Atelier WeekNotes w/c 6 November 2023
The Climate Group strategy workshop. From ‘why?’ to ‘how?’ All implementation is local — sorta. Combining intimacy with scale. Exploring with discipline. Commercial savvy vs charm.
I am writing newsletter of #weeknotes of starting the Atelier of What’s Next (What’s needed, What’s ready? What can we do? What next?). For my rationale for starting the Atelier see here.
This week covers:
The Climate Group strategy workshop
The shift from ‘why?’ to ‘how?’.
All implementation is local — sorta.
How can an organisation successfully combine intimacy with scale?
Exploring with discipline.
Change through commercial savvy vs through charm.
Climate Group strategy workshop
STEP: 2/DISCOVERING-4/DELIVERING. Theme: Climate. Org strategy.
Last week I said I was pretty much full preparing for two days of strategy development with the Climate Group, an international non-profit that exists “to drive climate action. Fast.” This week i was delivering those two days. Obviously, most of the content is confidential, and I can’t share here.
Instead, some more generic and big picture reflections.
The shift from ‘why?’ to ‘how?’.
All implementation is local — sorta.
How can an organisation successfully combine intimacy with scale?
Exploring with discipline.
Change through commercial savvy vs through charm.
The shift from ‘why?’ to ‘how?’.
Back in March I did a talk for the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources on business, policy and transformation (my slides here, a fair write up from Andrew Curry of Just Two Things here). The first half of the talk was my reflections on Forum and sustainable business, from 2013 to today.
The big shift I said I had seen from why to how, from “Why should we act? What is the business case for sustainability?” to “How should we act? What is the best commercial way of delivering?”.
It turns out the Climate Group was founded in 2004, just after I started at Forum. Not surprisingly, people’s experiences there had a similar shape. In their case, from commitment to action, from companies signing up commitments, such as buying 100% renewable electricity (aka RE100), to now actually delivering those commitments.
That there is this shift is a great step forward. One to be celebrated. And also, a sign of how much there is to do. We’re only in the early stages of really delivering rapid decarbonisation.
WHAT NEXT
Further evidence for this insight.
Position the Atelier of What's Next as about further driving the shift from why to how. it is part of getting more and better things done.
All implementation is local — sorta.
Implementing renewable electricity means building stuff in particular places: a wind farm here, a grid connector there, a battery factory somewhere else. Switching corporate fleets to electric vehicles (EV100) means there needs to be a automotive plant making them somewhere, and charging infrastructure too.
Pledges can be made in corporate headquarters at a global level, anywhere. But delivery, delivery happens in lots of places, all of which are somewhere.
There is a qualifier, “sorta". Because the delivery in this place here can benefit from delivery elsewhere. The experience curve means that the unit cost of the last unit is lower than the previous ones, because we keep finding slightly better ways of making it. For instance, the price of electricity from solar declined by 89% between 2009 and 2019 (and has kept going since). The flywheel of unit cost reductions for renewable energy is one of the major sources of hope for me.
The global ‘anywhere’ scale of production of solar, wind and batteries benefits all of the ’somewheres' that they are implemented.
Of course, in my headline I’m riffing off a famous US phrase, that all politics is local. That’s deliberate: the politics of implementation are different in different parts of the world. Yes, there are shared themes of just transition, community approval, planning permission, taking on vested interests and navigating the layers of government. But these all combine differently in different juristictions.
Also in this zone is David Goodhart’s splitting of people into "two big value clusters: the educated, mobile people who see the world from “Anywhere” and who value autonomy and fluidity, versus the more rooted, generally less well-educated people who see the world from “Somewhere” and prioritise group attachments and security.” HIs model is too simplistic.
And yet. The culture wars are being stoked by pitting normal, local people against the woke elite. (See Theresa May’s Citizens of Nowhere.) There is a pattern fossil fuel vested interests try to side with the Somewheres against the Anywheres (think Uxbridge ULEZ).
A lot of the politics of climate action is local, not global. And could easily be stirred up to pit local people against global organisations.
Incidentally, my reflection that implementation is local why I think the global negotiations are of declining importance. The Paris Agreement gives the shared direction. Now the main activity shifts to getting individual governments to having ambitious policies, and then implement them. Yes, the COPs are an annual moment to highlight the best, and spotlight the worst. And, yes, many countries are influenced by their peers, and by richer allies (especially if they can get investment). The global dimension does not go away. But national governments are much more influenced by the powerful interests and political movements in their countries.
WHAT NEXT
Be very wary of using the 'global we'.
Bias advise and action towards pushing governance to the most local level possible.
How can an organisation successfully combine intimacy with scale?
All of which means the strategic question for a global NGO is how to combine the context-specific interventions in certain places with the scale and reach of being a global entity.
Back in 2009 I was at the 30th birthday party of Green Alliance, the environmental think tank. I remember distinctly talking to Briony Greenhill (then working for a rival think tank, now a performer and Collaborative Vocal Improvisation teacher, see my interview with her last year here). I said “the organisations that win in a globalised world will be ones that combine intimacy with scale.” For some reason, that phrase has stuck with me.
WHAT NEXT
Develop this idea further.
Exploring with discipline.
Part of the genesis of the Atelier of What’s Next was two strategy projects, with EIRIS Foundation (when I was chair) and Sustainable Shipping Initiative (as an advisor). For both of them, the direction they chose was to reach out beyond the current frontier. Respectively, the tag lines of their new strategies were : "pioneering the next steps for sustainable finance” and "catalysing for a sustainable and successful shipping industry in this crucial decade of action”.
Partly that reflected internal features, especially being mission-led organisations. Partly it also reflect the external context: a sense that our situation is getting worse, that urgent and deep action is needed, and that more of the same will not be enough.
I founded the Atelier of What’s Next as a response to that diagnosis of the external context. At the risk of repeating myself, we see a big need to help new things to happen. The Atelier is a studio for interventions (of almost any kind) that accelerate us to a better future.
Whenever I am supporting an organisation develop its strategy, I always worry that I will impose my answer, rather than support them in coming to their own diagnosis and response (which might be very different from the conclusions I would draw by myself). I’m particularly wary about bringing this conclusion, on the need to push beyond the frontier.
But I needn’t have worried. The senior folks in Climate Group had already reach the conclusion that they needed to push their own frontiers, in order to deliver on the big ambitious changes in the world that they want to see. (What they are exploring is not something for me to share.) So, another validation for the core diagnosis of the Atelier.
This week reinforced to me the importance of exploring with discipline. Back in that UCL talk in March, I used the Cynefin Framework to say we were going to spend much of the coming decades in th e Complex space, where we cannot reply on best practice or expertises built from the past. The stable context in which those best practices or expertises worked is no longer there. The routine habits are out of date.
Instead, in the Cynefin terms, we need to deliberately learn-by doing, going through cycles of 'probe-sense-respond’ to create emergent practice.
WHAT NEXT
Finish the Cynefin course I started *cough* a few years ago. (Look, I've been busy.)
Change through commercial savvy vs through charm
Working with the Climate Group got me reflecting, and contrasting, with my time at Forum for the Future, especially the early days.
Back in 2004, The Climate Group was explicitly about bringing companies together to make big commitments to future spending (on renewable electricity, say). That would send a demand signal up their supply chains, to innovators and investors, and to governments. A large enough signal contributes to a response, in new technologies, new offerings, new investments and new policies.
That's a Theory of Change primarily based on dynamics of market power. It is commercially savvy, and does not require anyone to share the same values, necessarily. Just that there is a benefit from having a clear, concentrated market pull. And it is scalable (add more companies to the commitment) and replicable (move over to other commitments).
When I joined Forum in 2003, there wasn't an explicit theory of change or strategy. (This drove us a bit spare, as we didn't understand how all the bits fitted together or were supposed to be impactful. We had our guesses, but those were our own guesses, rather than a shared story about how our actions led to wider change. Without a shared story, it is hard to coordinate. In fact, it made it easy to be in near-constant dis-coordination.)
This week I realised one way of expressing the implicit Theory of Change was: we will convince senior leaders to act (mostly through charm but also some rational arguments and evidence), and they will do what we do in their place.
(To be fair, the education programme had more: if we create cohorts of young professionals and engineers who care about the subjects and are equipped to act, then over time they will make a big difference in the world.)
That charm-led approach reflects the personalities of the founders, who had backgrounds in campaigning and were used to getting things to happen as outsiders. Lots of the time through the 1980s and 1990s, charm would have been the main thing available to them. There was not a background understanding of the issues to draw on, or peer pressure to apply, or 'fear of missing out' to stir. Just: trust me, and do this.
Perhaps, some of that is inevitable on the frontier. For instance, the story of Steve Jobs telling a supplier's CEO that he can produce enough Gorilla Glass for the first iPhone. CEO: It can't be done. Jobs: “Don’t be afraid. You can do this.”
But charm is hard to scale and almost impossible to replicate. Even if you hire with an eye to people who will be charming, there are only so many hours in the day.
Plus, the authority to say "trust me, do this" takes time to build up. Forum's founders built that up when there were few others working in the field, so they were able to grow authority in a wide sweep. Now, with the sustainability field is made up of many domains, each of which is larger than sustainability in the 1990s. It is far harder to build the same kind of wide-ranging authority. The circumstances have changed.
Hence why organisations that are highly reliant on charm struggle to scale.
WHAT NEXT
As take the Atelier forward, make sure it becomes based on scalable and repeatable methods, and not reliant on charm.