"That team that you have as your support team, you've got to be tight with, and they've got to be able to challenge you and you've got to be able to challenge them." (CEO)

Sustainability change agents need to recognize that their role may be to challenge how the CEO sees their own role in the organization, or what the priorities of the organization need to be at a given time.

"To bring about change, you sometimes need to destabilize your CEO because you know about something where he doesn't have the same expertise. When you destabilize that hierarchy, then you become the authority, then he starts trusting you to make the right call. Often people that report in to a CEO are uncomfortable to do that. …but It's in the how. You obviously have to be conscious of the fact that you don't take on every little battle and you don't fight every little one, you save it for the bigger one. Then you position the more important discussions and the more important things. You don't want to be labelled as someone who changes for the sake of change." (Change Agent)

"I think as a change agent, you also know how to take the risk that something could happen that could work against you. You can't play it safe. If you're always looking to play it safe and you're always looking for consent, you're not going to change anything. You have to be prepared to go alone, to walk a path that's a lonely path because often it is." (Change Agent)

But CEOs also described how they were looking to identify new ideas that challenge the status quo in the organization.

"I'm actually looking to have contact with people two, three levels down. A CEO actually wants this and the opportunities are there. You bump into me at a cocktail function, you bump into me at the annual or six month results announcement, or in the passage… You just have to capitalize on the opportunity. You have to be opportunistic… and then you've got to make your point very quickly. It's just got to be in a way that it doesn't look like it's a reporting line challenge. Unfortunately sometimes this is a problem... Then when that CEO realizes "you know what, there's an idea here" then that CEO will find the opportunity to follow-up with that person." (CEO)

"That is quite an important part of really making sure that it is fully adopted by the organization. Inviting people to challenge you when they see things that they don't believe are consistent with that way of thinking, and they do." (CEO)