue: surfacing what people already half-know, and telling the story of why this matters in language that fits their job, so a corporate objective becomes something a warehouse team or a buyer recognises as theirs. Shared understanding is built in conversations, not cascaded in decks.

What games are for, and what they are not for

The most effective lever we have found for building this understanding at the level where the work happens is gamification. It belongs in this article for one reason only, and it is worth being precise about that reason, because gamification is easy to put in the spotlight and easy to get wrong.

A game is a scaffold for building competence. Its job is to teach people to see and measure what matters, and to give fast feedback while a new skill is still forming, so that an abstract objective becomes concrete enough to act on. The arc runs through four familiar stages. You start unaware that you are doing something badly. You become aware, and consciously try to do it better. You enter a phase where you are measuring deliberately, and you might even score worse for a while, because for the first time you can see what you are doing. Then the competence settles in, the behaviour becomes second nature, and you no longer need the game at all.

Our game design lead uses a simple personal example to make the point. Changing how you eat moves through exactly these stages: from eating badly without thinking about it, to eating more carefully, to a tracked and measurable phase where the food is arguably worse but finally visible, and out the other side to something like shopping at the farmers market by habit, eating well without measuring anything. The measuring phase was never the destination. It was the bridge.

This is the discipline that keeps gamification on the right side of Nguyen's warning. A game that becomes permanent, where the points stop teaching and start ruling, is just value capture with a friendlier interface. You will have replaced one captured scoreboard with another. The entire point of the game is to graduate from it. You gamify to build the competence and the measurement literacy, then you let the behaviour stand on its own and protect the human judgement underneath it. Measurement without the game, done well and almost unconsciously, is the goal. The game is how you get people there.

The pattern in our framework

In the Circular Readiness Levels, this failure has a name. It is CRL2 without CRL1.

CRL1 is Shared Understanding, the foundation. CRL2 is Compliance Readiness, the layer where an organisation can produce what regulation and reporting require. The website-editing sustainability manager is the visible symptom of an organisation that jumped to CRL2, the report and the disclosures and the public page, without ever building CRL1 underneath it. The compliance work happens because someone can be made to do it alone. The understanding never happens, so nothing further moves.

Sequenced correctly, the same effort compounds. Shared understanding at CRL1 makes a new driver legible. The driver shifts behaviour, which is the move into Active Adoption at CRL3. Repeated behaviour becomes how the operation runs, which is Operational Integration at CRL4. None of it holds if you start in the middle, which is exactly what hiring a sustainability manager into a reporting box and calling it transformation asks people to do.

What this means for each seat

For the CEO and board

The mandate gap is a design choice, not a hiring mistake. If sustainability sits off the scoreboard that runs the business, you have created accountability without authority, and you will keep refilling the role every eighteen months. The fix is to put a small number of circularity outcomes onto the same board everyone else is measured on, owned by the line rather than parked in a function.

For the CFO

A cost centre with no measured value attached is the first thing to go in a hard year, and framing sustainability that way all but schedules its own cut. Locate the value the business already counts, the avoided cost and the input-price exposure and the supply and regulatory risk, and give it a defensible line. A claim or a target only protects you if the number beneath it holds, which is a data question before it is a reporting one.

For the sustainability or ESG lead

Influence without a KPI is a weak hand, and arguing morality at teams measured on output will not change it. Put your energy into two moves: build the shared understanding that makes the change wanted, and get a small set of outcomes onto the drivers people are already rewarded on so the change actually happens. Use games to build competence and measurement literacy where the work is done, then let the behaviour stand without them.

For operations and line managers

You see the problems first because you are closest to them. What is usually missing is a method to act and the standing to use it, not the awareness. When the driver changes and the method is in your hands, the best solution comes from your floor, not from two levels up.

Where Circular Intelligence works

We are built for the gap this article describes. We help organisations build the shared understanding that has to come before compliance, and put the right drivers in place so culture moves with the strategy instead of against it. The competence is built where the work actually happens, and we treat the metric as something to earn and then outgrow rather than a new master to install.

Companion pieces: A circularity score is not a circularity claim, on why a number only means something once its method and scope are named, and Circularity is becoming a data discipline, on why the value you put on the scoreboard has to be built on data that holds.

References and further reading

• C. Thi Nguyen on VPRO Tegenlicht, Streaks, stappentellers en spaarzegels: wie bepaalt eigenlijk waar je punten mee haalt?, 14 June 2026, on value capture and value collapse.
• C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art (Oxford University Press, 2020), and his published work on value capture in institutions.
• The four stages of competence, from unconscious incompetence through to unconscious competence, a learning model widely attributed to Noel Burch at Gordon Training International in the 1970s.
• Napoleon Bonaparte, on soldiers and decorations, widely attributed.
• Knoster model for managing complex change (vision, skills, incentives, resources and an action plan), which underpins our approach to empowering change from within.

Note on sources: the value capture and value collapse framing draws on C. Thi Nguyen's work as presented in the June 2026 Tegenlicht film referenced above. The dietary example is drawn from our own game design practice and is used illustratively. Confirm the episode link and Nguyen's preferred phrasing before this page goes live.