Am I Asking the Right Questions?
By Harriet Richardson, Creative Director, Re:Co Insights
Good question…
When I joined Re:Co five years ago as its in-house Creative Director, I felt, at least on paper, pretty underqualified for the room.
Not for my job, of course, but for the landscape I was stepping into. I’d worked as a graphic designer for six years at an independent agency, and although design is all about immersion into new worlds, I rarely spent more than a few months with any one brand. The expectation to learn (and retain) the lingo was light.
My natural habitat is colour, typeface, and the disproportionate satisfaction of a grid aligning properly. I care about whether a brand holds together across every touchpoint; whether the tone of voice matches the vision; whether something feels cohesive, intentional, honest. I can spend an afternoon debating the weight of a headline font, the cover image of a white paper, or the style of a bullet point — and it’ll always be time well spent (I’m sure Re:Co’s founder, Jenn Wilson, would agree).
Sustainability consulting, by contrast, felt technical, regulatory, and intimidatingly objective. I could ask the right questions about kerning (that’s the spacing between letters, FYI), but I wasn’t sure I could ask the right questions about climate risk, governance structures, or value creation.
You might argue that I didn’t need to. But understanding is a fundamental part of communication, and communication is my job. If I couldn’t interrogate the substance, I couldn’t shape how it was expressed.
What I’ve learned (slowly, and often by asking questions that felt embarrassingly basic) is that the discipline of asking the right question is the connective tissue, not just between design and strategy, but between intention and impact.
The same instinct that compels a designer to ask, “Does this colour truly communicate what we stand for?” is the instinct that should compel a client to ask, “What are we really trying to change, and for who?”.
What I’ve learned in five years of sustainability consulting
One of the first things I noticed at Re:Co was how quickly the landscape shifts. Even the term that once sat confidently in our own strapline — ESG — has fallen in and out of favour over the last few years.
Not because the underlying issues have evaporated, but because the framing, the overextension of the term, and the political climate have changed. In some cases, ESG became a catch-all, applied so broadly that its meaning diluted over time.
For clients navigating this landscape, it can feel destabilising. The target appears to move just as you’ve aligned to it. And in a context like this, confidence can become performative. And performative confidence is dangerous.
So early on, I realised that the most valuable thing I could bring into a room was not expertise in sustainability-driven value, but the permission to pause.
- What does that acronym actually mean in this context?
- Who is this report actually for?
- What would happen if we didn’t do this?
- Is this about compliance, or about conviction?
There is an old cliché that there are no stupid questions. In complex, rapidly evolving environments, that cliché couldn’t be more important. The cost of pretending to understand is far greater than the cost of asking for clarity.
So often, the question you hesitate to ask is the one that unlocks the room — and has everyone else thinking: that’s exactly what I wanted to know.
Complexity has a way of masking weak assumptions. Jargon quickly develops into scaffolding for ideas that haven’t yet been pressure-tested.
This is something I recognise from design. A client might ask for a new website— but rarely is the website the problem. The issue might be misaligned positioning. A confused value proposition. Or internal disagreement about who the audience actually is. In sustainability consulting, the same pattern emerges.
A fund might say they need a sustainability strategy. But is the underlying driver a checkbox exercise to satisfy stakeholders, or a genuine desire to define how sustainability can amplify the core investment strategy?
If we don’t ask what problem we are really trying to solve, we risk delivering something technically robust but strategically misaligned.
Over time, I’ve also come to value a more uncomfortable question:
What would change our mind?
In a field that is frequently politicised and often polarised, conviction can calcify quickly. It becomes easy to defend a position because it aligns with market narrative, internal identity, or public expectation. But intellectual rigour requires something harder, the ability to articulate the conditions under which we would revise our view.
If we believe a climate transition plan is credible, what data would undermine that belief? If we think a portfolio company’s sustainability performance is strong, what indicators would make us reassess? If we assume the current backlash against ESG is cyclical, what would suggest it is structural?
How does AI change this?
In recent years, another layer has entered the mix: artificial intelligence.
AI can synthesise enormous volumes of information at speed. It can draft, summarise, pattern-match. It can appear authoritative. But it reflects what has been written most often, not necessarily what is most current, most jurisdiction-specific, or most commercially relevant to a particular strategy.
In a field where regulation, market sentiment, and best practice evolve rapidly, uncritical reliance on aggregated consensus can quietly embed outdated thinking. AI does not have experience— only patterns. And often, it will justify almost any position you prompt it with.
In this space, we don’t need more reinforcement. We need critical thinking. The better question is not “What does AI say?” but “Is this insight grounded in our specific context — our asset class, our geography, our risk profile, our ambition?”. Tools can accelerate thinking. They cannot replace discernment.
It’s not should we, but how can we?
Perhaps the most profound shift I’ve witnessed, however, is not in regulation or technology, but in framing.
Five years ago, the dominant question was often: “Should we integrate ESG?” — framed as a bolt-on, an additional layer of responsibility. Increasingly, the more relevant question is more fundamental:
How do we create durable value in a world defined by climate risk, regulatory scrutiny, and changing societal expectations?
The language may move in and out of fashion. The acronyms may evolve. But the underlying strategic imperative — resilience, long-term value creation, alignment between risk and return, and fiduciary duty — remains.
So part of asking the right questions is having the humility to interrogate the question itself. In design, coherence matters. Everything must sit together: typography, tone, colour, intent.
In strategy, coherence matters just as much. The narrative must align with the numbers. The ambition must align with governance. The long-term vision must align with day-to-day decision-making.
Both disciplines, at their core, are about alignment. Five years in, I still find myself in meetings thinking:
Am I asking the right question? Not the cleverest question. Not the most impressive question. The right one. The one that clarifies rather than complicates. The one that surfaces rather than obscures. The one that moves the conversation from performative certainty to thoughtful progress.
In a landscape that refuses to sit still, that question may be the most valuable discipline of all.