Imperfection as proof: an ESG documentary in the service of change management

A series born from leftovers

The format was not on the roadmap. Set against the business stakes that structure a marketing roadmap, a documentary series on ESG policy does not weigh much, and it was not prioritized.

It existed thanks to leftover budget. I took the initiative and set the editorial and artistic line, with production handled alongside EO Production under in-house art direction. That origin explains part of the result: a project with nothing to prove to anyone allows itself choices that a strategic project would not dare make.

Champions rather than a corporate line

The editorial choice was not to have the company speak, but to have the people inside it who genuinely carry the ESG policy do the speaking. So the series follows the chain at every level.

It starts with the macro strategy, set by Bollé Safety's CEO and president, then moves down to the volunteer ESG ambassadors, the people who spread the ESG culture through the company without it appearing anywhere in their job description. It then passes through the supply chain, through product development, and ends on customer engagement carried by the sales teams.

This sequence is not an org chart on film. It answers the most common objection made to ESG programs, that of a leadership message with no operational translation. Showing the same policy restated by an executive, by a supply chain manager, by a product engineer and by a salesperson is the only way to demonstrate that it has actually traveled through the organization.

Write the structure, let them write the content

The preparation method is what I take away from this project, and it transfers to any content carried by non-professional speakers.

My colleague, the Head of Brand Visibility, produced structure plans setting out, for each episode, every point that had to be covered. The contributors were then invited to take ownership of their own script: it was up to them to write the logical transitions and the information specific to their field.

Splitting the work this way resolves a familiar contradiction. A script written entirely by the communications team guarantees the message and produces contributors reciting vocabulary that is not theirs. Entirely free speech produces sincerity and episodes that fail to say what they were meant to say. Constraining the structure and freeing the wording holds both together, provided you accept that the result will not sound like a campaign.

Accepting imperfection as a deliberate choice

The most important directing decision was to give up on hyper-produced content.

The contributions were shot to camera, in English, with people very unevenly used to being filmed. An executive at ease with the exercise and a supply chain manager who has never done it do not project the same image, and I chose to own that gap rather than correct it in the edit or hide it behind an autocue.

That choice has a visible cost: hesitations, accents, uneven pacing. It has a payoff that is worth more. Imperfect speech is immediately distinguishable from words written by someone else, and it is precisely that imperfection that makes the argument credible on a subject where credibility is the only thing at stake. The series then becomes something other than a communications asset: a piece of recognition for the everyday actors of a shift in business model, the ones whose names never appear in an annual report.