A few years ago, I asked a sustainability director at a large consumer goods company what her job actually involved. She paused for a second, laughed, and said, “Honestly? Mostly translation.” 

After interviewing sustainability professionals over the past few years for a book I’m writing, I have heard some version of that answer again and again. Sustainability leaders translate environmental risk into terms finance will take seriously, social impact into language strategy can work with, and public commitments into language legal can live with. Most students who want to work in sustainability understand why the work matters. What they often don’t see is how much of the job involves internal persuasion.

If you are considering a career in this space or trying to understand what sustainability professionals actually do inside companies, the short version is: they spend a lot of time trying to get people who have different priorities, vocabularies, and incentives to move in the same direction. The analytical work matters, but it is often not the hardest part. The harder part is communication – learning to read a room, adjust an argument, and bring people along.

The real obstacles 

Inside an organization, the obstacles to sustainability progress are rarely cartoon villains or obvious bad faith. More often, they are legitimate institutional and leadership priorities colliding with one another. The CFO asks what the return on investment is and why this issue should take precedence over something else. Legal worries about overclaiming, liability, and commitments the firm may not be able to defend later. Strategy wants to know whether the sustainability proposal supports the business or distracts from it. Operations wants to know who will actually implement the plan, and at what cost. 

None of those questions are irrational, which is precisely why they are difficult to answer.  

Students often arrive with the impression that the real challenge is knowing what ought to be done, but the more difficult challenge is often figuring out how to move an organization made up of people with different responsibilities, incentives, and fears to support sustainability efforts. In such an environment, you can be right on the substance and still fail completely in the room. 

What classrooms miss 

Traditional classroom methods help, but only up to a point. A case discussion can expose students to a problem, readings can give them frameworks, and ethical debate can clarify stakes, but what those formats generally do not do very well is force students to work through resistance in real time. 

In most case discussions, the information is already organized and the actors already described. Their motives are already legible, and even conflict arrives in a somewhat processed form. In the end, students are asked to interpret the case but not navigate it. 

In a real organization, however, people don’t always tell you what they really think at first. They test your logic and push back selectively. They frame the same issue in very different ways depending on their function and what they are accountable for. Sometimes they agree with the principle and reject the timing, sometimes they like the optics and resist the operational consequences, and sometimes they are not opposed at all, but they need the issue translated into terms that fit their own obligations. You can read about that dynamic in a case, but you can’t practice it. 

Why I built the PrimeGoods simulation 

This gap is one reason I built the PrimeGoods simulation for my courses at Hult. In the simulation, students take on the role of a sustainability practitioner at a large consumer goods company facing EU regulatory pressure. Their task is to determine which issues the company should prioritize by weighing environmental and social impact alongside financial risk and opportunity – the kind of double materiality problem large firms are increasingly being required to confront. 

On paper, that may sound relatively straightforward. In practice, different stakeholders do not experience materiality in the same way, and they rarely rank issues according to a single logic. 

During the simulation, students engage a set of AI-driven executive characters: a CEO focused on competitive position, a CFO focused on cost and exposure, an investor balancing returns against sustainability expectations, a legal head concerned with liability, and a sustainability officer raising pressure for more dramatic reform. These characters are not there to deliver content in neat pieces. Instead, students need to ask good questions, follow leads, interpret hesitation, and adjust their framing when an argument is not landing. 

What surprises many students is that the simulation does not reward them simply for identifying the most morally compelling issue but forces them to confront a harder problem: how to make progress when every serious option runs into constraints that are not imaginary. The CFO’s concerns are legitimate, legal concerns are legitimate, and strategy concerns are legitimate. The task is not to brush those aside in the name of principlebut to figure out whether sustainability can still be advanced under those conditions, and if so, how. 

Why AI matters here 

A few years ago, building something like this would have been difficult. Human role-play can be useful, but it is expensive, hard to scale, and difficult to adapt once built. This is an AI use case with almost no downside: it lets us train skills that were practically impossible to train before. 

You can build characters around distinct motivations, control what they know, and keep the underlying stakeholders consistent across students while the conversation still varies depending on the quality of the questions. Students have to listen, notice what kind of resistance they are getting, and decide whether the problem is the evidence, the framing, the sequencing, or the political reality of the organization. And because the conversations can be repeated, they can try again after getting it wrong. 

What students take away 

There’s room within the simulation for students to disagree about the right answer, but that’s arguably beside the point from a pedagogical standpoint. Success really comes when students start seeing sustainability work as institutional practice, not just moral discourse or technical expertise. They see that progress depends not only on conviction but on timing, framing, coalition-building, and judgment under constraint. They have to synthesize conflicting information, weigh competing priorities, and make judgment calls without complete data, the kind of critical thinking that’s hard to teach in a lecture. They discover that a strong analysis is not self-executing, and they can experience the frustration of having a solid case and still failing to move someone. When it arises, that frustration brings students closer to the job than most classroom exercises can. 

This matters for all students to experience, even if they don’t plan to go directly into sustainability roles. Many graduates will end up in finance, strategy, operations, consulting, or general management. While they may never hold “sustainability” in their title, they are increasingly likely to encounter sustainability claims, reporting obligations, and internal pressure to justify or challenge action on these issues. When that happens, they will benefit from knowing what the sustainability team is trying to do and why conversations can become difficult. 

The bigger picture 

Companies often assume the challenge is mainly technical: find people who understand carbon accounting, reporting standards, life-cycle analysis, or supply chain audits and sustainability will be solved. While those skills matter, they are usually not enough. What many firms also need are people who can think critically across domains, translate across functions, build coalitions, and make sustainability legible to decision-makers in terms they can recognize – and in doing so, expand how those decision-makers think about business strategy. 

If students are going to work in organizations that are serious, conflicted, defensive, and structurally resistant to change, which many firms are, they need somewhere to practice operating under those conditions. The PrimeGoods simulation is one attempt to provide that. It does not simulate reality perfectly, but it gives students repeated exposure to a part of sustainability work that business education usually leaves abstract. 

The people who make progress in this field are not always the ones with the cleanest rhetoric or the strongest moral vocabulary. More often, they are the ones who understand how institutions absorb, resist, delay, reinterpret, and sometimes finally act. 

That is difficult to teach, but it is possible to practice. 

Rob Barlow is Professor of Business and Global Co-Lead for Sustainability & ESG at Hult International Business School.