Sian Modine is a learning & development specialist with over 30 years making sustainability in our human and natural enviornments accessible and practical for organisations
Is sustainability going through a profound shift, and what will it look like on the other side?
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Sian Modine has been shaping how organisations embed sustainability and human rights into the way they work for three decades. She joins Dan to discuss how her strategic change experience, learning design knowledge and work as facilitator can be used to explore where we have been on our societal journey with sustainability, and where it is headed next:
- The quiet confidence behind current sustainability efforts
- The transistion from greenwashing to green hushing
- How silos fragment the sustainability function
- How to develop a human rights culture throughout a supply chain
- The continuing importance of the three Ps
Watch the full episode here:
How is the language of sustainability evolving?
One thing that you're seeing at the moment is that the language of sustainability has almost been rewritten into the business language of risk management and resilience. Whichever words you want to use, sustainability is about people, planet, profit. We think of these things as separate and that's at the root of the problem. The world is messy and complex and human beings try to create order. So often in our organisations, we have silos. Even within sustainability departments, you still have the human rights team, and you have the social impact team, and you have the environmental team, and then you have the climate team. So even within our sustainability world, it's quite fragmented. I think we need to focus more on the interconnection between all of these things.
How has the business case for sustainability shifted?
Twenty years ago, people didn’t really understand what climate change was. I remember speaking to a hotel manager about sustainability and he laughed and said, ‘Oh, you’re a tree hugger.’ That wouldn’t happen now. Most big corporations have sustainability departments, more chief sustainability officers - at the executive level - increasing legislation, reporting, investors asking more questions. So yes, the business case has moved massively. But in 2025 and now into 2026 it has been really strange. There was a pause on EU legislation. And with political changes - especially in the US - the business case for sustainability feels paused. There’s been an ESG backlash, and I’ve come across a new phenomenon: green hushing. Companies are still committed to sustainability but are just not talking about it.
How does sustinability fit into leadership and learning?
I don’t believe we should run a leadership programme that doesn’t have sustainability embedded in it! Even if sustainability is ‘snuck in by stealth’, with this green hushing going on people might not want to give their budgets to a sustainability training program, but we should just be having it in everything. People need to see it, feel it, experience it to connect emotionally and logically. So that we help people to think how is your work dependent on this resource or these people? How does the work that you do impact other people or the planet? And then what can you do in terms of your business and decision making to integrate the consideration for this into what you do? It's trying to not put it as an initiative or something separate from what they do. But how does it intrinsically fit into what you're doing to make your business better and also make it better in terms of resources and people? It’s how to get that into decision making at all levels. That's the challenge, to make it relevant- to their day to day - so it's not just seen as the ESG department over here, it is part of what everybody does.
Bonus insight: what does the end of the sustainability function look like?
We used to have quality management, a product would go through a quality check at the end of a process, then total quality management came in and was embedded at every stage of the process. So you didn’t need the quality team anymore because everyone was looking at quality. And that’s what needs to happen with sustainability. At the moment, we've still got sustainability teams doing the work at the end of a process or separate from the process. Whereas what we need to look at is like, how do we integrate it to everybody's work so that it’s everybody’s focus?
Find out more about Sian
Leadership for Sustainability Training for Sustainability
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