MAKE THE HUMAN SHIFT

Author: Jérémy Dupont

  • Industrial Decarbonization: We’re Running Out of Time and Illusions

    Europe still speaks about decarbonization as if it were a policy journey, a transition we could pace gently, with milestones, debates, comfort. But inside factories, no one calls it a transition. They call it something else: survival.

    Because the truth is simple: companies are not in an energy transition — they are in an energy competition. A global race for access to stable, affordable, decarbonized energy. A race that is reshaping the industrial map of the world while Europe negotiates definitions.

    Walk into any European plant today and you see the same story. A steam network installed in the 1980s, patched for years, losing heat at every elbow. A compressor room where leaks are so widespread that no one remembers when the load fell below 70%. A SCADA workstation blinking again because the boiler oscillates each time the electricity spot price jumps. Teams trying to stabilize a process in real time, hands on the PLC, eyes on the meters, knowing that every kilowatt counts.

    And behind every one of these improvised solutions, there is an engineer who stayed late, a technician who rewired a panel in the middle of a shutdown, a manager who defended a CAPEX request three times before it finally passed. This is not innovation. This is industrial triage.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the world moves with a clarity Europe no longer has. The United States signs long-term PPAs in a matter of weeks. China builds industrial clusters plugged into massive hydro and solar baseloads. The Middle East creates entire low-carbon production zones powered by ultra-cheap renewables and hydrogen.

    These regions do not talk about transition. They talk about advantage.

    And Europe, for all its ambition, struggles with the one thing industry cannot live without: stability. You cannot decarbonize competitively without predictable energy conditions. But today, unpredictability is the only constant.

    Factories are not abstractions. They are thermal cycles, pressure systems, conveyors, PID loops, furnaces, dryers, automation architectures built layer upon layer over decades. You don’t electrify a line by changing a paragraph in a regulation. You do it with CAPEX, downtime, engineering, risk — and a level of energy visibility that has become almost impossible to obtain.

    So teams improvise rationally. They instrument steam lines never monitored. They deploy edge computing to extract signals buried in old PLCs. They reverse-engineer code written in the 1990s. They patch SCADA systems that should have been replaced ten years ago. They build temporary dashboards because the ERP can’t track energy flows. They keep the factory alive one workaround at a time.

    But they cannot fight uncertainty alone. When a plant cannot predict its energy cost six months ahead, every investment becomes a bet. When regulatory frameworks shift faster than machines can be retrofitted, every roadmap becomes obsolete. When the rest of the world accelerates while Europe hesitates, the gap grows silently — and dangerously.

    Europe is not losing the race because it lacks ambition. It is losing ground because it lacks visibility.

    Industry doesn’t ask for miracles. It asks for long-term contracts that don’t shift overnight. A grid capable of absorbing electrification. Regulatory consistency. Access to capital. And the recognition that decarbonization is not a CSR exercise but an industrial redesign.

    Give European plants stable conditions, and they will do the rest. They always have.

    But today, we are running out of time. And even faster out of illusions.

    Europe can still win this race. But it won’t win it with narratives. It will win it with clarity, stability, and courage — the courage to align ambition with the reality of factories and the people who keep them alive.

    Or it won’t win at all.

    The rest is noise.

  • The Substrate of Failure

    Why Europe’s Industrial Transformations Succeed or Fail Before They Begin

    Europe speaks the language of transformation fluently. It funds transformation. It creates committees, drafts roadmaps, launches alliances, and names programs with theatrical ambition.

    And yet nothing fundamental has changed.

    Seventy percent of large-scale transformations still fail — the exact same figure reported by Kotter in 1995. Meanwhile, 21 percent of European industrial companies now face acute strategic stress, a 50 percent increase in two years.

    The paradox isn’t mysterious. It is simply misunderstood.

    We blame leadership. Or communication. Or resources. Or methodology. We rotate through new frameworks — agile, OKRs, design thinking, product operating models — as if better choreography could fix structural gravity.

    We keep refining the method.
    We keep ignoring the soil.

    Transformation rarely fails because the plan was wrong.
    It fails because the substrate makes execution impossible.

    The substrate is the organization’s relationship with risk, truth, iteration, disagreement, and failure.
    European industry was built in a world where failure meant bankruptcy, injury, or operational collapse. Today, failure means data. But the reflexes haven’t changed.

    When the substrate punishes experimentation, transformation becomes theatre:
    agile rituals without agility, innovation boards without innovation, cultural programs without cultural movement.

    A perfect methodology on a hostile substrate produces nothing.

    The real divide isn’t technological — it’s civilizational

    Look globally and the contrast is blunt.

    • In Silicon Valley, failure carries social currency. A founder who crashes a startup raises money for the next one.
    • In China, entire industries pivot in a single quarter. Velocity is systemic.
    • In Europe, committees multiply while decisions evaporate.

    Our industrial memory was shaped by decades of stability: optimize, standardize, eliminate variance. Those instincts were rational when a poor automation choice could shut down a factory.

    But today, when business models depend on rapid iteration under uncertainty, the same instincts become an anchor.
    And anchors don’t transform.

    This substrate determines why identical methodologies produce opposite outcomes in organizations that look identical on paper. It determines why some European companies accelerate while others stall. It explains why capital, consultants, and pilots accumulate — but little actually changes.

    A Tale of Two Giants

    Siemens: engineering failure tolerance into the operating system

    During COVID, Siemens shifted 300,000 employees in 190 countries to remote work in two weeks. Not because of technology — because of culture.

    Siemens practices Customer Zero: every new tool, product, or module is deployed internally first, at scale, with real consequences.

    Bugs are not shameful; they are expected.
    Engineers surface issues early.
    Iteration is rewarded, not penalized.

    Transformation isn’t a program.
    It is a physiological function.
    The substrate supports adaptation.

    Volkswagen CARIAD: when political survival destroys technical truth

    CARIAD, launched in 2020, was meant to unify software across Volkswagen’s brands.
    6,000 engineers. Billions invested.

    Four years later: layoffs, restructuring, and a $5.8B partnership with Rivian that bypasses CARIAD entirely.

    The issue was not technological — Rivian proves the technology works.
    The substrate failed.

    At Volkswagen, brand sovereignty outweighs software unification.
    Audi engineers answer to Audi.
    Porsche engineers answer to Porsche.

    Six teams reportedly built the same feature six times because no brand would adopt another brand’s work.

    When failure becomes political ammunition, engineers stop iterating.
    And once iteration stops, transformation is dead.

    CARIAD didn’t fail in execution.
    It failed in conception.
    A centralized software substrate was incompatible with Volkswagen’s political substrate.

    Three questions that predict transformation outcomes

    Executives often ask: “Which method should we choose?”
    The wrong question.

    These three reveal the truth with brutal precision:

    1. When was the last major failure discussed openly in an all-hands meeting?

    If leadership can cite one — and what was learned — the substrate tolerates reality.

    2. Who received the last three major promotions — risk-takers or risk-avoiders?

    This reveals the real incentive system. It is the operating truth behind the PowerPoint.

    3. How many days between “we have an idea” and “we test it in real conditions”?

    Under 90 days → experimentation is possible.
    Over 180 days → bureaucracy suffocates innovation.

    The decision matrix writes itself:

    • 3 positives → transform boldly.
    • 2 positives → transform selectively.
    • 1 positive → fix the substrate before scaling.
    • 0 → do not transform internally. Partner or rethink strategy.

    Volkswagen’s partnership with Rivian was not a failure.
    It was substrate honesty.

    The truth Europe avoids

    Europe does not lack capital.
    It does not lack engineering talent.
    It does not lack ambition.

    It lacks a healthy relationship with failure.

    Our industrial DNA rewards consistency over curiosity, predictability over iteration, political safety over technical truth. As long as this substrate remains intact, the 70% failure rate will remain intact.

    Siemens succeeds because it aligned its substrate with today’s world.
    Volkswagen struggles because it defends a substrate built for yesterday’s world.

    Methodology is irrelevant in both cases.

    The only question that matters

    Before the next €50M transformation program, leaders should stop asking:

    “Which methodology should we use?”

    and instead ask:

    “Does our organization tolerate the failure rate this transformation requires?”

    If the answer is yes, the transformation has a chance.
    If the answer is no, the transformation is already over.

    → Read more about our approach to industrial transformation in the About page.

    → Discover the mission behind Make The Human Shift on the Home page.

  • The Courage to Lead People: What Real Management Looks Like Behind Closed Doors

    We talk endlessly about strategy, transformation, culture. We talk far less about what happens where management is real — in the silent space between a manager and their team. It is there, in the conversations no dashboard captures, that performance is built or destroyed.

    The truth is simple: managing people is not about giving direction. It is about carrying the emotional, operational, and ethical weight of coordinating human beings with different histories, fears, ambitions, limits, and talents. And doing it every day, with consistency.

    Most leadership books forget this: a manager’s true battlefield is not the boardroom.

    It is the corridor after a difficult meeting.

    The office where a colleague closes the door and whispers, “I can’t anymore.”

    The Monday morning when half the team is behind target and the client is calling every hour.

    The Friday afternoon when someone asks for recognition you meant to give but never did.

    The Wednesday where two key people are no longer speaking to each other.

    The moment where you must decide — again — who carries the weight, and who needs protection.

    Management is a craft. And a lonely one.

    Behind every team that performs, there is a manager doing the type of labor no KPI measures: calming tensions before they become conflicts, telling the truth without breaking people, asking more while preventing burnout, protecting one person without fragilizing another, balancing fairness and performance, explaining decisions they did not choose, and carrying the emotional load of everyone else while pretending they are fine.

    This work is invisible because it is relational, not procedural.

    The best managers don’t shine.

    They absorb, they listen, they redirect, they reframe, they repair.

    Every day.

    Every manager knows the moment when performance drops: the numbers fall, tension rises, and the room becomes heavy. Half the team looks guilty, the other half looks exhausted. And everyone silently wonders: Who will be blamed?

    A weak manager defaults to pressure.

    A courageous one defaults to clarity.

    Saying “We’re not where we need to be” is not a humiliation.

    It is an act of stewardship.

    A great manager knows how to speak the language of performance without breaking trust:

    “We’re behind — not because you’re incompetent, but because the system changed.”

    “We must improve — and we will do it together.”

    “Yes, the standard is demanding — and yes, I believe you can reach it.”

    “We failed this week — but we are still in the race.”

    Performance is not an accusation.

    Performance is a direction.

    Teams collapse when managers confuse the two.

    One of the hardest truths in management is this: individual performance is meaningless if it harms the collective.

    Organizations promote stars.

    Teams survive thanks to cohesion.

    A brilliant but solitary performer can damage a team just as much as a weak link — sometimes more. Managers must have the courage to intervene when talent becomes destructive: when someone delivers but refuses to help others, when someone excels but creates fear, when someone is technically right and humanly wrong, when someone hoards knowledge, when someone protects their territory instead of serving the mission.

    Great managers understand this: a team is an ecosystem, not a ranking.

    Talent becomes a resource only when it circulates.

    One of the most complex acts of management is deciding to change the composition or responsibilities of a team. It requires both lucidity and humanity.

    Because you see what others don’t:

    Someone technically brilliant but exhausted.

    Someone who tries hard but never finds their rhythm.

    Someone who could shine elsewhere.

    Someone who is slowly poisoning the group without noticing it.

    Someone who cares but is misplaced.

    Someone who needs a break, not a reprimand.

    Someone who needs a challenge, not comfort.

    Someone who cannot stay in their role if the collective is to rise.

    Reorganizing is not a betrayal.

    It is an act of care for the collective — and an act of honesty toward the individual.

    Courageous managers know when to say:

    “This role no longer fits you — and we will build the right one together.”

    Or:

    “The team needs something different — let’s adjust before this hurts you.”

    This is the kind of leadership that saves careers instead of breaking them.

    Conflict is not a managerial failure.

    Avoiding conflict is.

    Every manager has lived these moments: two colleagues fighting for recognition, a misunderstanding that escalates, a senior employee blocking a younger one, resentment building in silence. Conflict does not resolve itself. It grows.

    The courageous manager enters the room, closes the door, and brings everything back to the table — misaligned expectations, unspoken frustrations, conflicting agendas, differences in pace or method.

    Not to punish.

    To clarify.

    A team that cannot confront itself cannot grow.

    People don’t leave companies.

    They leave managers who never said, “I saw what you did.”

    Recognition is not about abundant praise.

    It is about accuracy.

    The best managers practice specific recognition:

    “The way you handled that client saved us.”

    “The extra care you put into this file made the difference.”

    “You were under pressure, but you stayed calm — and the team followed you.”

    “Your progress these last weeks is visible.”

    Recognition is not a ritual.

    It is a calibration tool.

    It tells individuals:

    “You matter — and here is how.”

    The courageous manager lives permanently in contradictions: pushing without crushing, giving autonomy while ensuring alignment, demanding quality while accepting imperfection, protecting people while delivering results, being available without being absorbable, correcting without humiliating, forgiving without lowering standards.

    This is why management hurts.

    This is why it demands courage.

    Because you must walk the narrow line between empathy and direction, humanity and responsibility, patience and ambition.

    And you must walk it every day.

    A responsible manager is not the one who always knows the answer.

    It is the one who accepts the weight of the role: naming difficulties, absorbing conflicts, stabilizing emotions, taking responsibility for failures, and reorganizing reality so the team can perform.

    Courage is not an event.

    It is a posture.

    The courage to say no.

    The courage to say yes with conditions.

    The courage to tell the truth without breaking people.

    The courage to adjust the team without losing anyone.

    The courage to step in when conflict explodes.

    The courage to take pressure without transmitting it downward.

    The courage to hold the collective together when everything pushes it apart.

    In the end, great managers do one thing better than anyone else:

    they honor the collective without erasing the individual.

    And that is the real superpower.

  • The importance of managers in the age of AI

    Technology changes fast. Culture does not. And in between stands the manager, the translator and the connector who turns algorithms into meaning.

    Artificial intelligence is transforming how we decide, how we plan and how we work. Yet despite the hype, one truth remains unchanged: organizations do not transform through technology; they transform through people. And among those people, managers play a central, irreplaceable role.

    Over the past eight years, I have worked on AI projects across industrial sectors. I have seen brilliant algorithms fail because no one could explain them to the teams. I have watched predictive models sit unused because managers did not know how to integrate them into daily decisions. And I have seen organizations succeed not because they had the best technology, but because they had managers who knew how to bridge the gap between what machines can do and what humans need.

    This gap, the fragile space between computation and meaning, is where the future of work will be won or lost.

    The illusion of self-driving organizations

    Many leaders dream of an autonomous company where data flows perfectly, decisions optimise themselves and performance becomes automatic. AI feeds that fantasy with predictive models that anticipate failures, dashboards that recommend next actions and generative tools that draft reports on demand. It is a seductive idea: an organization that runs itself.

    Reality is more complicated.

    AI does not remove uncertainty; it often multiplies it. A predictive model might tell you that a machine has a 73% chance of failing within two weeks. But it does not tell you whether you should stop the line now, wait, or renegotiate your maintenance schedule. It does not factor in politics, supply chain tensions or the informal knowledge of the operator who has a bad feeling about the sound it made yesterday.

    Data alone does not resolve ambiguity. It needs context, interpretation and prioritisation. Without human mediation, AI systems tend to amplify noise instead of creating clarity. They produce more dashboards, more alerts and more recommendations, but not necessarily more understanding. Teams can end up drowning in insights they cannot use.

    This is where managers step in, not as micro-controllers but as interpreters of complexity. They filter the signal from the noise. They translate algorithmic outputs into consequences. They decide what matters in the real world where customers complain, suppliers delay and strategy shifts overnight.

    I once prepared a predictive energy monitoring initiative. The model was solid, the data accessible and the business case clear. The project never started. Not because of technical issues; the technical work never even began. It died in organizational turbulence: shifting sponsors, reorganisations and redirected budgets. No algorithm could have prevented that. Only committed managerial leadership could.

    The autonomous company is a myth. AI can accelerate decisions, but it cannot anchor them. Organizations still depend on human judgement, and that judgement comes primarily from managers who understand both technology and people.

    From control to sense-making

    The role of the manager has changed profoundly, and AI accelerates that shift. In the industrial era, managers coordinated work. In the digital era, they guided change. In the age of AI, they must create meaning.

    AI operates at a level of complexity that most employees and many executives do not fully grasp. The decisions that follow involve trade-offs between efficiency and fairness, automation and employment, innovation and risk.

    This new managerial mission has several dimensions.

    Explaining what AI can and cannot do

    Most people overestimate AI in some areas and underestimate it in others. Managers must calibrate expectations and correct misconceptions. When an algorithm makes a mistake, someone has to explain whether this is a fundamental limitation or a correctable flaw, and what that means for the way the team should use the tool.

    Framing decisions so data informs rather than dictates

    Data can highlight patterns, risks and opportunities, but choosing the action still requires human judgement. A forecast may show which customers are likely to churn, but it does not decide whether you should offer a discount, improve the product or let them go. A predictive maintenance model may indicate a risk of failure, but it does not decide whether disrupting production is worth it. Managers ensure that AI supports decisions instead of replacing them.

    Protecting trust around how AI is used

    Employees carefully watch how AI is deployed. If it is used mainly for surveillance, trust collapses. If it introduces bias, resentment grows. If it operates as a black box, engagement drops. Managers are the guardians of fair, transparent and respectful AI practices inside their teams.

    Keeping teams engaged as roles are reshaped

    AI rarely eliminates jobs in a single step; it reshapes them. Tasks disappear, others appear, and the balance of the role changes. Managers must help people navigate this shift, find purpose in new responsibilities and reconnect with the uniquely human parts of their work instead of feeling replaced by the system.

    In this sense, managers are the human middleware of intelligent systems, the connective tissue between technology and emotion. Without them, AI remains a tool that nobody truly trusts or uses effectively.

    The empathy gap

    AI is efficient but indifferent. It processes patterns without caring about consequences. Empathy is therefore no longer a soft skill; it is a strategic one.

    Managers perceive what the data cannot: the fatigue behind polite compliance, the hesitation buried under a quick “yes”, the intuition that something is off even when the metrics are green. These signals often surface long before problems appear in dashboards.

    Managers do not compete with algorithms; they complete them. The model predicts while the manager interprets. The algorithm optimises while the manager examines whether that optimisation still serves the mission. The system says “this is what the data shows”; the manager asks “is this what we should do?”

    After we deployed a demand forecasting model, one manager noticed her team becoming more anxious, not because the model was wrong but because it revealed operational problems that had previously been hidden by uncertainty. Her reaction defined the success of the project. She reframed the situation: “We now see what we could not see before. This is an opportunity, not an accusation.” That moment of empathy turned a stressful tool into an empowering one.

    A new kind of literacy

    Managing in the age of AI requires a new form of literacy. It is less about coding and more about cognitive, ethical and contextual understanding.

    Understanding how AI makes decisions. Managers do not need to master the mathematics behind machine learning, but they must understand that AI extends patterns from the past into the future and struggles with situations that are fundamentally new.

    Recognising bias and limitation. Every dataset carries the history and distortions of the system that produced it. A model trained on historical behaviour will reproduce historical biases. Managers must learn to question assumptions and to test outcomes against reality.

    Translating outputs into context. A probability or a score is not a decision. A 78% risk of equipment failure may sound precise, but managers still have to decide how to act, taking into account costs, constraints and strategy.

    Maintaining space for human judgement. Just because AI can make a recommendation does not mean it should have the final say. Some decisions involve values more than optimisation. Managers protect that space and sometimes choose to go against the model for reasons that matter but are not encoded in the data.

    This literacy is cultural as much as technical. It is the ability to ask why before asking how.

    The real leadership challenge

    The challenge of AI is not replacement; it is relevance. In systems that increasingly automate decisions, how does human leadership stay essential?

    It requires a shift in focus.

    Managers move from supervision to interpretation. Algorithms can monitor performance and flag anomalies, but managers still have to decide whether a deviation is meaningful or just noise.

    They move from rigid planning to continuous adaptation. AI accelerates the pace of change, making long, detailed plans obsolete more quickly. The capacity to adjust becomes more valuable than the capacity to predict everything in advance.

    They move from control to trust. Information and analytical tools are increasingly accessible across the organization. Managers shift from controlling every decision to enabling good decisions to be made by others.

    This is uncomfortable. For decades, expertise was authority. Now, the algorithm may know more than the manager about certain problems. The manager’s value must come from synthesis, judgement and human understanding rather than from holding all the answers.

    In the end

    AI may optimise processes, but only managers can optimise meaning. They are the bridge between machine logic and human aspiration. They navigate ambiguity, balance competing values, maintain trust and help people find purpose in a transforming world.

    These capabilities are not being automated; they are becoming indispensable.

    The organizations that thrive in the age of AI will not be the ones with the most sophisticated algorithms, but the ones where managers excel at connecting technological capability with human understanding. In those organizations, efficiency serves strategy instead of replacing it, and automation creates space for deeper work rather than just more work.

    This is why, in the era of artificial intelligence, the most valuable intelligence in any company remains human.

  • Europe’s Impossible Mandate: Why Sustainability Became the Hardest Strategic Puzzle for European Companies

    Europe is asking its companies to do something no other region demands: to be simultaneously transparent, responsible and competitive in a world that rewards none of these qualities. This is the paradox at the centre of the European project today, and it is hitting the industrial world with a violence that many underestimated. Not because sustainability is misguided—far from it—but because Europe has built a regulatory architecture that exposes industrial reality faster than Europe can change it. And in the global race for industrial power, timing matters more than virtue.

    Something profound has shifted over the past three years. The sustainability movement that once looked like a moral horizon has become a geopolitical pressure cooker. CSRD, due diligence, taxonomy, CBAM: each of these tools was designed to make European companies confront their impact on the world. Each had the ambition to transform capital allocation, business models, and value chains. But taken together, and placed within the unforgiving reality of global competition, they now form a mandate that appears both admirable and impossible. Europe built the world’s most advanced mirror at exactly the moment it became the hardest place to run an industrial business.

    Behind the façade of regulatory elegance lies a more brutal story. European executives are not dealing with sustainability. They are navigating contradictions. They must comply with the deepest reporting framework ever designed while their competitors in the United States receive massive subsidies, face fewer disclosure requirements, and operate with energy costs that Europe cannot match. They must decarbonise faster than China while China continues to scale production, secure raw materials globally, and drive down the cost of clean technologies through sheer industrial volume. And they must align with societal expectations on sustainability while shareholders, markets and remuneration systems still reward short-term metrics shaped in the 1990s.

    It would be easy to accuse companies of resistance. The reality is the opposite: they are cooperating in a system that gives them contradictory signals. They are told to invest heavily in transparency, traceability, ESG data, double materiality assessments—yet their industrial environment remains structurally misaligned with the very transformation this transparency reveals. They are asked to make credible net-zero commitments while operating in value chains where Europe controls neither the energy mix nor the critical materials nor the geopolitical environment. They are required to publish transition plans that presume clarity on technologies, infrastructures and costs that do not yet exist. And they must do all of this under political messages that oscillate between ambition and rollback, depending on electoral cycles, energy prices and public opinion.

    This is the European dilemma: regulation has moved faster than strategy, and transparency now reveals what strategy is still unable to solve.

    In the boardrooms of industrial Europe, this tension is not theoretical. It is the daily substance of leadership. Decisions that once seemed unthinkable are now routine. Do we invest millions into CSRD-grade reporting systems while our competitors invest in production capacity? Do we extend European sustainability standards to global subsidiaries, knowing it could create cost asymmetries and legal exposure in jurisdictions with weaker norms? Do we exit profitable legacy businesses because their carbon profiles make long-term alignment impossible? Should the next gigafactory, datacentre or R&D hub be built in Europe out of loyalty, or in the US where the incentives are overwhelming? How long can we operate plants exposed to volatile energy prices when other regions stabilise industrial costs through state intervention?

    None of these decisions are easy. None are addressed in the directives. And none fall on regulators; they fall on the executives who must reconcile principles, politics and survival.

    What makes the European situation unique is not the regulation itself but its geopolitical solitude. The United States talks about sustainability but scales subsidies. China talks about climate neutrality in 2060 but scales production and secures minerals. Emerging economies talk about development—and they are right to. Europe, meanwhile, built its transformation narrative on transparency. Not on industrial policy. Not on energy sovereignty. Not on strategic autonomy. On transparency alone.

    But transparency is not a strategy. It is an exposure.

    What makes this exposure dangerous is that Europe has not yet answered the only questions that matter: What kind of industrial base does it want to keep? What sectors justify public investment? Which value chains must be secured regardless of cost? How much resilience is Europe ready to pay for? And what sacrifices—social, financial, political—is it willing to make to preserve industrial sovereignty?

    Without these answers, CSRD becomes a paradoxical instrument. Not a lever of transformation, but an X-ray of structural fragility. It forces companies to make visible the vulnerabilities of a continent that has not decided whether it wants to compete on cost, innovation, resilience or moral leadership. It pushes leaders to articulate transition plans while Europe still hesitates on its own energy and industrial doctrine. And it confronts companies with truths that political systems prefer to treat as technicalities.

    There are, of course, leaders trying to turn this burden into an operating system. Companies that redesign products for durability rather than replacement. That bring parts of their supply chain closer to home. That invest in circularity, industrial symbiosis, lifetime extension, traceability. That take resilience seriously, not as a communication theme but as a design constraint. They are not the loudest but they may be the most strategic. Their bet is simple: Europe’s regulatory discomfort is temporary, but the need for credibility is permanent. If Europe ever aligns its industrial and geopolitical strategy with its transparency regime, these companies will be the first to benefit.

    But the truth remains: this is not yet Europe’s collective trajectory. Today, sustainability in Europe is a question of individual courage inside a system that still rewards the old equilibrium. And courage has limits when the environment punishes those who move first.

    The sustainability debate in Europe will not be resolved by refining ESRS indicators or adjusting thresholds through Omnibus packages. It will be resolved by answering a geopolitical question that has nothing to do with reporting: What does Europe want to be in the next industrial cycle? A museum of past excellence? A regulatory island? A high-trust, high-resilience industrial bloc? Or a region that imposes constraints on itself while depending on others for energy, materials and technology?

    European companies cannot answer this question alone. But they are forced to act before Europe has answered it for itself.

    That is the heart of the impossible mandate. Europe built the most demanding sustainability mirror in the world without building the political, industrial and geopolitical structures necessary to act on what the mirror reveals. And until this gap closes, European companies will continue to carry a burden that is not of their making: the expectation to reconcile moral ambition with global competition, without the tools that make such reconciliation possible.

    If this reflection resonates, explore the other essays in the laboratory.