Published August 4, 2026 in Innovation ⢠13 min read ⢠
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As environmental and societal challenges escalate, executives are struggling to keep pace. In a 2025 World Economic Forum and McKinsey survey, 84% of companies reported feeling underprepared for current and future disruptions.
But a powerful source of resilience is hiding in plain sight: their own people. A recent GlobeScan/Ashoka global survey of over 8,600 employees found that 82% believed they could help improve their companyâs social and environmental impact.
Yet less than a quarter were engaged in business-critical impact activities. The potential for change is in the workforce â but can organizations activate it?
Our research suggests the solution may lie with insider social change agents. These employees drive meaningful progress on social and environmental issues, whether or not it is in their job description.
Under the right conditions, anyone has the potential to become a change agent. To understand this potential, we conducted a review of more than 400 academic articles and books from fields such as management, psychology, and sociology.
We leveraged this analysis alongside our experience working with hundreds of change agents in university classrooms and the Aspen Instituteâs First Movers Fellowship Program to document the characteristics of people who catalyze change within organizations, how they do it, and what leaders can do to support them.
To accelerate how organizations deliver social impact, leaders need to understand the nature of change agents. Who are they? What do they do? What motivates them?
Our research found that the potential to drive social change is distributed far more widely than formal job titles would suggest. A single profile does not define insider social change agents; rather, they vary across three attributes: roles, identities, and motivations.
Some social change agents hold an official role related to sustainability or a mandate to pursue a socially-oriented goal. However, others voluntarily take on sustainability efforts beyond their regular duties.
Those with official roles may have titles such as sustainability manager, CSR director, or chief diversity officer. Yet our review indicated that organizations miss out on potential for social change if they limit or ringfence expectations and opportunities to those with related âsocial changeâ mandates or titles.
People without a formal mandate to pursue sustainability â anyone from a marketing VP to a chemist to an innovation manager â are just as capable of acting as agents of change.
Change agents represent a wide range of personal and professional identities that can influence how they pursue social progress. We identified four key dimensions:
Our research highlighted how different motivations inspire change agents. Life experiences such as traumatic personal events, career successes (or failures), or engaging in activism outside of work can be factors.
A sense of personal calling may drive some, while others may act after experiencing heightened emotions in response to traumatic events, such as a natural disaster or political upheaval.
These attributes are dynamic. Roles change over time, identities transform, and motivations shift. They can also come into conflict.
Our personal identity may clash with the demands of our formal role, or a new life experience could lead us to question our values.
For leaders, this means identifying and supporting change agents is not a one-time exercise. The conditions that activate someoneâs potential can shift.
Organizations miss out on potential for social change if they limit or ringfence expectations and opportunities to those with related mandates or titles.
To be effective, leaders must learn how change agents operate. Our research identified seven pathways for enabling maximum impact:
Supportive and informed leadership is required to facilitate insider social change agents and to scale their impact. Think of it like chemistry.
Change agents are the catalysts who accelerate transformation by lowering the âactivation energyâ required for change. They make it easier for others to move past resistance and begin to act differently, often sparking reactions that spread through teams and departments.
Yet, like in chemistry, a catalyst only works under the right conditions. Without support, even the most capable catalysts lose their potential, becoming exhausted, disengaged, or eventually leaving the organization.
Our review identified six leadership actions that foster the conditions to help catalysts operate at their best. When leaders adopt these steps, small acts of change can combine and amplify, creating a chain reaction that leads to scale and organizational transformation (Figure 1).
As we have seen, aspiring change agents donât need a formal mandate to pursue progress. Organizations should explicitly integrate sustainability efforts into all job functions (not just those with a related mandate).
For example, rather than assuming D&I is the sole purview of a chief diversity officer, leaders should instill the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion across their org chart and support initiatives for positive change, regardless of where they come from.
For example, Drew Wilkinson joined Microsoft as a paralegal, but he turned his passion for environmentalism into an internal sustainability community with the mission to âMake sustainability part of everybodyâs job.â
The community grew to more than 10,000 members. And Olu Odubajo, while working as a customer and digital product manager at KPMG, founded the Black Entrepreneurs Award after hearing stories of young leaders who used their organizations to create change.
Collaboration is vital in driving social change, whether thatâs creating a forum for internal coordination, bringing in external experts, or leveraging partners to co-create a sustainability initiative.
The wide range of roles, identities, and motivations among change agents underscores the importance of encouraging people to work together with (sometimes unlikely) allies.
Leaders should celebrate these collaborative efforts rather than focusing exclusively on individual heroism.
While working as a sustainability manager for the multinational beverage company AB InBev, Carolina GarcĂa ArbelĂĄez helped build a project, financed and led by six major beverage companies, to improve the health of a common watershed.
Antoni Ballabriga encouraged his employer, the Spanish bank BBVA, to address systemic inequities in the financial system: âI knew we needed new rules for the financial system and that BBVA should play an active role in building a new architecture for the industry.
âIt was an âahaâ moment when I noticed that I should work not only at BBVA, but also from BBVA, for this systemic change.â
The work of change agents is not easy. They often tackle âwicked problemsâ for which there are no answers yet. Failure or falling short is inevitable.
These issues are closely tied to personal values and identity, and setbacks can be painful, but they are part of the process.
Leaders should model constructive responses to failure by offering collective debriefs and facilitating shared learning from missed goals.
Within the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Climate Corps program, EDF engagement managers helped change agents overcome setbacks and plan new initiatives through regular status updates, noting how past participants had overcome failures, and facilitating discussions among multiple change agents on what they might try differently going forward.
But the value of failure extends beyond a single organization. Our research shows that openly sharing what didnât work across industry networks, communities of practice, and peer groups can seed new approaches elsewhere.
A failed pilot in one company may contribute to a broader toolkit that another organizationâs insiders can draw on. This was the case when LGBT employees in France used setbacks to refine training programs, awareness campaigns, and whistleblower systems that spread across organizations (Buchter 2021).
Leaders who encourage their change agents to share setbacks both externally and internally contribute to a broader ecosystem of learning.
Social change efforts are only as effective as the resources people can muster in support of them. To help employees move from idea to impact, leaders must connect potential agents of change with the resources they need.
This may mean matching junior employees with mentors, raising awareness about internal grants or intrapreneurship programs, or offering opportunities for informal connections and networking.
Proactively introducing employees who share a passion for social change and helping them build cross-functional networks (rather than seeing employee organizations as a threat) means that, when a crisis hits, these coalitions of innovators will be ready to act.
Wilkinson emphasized that a key role of the sustainability community he helped create at Microsoft was: âTo provide additional resources and support, to share important information, gain new insights, and address employee concerns directly.â
This community benefited from extensive resources and support through Microsoftâs Communities of Practice program.
Some organizations have gone further, building structured programs that make resources available to any employee with an idea.
Swisscomâs Kickbox program gives every employee access to a validation phase that includes 20% of their working time for two months, a starting budget, and coaching support.
Ideas that gain traction move through piloting and implementation stages, each with increased resources. The program has generated 26 implemented projects, 10 spin-offs, and a community of 4,000 members.
Change efforts gain traction when they are not treated as separate from the business but woven into its priorities. When insiders are expected to adapt to business priorities, little transformation can be achieved.
Leaders have a responsibility to adapt their structures and systems so that social and environmental goals become part of how the organization operates, rather than an add-on that employees must justify.
Leaders should create internal channels for voicing concerns, including reverse mentoring, to stay abreast of the issues that are top of mind for people across the organization.
Odubajo co-led the creation of such a program at KPMG, pairing black heritage employees with senior partners to surface how colleagues from underrepresented backgrounds experience the workplace. The program has been replicated at many FTSE 100 companies.
Listening is only the first step. Leaders must act on what they hear. Ballabriga was gratified to see BBVA add a focus on sustainability to its strategy.
GarcĂa ArbelĂĄez described a similar shift at AB InBev: âWhen we launched the Global Sustainability Goals,â she recalled, âWe said loudly and clearly that sustainability was not part of our business, that it was our business.â
By pushing her organization to view sustainability as core to the business, she was able to ensure substantive, lasting progress in her initiatives to boost water availability and quality.
In Colombia alone, her team protected nearly 4,000 hectares of the endangered Santurban wetlands, planted over 200,000 trees, and engaged more than 1,000 farming families in sustainable agriculture â creating the water brand Zalva to fund the project.
There is, however, a risk. Even in organizations that have formally embraced social goals, insiders may still be expected to justify every initiative in terms of existing business metrics.
When that happens, the most ambitious ideas â the ones that might truly redefine how the organization creates value â can get trimmed before theyâre ever tried. That could have been the fate of M-PESA, the worldâs most successful mobile banking service targeting people without bank accounts.
As intrapreneur Susie Lonie recalls, in the beginning: âIt was only a small CSR project that the directors were not interested in,â which only survived because the team secured external funding.
Our research suggests that the most effective insiders donât just align with the business case; they work to redefine it, making positive social change financially viable on its own terms.
Leaders should adjust incentive structures, performance metrics, and reward systems that determine what counts as âbusiness-relevant.â Without this, even the most resourceful insider is playing on a tilted field.
Change agents are the catalysts who accelerate transformation by lowering the activation energy required for change. Yet, like in chemistry, a catalyst only works under the right conditions.
Our research points to the power of small wins. Starting small and making real, if measured, progress is the way to drive long-term momentum. Leaders must help people connect their small wins to a larger strategic roadmap.
Manuela Pastore spent almost two decades in conventional corporate roles at Boehringer Ingelheim before finding her way into social impact work.
When the family-owned pharmaceutical company launched its Making More Health initiative in 2011, Pastore seized the opportunity to work with communities on the poverty line in Kenya and India.
She started small and visible: a school in one location, a community center in another. They were projects designed to build trust and demonstrate results.
âAt the beginning, you have to build your relationships,â she explained. âCommunity people, but also employees, my supervisors, everyone wants to see some first results.â
Recognizing that community needs were too holistic for any single intervention, she brought together nine local NGO partners into what she calls a, âsystem changer network,â in which each partner trains local trainers who spread solutions across the other organizationsâ locations.
To sustain momentum, she developed a system index that measures how frequently partners exchange trainings and collaborate. This introduced a gamification element that motivated deeper engagement.
Leaders should treat small wins not as isolated successes but as steps in a roadmap, with measurement tools that track cumulative impact and structures that connect progress across organizations.
A small win at one location becomes the proof of concept that unlocks investment at another, but only if leaders build the infrastructure to make that connection visible.
As our research has shown, it is often ordinary people from within the system who are best equipped to catalyze lasting social change.
The cost of failing to support these agents of change is high. If they give up or leave the workplace, their organizations will miss out on the potential to contribute to critical sustainability goals and to unlock new avenues for value creation.
Supporting insiders is good management and urgently needed. The window for meaningful progress on climate, inequality, and other systemic challenges is narrowing, and the incremental approaches that once seemed prudent are no longer sufficient.
Leaders who create the conditions for insider social change will build the organizational capability that the next decade demands.
Maureen Scully, Ante Glavas, and Nancy McGaw contributed to the research and article.
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