The tote bag outlived the commitment


Run the Room

Never, never launch from a stage

Picture this: eighteen months ago your leadership stood on a stage and committed the company to net-zero by 2030. There was a keynote, a countdown graphic, and a tote bag made of recycled bottles.

You still have the tote bag—it holds your gym shoes now. The target lives in a 60-page PDF on the investor-relations page, last opened, the analytics say, in March.

Meanwhile procurement still buys from the cheapest supplier, the plant in Essex runs the way it did in 2019, and finance just approved a plan with no carbon line in it.

Eighteen months in, the only thing that's moved is the tote bag—from the swag table to your locker room.

When you want to change behaviour, oder of operations matters. A stage should never, never be the first step.

A launch is the last five percent—the forcing event you stack on top of months of quiet work that has already won the key decision-makers over. That work usually takes eighteen to twenty-four months, and it happens away from the stage, before anyone's watching.

Try this

Here's the litmus test for your next initiative: if you've got nothing already moving to announce, you're not ready for the stage.

Launching intentions reliably fails. Launching "here's what's already happening—come join in" is the ticket.

🌿 Progress sells

Got a commitment you announced & still can't move?

Then you need the DRIVE Audit. Twelve weeks to unstick it, using the same approach that changed health policy in 30+ countries.


RUN THE ROOM

Your weekly briefing on making it easy to move decisions that matter.

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here to get next week’s Run the Room in your inbox


128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX
Unsubscribe · Preferences

Run the Room

Get in the room. Run it. Change what happens when you leave. That's the work I do with senior leaders moving standards from concept to institutional adoption. My work has been featured in The New York Times, TIME, The Lancet, and Foreign Policy. Each Saturday, one short note on making it easy to move decisions that matter—three minutes to read, used in next week's meeting.

Read more from Run the Room

Run the Room The Big Lever Behind the Bloom ↓ Most years, the floor of Death Valley is gravel. Known as the hottest, lowest, and driest place in North America, the desert holds the record for the hottest air ever measured on Earth. But this spring, it went yellow. Fields of gold appeared along Badwater Road in the biggest bloom the park had seen for a decade. The best part? The seeds had been sitting in the gravel the whole time. They were waiting for a condition: a storm heavy enough to...

Run the Room Can it really not be done? ↓ In 2000, a year of antiretroviral therapy cost about $10,000 per patient. Health ministries across Africa built treatment plans underneath that number and reached the same conclusion: treating everyone was unaffordable. That was a reasonable conclusion. Then in February 2001, the Indian generics manufacturer Cipla offered governments and NGOs a three-drug combination for $350 a year. Nine months later, the Doha Declaration confirmed that the generic...

Run the Room What if you’re not risk-averse, but leverage-blind? ↓ There's a lot of hullabaloo about the billions of dollars now flowing into philanthropy from the AI boom. And while there's plenty of speculation about where it will go, there's also an emerging consensus: a lot of it (a lot!) will go toward "GiveWell"-style giving: interventions with strong evidence, measurable outcomes, and a reasonably clear answer to the question, “What did this dollar buy?” And this prompts a much larger...