Not long ago, in a moment I’ll never forget, a senior colleague told me:
“You’re just struggling with your conscience. Just tuck it away in
your mind — we’ll come back to it once the annual report is signed.”
I had raised ethical concerns that warranted disclosure. The response I received was almost paternal. It was said kindly, in an effort to make it small. As if setting aside that quiet inner voice was just a normal part of leadership. A calm determination came over me and I knew that I was done. A few days later, I cleared my office and walked away. I never looked back.
That moment returned to me recently as I read Otti Vogt’s philosophical critique of Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition — a bold call for privileged professionals to reorient their careers toward morally impactful work. The critique is thoughtful, rigorous, and, perhaps most importantly, spiritually provocative.
After my departure there was ample opportunity to unpack that moment. In essence, my conclusion was about the difference between doing what is right versus doing what you can get away with. Now, this is a core part of the human condition and I’m sure we all have moments where we need to chose. And I discovered there were moments where I didn’t adhere to the societal rules either, like not always respecting the speed limit for example. So who was I to judge?
It did leave me though with that essential question:
What happens when we act upon that whisper within?
And more specifically:
Can our efforts toward sustainability, justice, and impact be truly
regenerative — if they are not rooted in inner transformation?
Performance or practice?
In his critique, Vogt argues that Moral Ambition offers a motivational, yet ultimately fragile, ethical vision. It reframes moral life as a kind of career strategy — where ethical choices are made based on calculations of global leverage and impact. The result is a thin moral grammar: persuasive and inspiring, but in essence a bit shallow.
“By focusing on what we do rather than who we become, it treats moral life as a performance rather than a practice. Ethics becomes a leaderboard. Solidarity, a career path.”
This analysis speaks to a broader condition in our culture of change-making — especially in the sustainability field. Much of the efforts om sustainability are focused on externalities: reporting, metrics, targets, roadmaps, outcomes, dashboards. The CSRD requirements from the EC only stregnthened this notion.
These tools are not inherently wrong. But when they become the entire story, something essential gets lost: us! Are the challenges we grapple with not in large measure the consequence of our way of living and being? Who are we becoming as we act.
Without approaching the challenges from this deeper perspective, sustainability risks becoming another form of performative morality — steeped in CSRD requirements, dressed in ESG reports and SDG badges, but ultimately shaped by the same extractive logic it seeks to challenge.
Conscience as “Inner Knowing”
So what exactly is this conscience we keep brushing aside? Like so many, the word itself comes from the Latin: conscientia. I invite you to read up on the word online (and do scroll down to see the graph with the dramatic drop in occurrence of the word in since 1800). In short, it is a felt sense of truth and not just guilt or obligation. Not even just ethical. I experience it as a quiet, persistent knowing that something is off — or deeply right — even when we can’t explain it and even when no one else sees it.
And if it feels like truth, for some reason I don’t feel I can argue with it. However, when I ignore it, it does leave a sense of unease, at times even a tightness in the chest, and the energy it takes to deviate from truth, it can result in a ense of fatigue I can’t quite name.
I can feel it when I stay silent in rooms where harm goes unspoken. When I push through with work that contradicts my values, when I perform integrity instead of embodying it.
We tell ourselves stories we start believeing in
Because listening to conscience is disruptive, at times I also didn’t listen to that little voice, but instead I rationalised it away. I could and still can tell myself that it’s was not the right time or that it is not within my power, that I’m not ready or that someone else will take care of it, that it is not my business. These stories buy some time but they also can keep me stuck.
And this disconnection — from self, from others, from truth — begins to hurt. It can even manifest physically: as burnout, restlessness, headaches, or persistent skin issues. As a low-grade ache for meaning we can’t quite locate in the body.
In this sense, conscience is not just an ethical compass – it is an invitation back into a healthy relationship with ourselves, with others and – dare I say – the planet as well.
So where does conscience come from?
From a little further research I learned that it has deep roots;
- Biologically, it arises from our capacity for empathy, emotional regulation, and social sensitivity.
- Psychologically, it is shaped by early experiences, attachment, and cultural conditioning.
- Spiritually, many traditions speak of conscience as a thread of the soul — the memory of right relationship.
- Systemically, it may carry ancestral echoes: the longing for justice, the trauma of past dislocation, the wisdom of those who walked before us.
Evidently, it is not simply learned at school. And if we slow down enough to hear it, conscience often points toward the work we most need to do — not as saviours, but as human beings seeking to become whole.
The undercurrent beneath the ripples on the surface
Many of today’s crises — ecological collapse, rising inequality, mass burnout, separation and loneliness, mental health struggles and the erosion of trust in our institutions — are not just external breakdowns. They reflect an inner fragmentation, a deeper disconnection from self, from each other, and from the living world.
Even moral ambition — without this necessary inner work — can reinforce the very fragmentation it seeks to address.
We may “do good” from a place of disconnection or “drive change” without acknowledging grief, humility, or solidarity. We may be at risk of building new systems with old consciousness.
And that’s the danger Vogt so eloquently describes: when moral ambition becomes ideology, it becomes shallow. It remains stuck in the logic of performance, calculation and status.
Now, I have written about this before and I firmly believe transformation begins with listening – not springing into action to fix things, not performance.
Listening as leadership
And I can only listen to conscience when I slow down, when I pause for a moment and stop chasing. A moment of ‘being’ and not ‘doing’ (and I can tell from personal experience how difficult that is, having told myself the story that I get most out of life by ‘doing’ as much as possible and doing it ‘fast’).
Conscience invites us to remember a few essentials:
- That speed is not the same as progress
- That metrics are not the same as meaning
- That change is not the same as transformation
A regenerative future cannot be engineered. It must be cultivated — through character, through community, through consciousness. And that begins not with a grand gesture, but with a quiet return to what we already know.
Are we asking the right question(s)?
So rather than asking:
- How do we maximise our impact?
- What’s the most effective way to drive change?
- How do we scale our sustainability strategy?
Maybe we begin with something else:
- What kind of person am I becoming through this work?
- Where am I out of alignment — and what would it mean to return?
- What is my conscience trying to tell me that I’ve been too busy, afraid, or proud to hear?
Because sometimes, the most courageous form of leadership is not a bold public move but the quiet, inward decision to listen to ourselves more deeply. To choose integrity over image, wisdom over ambition and wholeness over performance.
None of this is about perfection. It is about being present. About reclaiming the capacity to feel, to sense, to choose from a deeper place.
If we want to lead wisely within systems on fire, we must root our action in deeper ground. The only reliable compass in an volatile, chaotic and uncertain environment is the one within.
As Otti Vogt reminds us, the question is not only how much good we can do — but who we must become to act wisely.
So I leave you with this:
Where in your life or leadership are you being invited to listen to that inner whisper? What quiet knowing is there to be found beneath the noise? And what might change — in your work, in your world — if you listened and had the courage to act upon it?
Please let us know what you think, we would love to hear from you via sendlove at heartwork dot earth.