Atelier WeekNotes w/c 2 and 9 Sep 2024
0/DETECTING. Video of 'Exploring What's Next: generating a better future' talk. Chatham House Sustainability Accelerator UnConference.
I am writing newsletter of #weeknotes of starting the Atelier of What’s Next (a studio for initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future). For my rationale for starting the Atelier see here.
It shows how much we are shaped by our schooling that these weeks always feel like the start of autumn term, some 27 years on from the last time I was a student with an actual autumn term.
This year, the autumn term has started with a bang. Mostly a good bang, but also some family crises and also some confidential challenges in work. So, there's been a delay in getting the first WeekNotes out since my return. Here are two big pieces. More to follow in the coming weeks!
This week covers:
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Exploring What's Next: generating a better future.
Chatham House Sustainability Accelerator UnConference.
Self-sufficiency for security (even with costs).
The 'Soft Reform' business case for sustainability isn't working; need Strong Reform at least.
The Paris Agreement's teeth are national, not international.
What limits us is our alignment with nature, not nature's current limits.
Asking new, cheeky questions helps have a different conversation.
How can the Atelier of What's Next be of service to you, and your purposes? We'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you have a challenge or idea to put in the studio. Maybe one of our existing topics appeals to you. What if you love to make new things happen by being part of the studio? Or if you have feedback or comments that would improve this deck. Either click the button below or email davidbent@atelierwhatsnext.org.
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Exploring What's Next: generating a better future
The video of my talk to the Institute of Public Administration New Zealand (IPANZ) and the Wellington School of Business and Government at Victoria University of Wellington | Te Herenga Waka is now available:
The outline:
The first 20 years: corporate and technocratic change; into personal crisis and exploration.
Towards an understanding of what is going on.
Audience exercise using the Depth of Change Spectrum.
The next 20 years: exploring what’s next.
Q&A
The key messages will not be a surprise to regular readers:
We are living in a time of connected, escalating crises, of which climate change is but one example.
We will need to transform our our social, political and economic context for billions to live their own version of the good life.
No one knows how to do ‘transformation’, yet. We will need to learn-by-doing.
It is going to rough, messy, scary, political – and also galvanising, generative, meaningful.
Humankind has been astonishingly adaptive. We can all learn to explore and generate possibilities.
It also has my first ever attempt at a traditional Maori greeting called a pepeha.
Kia ora tatou. Ko One Tree Hill te maunga. Ko Hard Castle Crags te awa. Ko Chew Magna Lake te moana. Nō London ahau. Ko Bent-Hazelwood tōku whanau. Ko David tōku ingoa.
Translated:
Hello everyone. One Tree Hill is my mountain.* Hard Castle Crags is my river.** Chew Magna Lake is my sea.*** London is where I live. Bent-Hazelwood is my family. David is my name.
*Where my wife’s ashes are scattered.
**Where my dad’s ashes are scattered.
***Where my mum’s ashes are scattered.
WHAT NEXT.
Feel the need to land more of my learning as insights / precepts / principles / guidelines / lessons on the how of exploring what's next.
Hoping to go back to Aotearoa New Zealand in the new year to do work in line with this talk.
Chatham House Sustainability Accelerator UnConference
On my first full week back I attended the Chatham House for the 2024 Sustainability Accelerator UnConference. Unpacking all those elements:
Chatham House = "a world-leading policy institute with a mission to help governments and societies build a sustainably secure, prosperous and just world". You might know the Chatham House Rule (note the singular) about sharing the information you receive, but do not reveal the identity of who said it.
Sustainability Accelerator = "a major initiative to increase the speed and scale of the transition to a sustainable, inclusive future".
UnConference = "aims to harness the collective power of all of its participants to bring new ideas to discussions on sustainability" by using Open Space (basically, a way to have an event where people get to engage with each other, but without having to do a plan in advance).
There were, I guess, 200ish people, from a range of places and professional backgrounds (though all pro-sustainability). The Open Space was organised into 4 sessions, with 15-20 meetings in each session. Last year I organised 2 sessions, which meant I didn't really experience much of the conference. This year I made an effort to move during the course of each session, which gave me a bigger sample but still only a flavour of the overall.
I came away with some themes and insights. Given the distributed nature of the event, any other attendee could have a very different list. With that caveat, let's dive in:
Self-sufficiency for security (even with costs).
The 'Soft Reform' business case for sustainability isn't working; need Strong Reform at least.
The Paris Agreement's teeth are national, not international.
What limits us is our alignment with nature, not nature's current limits.
Asking new, cheeky questions helps have a different conversation.
Self-sufficiency for security (even with costs).
In 2008, I was part of a Forum for the Future team creating 2030 scenarios with a Fortune 500 company, ion order to drive their sustainability strategy. When we made one of the scenarios about the retreat of globalisation, the senior executives just laughed at us. Global trade will never go into reverse, they told us. Borders and boundaries only go down.
In contrast, the most confident position held by various people at the UnConference was that some retreat of globalisation was needed in these troubled times. Self-sufficiency was necessary for security reasons, even though that would likely increase the costs of many everyday items. (Most places are the not the cheaper parts of the world to make food, digital equipment, vehicles or fossil fuel energy. A turn to self-sufficiency means turning down cheaper imports to increase your sense of control.)
One person was from Ukraine, who stated they had wished the country had pushed for greater self-sufficiency in food and energy as part of preparing for crises. Others too argued for bringing key sectors 'home', so that a country could be confident of being able to produce what matters when it matters.
This matches with a broader post-neoliberal direction of travel. Noted economics blogger Noah Smith (@Noahopinion on SubStack) is emblematic of the argument here:
"Even if promoting industries like semiconductors and drones makes your country a little bit poorer, that could easily be a cost worth paying in order to maintain a strong defense-industrial base and an edge in military technology. Any efficiency loss from industrial policy can therefore be viewed as a cost of national security, which is one of the most important public goods that governments provide."
Much of the Bidenomimcs has been premised on having particular sectors which have industrial policy boosts and protectionism via tariffs.
The UnConference provided a further data point that full-spectrum globalisation no longer has a wide base of support. Behind this is a growing geopolitical competition between the US (guarantor of the current near-global hegemony) and China (presumed to want to create its own hegemony). Also the disruptions and dislocations of climate change, which make just-in-time supply chains look thin and brittle.
Is it possible to have globalised trade in some sectors but not others? Or will we fall into several, competing trade regimes based on the ultimate customer? For instance, could companies, and/or countries, have to line up with one of US vs China vs, maybe, Europe? (I fear that India, Africa and South America will not have the consumer spending power to be in that group.) Can such a situation of parallel trading systems of global extent co-exist (like the late 19th century?), or is some growing conflict, cold or hot, inevitable? How might extreme climate events or tipping points do to an brittle set up like that? Fun thoughts.
Citizens-as-consumer have hugely benefited from the lower costs of goods of globalisation. Citizens-as-workers have at least been put at risk, if not harmed, but the relocation of industries (especially where neoliberal governments did nothing to support the transitions of those places). How will citizens react if prices rise but jobs are in-sourced? (Noting that those new jobs are unlikely to ahve the same scale of pay and security as the equivalent 40+ years ago.)
The 'Soft Reform' business case for sustainability isn't working; need Strong Reform at least.
For my sins, I've been involved in creating many tools for working through the 'business case for sustainability' for many individual companies. The basic argument is: there are profits to be made in the overlap between your company's capabilities and activities which create a sustainable future. In the terms of the Depth of Change spectrum, this is the Soft Reform case.
The basic argument is often true (though not for all sectors; the overlap is basically nil for oil and gas firms). But it has clearly failed to carry the day. You can read my old boss Jonathon Porritt be very angry indeed that "the backsliding going on in Unilever at the moment marks the definitive end of a period of “win-win” ESG/ corporate sustainability that has lasted for more than 20 years".
What surprised me at the UnConference was just how many people are sticking to the Soft Reform business case, even though they are so very disappointed with the results.
I've thought for some time that the "win-win ESG/corporate sustainability" could never be enough.
For one thing, there are always other, less sustainable, opportunities for a company. If those have higher returns than the sustainable ones, then the company will feel obliged to pursue them. The opportunity costs are too high.
That's even if the non-ESG opportunities are only in short-term. Most executives are rewarded on the short-term, and are only around for the short-term. Also, shareholders are short-term. We never get to find out if the tortoise would beat the hare; it gets taken-over (/eaten) before we get to halfway through the race.
For another, executives are risk-averse and only know what they already know. To ask them to do something new involves being risk-seeking. Incumbent capitalists are not risk-seeking, whatever the rhetoric claims.
So, if the Soft Reform win-win business case isn't enough, what might work?
My conclusion is you need outsized rewards for doing the sustainable thing, and strong punishments for doing the harmful thing. This is my case for industrial strategy (rewards) and stringent, targeted regulation (punishments).
That is the basis for Prof Mazzucato's Mission-Orientated Innovation Policy: 'go in this direction, where there will be lots of money for a long time'. It was also the basis of Biden's Inflation Reduction Act: reward those going for it (which creates champions who will campaign for your legislation), rather than try a carbon market (which creates no champions and lots of losers who will campaign against it). (More in this Volts podcast where David Roberts looks at the politics of why IRA pased when other attempts had failed.)
The case for Strong Reform is that it changes the economic incentives so much that staying with what you know is more risky than trying to deliver.
The Paris Agreement's teeth are national, not international
Some people held a session saying the Paris Agreement is dead, and what's next. Listening to them, it seems to me they have a different understanding than I do. The only way to get a global agreement was to make it not have any teeth. Countries submit their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), but there is no international enforcement mechanism.
For some, this - combined with the increasing certainty we are going through 1.5C of warming - shows that the Paris Agreement needs to be replaced.
That makes little sense to me.
First, since 2015, the expected temperature rise by 2100 has come down by 1-2C. So, more effort has been catalysed in the years since than was anticipated at the time.
Second, the factors preventing international enforcement have not diminished. If anything, they have increased. The US and China now talk about being a new cold war. Hardly a good moment to agree tough targets and a binding legal remedy.
Third, there is accountability in the Paris Agreement -- at the national level. We live in a world of sovereign states. International law is rarely successful without the backing of many governments. Realism is that larger countries act on the basis of national political forces.
Rather than try to replace the Paris Agreement (which took half a decade from the Copenhagen failure to happen), better to grow national-level political movements for ambitious NDCs, and the Strong Reform policies to deliver them.
What limits us is our alignment with nature, not nature's current limits.
One session asked 'What would you say to aliens?' (more below). One person responded that he had an answer to Fermi Paradox ("If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now").
His answer: if your civilisation exceeds your local natural limits, then your civilisation collapses. Successful civilisations would be the ones who stayed at home. Hence, there can be abundant life in the universe but no alien visitors to our planet.
This intervention crystalised for me one part of why limits to growth is utterly wrong.
Yes, an ecosystem's capabilities have limits on a short timeframe. But those limits are not fixed. They can expand hugely over time.
If we take the Earth, 4.5 billion years ago there was no living things. Now Earth is teeming with life. At points there have been mass extinction events. Each time, the Earth has bounced back with more species and complexity -- eventually. Where 'eventually' is on a million year timescale.
In any one year, the ecosystems on the Earth can only absorb so much of the sun's energy, combine that with existing live matter to produce more live matter, and go on a tiny bit of evolution's random walk.
But. Over even a mere 300,000 years, a lot can happen. The species homo sapiens can emerge, and cover the planet.
Famously, Rockstrom et al have 9 planetary boundaries, which describe a safe living space for humankind (more here from the Stockholm Resilience Centre).
Now, the current boundaries are an expression of the current capability of Earth-bound nature. If those boundaries had been drawn 4.5 billions years ago, then they would have been extraordinarily narrow. Between 4 and 3.5b years ago, there were only single-celled life. The planetary boundaries then were a bit bigger than the previous half billion years, but still tiny compared to today.
And so on. The planetary boundaries are not fixed for ever. They are a function of the capability at that moment in time. There is every reason to believe that, if nature is given time, then the planetary boundaries for humankind will expand.
What limits the scale and complexity of humankind is our ability to align with nature, to co-evolve with it, so the rest of nature can cope with us, and we can cope with nature.
Hence, I don't believe this is the solution to the Fermi Paradox. And the question to ask any aliens who visit us is: how did you keep on expanding the limits of your local ecologies so that you are able to be here?
Asking new, cheeky questions helps have a different conversation.
One of the risks of the UnConference format is that you get a group which is interested in the topic but has no particular knowledge. Then you have a slightly stilted conversation, where everyone is trying to remember that Guardian article from 6 months ago which is probably relevant, and, anyway, people pretty already agree with each other. (That's the moment to use the Open Space Law of Two Feet, and move on to another group.)
Obviously, the conversations were better when there were some topic experts. But that is hard to guarantee.
So, the best sessions I went to were the ones which asked new, slightly cheeky questions.
What would you say to aliens? turned out to be a great way to get people to project their assumptions out onto a blank canvas. Many of the attendees assumed that the aliens would judge us -- which revealed how much people in sustainability often judge humankind. (Ironically, this projection onto aliens is what happens in Iain M Banks' The Culture Series novel Excession. "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop." See footnote1.)
What's funny about the future? revealed how poe-faced and unhappy we all were about the possibilities. Part of the session was on how people in the past had been so wrong about how things played out. It left me with the question: 'What will people in the future be so glad that we were wrong about?'
WHAT NEXT
Some inquiry questions:
What will people in the future be so glad that we were wrong about?
How can we generate the in-country political movements that hold their governments to account in delivering the Paris Agreement?
How can we ensure that investing for sustainability has clear, certain adn very outsized rewards, compared to sticking with the status quo?
How can we be deliberate in when we choose effectiveness (eg self-sufficiency) over efficiency (eg global trade)?
How can we generate sufficient coherence and common direction to our efforts, without requiring costly, constant, close collaboration?
How can we create positive feedback loops, so our responses to the polycrises accelerate faster than the challenges themselves?
How can we grow our capabilities to match the scale of the challenges we face and, at the same time, grow nature's capabilities so that we have larger limits to exist within?
Meeting with the folks at the Sustainability Accelerator to explore collaboration.
This gives me an excuse to give Banks' example of an Outside Context Problem:
"The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests."