Why CSOs should 'anchor high' and set the tone this January

At the start of every year, Chief Sustainability Officers face the same quiet dilemma: how ambitious can I really be? Too often, CSOs answer this question by pre-emptively moderating themselves. Targets are softened, budgets framed cautiously and asks hedged with caveats. The logic is familiar: if sustainability proposals are grounded in strong evidence and moral urgency, decision-makers will do the right thing.

But after a decade of pitching climate strategies, it’s becoming harder to ignore an uncomfortable truth: moral authority plus evidence rarely unlocks the necessary capital.  And looking around the organisation, it’s likely they’re not the tools that other departments are using to secure budget. Power, narrative, and leverage are more effective.

This is the gap organisations like Ecologi increasingly focus on closing. Climate and nature leadership today is less about perfect data or ever-more ambitious rhetoric, and more about creating the conditions in which ambition can survive contact with budgets, procurement cycles, and commercial pressure. That requires leverage, not just intent and an understanding of where intervention actually changes outcomes.

One tactic that may help CSOs reframe the discussions this January is the idea of anchoring high. In negotiation theory, the first serious number placed on the table shapes the entire range of what follows. In organisations, the same dynamic applies. The initial framing of ambition, on targets, timelines, or investment, often becomes the psychological baseline against which everything else is judged.

From observing these interactions up close for many years, CSOs frequently do the opposite and anchor low. They start from what feels “realistic,” aligned, and finance-friendly. Yet feasibility discussions almost never increase ambition; they only reduce it. By contrast, functions like finance, legal, and strategy routinely open from maximal positions and let constraints negotiate them down. Sustainability is one of the few corporate disciplines that begins by compromising with itself.

What sustainability can learn from politics

There is a lesson we can learn from the political world here. Whatever you think of the current US President, his approach to negotiation demonstrates a blunt reality: the first move defines the battlefield. By anchoring aggressively, he has forced counterparts to argue against his starting position rather than propose their own. CSOs don’t need the theatrics, but the confidence to set the agenda is something they too often deny themselves.

Anchoring high does not mean being reckless. It means setting direction before being shaped by constraint and signalling seriousness before pursuing consensus. It forces trade-offs into the open. A bold opening target changes the internal conversation: finance asks how much will this cost, not why are we doing this at all. Procurement asks which suppliers matter, not whether Scope 3 is real. To move budgets, we need to move the narrative.

How to counter arguments against high anchors

The usual counterarguments are well rehearsed.

• “High anchors damage credibility.” Only if they are abandoned quietly. Visible negotiation downwards preserves trust while still pulling outcomes higher than a cautious opening ever would.
• “We’ve been burned by over-promising before.”  Often because ambition was declared externally without internal leverage. Anchoring high internally, before any public commitments, reduces that risk, not increases it.
• “Sustainability needs consensus to succeed.” Consensus is useful for execution, but it is a poor starting condition for change. Every major corporate shift, from cost-cutting to restructuring, begins with power and conviction, not unanimity.

The deeper issue here is that many CSOs still operate as if their role is to convince. To convince the organisation to change and sometimes to convince themselves. In reality, their role is increasingly to negotiate. Evidence should certainly inform those negotiations, and ethics should guide them, but neither of these are substitutes for leverage in achieving effective outcomes.

January is often a time of year when strategies are fluid, budgets provisional, and assumptions malleable. Pitching ambition at a level that feels comfortable is not prudent, it is lazy and risks leaving vital change and impact on the table. Anchoring high gives the CSO a chance to redefine the contours of the discussion, to move beyond the traditional safe consensus and towards something more consistent with the level of ambition required. 

Written by Simon Heppner, Chief Sustainability Officer at Ecologi

Ecologi is the UK's most trusted climate action platform for every step of your climate journey. Speak with one of their climate experts today at www.ecologi.com