Sustainability Is Not a Committee Agenda Item

A Podcast That Made Me Rethink How We Talk to Clubs

I was driving back from a meeting with a state sporting body last month when the latest HBR IdeaCast came on. Goutam Challagalla from IMD Business School was talking about his book Clean Winners with Adi Ignatius, and about halfway through I actually pulled over to take notes on my phone, because what he was describing — the mistakes, the misaligned incentives, the gap between what organisations say about sustainability and what their customers actually respond to — was not just a corporate problem. It was a description of every sustainability conversation I have ever sat through in community sport.

Challagalla's central provocation is blunt: stop asking "how do we become more sustainable?" and start asking "how can sustainability help us create more value for the people we serve?" He breaks customers into three segments — green (will pay a premium for sustainability, less than 10%), blue (will engage if there is an incentive or cost saving), and gray (do not care about sustainability as a concept, just want the product to work). His argument is that if you only target the green segment, you will never scale. You will have a niche. And most organisations, he says, are stuck in that niche.

I kept thinking: he is describing our clubs. He is describing our governing bodies. He is describing the entire approach that community sport has taken to environmental and social sustainability for the past decade.

So I called three people.

The Roundtable

I wanted perspectives from people who actually run the governance machinery in three different sporting systems, because the conversation plays out differently depending on where you sit.

In Australia, the sustainability conversation in community sport is largely driven by funding conditions. Sport Australia, state departments, and local councils increasingly attach environmental and social governance requirements to grants and facility access. Clubs respond to these as compliance obligations — which is exactly what Challagalla would call "right to play" investments. You do them because you have to, not because you see strategic value.

In the UK, Sport England's governance framework — the Code for Sports Governance — has embedded environmental sustainability into its requirements. The DCMS has just valued volunteering at £24.7 billion. There is political will, institutional infrastructure, and public data. But the clubs on the ground experience this as paperwork, not innovation.

In the US, the conversation is more fragmented. There is no single national sports governance body equivalent to Sport Australia or Sport England. The NCAA, YMCA, Parks and Recreation departments, and thousands of independent leagues each approach sustainability differently — or not at all. The political climate has made the word itself radioactive in some communities, even as the underlying problems (facility costs, water, energy, volunteer burnout) have not changed.

What follows is not a verbatim transcript. It is the argument as it developed, with the specific points of agreement and disagreement that I think matter most.

"We Stopped Saying the Word"

The American perspective landed first and hardest. In parts of the US, particularly in red states where community recreation is most dependent on local government funding, the word "sustainability" has become politically charged to the point of being counterproductive. Several recreation directors have quietly stopped using it.

But here is the thing — and this is straight out of Challagalla's framework — the underlying problems have not gone away. Water bills at community pools are still rising. Energy costs at indoor facilities are still climbing. Volunteer burnout is still emptying committee rosters. The problems are real. The label has become toxic.

Challagalla tells the story of Reckitt's Finish dishwasher product. They discovered that 50% of households rinse dishes before loading the dishwasher — wasting 57 litres of water per cycle. So they engineered a product that eliminates the rinse. They did not market it as a green product. They marketed it as "skip the worst part of doing dishes." The water saving is a byproduct. The customer value is convenience.

The parallel for a community pool: you do not install solar heating because you want to reduce your carbon footprint. You install it because your gas bill is $14,000 a year and solar cuts it to $3,000. The environmental outcome is identical. The framing is financial. And the financial framing works in every political climate, in every community, with every committee member — including the ones who roll their eyes at the word "sustainability."

This is what Challagalla means by appealing to the gray customer. The gray customer is not anti-environment. They are indifferent to the framing. They want lower costs, less hassle, better outcomes. If the sustainable option delivers those things, they will choose it every time. They just will not choose it because it is sustainable.

The Governance Trap

The UK perspective complicates things. When sustainability is embedded in governance codes — as it is in Sport England's framework — organisations are compelled to report on it. This is Challagalla's "right to play." You do it or you lose funding eligibility. No strategic choice involved.

The problem is that governance-driven sustainability tends to produce compliance behaviours, not innovation. A club that writes an environmental policy because Sport England requires one has ticked a box. They have not asked the question that Challagalla insists matters: where is there waste in our system that, if eliminated, would create more value for our members?

I have seen this in the UK clubs we work with. They have environmental policies. Beautiful documents. Filed in a folder. The committee approved them at the September meeting. They have had zero impact on operations, because they were written to satisfy an external requirement, not to solve an internal problem.

Challagalla distinguishes between three types of investment: right to play (compliance), right to stay (resilience), and right to win (competitive advantage through innovation). Most clubs in all three countries are stuck at right to play. A few are thinking about right to stay — the Australian clubs in drought-affected regions who are genuinely worried about whether their playing surfaces will survive the next five summers. Almost none have reached right to win.

What "Right to Win" Looks Like in Community Sport

This is where the roundtable got genuinely interesting, because the three perspectives diverged.

The Australian view is that the right-to-win opportunity in community sport is operational efficiency. Australian clubs are chronically under-resourced. Most have zero paid staff. Every hour of admin is a volunteer hour — and as we have written about extensively, volunteer time is worth $44-50 per hour in replacement cost terms. The sustainability lens here is not about carbon. It is about waste — wasted volunteer hours, wasted paper, wasted effort on manual processes that technology eliminated a decade ago in every other sector.

A club that moves from paper forms to digital membership registration is not making a sustainability decision. They think they are making an efficiency decision. But they have eliminated printing, eliminated postage, eliminated the physical storage of paper records, eliminated the volunteer hours spent on data entry, and created a database that can generate the reports their governing body requires in seconds instead of days. The sustainability outcomes are real and measurable. They are just not the reason the club made the change.

This is the Finish framework applied to club management. Do not sell the water saving. Sell the elimination of a chore.

The UK view pushes further. In the UK, facility costs are the existential issue. Energy prices have been volatile since 2022. Clubs that operate their own facilities — and many UK sports clubs hold long leases on community halls, pavilions, and grounds — face energy bills that have doubled or tripled. For these clubs, the sustainability-as-innovation lens points directly at facility performance: LED lighting, insulation, solar, heat pumps, smart metering.

But here is the strategic insight: a club that invests in reducing its facility energy costs is not just saving money. It is building resilience — Challagalla's "right to stay." A club that can operate a venue at half the energy cost of its neighbours is a club that can offer lower hire fees, attract more bookings, cross-subsidise membership, and survive the next energy price shock. That is not a green initiative. That is a business strategy. It just happens to align with environmental outcomes.

The American view brings a dimension that neither the Australian nor the UK conversation typically addresses: community impact as brand. In the US, youth sports organisations compete fiercely for participants, coaches, and sponsors. A league that can demonstrate measurable community impact — reduced youth screen time, improved mental health outcomes, inclusive participation — has a recruiting and fundraising advantage over one that cannot.

Challagalla would call this blue customer territory. The parents are not paying a premium because the league is "sustainable." They are choosing the league because it delivers outcomes they value — healthy kids, good coaching, inclusive culture — and the sustainability framing gives sponsors and local government a reason to invest.

The Uncomfortable Bit About Greenwashing

Challagalla cites a study showing 42% of sustainability messages in the EU contain some element of greenwashing. I suspect the figure in community sport is higher, though the greenwashing is usually accidental rather than cynical.

Clubs write sustainability policies using template language from their governing body. They include phrases like "committed to reducing our environmental impact" and "promoting sustainable practices" without any measurable commitment behind them. They are not lying. They are just saying things that sound right without having done the work to make them true.

This matters because members, sponsors, and funders are increasingly sophisticated. A sponsor evaluating two potential club partnerships — one that says "we are committed to sustainability" and one that says "we reduced our facility energy costs by 34% last year, saving $8,200, and diverted 2.1 tonnes of waste from landfill through our digital membership system" — will choose the second every time. Specificity is the antidote to greenwashing. Numbers are the antidote to platitudes.

Challagalla's Mayonnaise Problem

There is a moment in the HBR conversation that I keep coming back to. Challagalla quotes activist investor Terry Smith on Unilever: "Any company that thinks they need to define a purpose for mayonnaise has, in our view, lost the plot."

I laughed out loud in the car when I heard it, because I have sat in committee meetings where clubs were trying to write a purpose statement for their Saturday afternoon sausage sizzle. Not every activity needs a purpose. Some things just need to work.

The danger Challagalla identifies at Unilever — Paul Polman's well-intentioned push to give every brand a purpose, leading to waste and unfocused marketing across 400 product lines — has a direct analogy in sport governance. When a state sporting body tells its 200 affiliated clubs that every club must have an environmental sustainability plan, a reconciliation action plan, a mental health strategy, a social inclusion policy, and a digital transformation roadmap, they are doing the Unilever thing. They are trying to attach purpose to everything, including the mayonnaise.

Some clubs need a sustainability strategy because they operate a facility and their energy costs are killing them. Some clubs need a mental health policy because they work with vulnerable young people. Some clubs need exactly none of these things because they are eight retired blokes who play lawn bowls on Tuesday mornings and their total environmental impact is a kettle and a biscuit tin.

Governance bodies that mandate the same requirements across every club, regardless of size, context, or risk profile, are creating compliance busywork — not sustainable practice. Challagalla would say they are running a "right to play" programme when they should be helping clubs find their "right to win."

What I Think We Should Actually Do

I have been building software for clubs and associations for a long time now. I have a bias, and I will name it: I believe most sustainability outcomes in community sport will come as byproducts of operational improvement, not as the result of sustainability strategies.

When a club moves from paper to digital, they eliminate printing. When they automate renewals, they eliminate the car trips and phone calls and stamps that went into chasing lapsed members. When they process payments online, they eliminate the cash handling, the bank runs, the manual reconciliation. When they check in event attendees with a phone instead of a clipboard, they generate data that can be reported to governing bodies without a separate data-collection exercise.

None of these are sustainability initiatives. All of them have measurable sustainability outcomes. And — this is the Challagalla point — all of them create customer value first. The club secretary gets her Sundays back. The treasurer stops drowning in spreadsheets. The member pays their renewal in 30 seconds instead of waiting for the clubhouse to open. The sustainability is real, but it is not the reason anyone made the change.

I think this is the only way sustainability scales in community sport. Not through mandates and policies and template documents. Through tools and practices that make clubs work better, that happen to be sustainable.

Challagalla ends the podcast by drawing an analogy to the dotcom bust. A lot of bad companies went out of business in 2001. That did not mean the internet went away. The companies that stayed on the digital transformation path thrived. He is making the same argument about sustainability: the problems are not going away. Water scarcity, energy costs, extreme heat, volunteer burnout, facility maintenance backlogs — these are getting worse, not better. The clubs that find innovation opportunities in these constraints, rather than treating them as compliance burdens, will be the ones that thrive.

I think he is right. And I think community sport — which runs almost entirely on volunteer labour, donated facilities, and minimal budgets — is actually better positioned to prove it than any multinational corporation.

We just need to stop writing purpose statements for the sausage sizzle.

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The HBR IdeaCast episode with Goutam Challagalla aired on 31 March 2026. His book, Clean Winners: Sustainability Strategy That Puts Customers First, co-authored with Frédéric Dalsace, is published by IMD Business School.