Shaking,loudly.

The emergency plan came ahead of the weather. Stay at home. Even if the alert drops to orange, or yellow, stay at home — message your reporting line, confirm you are safe. Somebody wrote that sentence long before the rain arrived, and this morning it simply worked. That is what a system looks like when it is well made: quiet, prepared, invisible until the hour it is needed.

Outside, nothing is quiet. The rain pulls at the ground. The wind takes the trees and shakes them the way you would shake a sheet. The sound arrives in waves — loud, then a pause, then loud again. A friend sends a video: the street outside her apartment is flooding above the knee, and there is a wave in it. An actual wave, in a street. It is still summer-hot, thirty-something degrees, though the calendar has stepped into autumn. Under the plane trees there is no longer just shade. There is water.

We are in the concrete room. The door is closed, not out of fear but out of agreement: don't interrupt, don't take the risk. And from behind the glass you watch the small garden — trees shaking, grass shaking, soil drinking as fast as it can — and none of it looks afraid. It looks like dancing. A gust, a lean, a pause, another gust. They seem to enjoy it.

I don't know how nature observes, or decides. I don't know whether this is cooling, rinsing, recovering, or transforming. But I notice that gentleness has been tried, for a long time, and the question that surfaces is not romantic at all: is this becoming the ordinary? Ten more days of rain against twenty-six to thirty-six degrees. That is a lot of washing and cooling for a system to do. It is hard work.

So the question stops being about weather. Do we move slowly. Do we act loudly. Do we feel the pain. Do we shake, in order to change. Not once. Not for one season.

I came from a farming village and a family that worked land. Then a big city, a doctorate in polymer chemistry, and decades inside a global chemical company — plant floor, R&D, product stewardship, sales, key accounts, regional market, then global marketing and stewardship: product planning, pricing, cost efficiency, profit optimisation. Years on the sustainability committee for product and supply chain, sitting between the sustainability team and the customers who have to actually buy the thing.

For most of that time, sustainability was carried as a “better to have.” A responsibility. A story. A marketing layer over a portfolio that had already been decided elsewhere.

In the last five years that framing quietly stopped being true. The work is not to add a claim to an existing product. It is to create new value that pulls the market forward — to build the leading product, then partner with the customer on adoption and scale-up, because a molecule that nobody scales is not a transition, it is a press release.

Which is precisely why the storm is not a metaphor I chose. It is the model. An ecosystem does not transform by memo. It transforms because pressure arrives at every node at once, and the parts that can flex, flex — and the parts that cannot, break, and are replaced by something that can.

So: as a global sustainability and product role in a supply chain, do we shake in order to refresh the ecosystem? If yes — what exactly do we do. If not — what is behind the hesitation, honestly named.