A few weeks ago I caught up with Lucy Hagger, who started working for herself as a sustainability consultant a little over a year ago. She now combines freelance and fractional work, runs a collective of independent practitioners called Let’s Do Some Good, and is a founding partner of Good Eye, a community interest company. I asked her what the year has taught her, where she’s finding motivation, and what she makes of the reporting work that has taken over so many of our careers lately. Here’s what she told me.

Squiggly lines

“I’ve squiggled. I’ve really squiggled,” Lucy says of her career so far (a reference to Squiggly Careers, in case you haven’t heard of this brilliant resource).

She trained as a biologist and came out of university convinced that science had a communications problem. “Scientists tend to talk in jargon… I think there’s a lot to be said for how awesome science is, and how poorly that awesome science is often communicated, still to this day.”

Her first job was in healthcare communications, which she says turned out to be an unexpected education in avoiding greenwashing. “The pharmaceutical industry is so highly regulated that… claims are so difficult… You can’t say – ‘this drug’s gonna save your life’. You have to qualify everything – ‘this drug, for this subset of patients, may potentially show signs of possible…’ So that was actually very good training.”

The same agency Lucy worked for also ran the secretariat for the Global Salmon Initiative. “At the time, it brought together about 70% of the world’s salmon farming companies… And it was a really remarkable thing watching these companies work pre-competitively on sustainability from the CEO level down. It really sparked something in me around how much more progress can be created by putting our heads together and collaborating on sustainability.”

From there Lucy moved into reporting and strategy, keeping a foot in communications because she enjoyed “the technical and the creative.”

Taking the leap

What began as a few freelance contracts has grown into what Lucy calls “a weird and wonderful situation that I’m really excited about.”

Let’s Do Some Good came out of two things she noticed. One was the number of people choosing to work independently, and what they might gain from banding together. “Whether that is because they have a neurodivergence, whether they have a physical disability, whether they have caring responsibilities, whether they have kids, you know, whatever their reasons are, is there a way that we can support each other?”

The other was what clients were asking for. Companies were hesitant to hire full-time and were pushing back on big agency fees as budgets tightened. “The whole idea is to bring in the specialists when they’re needed. We cost at freelance rates. We don’t have to pass all these overheads onto the clients, like office spaces, technology, etc.”

But Good Eye was never part of the plan. Lucy went to one of its early events and knew within the evening that she wanted in. “I just sat there… I thought, I have to be involved in this… it was a lightning strike moment. I think when you’re working for yourself, you trust your intuition and you’re connected to it so much more. And I just went up to the founder at the end and said I want to help. And he thought I wanted to help clear up.”

Good Eye pushes back on what Lucy sees as a decade or two of creativity being commoditized and “used to push horrible agendas. If you’re a creative working on an oil and gas campaign, you might not feel good about that. So how can we start funneling that creativity into good? We believe in the idea of shamelessly idealistic creativity.”

The group hosts events with speakers, and is now working out how to turn the ideas into action. “We had a speaker come in to talk about kindness as a powerful facilitator of change. Out of that, one of our event attendees came up with the idea of creating a Bank of Kindness – a way for Londoners to share and access kind words. We’ve worked with that individual to build a website for it and some stickers with QR codes for folks to access a little more kindness when they need it. We hope to do more of that and empower our community members that they can make a change no matter how small or huge.”

From targets to delivery

Although reporting has formed part of her freelance work, including a recent CSRD aligned double materiality assessment, over the past year, more of her work has moved towards strategy and importantly, what comes after the strategy. “What you actually do when you have your plan, your targets, and then how do you go about actually making it happen? Because generally speaking, it’s much easier to set the targets than it is to deliver them.” She is currently working on just this with a major events company – figuring out how to intentionally embed sustainability within a business and what and who that takes.”

I told Lucy I feel the same tension between planning and delivery. I’ve done a lot of reporting, and I can see that’s where the demand is, but I’m not sure I want to spend every day on it. She described the last few years of regulatory change like this:

“It’s felt like walking through porridge, you know, every step has been slow, painful, difficult, complicated.”

Even so, she still describes herself as hopeful. “I’m a natural optimist for my sins. I think I’m a pragmatic optimist at least in the world of sustainability.”

She still supports where reporting is heading, at least for the biggest companies. “I agree with it a hundred percent for large corporates and the applicability of this kind of model to them. But I’ve also seen the time and resource burden… on businesses that perhaps it isn’t as suited for… you see these budgets that have been spent on reporting projects, materiality projects, and you think, oh, that could have gone a really long way for multiple programmes… I just feel like that payoff is going to take a while, and I just really hope it’s worth it.”

Some of that burden is now landing on very small firms. Lucy is getting more requests for “fractional sustainability lead roles or fractional CSO roles,” mostly from small and medium-sized businesses. “I think it’s really resonating right now because people and companies aren’t in a position to make full-time hires, but they need that support.”

One of Lucy’s fractional clients is a service provider receiving supplier questionnaires from its own clients. “A lot of those questions aren’t really for them. They’re for scary parts of their client’s supply chain, right? But they’re having to answer all these questions around things like their child labour remediation process and their net zero targets. They’re like: ‘we’ve got 20 staff…’ But without that information they can’t run their business, they can’t retain clients, they can’t get new clients. So they need help from someone to come in and just set up a system that works.”

If you’ve ever sent a supplier questionnaire out in bulk, this is a useful reminder of who might be on the other end. We recently wrote about this problem too.

Where the impact is

For most of her career, Lucy worked with some of the world’s largest companies: “complicated supply chains, massive footprints… vague impact, hard to prove.” Over the past year as she’s had to really engage in her network, and had the time to, she’s been meeting more local business owners, creative and curious thinkers and community organisations, and it has changed how she sees things.

“It makes you see what’s actually happening on the ground… You actually realise that the fight is absolutely still being fought, and most of that fight, I don’t think, is happening necessarily in offices.”

At her co-working space, she’s met a woman cutting waste on film sets and a designer whose whole ethos is “sharing learnings, working pre-competitively, which she says speaks to her Global Salmon Initiative years.

And chatting with her neighbours, she’s learnt about her local repair café and rewilding campaigns happening in her area. “I think sometimes you can get quite wrapped up in this big, corporate world – big company must mean big impact. But actually, the culmination of all of these things that are happening in communities, a lot of that’s adding up. And you can see and you can feel it, and it’s tangible.”

It also gave her a moment of doubt. “In a way, it gave me a little bit of imposter syndrome, because I thought, have I even been making an impact all these years?”

I suspect plenty of people in corporate roles have asked themselves the same thing.

Keep it human

Lucy says she’s always had a complicated relationship with creativity. “When you choose a scientific, academic route or career, you take on the identity that you can’t have both.” Good Eye has changed that for her. “Yes, obviously it’s great to have all this technical knowledge, but actually, doing better, and whatever definition you believe fits to that phrase, anyone can do it. You don’t have to have all these special degrees and technical know-how.”

After years of standards, data and regulation, Lucy has found herself returning to the basics. “We’re talking about pretty basic principles most of the time – just don’t be a jerk. Don’t be a jerk to people, to the planet, to your environment, to your communities, to your staff, to your partners.”

She’s never been one for role models. “I don’t know whether it was not seeing myself in them…” But one person has made an impression this year.

Through Good Eye she met Sandy Glanfield of Reboot the Future, a group whose core belief is that a better future is possible if we treat others and the planet as we’d wish to be treated. Lucy appreciates kindness being central in this mission, but is clear that kindness alone won’t do it.

“I don’t think we’re going to fix the world through saying ‘let’s just be nice!’. But I think it helps.”

She doesn’t want a return to old-style CSR either. “I don’t think we should be going back to the years of cutesy CSR initiatives, but I think the two truths can exist at once. That we can have both the absolutely important guardrails, regulations, compliance, data systems, infrastructure, commercial perspective of sustainability… but I don’t think it has to come at the expense of this also being human-led.”

Lucy’s picks

Lucy describes herself as “a bit allergic to whizzy new software, because I’m just fundamentally suspicious of whether it’s actually going to be helpful or not.” But Notion won her over. “I feel like it’s quite low barrier to entry, because you can get free access… This has probably been the first system that I feel has been really intuitive, very, very practical and really user-friendly.”

Her reading pick is Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, which asks how to measure productivity in knowledge work, “which is a lot of what we do in sustainability.” She likes that it’s recent. “It’s post-COVID, which means it understands and acknowledges things like Microsoft Teams, and, actually what working is like nowadays.”