By most conventional measures, 2026 should be a year of acceleration. Clean electricity continues to scale. Corporate sustainability is institutionalized. Artificial intelligence promises unprecedented efficiency. Reporting frameworks proliferate. The tools appear to be improving. And yet, inside global enterprises, a very different reality is setting in: a growing recognition that the world is becoming less governable even as it becomes more instrumented.
Volatility is no longer cyclical; it is structural. Supply chains remain exposed not because firms forgot how to optimize, but because the geopolitical architecture that stabilized them is eroding. Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than institutions can metabolize. And climate and environmental breakdown are no longer “externalities” to be managed—they are lived conditions shaping where people can live, work, insure, invest, and govern.
Beneath these dynamics lies a deeper shift. The post–World War II global order—designed, defended, and dominated by the United States—is visibly fraying. What follows it is not yet coherent, but its early features are increasingly clear: fragmentation, hardened blocs, economic coercion, and the re-emergence of openly militarized competition.
We are not yet in chaos. But we are unmistakably beyond equilibrium. History offers an uncomfortable parallel. The last time accelerating technology, economic dislocation, environmental stress, and political radicalization converged at this scale was the 1930s—when a science-dismissive and morality-dismissive nativist authoritarianism began to cast its sulfurous shadow ahead of the conflagration of World War II.
The lesson of that era is not rhetorical. It is operational: when complexity outpaces shared meaning, fear fills the vacuum—unless leadership supplies an ordering principle strong enough to sustain cooperation. This is the context in which sustainability leadership must now be redefined.
In Dignity First Leadership: Developing & Driving a World-Class Sustainability Strategy (now available in Author Edition form to SR Inc’s Sustainable Business & Enterprise Roundtable Member-clients), we begin with a distinction that has become unavoidable:
Management is fundamentally about doing things right.
Leadership, when history presses in, is about prioritizing right.
For two decades, the sustainability movement has made extraordinary progress by professionalizing management: metrics, targets, frameworks, disclosures, and tools. That progress matters—and must continue. But the deepening, broadening, and accelerating challenge of human-caused climate and environmental breakdown cannot be met by better management alone. It now requires leadership capable of ordering competing claims under uncertainty without losing legitimacy.
That task demands a first principle too often treated as optional: Every stakeholder’s universal, inviolable, and unalienable human dignity must be recognized and addressed. In our work, dignity is not defined sentimentally. It is defined precisely—as our evolved and differentiating need and capacity for constructive social meaning.
This definition matters because it explains a recurring failure mode of complex systems under stress. When people lose confidence that their work, their communities, and their futures mean something within shared systems, trust collapses. Coalitions fracture. Institutions decay. Power flows to those who offer certainty without truth, belonging without dignity, and control without consent.
Leadership that centers dignity does something both radical and practical: it restores the conditions for cooperation. It treats legitimacy not as an asset to be spent, but as something to be earned continuously—especially when trade-offs become unavoidable. Against this backdrop, three revolutions are colliding in 2026. None can be navigated in isolation. And none can be addressed without leadership worthy of the name.
Enterprise decarbonization has moved from aspiration to obligation. Sustainability reporting is proliferating across jurisdictions, increasingly tied to capital markets, procurement decisions, and legal exposure. What distinguishes 2026 is not “more reporting,” but entanglement.
Reporting regimes interact rather than converge. Assurance expectations rise even as methodologies evolve. Customers, lenders, insurers, and employees increasingly act as de facto regulators. Political volatility collides with physical reality. In this environment, sustainability leadership is shifting from producing reports to building an enterprise capability: mastering mandatory reporting as a living system—with decision-grade data, transparent assumptions, auditability, and governance that can absorb change without forfeiting credibility.
The analogy is financial reporting in the early 20th century. Firms did not win trust by publishing prettier statements. They won it by building controls, standards, and discipline that made statements reliable under scrutiny.
Sustainability is now at the same inflection point.
The second revolution—what Ember has described as the Electrotech Revolution—reframes the energy transition as a systems transformation driven by clean electricity, electrification, and digital optimization reinforcing one another. This is not a future scenario. It is a present condition.
For globally scaling enterprises, the implications are structural:
Scope 2 becomes increasingly time- and location-sensitive as grid conditions diverge.
Scope 3 evolves as suppliers electrify unevenly and value chains reorganize around electricity price, carbon intensity, and grid access.
Procurement, siting, sourcing, and selling quietly become energy strategies—whether leaders acknowledge it or not.
This shift is particularly acute for ICT-intensive sectors, where growth is increasingly electricity-bound. The International Energy Agency projects that global data-centre electricity demand roughly doubles by 2030, driven in large part by AI workloads. Electricity is no longer a background input; it is a strategic constraint.
This reality is fueling interest in time-aware and grid-aligned approaches beyond 2030 or 2035. But sophisticated leaders understand the deeper point: accounting frameworks are means, not ends.The real leadership challenge is whether enterprises are willing to cause new clean energy generation at scale—often through aggregation and collaboration within constrained grid boundaries where no single company is large enough to act alone.
In the Electrotech Revolution, collaboration is not a values statement. It is a technical necessity.
The third revolution now collides with the first two: the dawning age of Agentic AI. These systems do not merely analyze; they initiate action, sequence decisions, and learn across domains. Used well, they can dramatically reduce friction and surface insights humans miss. Used poorly, they can create confidence at scale without comprehension.
In sustainability, AI will increasingly generate:
emissions estimates and supplier “fills,”
scenario narratives and transition-plan language,
automated benchmarks and peer comparisons,
procurement recommendations and “optimal” pathways.
The risk is not error alone. It is institutionalized error—outputs that look coherent, scale quickly, and harden into belief before assumptions are examined. This is where sustainability ceases to be primarily a technical function and becomes unmistakably a leadership function. The central question of 2026 is not whether enterprises will deploy Agentic AI. They will. The question is whether they will govern it in ways consistent with dignity, credibility, and long-term value.
That governance cannot be automated. It requires human judgment, peer challenge, and independent perspective.
At SR Inc, we are developing—together with several Member-clients—human-led Agentic AI processes anchored in our Community of Experts & Executive Practice (CEEP), referred to as Shared Roundtable Agents. These are designed to pressure-test AI-informed sustainability analyses against real executive practice—to surface assumptions early and, when necessary, to call bullshit before it becomes institutional belief. They will be formally introduced at our Q1 Executive Symposium in Boston and Denver on March 19.
In an age when machines can generate almost anything, judgment becomes the scarce resource.
The convergence of mandatory decarbonization, the Electrotech Revolution, and Agentic AI marks the end of an era in which sustainability could be treated as a bounded management problem. The next era will not reward those with the most sophisticated dashboards. It will reward those who can sustain legitimacy when systems become less governable—leaders who can prioritize rightly under pressure, hold coherence amid fragmentation, and preserve trust across stakeholders with competing claims.
The 1930s remind us what happens when global norms are dismissed, morality is relativized, and dignity is denied. The lesson for 2026 is not fear, but responsibility. Sustainability will not be “won” by better tools alone. It will be advanced by leadership that understands why dignity comes first—not as a moral ornament, but as the evolved social foundation that makes cooperation possible at the scale the moment demands.
It is an enormous privilege to be engaged in this work with so many remarkable leaders committed to more sustainable business.