Launching Lantela: making sustainability work in practice

We are launching Lantela, a sustainability consultancy built on a simple premise: sustainability is the discipline of designing for the long term.

It comes from a pattern we have seen repeatedly in our work at Perago. Across local authorities, NHS organisations, universities and the private sector, there is no shortage of intent when it comes to sustainability. Net zero commitments are in place. Social value frameworks are established. In Wales, the Well-being of Future Generations Act sets a clear expectation for long-term thinking and better outcomes.

On paper, the direction is clear. What is much less clear is how that ambition translates into the day-to-day reality of services, systems, and decisions.

Where the gap really sits

At Perago, we have always worked in the space between ambition and delivery. It is where most transformation efforts succeed or fail. What has become clear is that this gap is now increasingly visible in sustainability.

This is not primarily a failure of intent. It is a failure of delivery. More specifically, it is a failure of design.

Organisations are being asked to achieve fundamentally different outcomes but are still operating through systems and services that were never designed to deliver them. That creates a familiar pattern. Sustainability sits in a document. Or in a separate function. Or in a quarterly report. It is disconnected from how services actually operate and competing with short-term pressures that, understandably, take priority.

People are not resistant, they are frustrated. They can see what needs to change, what they often lack is the practical means to redesign their services and organisations so that sustainability lives inside how the organisation actually runs.

Why Lantela exists

Lantela is our response to that gap.

We design how sustainability strategy actually gets delivered. The work that turns commitment into how every team plans, decides, and operates. That includes environmental impact, social value, and the communities you serve.

For us, this is not a departure from Perago’s work. It is a natural continuation of it.

Perago exists to make transformation work in practice. For people, organisations and places. Increasingly, the organisations we work with are being asked to demonstrate environmental and social value alongside digital and organisational change. Those expectations are becoming central to how organisations are funded, regulated, and judged.

Lantela gives us a way to respond to that shift with the same focus on delivery that underpins everything we do.

Leadership and credibility

Lantela will be led by Cory Hughes, who has been a core part of Perago’s team for the past four years as our Director of Strategic Design and is now stepping up as Managing Director of Lantela.

Cory has played a central role in shaping how we approach complex transformation challenges, particularly where service design, systems thinking, and organisational change intersect. Her work has consistently focused on making change practical and deliverable, not just well described.

She also brings deep credibility in this space as a Design Council expert, trained in their Design for Planet approach. That grounding is important. It connects Lantela directly to a wider movement focused on embedding environmental and social value into design practice, not treating sustainability as a separate discipline.

Lantela is not being built from scratch. It builds on capability, experience, and leadership that already exist within Perago.

A different way of approaching sustainability

Much of the existing sustainability landscape is focused on measurement, reporting, and strategy. Those things matter. But they are not enough on their own.

The harder question is what happens next.

How do you translate a sustainability commitment into the language every team already uses? How do you design what good looks like, and then stress-test it before you commit? How do you build social value into how you deliver, rather than into a separate report?

These are design and delivery questions. Lantela approaches them through three interconnected lenses.

Efficiency focuses on simplifying services so they are easier to run, lower in cost, and less resource intensive.

Transition supports organisations to redesign how they operate so that sustainable ways of working can take hold.

Place works with communities to build solutions that reflect how change actually happens on the ground.

In practice, these lenses are applied together, because sustainability is not siloed, and neither is the work required to deliver it. The goal throughout is to design for the long term, not the quarterly report.

Why now

There are moments when the conditions for change align and this feels like one of them.

In Wales, the policy environment is already ambitious and increasingly focused on delivery. Across the UK, sustainability is becoming central to procurement, funding, and organisational strategy. At the same time, there is a clear gap in the skills needed to translate that ambition into practice, particularly in service design and systems thinking. Alongside this new tools, including AI, are creating opportunities to accelerate insight and delivery in ways that were not previously possible.

Taken together, these factors create both pressure and opportunity.

What happens next

This is the start, not the finished product.

Over the coming months, we will work with a small number of organisations to test and refine the approach in practice. We will continue to build the tools, methods, and partnerships needed to support delivery at scale.

And we will share what we learn, because this is not a challenge any one organisation solves alone.

If you are working through this in your own organisation, we would value the conversation.