S13 E6 DB|BD at Aspen: Motivating People is a Design Challenge with Deloitte’s Steve Goldbach

 Steve Goldbach leads Deloitte’s Sustainability and Infrastructure practice. He believes today’s leaders face an emerging new design challenge: figuring out how the next generation will build real judgment and taste when AI is taking over so much of the work that used to teach it. He’s the co-author, along with his longtime collaborator Geoff Tuff, of three best-selling books on leadership and innovation.  His latest is called Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift.

In this conversation with DB|BD host Ellen McGirt, Steve explains that a business’ culture is a collective outcome of the behavior of people in it and why motivating people to change those behaviors is the ultimate design challenge. He also shares his research on making a business case for sustainability and explains why preparing for an organization’s future lies in the experience of their youngest employees in mind.

On this season of DB|BD, we are thinking about radical collaboration. Host Ellen McGirt sat down with visionary designers, leaders and thinkers at the 2026 Aspen Business & Society Summit to ask them about the radical act of collaborating with others in a time when it often feels impossible to find common ground.

Make the Business Case from Your Sustainability Initiative from the Harvard Business Review

Steve’s latest book, Hone

TRANSCRIPT

Ellen McGirt: Deloitte’s Steven Goldbach wants everyone to approach every important conversation at work — and let’s face it, they all are— with one phrase in mind: I have something important to say, but I might be missing something. The first half gives you agency; the second keeps you open. Helpful, right? Steven leads the firm’s sustainability and infrastructure practice, and he says we’re all going to need both agency and openness to navigate what’s coming next.

Here’s just one very top-of-mind example. He believes today’s leaders face an emerging new design challenge: figuring out how much the next generation will build real judgment and taste when AI is taking over so much of the work that used to teach it. He’s the co-author with his longtime collaborator Jeff Tuff of three best-selling books on leadership and innovation. His latest is called Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. We’re going to get into that.

But he’s also an Aspen veteran. Following his own principles, he led a wide-open brainstorm at last year’s summit that grew into a new HBR framework to help sustainability leaders speak the language of CFOs to better embed sustainability into the core of the business. We’ll link to that story in the show notes.

In our wide-ranging conversation, we talk about what culture change really means, what sustainability leaders often miss, and why human behavior belongs at the center of everything we do. Here’s Steve Goldbach.

Ellen McGirt: So, Steve, I’m so happy that you’re here, and to get to know you better and what you do, and learn more about collaboration and sustainability and all the most important things. I love your books, by the way.

Steve Goldbach: Thank you so much.

Ellen McGirt: I tell you, this is some trilogy between the two of you. The three books are really extraordinary. Can you walk me through Detonate, Provoke, and Hone, the eight years between the books? Can you narrate the period of time between the first and the third?

Steve Goldbach: Yeah. Our first book, Detonate, was really… neither of us had a book in mind when we started talking about writing together. Jeff and I had been working partners for a long time, and we were facilitating a session in Chicago one day together, and Jeff had been published in HBR a number of times, and I said to him, “We should write something together.”

And I had in mind we’ll write an article or something like that. And Jeff was at the time a guest blogger on HuffPo, and he said, “Why don’t you just take one of my columns for the week?” And I said, “Nah, I don’t really wanna be a blogger just yet.” And then it came to pass that Wiley was looking to publish a book that would be a bit of a follow-up to Ten Types of Innovation and had been in touch with Jeff in his leadership role in the innovation practice at Deloitte.

And we had a few things in mind, and we went to lunch, and we whiteboarded a few different things where we saw a lot of companies, not making mistakes, but just doing things in a way that didn’t fit the way the world worked. So the example that I’ll share is every company does their cost forecasting saying, “First we’re gonna think about what our market opportunity is, and here’s our revenue, and here’s what we expect it to grow over the next several years. And therefore, here’s what we can afford to spend to generate that revenue.” And in reality, the world works in exactly the opposite way. You spend money to create customer behavior, which results in revenue. It’s not like revenue is preordained.

But we come at it from this point of view, like we have this right to our market share, or we have this right to our market. And so there were a number of issues like that in Detonate that we wanted to expose. And if we went back, we would say we probably could have written a much more effective book, but we wanted to just do it, make a minimally viable move and get out there.

And then with Provoke, it was done in the middle of COVID, and we wrote it entirely virtually without ever seeing each other, and we wanted to capture the idea that a lot of times world issues move from a matter of if they’ll come to fruition to a matter of when they’ll come to fruition very quickly.

And if companies can understand and appreciate when that phase change is coming, then they have more degrees of freedom to shape the competitive environment in which they compete, rather than waiting until it’s clear that something is going to be an important issue. And the companies that we think do the best job of figuring out early on when that issue is gonna come to fruition are the ones that shape the environment to their benefit.

Look, an easy example is if you look at the work of Elon Musk at Tesla and SpaceX: seeing that electric vehicles are going to be an important component of the auto sector for a variety of different reasons, and space is going to be an important frontier for mankind. Being at the early stage of that development and shaping it has allowed both Tesla and SpaceX, for better or for worse, to be the leaders in their space.

And so that’s an important notion, and we wanted to highlight some provocateurs, so to speak, who we felt were great. So we profiled a few different folks in Provoke, including the amazing Valerie Rainford, Debbie Beale from Posse, and Ryan for his work in Atlanta on the Beltway project there.

And then with Hone, people were saying, “You’ve detonated and provoked.” We wanted to come back and make perhaps a more pragmatic… How do you put some of these principles into practice?

And it was calling attention to the importance of management system design, because you know this as a designer: your system is always perfectly designed to get the outcomes it gets, right? And so we wanted to have more purposeful system design and make the statement that that’s the responsibility of leadership.

This doesn’t happen by accident. System design is a really crucial strategy point for CEOs. And so that’s where Hone came from. And I realize this is a really long answer, but the through line in the three books is that we are all about behavior, human behavior.

Detonate was articulating that behavior is the unit of analysis that matters most, whether it’s customer behavior or employee behavior. Provoke is about figuring out when to try to influence that behavior. And Hone is all about how you design behavior.

And management systems are the tools inside organizations that cause people to understand what good looks like around here. And therefore, if you want to influence behavior inside your organization, you must understand management systems.

Ellen McGirt: So I absolutely wanna dig into all of that, including the origin of systems thinking, which I did not know, and which your book illuminated. But let’s talk a little bit about what you do in your day job and how you got there. In your own words, how do you describe what you do, and who do you do it for?

Steve Goldbach: Well, at the heart of it, like anyone at Deloitte, I am here to help my clients be successful, however they define that.

I think the idea of being in the client service field is sitting side by side with your client and trying to help them be successful, and we’ll talk more about that when we talk about collaboration and what it looks like to take a really client-centric approach to that kind of collaboration.

My current set of responsibilities is leading our sustainability and infrastructure practice at Deloitte, and in that, it’s all the issues associated with sustainability, which is very broad. I realize sustainability and infrastructure are both broadly and differently defined by different parts of the world.

So in sustainability, it’s all the issues of driving the energy transition, thinking about the heart-of-the-business sustainability issues. Like we talked about EVs: that’s a heart-of-the-business strategy choice for the auto sector. Whether it’s in insurance, how do you think about serving areas that have substantial weather-related risk?

Or whether it’s in other parts of financial services, or how do you think about getting energy to data centers? These are all issues of sustainability. Same thing with circularity and packaging and all kinds of other issues. It means all kinds of different things. And same with infrastructure: how do we create the infrastructure that we need, not just for sustainability purposes, but for our whole economy, which sort of takes infrastructure for granted?

We always just assume it’s gonna be there, and we’re now at a time when so much of our infrastructure needs an upgrade, both to bring it into the 21st century in terms of its digital capacity, but also just to repair it. It’s been under-invested for a long time. So there are massive challenges in both of those spaces that we want to help our clients navigate.

So that’s my job. Well, it’s a fun job.

Ellen McGirt: You took over the sustainability practice at exactly the moment when words like sustainability became a buzzword and under fire. How have you learned to talk about it with your clients? In general, what are your clients asking for? Has it changed? Has the work changed?

Steve Goldbach: I don’t think the work has changed. I think the issue that sustainability has had is that it began its life as a compliance choice. And therefore, it immediately was sort of an adjacency to the business. And I learned early on, in some work with a consumer packaged goods company that competed with some of the so-called sustainability-focused cleaning products…

And their comment to me was, “We will do a lot more good for the world if we make our products that have large market share more sustainable than a small niche brand that doesn’t work very well.” So I’ve always come at this from the point of view that what we really need to do is infuse this kind of thinking into business issues, because there are huge opportunities for value creation.

And if there’s a portion of consumers who really care about that, then they’ll buy it. But we know that if you make your products better and more desirable, and they also happen to be sustainable, you will create more consumer value, and you will create more sustainability. And so we’ve always tried to take the tack of how can we infuse sustainability into the value creation thesis of companies.

And that’s in some ways the best way to get the best of both. Because if you’re out there competing for capital, competing for ideas, and it’s either/or, then you’re far less likely to succeed in a world where we’ve got constrained resources, and we’ve got to make a choice of, do we maximize our market share or serve our customer needs?

And if our customers aren’t buying it, it just creates tension. And innovation, in my mind, is about figuring out a way to make the trade-offs go away. And I think in this world, there are a number of different ways where you can be both better for the customer and more sustainable, in whatever way that might get defined, whether it’s water or nature or carbon or what have you.

You can have both. And there are plenty of different initiatives that we think accomplish both. And so we’ve worked pretty hard to try to create a framework for sustainability leaders to be able to capture that thinking. Because up till now, it’s been largely, “Well, we’re doing this bit of our work for this other purpose,” and that’s at cross-purposes with what the rest of the business is doing.

Ellen McGirt: It’s just not sustainable.

Steve Goldbach: It’s just not gonna lead to the outcomes we want, which is better customer performance that also happens to be more sustainable.

Ellen McGirt: So I wanna go into systems design and talk about collaboration, particularly since you mentioned data centers and energy. It just seems to be so fraught right now. I was delighted to learn something in your book that I didn’t know, that the term systems thinking, which is now so widespread, has a surprising origin traced back to a cattle ranch in Nebraska in the 1920s. Could you tell us that story, please?

Steve Goldbach: I’m not sure that the listeners are gonna wanna get into that all that much.

Ellen McGirt: We love origin stories at Design Observer.

Steve Goldbach: Look, on systems thinking, the only thing I wanna get into here is that it’s become a little bit of a meme word. Everything’s a systems problem. And then we even have this now, systems of systems. And I think the most important thing for the listeners to appreciate, and I think as a designer you would too, is that systems thinking is just figuring out the motivations of how people behave and what they will do, right?

And I think the origins go back from that cattle ranch story to a lot of work at MIT through the years. But put down to it, everything is a system. There’s nothing that isn’t a system. And what you need to understand in any system is there are going to be actors in it.

Those actors are human beings. Each human being has different sets of motivators for their behaviors, whether it’s a driver of their behavior or a barrier to their behavior. And understanding and figuring out how you might be able to access that behavior, or change it or harness it, or get someone to do something different, is the ultimate design challenge.

It’s how do I get someone to behave in a way that’s consistent with the objectives that I’m seeking? And I think far too few people… they get fancy when they talk about systems thinking, right? And it’s like, let’s just bring it down to its core level, which is systems thinking is about figuring out how to get different groups to behave in some way, whether it’s changing behavior or keeping behavior.

And ultimately, every problem, to some extent, has a systems component to it. Every time an organization wants to change behavior, they need to tweak some tool that is causing people to behave a certain way in the organization. This is why we take a little bit of umbrage with the notion of culture inside an organization, because everyone says, “Well, we just need to change the culture.” Well, culture is an outcome. It’s the collective of people’s behavior. The way you change that behavior is by changing the motivators, ’cause everyone shows up at work wanting to be successful in some way.

And they need to have success defined for them in some way. And when it’s defined in that way, they’re like, “I’m gonna try to be successful.” If I’m a salesperson and you tell me my goal is to sell more to this group of customers, I’m gonna obviously target that. If you tell me my goal is to sell more overall, I’m gonna figure out a way to sell more overall. So framing what success looks like is super important in the world of system design.

Ellen McGirt: But in the old-school approach, the incentive was money and compensation. That was it. You are really talking about a much more sophisticated approach.

Steve Goldbach: Well, I think money and compensation certainly is almost always at the root of it. But I would argue that it goes even deeper. Money and compensation is to some extent a metric of a person who wants to be deemed as successful. And oftentimes some people are motivated purely by money, and some people aren’t motivated by the bottom line as long as they believe they’re fairly compensated.

So I believe that there is a difference. If you believe you’re unfairly compensated, then you work really hard to get yourself fairly compensated. But just paying someone more doesn’t have that same linear effect. So getting someone to fair or even slightly above has a certain amount of behavior change.

Awarding someone with outsized compensation once they’re already fairly compensated doesn’t necessarily change behavior in the same way that being perceived as successful, or helping make an impact, or doing something else does. So I think it depends on where you perceive yourself at this moment, and it’s important to recognize that not all humans are motivated in the same way, and that’s the trick of system design.

If humans were uniform, it would be super easy to design systems that created these outcomes. But you end up having these different segments of people, all of whom have different motivators, and that becomes a design challenge.

Ellen McGirt: So how does someone get good at it? And I wanna add to the complexity when you think about companies and the communities they serve, for example, who may be at odds. One of the things we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast and at this conference is that moment where people who are very different from each other, with different expertise, different experience, looking for a different outcome, come together virtually or physically in the same room, and they have to have a series of difficult conversations and decide on something.

The system design as you envision it, as you teach it, prepares people for success in that moment, I think. How do you get into that room? And I think the philosophical question is: How can you design a system, and maybe you can’t, where people who are very different from each other, on different sides of an issue, are open to the needs and concerns of someone different from them?

Steve Goldbach: Yeah. Look, it’s a massive challenge that is at the root of so many different issues that leaders face in business. There are competing interests. These are societal challenges, and they’re often about different interests that need to get resolved.

I’m gonna answer your question in two different ways. You asked how do you get good at systems design. I think the answer to that question would be you have to practice, and you have to have a hypothesis. And what you have to ask yourself is, “If I change this management system, whether it’s a formal or an informal management system, does it create the behavioral outcome that I’m looking for?”

So either it could be I change how people are compensated, I change how people are evaluated, or I change the questions that leaders are asking in meetings, or how people perceive that they’ll get ahead in an organization.

If you start to experiment with systems design by saying, “I’m going to have a hypothesis about what it will take to change that behavior. I’m gonna change these management systems, then I’m gonna see and keep repeating,” you will get better at figuring out what moves people in that situation. The second aspect of your question is around how do you deal with disparate interests, where humans are motivated by different things or have different things that are important to them.

I’m a big proponent of the field of productive interactions as originated by Chris Argyris, which was taught to me by a number of my colleagues at Monitor Group, where we made a practice of this. In particular, Roger Martin was a great influence of mine over the years, both in this field and in design.

The key thing that Argyris says is if you can say the following words to yourself as you enter a conversation: “I have something important to say, but I might be missing something.”

The first speaks to, I have a role to play, I have agency in this conversation. But the second is really important, because it causes you to say that if my desire is to get to the best possible outcome, I can’t possibly have all the answers, and it forces me to be open to listen to those other points of view.

Because the reality is we do better, both as society and in business, by getting different points of view, whether based on different expertise, different lived experiences, or different constituencies, because we can’t all possibly see the world. The way human beings make decisions is that they are bombarded with a bunch of data about the world. We all have our lived experience. And then we take a small sample of that data.

We hold it, and we process it, and we reach a conclusion about the world based on the data that we select, whether it’s an observation or a lived experience. And we usually, and increasingly, hold those conclusions quite firmly, right?

I think it’s really important that we hold our conclusions a bit more loosely and realize that there are other groups of people who have access to different data in the world and might select different data and process it differently. And therefore, if we go into these conversations with the idea that I might be missing something, and ask them questions about what they’re seeing, and they do the same with us, together we might come up with a better outcome that can make some of these trade-offs go away, that can drive better outcomes for all groups.

And I just think that when you position something as either/or, and you’re fighting for your position, then you’re much less likely to end up with a great outcome. The way you usually reduce the tension is by asking questions, leading with inquiry.

“Tell me why you feel that way. What is it that you’re seeing?” Looking for some degree of commonality, because I think the world today highlights differences. The more people get together physically and actually listen to each other… but you have to come with an open mind.

Ellen McGirt: So do you have any examples that you’re able to talk about? Let’s just pivot to the collaboration here at Aspen. I think that’s a more important piece.

Steve Goldbach: So how do we put this together in practice? I think the collaboration that we’ve had in the sustainability community here, coming out of the Business and Society Summit last year, was an example of putting this concept of design thinking and productive interactions into practice.

So the story is that at the 2025 summit, I was asked by Alicia to have the fun of facilitating the so-called wildcard session. So this was the action breakout that didn’t have a topic, and we were meant to define our own topic. And as a student of design, since I was responsible for facilitating it, I asked everyone around the table who had chosen the wildcard session, “What’s on your mind? Let’s just start with, what are you thinking about as a human being?” And many of them had some version of the same problem, which is, “I’m having trouble getting my initiatives approved because I’m running into roadblocks getting access to the capital that I need to fund my initiatives.”

And I had a hypothesis from working with a couple of different CSOs, in particular Kathy Pickus from ADM and Anne Tracy from Colgate, who had been saying, “Look, we need to be moving more towards a world where we’re talking about value creation.” And so I had that hypothesis in mind, and then listening to everybody, I said, “Well, what if we focused on how we could talk about sustainability in a way that was much more conducive to a CFO and a value creation mode?”

And everyone was like, “Yes, we need to spend some time talking about that.” And then when we reported back to the broader room after the hour that we had to work on this, about 25 people volunteered and said, “Hey, I’d love to spend more time on that.” And I said I would volunteer us at Deloitte to work together with Aspen to facilitate some of those conversations.

And what was going through my head was, look, first of all, it’s an amazing opportunity to hear what these senior executives are struggling with, and that’s the ultimate in a client service mentality, going back to before. And I also felt that this is an important problem to solve, because it allows for the infusion of sustainability into the parts of the organization that are less likely to adopt it unprovoked.

And so that led to a number of working sessions where we listened really hard and tried to come up with a tool that would be super simple and useful to sustainability leaders in all kinds of organizations. And it just got published yesterday in HBR, with a few of my colleagues, myself, Alicia from Aspen, and Kathy and Anne as co-authors, where we talk about this simple sustainability fusion perspective, which is that an investment in sustainability is just like any other investment in a company.

It has to either enhance revenue, reduce cost, avoid future cost, or avoid future revenue loss. And when you evaluate it from that simple framework, it’s really not hard to create a business logic for the kinds of things sustainability leaders are looking to invest in today.

Ellen McGirt: That is fantastic. Congratulations. We’re gonna link to the story in our show notes as well. I know I’ve gotta let you go, and you have to continue to do all kinds of wildcard collaborative things here on campus. I wanted to ask you about the next generation of business leaders, because that is also very much top of mind.

It’s coming up at every roundtable I’m sitting at. Are they prepared? Words like judgment and discernment come up. Are they over-reliant on technology? In your view, what will the next generation of business leaders need to do, study, and take seriously to thrive within the systems that they will ultimately be designing?

Steve Goldbach: I think what we are facing now is a terrific system design challenge. I think it is not unforeseeable. So coming back to the language of Provoke, it is a matter of when, not if, work is meaningfully changed by AI.

And the problem to be solved, at least as I see it today, is that the people who are currently business leaders got to that chair through some combination of experiences and mentorship along the way, where they learned to have discerning taste and judgment, right? This is what good looks like. Or this is, in my judgment, when I make a decision. ‘Cause humans are still going to be making the most important decisions in organizations as we go forward. We might outsource some of the data collection and the analysis, but it’s unlikely that we’re gonna outsource those decisions to non-humans for the foreseeable future.

And the design challenge of the future is going to be: how do we create business leaders who have taste and judgment in a world where a lot of the work that helped them create that taste and judgment is going to be changed? And so the design that I think the business leaders of today need to do to create the business leaders of tomorrow is really think hard about what it means to be an early-stage employee at your organization.

Because we need to not just have you there to do the work. We need to have you there to become the next generation. And so we need a more thoughtful design about what that set of experiences looks like in this world. How do you have a thoughtful design about what mentorship means in a world of AI?

How do you bring those people along so that you give them enough experience, allowing them access to tools like AI, but also making sure that they’ve got enough to develop into the business leaders of tomorrow? That is a design challenge to come. And I think our systems are gonna need to change in how we think about the development of people.

It used to be about what work you gave them. And I don’t have an answer to what it needs to be. But it’s not just work, ’cause a lot of the analysis might be done by someone, or something, else. It might be access to conversations, participating in different meetings. That’s gotta change in order to give them the ability to develop that judgment.

Ellen McGirt: So in the absence of the never-ending series of stretch assignments, it’s time for all senior leaders to live in the question, “I might be missing something here.”

Steve Goldbach: Totally. I know we gotta run, but I have a 12-year-old, and she is in the middle of middle school. We don’t have debates at home about it, because she’s pretty self-sufficient and strives to learn on her own. But I can imagine that in schools, this is gonna be something where we’re gonna have to think about the redesign of what it means to be educated.

We have to, at the same time, hold two things that are inconveniently in opposition. One is that the way you learn is by doing, and so it’s really important to give them repetitions in school. But at the same time, they need to learn how to use these tools, and they’re gonna experiment with them. So we need to have a framework that allows for both, and I’ve seen some interesting examples of universities going back to oral exams to make sure that students have understood the concepts without the use of tools. And so we’re gonna have to get experimental for the next little while on how we really create opportunities for people to demonstrate that they’ve ingrained their learnings before they have access to the tools, ’cause the bar is gonna get high.

And so I think teaching that creativity early on is gonna be important.

Ellen McGirt: And we’re gonna be honing it in the process.

Steve Goldbach: Indeed.

Ellen McGirt: Thank you so very much. I’m really grateful that you’re here, and congratulations.

Steve Goldbach: Thank you for the conversation.