Being a Changemaker Inside a Company Is One of the Hardest Jobs There Is.

Published: 2025

There is a particular kind of professional experience that does not get talked about enough, and I want to name it directly — because I have lived it, and I know how many people are living it right now.

Being a changemaker inside a company is one of the hardest jobs you can do.

You are not just trying to meet KPIs. You are trying to shift mindsets. You are trying to balance business and purpose. And you are trying to prove — over and over, and then over again — that doing good is good business.

And some days, it feels like pushing a boulder uphill.

What the experience actually feels like

If you have done this work, you will recognise the patterns.

You feel like you are always justifying the “why” — making the case for work that should not need a case made for it, in meeting after meeting, to audiences who reset to scepticism between each one.

You are told to “go big” but not to rock the boat — given a mandate for change alongside an implicit instruction not to change anything that matters.

You are invited to the meeting but not given a voice — present for the optics of inclusion, absent from the decisions that count.

You are asked to lead change without the budget or support to make it happen — accountable for outcomes you have not been resourced to deliver.

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. To the ESG lead, the proposition manager, the product designer, the strategist — the person in the room asking “how does this really serve the customer?”, “are we leaving anyone behind?”, “what impact will this have in ten years?” — you are doing the work. And that work matters, even on the days when it does not feel like it is landing.

The pressures on internal changemakers have intensified as ESG and sustainability initiatives have become politically contested — which makes the internal advocacy job harder at precisely the moment it matters most. The people holding this line inside organisations deserve more recognition than they get.

The mistake most changemakers make

Here is the thing I have learned, though — both from my own experience and from watching the most effective changemakers I have worked with.

The ones who succeed do not go it alone.

The most effective corporate changemakers build bridges. They partner with nonprofits. They co-create with communities. They listen before they lead. Not for PR. Not for the CSR report. For insight.

Because nonprofits and community organisations bring things that most companies simply cannot generate internally: ground-level insight into complex issues, a mission-first mindset that keeps impact at the centre, an understanding of systemic friction that no dataset will surface, and — perhaps most valuably — deep trust in underserved communities that a corporate brand cannot buy.

When companies and nonprofits genuinely collaborate, the result should not be a checked CSR box. It should be real, measurable change — and better products, because the insight that community partners bring makes the products better.

A practical question for anyone in proposition design

If you work in customer strategy or proposition design, here is the question worth sitting with: what would change if your discovery phase included a community partner?

What would you see differently? Whose experience would you centre that you currently do not? What assumptions — about your customers, about the problem, about what a good solution looks like — would you have to let go of?

Some of the most inclusive strategies I have seen did not come from brainstorming sessions. They came from listening — from putting the organisation in genuine contact with the people and communities its products affect, and being willing to hear things that complicated the plan.

The future of impactful design is not siloed. It is shared. And the changemakers who understand that — who build coalitions rather than carrying the boulder alone — are the ones who actually move it.

If that is you: keep going. And find your partners.