A Legacy Launch
In this blog series, Tandem Global CEO Margaret O’Gorman shares insights from her decades of experience working with businesses to advance nature-positive strategies. She’ll explore key trends, highlight innovative solutions, and offer perspectives on how companies can move from intention to action.
February 2025
Tandem Global is a new organization focused on combining business and nature for good. Rooted in the legacy of WHC and WEC, two global NGOs that played pivotal roles in the early days of corporate sustainability. Together they have witnessed sustainability evolve from initiative to strategic imperative, transitioning from sporadic efforts to become a fundamental aspect of corporate operations.
During a season of much disruption in this realm, it’s important to have perspective on the past and a clear value for the future iteration of corporate environmental sustainability. The timely arrival of Tandem Global offers both.
As companies recalibrate their efforts and pivot in response to headwinds, tailwinds and tornadoes, the direction for biodiversity loss, climate change, water quality and other planetary challenges remain stubbornly unchanged. For many in the profession, the pushback on corporate sustainability is demoralizing and depressing. For those with perspective it’s just further proof that we’re not so much following an elegant arc of progress, but a switchback road up a steep and rugged mountain.
At GreenBiz25 this year, many newly minted sustainability professionals gathered to learn, network and seek community during tough times. (Seasoned professionals gathered for the same reason.) A reflection repeated towards the end of the meeting was on how valuable this act of collegial collection was. This repeated sentiment highlighted that for many individuals, sustainability is now not only a career path, but also a calling.
GreenBiz25 also provided the opportunity for perspective in one of the inspiring main stage panels when long-time sustainability professional, Jill Dumain, a partner at Fractal CSOs, and Patagonia’s former Director of Environmental Strategy sat with Kathleen Talbot, Reformation’s CSO, a colleague relatively newer to the effort. Jill reminded us of how far we’ve come as she described the effort to source organic cotton in a time when faxes were the main mode of communication and phone calls were prohibitively expensive. She told stories of physically tracing the supply chain and creating a product that we now know as organic cotton which was all but nonexistent back when Patagonia was embarking on its sustainability journey. She told how Walmart’s embrace of the same material was a tipping point in her understanding that sustainability could move the needle beyond a niche apparel company to a behemoth retailer. The distance between the first fax and Walmart’s conversion was many years. This story, one of perspectives linking past and present was pitch perfect for the occasion and reminds us how far we’ve come.
As Tandem Global launches it will carry decades of learning, continuing its predecessors’ focus on impact. Here are some of the things we’re thinking about as we address the present, reflect on the past, and gear up for the future:
Normalize the evolution of commitments.
A company that makes a sustainability commitment in 2020 towards a 2025 goal will have 5 years more data and information at the end of the goal period than it had at the beginning. If this additional information does not cause a change in commitments, the goal was flawed to begin with. We need to normalize the evolution of corporate climate and nature commitments and be at peace with the fact that circumstances, data, science and policy are all forces that act on corporate goals. There is an embedded reflex in our community to condemn a company for changing its commitments
Accept storytelling.
Data does not tell the whole story. Over-weaponization of greenwashing has resulted in a dismissal of storytelling as an effect sustainability communication tool for stakeholders. If the finance folk want excel spreadsheets and complicated formulae, provide them. However, if stakeholders want stories of exceptional efforts and inspirational results, companies should provide those as well. We who seek to judge should be bright enough to know the difference between a sum and a story.
Understand company culture.
The corporate world is not built of beige colored blocks of brutalist concrete that can be viewed as a single entity from afar. It is more like a pointillist painting where each dot contributes to the whole picture, whilst being unique. Many of the tools and roadmaps being marketed to companies today to serve their sustainability needs seem to be offering a ‘one size fits all’ approach. A legacy flowing through Tandem Global’s DNA is understanding corporate culture and meeting companies where they are.
Design implementation into strategies.
The distance between the C-suite and the site of operation is vast in both real and metaphorical terms, yet many strategies are developed seemingly without this understanding. What we affectionately call the ‘Clay Layer’ – nothing gets through it – is the internal strata of functions, departments, and responsibilities that, if not acknowledged, can derail the most beautifully crafted sustainability strategies for nature, water, climate or social impact. Building implementation approaches by understanding people, policies, processes and operations is the only way strategies become actions. A recent issue of Amplify that I guest edited alongside my colleague, Frank Werner, addressed this issue with some powerful examples of pushing through the clay layer.
Integrate for impact.
One of the biggest legacy items coming from WHC and WEC to Tandem Global is the importance of integrating strategies for better impact in terms of environment and society. The S of ESG sometimes seems to be an afterthought but integrating a human dimension into nature, water and climate strategies can reap benefits for a company’s employee engagement, community relations, social license to operate and risk reduction strategies. Since its launch in 2016, WHC’s singular certification program has weighted scoring for societal efforts alongside environmental ones. It has developed and delivered methodologies to provide impact assessments through biodiversity and societal lenses and, it has convened companies across their fence lines for meaningful community engagement. Much of WEC’s focus has been geared towards the beginning of the supply chain, providing capacity building for SMSEs in central and south America to develop resilience in small holder agriculture and women-owned businesses. These social efforts integrate seamlessly with environmental work to double impact and leverage resources. As sustainability budgets tighten, integrating for impact will no longer be an exceptional approach but an expected approach.
Today, when the proven principles of corporate sustainability are being challenged, when regulatory advances are being weakened, when the environmental and societal problems we seek to solve persist and grow, many may fall into despair. But rather than lose hope, we must use our perspective to learn from where we’ve been, and our passion to leverage that learning to build the future we want to reach. The switchback road we’re on seems to have taken a 180 degree turn but it is still, ever so slightly, moving us up the hill.
