The Business of Sustainability

Apex Session was designed to explore sustainability as an innovation challenge

Sustainability often lives in tension—between long-term vision and short-term action, between systems thinking and organizational inertia. Apex Session was held to meet that tension head-on—not by offering fixed answers, but by creating the conditions where insight, creativity, and collaboration could emerge.

Conceived as a live prototype and hosted at HxGN LIVE 2023, Apex Session was built not as a presentation but as an experience—a designed space for alignment, shared inquiry, and collective imagination. It served as an intentional threshold moment: a platform for strategic co-creation across teams, sectors, and roles.

Holding Space for Uncertainty

Apex Session was conceived as a thinking environment—a structured, intentional space for exploring the uncertainty of emerging trends, shifting business priorities, and the complex drivers reshaping industry. It brought together corporate leaders, key customers, employees, and investors in a shared strategic exercise—designed to generate insight across perspectives rather than separate them.

The environment supported making to learn—an approach that invites participants to prototype their thinking through hands-on exploration and facilitated collaboration. The session enabled people to work through real tensions, imagine shared futures, and bring abstraction down to action

Two strategic models grounded the experience:

Marginal Gains: The compounding impact of 1% improvements across tools, systems, and decisions.

The Adjacent Possible: Innovation as what becomes possible when existing resources are recombined in new ways.

Through facilitated dialogue, spatial storytelling, and participatory formats, the platform allowed the topic of sustainability to be explored not as a fixed destination, but as a shared possibility to be imagined anew. It offered a way to hold ambiguity with care, surface insight through co-creation, and move forward with a sense of shared momentum.

Experiences resonate when they offer ideas that can be shared. Apex did just that—providing participants with language, clarity, and a framework they could carry into ongoing conversations and decisions.

From Experience to Impact

The influence of Apex extended well beyond the room. Reflected clearly in Hexagon’s 2024 Sustainability Report, the session helped catalyze a shift from static reporting to narrative integration:

  • More integrated narratives linking sustainability with core business strategy

  • Increased clarity and ownership of internal and external commitments

  • Stronger connection between values, initiatives, and measurable outcomes

Apex helped reframe how sustainability was understood and enacted—by transforming it into something people could actively participate in, not just align around.

Apex didn’t just create momentum. It created a method—a way of working with complexity that can now be applied, adapted, and expanded across the business.

Client: Hexagon

Team: Octo, Sudo Magic, Micheal Cooke, Adam Dalton, Steven Johnson, Catherine Scott, The Keynote Curators