The Climate Majority Project has the mission to “accelerate effective, coordinated climate action by a broad-based coalition of citizens; from grassroots initiatives to high-level policy”. Rupert left the relatively stability of academia to wholeheartedly focus on CMP.
Temperature records are falling, and there are signs that climate change is accelerating. For Rupert, the paradoxical insight is that now is not the time to get more radical, but to be ready to welcome more people into the climate movement. Experiencing the weird weather will be the best recruiter into climate action.
In the interview, Rupert unpacks the four strands of the Climate Majority Project:
Truthfulness. Shifting the public narrative about climate change towards the truth, through skilful messaging.
Cultures of awareness and resilience. Facing the truth together and taking action calls for inner resources and communities of support.
Serious action. Helping people from many backgrounds take meaningful action to help drive the systemic change we need.
Building shared understanding. Developing the identity and vision of the emerging mass movement, and helping people see that they are powerful together.
Core to the Climate Majority Project is depolarisation, because acting on climate over the long-term needs to be a broad project which reaches across classes, political orientations, identities.
As you might expect from a former philosophy professor, there is a great deal of nuance to Rupert’s views. One is that there is no shortcut. Just as a technological fix to our predicament is an illusion, so is revolution. He’s wants to create a future which is not based on illusion, which involves a transformation over time, it’s going to take the time of political culture.
Rupert very much believes that, yes, the problem is overwhelmingly vast but when you start to see yourself as part of a huge coming wave of action, and you start to feel yourself as part of that, then it’s exciting and energising you no longer feels so puny, or hopeless.
Collectively, we are a call-and-response between how the geophysical situation is getting worse, but the human response is also accelerating.
The Climate Majority Project is an inspiring example of what we need so the human response can deal with the geophysical situation, more than just reforming the status quo but not taking the shortcut of revolution, nor settling for ruins.
Erica Austin is a social entrepreneur, community weaver, facilitator, photographer and Christchurch Ambassador (LinkedIn). She describes her self as a multi-potentialite, or someone with activities in many fields. As we will hear, in Erica’s case, this is something of an understatement.
I was first introduced to her as the Community Activator in the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, a community of 500+ innovators, entrepreneurs and investors committed to New Zealand as a basecamp for global impact. (I am an Edmund Hillary Fellow.)
We have a very rich conversation, touching on many huge themes.
One is culture and identity, especially in a place with strong indigenous and colonial heritages plus inward immigration.
As her introduction (using the Maori tradition of Pepeha) makes clear, Erica was born in China, moved to Aotearoa New Zealand when she was young. We talk about Aotearoa New Zealand as both a bicultural and a multicultural nation: “acknowledging that, that Maori people are the first people who’ve arrived in this land, and then comes multiculturalism, to be able to then create a space for all people to thrive”. How she is part of something she calls re-indigenisation, not decolonisation.
Another theme is neurodiversity. Erica was diagnosed with ADHD when she was young, and really sees this as her superpower, which allows her to connect with other people, and people with places.
One consequence is that Erica is involved in many things, and has organised her work according to the Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs).
Erica’s priorities for the next three years are integrating indigenous practice and knowledge into our modern world, and growing the idea of a learning ecosystem, where people are not just learning in schools, not learning just in the organisation, but actually creating multiple different pathways for them to understand and learn to create better future, the future focus learning opportunity.
We did this interview in November 2023, and I remember being energised for days afterwards. I’ve just re-listened and again have a buzz from Erica’s energy, her ambition, her practices of connecting people, and her uses of her superpower.
Playing to Win is an excellent book on business strategy. It comes out of the experiences of A.G. Lafley (formerly CEO of P&G) and Roger Martin (who advised P&G, and is also a leading management academic, including in the growth of design thinking).
The fundamental propositions:
Strategy is the answer to these five interrelated questions:
What is your winning aspiration? The purpose of your enterprise, its motivating aspiration.
Where will you play? A playing field where you can achieve that aspiration.
How will you win? The way you will win on the chosen playing field.
What capabilities must be in place? The set and configuration of capabilities required to win in the chosen way.
What management systems are required? The systems and measures that enable the capabilities and support the choices.
Ultimately, there are four dimensions you need to think about to choose where to play and how to win: the industry; customers; relative position and strengths; and, competition.
You can reach a good decision on a set of choices, which also have greater commitment from the group, using a decision-making that reverse-engineering the choice (and avoiding general production of contextual data to swim through in order to create a strategy).
The crucial question is: “what would need to be true for this choice to be strategically sound?” This should give you a testable hypothesis, which then drives the choice
The kind of dialogue needed for these strategy discussions is not ‘propose and defend’ but ‘assertive inquiry’, where individuals need to embrace a particular stance about their role in a discussion…“I have a view worth hearing, but I may be missing something.”
I first read this in 2013 (11 years ago) and really liked it from the start. I found it extremely useful, especially:
The ‘what would need to be true?’ question, which I used so much that my colleagues from that time use it still as “the David question” (along with “What is the purpose of this meeting? What is the place we need to get to by the end of our time together?”).
The ‘Imagining Influential Trajectories’ method, a combination of systems transition theory, technology roadmapping and more, is in development using the same ‘reverse engineering’ approach.
The five interrelated questions could be answered by using a variety of better-know analytical frameworks.
While the focus on ‘winning aspiration’ has value (forcing hard choices) there are circumstances that where the zero-sum (‘we win, competitors lose’) is less appropriate, especially in the system change space. It also can make for quite a heroic book, where individuals are overcoming problems with their great use of the book’s tools.
Even so, one of the foundations of my own strategy practice.
Citation: Lafley, A.G. and Martin, R., 2013. Playing to win: How strategy really works. Harvard Business Press.
This post is part of the #ReadingNotes series, see here for more (including format and use of bulletpoints).
Dr Anna Birney is CEO (Chief Executive / Enabling / Evolving Officer) of The School of System Change, which enables personal and collective agency to cultivate change in the world with a multi-method approach to systems change learning – with networks, organisations and individuals (Anna’s LinkedIn, Medium and Twitter).
This episode is a little unusual. We dive into the Multi-Level Perspective (‘MLP’), one of the leading theories of system transition which we teach in the module (here for the Wikipedia explanation). MLP has been used in academic research for the last decade or so. However, there are not a lot of good case studies of using MLP for change.
Anna uses slides to explain the story. You can watch the presentation on YouTube immediately below (and here) as well as download the slides here. (Note: the sound quality of the video is poor while the music is playing but settles down after that.)
PDIA is a step-by-step approach which “helps you break down your problems into its root causes, identify entry points, search for possible solutions, take action, reflect upon what you have learned, adapt and then act again”.
I would place it in a family of ‘complexity literate’ approaches, which put those insights into practice (others include: Cynefin Framework and Wasafiri’s SystemCraft).
Molly Webb is Founder of Energy Unlocked, an energy market accelerator focused on new market entrants achieving a low cost, renewable, resilient energy system, and Co-Founder of PeerCo, a platform which boosts carbon impact for businesses through digital Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (Molly on LinkedIn).
We cover (amongst many things!): -How the Energy Unlocked cam out of Molly’s work at the Climate Group, and her diagnosis of the challenges for innovating in energy. -How Energy Unlocked is a market accelerator, not a business accelerator. Molly is focussing on the conditions that would make it possible for multiple start-ups to succeed. -One of the methods Energy Unlimited uses is Open Innovation. -Molly also uses a strategy approach called ‘Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation’ (PDIA). -Relate the Energy Unlimited approach to the module’s innovation typology. -If the incentives in the energy market were there, then we’d be fast on our way to a sustainable future already. -There has been a shift to government-led industrial strategy. -The Carbon Flex project, which asked asked the question ‘Are we investing in the right things at local level to decarbonise the grid faster?’. -Part of accelerating a market is breaking new ground which is too risky for funding which wants a secure and certain return. Which makes it difficult! -How understandings of the way energy markets work are very entrenched by how they happen to work now, rather than how they might work if you change the incentives. -Addressing that inertia and entrenched situation requires exploring. Hence the need for Energy Unlocked. -The importance of making sure the problem definition is not constrained by the understanding of what is currently possible. -How important he demand side of the energy markets are, and how this is under-explored in policy, philanthropic funding and investment.
This is part of a series of interviews about innovation for sustainability conducted for the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, as a contribution to a module in this Masters. You can find out more about these interviews, and the module, here.
Alex Evans is Founder and Executive Director of Larger Us, a “community of change-makers who share the aim of using psychology for good – to bridge divides, build broader coalitions and bring people together” (Alex’s LinkedIn and Twitter).
Alex set up Larger Us to flip society from a breakdown dynamic and into a breakthrough dynamic. That means paying attention to how the state of world impacts our state of mind, how our state of mind how we show up, and how we affect others through our behaviour, especially in a primed and fast-hyper-connected world.
We were speaking a month on from Hamas attacking Isreal, adn the Isreali response. Alex had written a fantastic blog post on how to make sense and respond without just accelerating the conflict.
In the interview he talks about how the real tussle of our times is between those two ways of looking at the world: are we nudging things towards zero-sum outcomes (‘for me to win, you must lose’) or nonzero sum outcomes (‘for me to win, you must win also’). If we want contribute to towards nonzero sum outcomes, and avoid feeding conflict, then it starts with managing our own mental and emotional states.”
For Alex this part of a wider sense that the kind of moment humankind is now living through it is a sort of initiation threshold. We need a deep story that’s capable of holding the immense difficulty and intensity and all the contradictions of this moment that we’re living through.
‘On order and complexity in innovations systems’ has has been part of the foundations to my understanding of innovation and systems change (partly as a stand-alone paper, partly as a sorta summary of the book Planetary Economics).
The diagnosis is that there is a need for a bridge between the mainstream innovation-economics (which puts huge emphasis on market prices) and systems-innovation/evolutionary literatures (which focusses on niches and market developments).
The way the paper does that is through a series frameworks:
Three Domains, which applies different economic theories to different situations (a bit like physics has quantum for the small, special relativity for fast and so on). In this case:
First Domain. Behind the productivity frontier. Key theme: Satisfice. Key thinking: Behaviour Economics. (Because orthodox economics believes that Homo economicus is laways rationally maximising benefit, it cannot easily understand why people and firms stay behind the productivity frontier. The paper argues this is a systematic feature of human psychology and organisations, not some anomaly or irrationality.)
Second Domain: At the productivity frontier. Optimising. Classical economics. (Key belief: the market is right, and the state should only intervene when there is a market failure.)
Third Domain. Trying to shift how the productivity frontier is moving. Transforming. Complexity and evolutionary economics. (Key belief: the market is useful, but not the only way of setting the direction of the economy.)
Policy pillars, which relate the importance of certain policies (1.Standards and engagement; 2. Markets and prices; 3. Strategic investment) for addressing the challenges in the different Domains.
The Innovation chain, which simplifies the phases of maturity of a technology: invention; development; demonstration; commercialisation; market accumulation; diffusion. This is presented as a useful heuristic, knwing that any particular technology will not go on a simple straight journey.
The Multiple Journeys, which show the co-evolving of various sub-systems so that the technology can mature. The sub-systems (in growing scale and complexity): Organisation and supply chain; Customers and standards; Financing; Market regulation; Institutional structures; and, Infrastructure. (Full diagram below)
This is a paper (and the Planetary Economics book) is something I return to as a useful set of frames for understanding innovation and system transformation.
One critique is that the Multiple Journeys framework only hints at the dynamics in the regime receiving the innovation. Maybe there is a tight and effective bundling, which is successful enough at the moment to ignore ‘superior’ technologies.
Other critiques are the usual ones for this field. Where is power, politics and culture? These are hinted at Multiple Journeys, but for me, under-emphasised.
This post is part of the #ReadingNotes series, see here for more (including format and use of bulletpoints).
Citation: Michael Grubb, Will McDowall, Paul Drummond, On order and complexity in innovations systems: Conceptual frameworks for policy mixes in sustainability transitions, Energy Research & Social Science, Volume 33, 2017, Pages 21-34, ISSN 2214-6296. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.09.016
‘Roadmapping for Strategy and Innovation – Aligning technology and markets in a dynamic world’ is the classic text book, co-written by Dr Phaal, who also coordinates the Strategic Technology and Innovation Management (STIM) consortium programme at the Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge. As a textbook it is admirably thorough, a necessary, rather than a good, read.
It explains how roadmapping grew out of technology roadmapping and can serve different purposes, including: aligning commercial and technical strategy; and identifying new business opportunities.
Schematically, roadmaps have the same structure: time (horizontal) vs hierarchy of systems (vertical)
My view is that roadmapping is useful because it explicitly considers time, and how there are cumulative, inter-linked developments at the different levels. One important chapter in the summarises different perspectives on S-curves (or near-equivalent dynamics) at different levels: technology; application; business; and, industry.
When it comes to a roadmap itself, the claim is that all are underpinned by 6 questions:
Where do we want to go?
Where are we now?
How can we get there?
Why do we need to act?
What should we do?
How should we do it?
Four core roadmapping principles:
Timeframes should reflect the rate of change associated with the topic and time horizons that are of importance.
The structure should match the particular use. Typically:
Top: Trends and drivers that govern the overall goals.
Middle: tangible systems that need to be developed in response to the trends and drivers.
Bottom: internal and external resources that need to be marshalled.
The process to develop and maintain the roadmap should fit the need.
Key output is in a visual format.
The book also reminds us that process can be most important (through the communications and consensus generated). I had thought it might focus on the content. Interestingly, the book also advocates rapid prototyping on the basis that getting to a draft roadmap quickly generates insights which then start to get used.
Also interestingly, the book gives 2 processes (to the level of detail of draft workshop agendas: strategy (or ‘S-Level’) and technology (or ‘T-level’). I was surprised how, well, obvious the steps are, a combination of forecasting (trends from now) and backcasting (working back from long-term aims).
The key thing I hadn’t come across were linking grids, which give a systematic way of working from priorities at the top level (eg market trends) down to the bottom level (technologies) by playing out how each affects the middle (product or application level). I read this as a way of working through the hypothesis of how macro-level factors drive micro-level importance.
As criticism, not surprisingly, this is a an analytical and technocratic approach. It implies technology-led change (technology pushes into the market). There is little on the cultural context in which all of this happens, especially the micro-culture of the business and industry. (Think of how the culture of Silicon Valley has percolated out in how its technologies are developed and used.)
Citation: Phaal, R; Probert, D; Farrukh, C., ‘Roadmapping for Strategy and Innovation – Aligning technology and markets in a dynamic world’. Here
This post is part of the #ReadingNotes series, see here for more (including format and use of bulletpoints).
Transformative Outcomes is a process-oriented heuristic that comes from the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC). It comes from using the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP), which describes transitions in terms of: landscape pressure on an otherwise dynamically stable regime; the regime struggles; opportunities for mature niches of innovations to become the new mainstream.
The 12 Transformative Outcomes (TOs) have come from using the MLP with policy-makers, as they try to drive transformation. ‘Outcome’ is being used very widely here. I understand them as on-going functions that area usually needed for transformative change.
The TOs are organised in three sets of four:
Building and nurturing niches, so there are innovations that can be adopted by the mainstream.
Expanding and mainstreaming niches, so that innovations move into the regime.
Opening up and unlocking regimes, so that the existing mainstream gets out of the way
Building and nurturing niches
Expanding and mainstreaming niches
Opening up and unlocking regimes
1.Shielding
5.Upscaling
9.De-aligning and destabilising
2.Learning
6.Replicating
10.Unlearning and deep learning in regimes
3.Networking
7.Circulating
11.Strengthening regime–niche interactions
4.Navigating expectations
8.Institutionalising
12.Changing perceptions of landscape pressures
The idea is to use them as a starting point for what might be missing. They are not supposed to be in a particular order or importance (though there is a claim to completeness).
My instinct is that they will be useful as a diagnostic tool: describe what is currently happening, and identify gaps where interventions are likely to be needed.
As with MLP in general, it is strong on technical and technocratic, as in the innovations are presumed to be physical widgets (rather than, say, methods or beliefs), and the users are assumed to be well-intentioned, evidence-led policy-makers.
Hence the blindspot: cultural and political influences on the transformation. The paper explicitly says that “how TOs are enacted is a deeply political process, riddled with choices and conflicts between multiple actors with incongruent interests”. But I didn’t get much guidance from the paper on what to do with that insight, or what might be needed outside of the TOs to deal with the deeply embedded political process.
Similarly, the role of culture — imaginaries, stories, lifestyle expectations, values, movements — is only hinted at as being part of the Landscape, which is assumed to be beyond the influence of single actors. Tell that to Nigel Farage on Brexit or XR on UK’s commitment to Net Zero.
Even with those caveats, this looks likfe a very useful development to the MLP framework.
Level n.Transformative Outcome
Explanation
Building and nurturing niches
1.Shielding
Offering protection for niche experiments and normalising these protection measures.
2.Learning
Induce first- and second-order learning in niche experiments. First-order learning focuses on improving what actors are doing while second-order learning questions frames and assumptions of structures and activities.
3.Networking
Create high-quality opportunities for collaboration between actors, strengthening their networks.
4.Navigating expectations
Create spaces for articulating expectations around societal challenges and appraising these expectations to enhance their credibility (among niche actors), quality (providing more evidence), and stability (expectations are not questioned anymore).
Expanding and mainstreaming niches
5.Upscaling
Increasing adoption by users of the new emerging system; this is not only about adoption of a new set of user preferences and technologies but also wider adoption of policy measures, industry strategies, and cultural meanings and symbols.
6.Replicating
Intentionally facilitating the replication of specific niche experiments in other contexts.
7.Circulating
Intentionally facilitating the replication of specific niche experiments in other contexts.
8.Institutionalising
Mainstreaming the rules of the niche (behaviour, beliefs, and values) among existing and new niche actors.
Opening up and unlocking regimes
9.De-aligning and destabilising
Facilitating the development of disruptive policy frameworks and governance arrangements (such as organisational and administrative reforms) that challenge existing systems.
10.Unlearning and deep learning in regimes
Facilitating unlearning and deep learning among regime actors, helping them re- assess the regime rules in comparison to new alternative rules for solving systemic problems.
11.Strengthening regime–niche interactions
Creating linkages between niche and regime actors, and their ideas and resources with the aim to empower niches and make them more competitive.
12.Changing perceptions of landscape pressures
Facilitating processes to challenge individual and collective perceptions about landscape pressures of diverse groups of regime actors: policymakers, producers, and businesses.
This post is part of the #ReadingNotes series, see here for more (including format and use of bulletpoints).
Citation: Bipashyee Ghosh, Paula Kivimaa, Matias Ramirez, Johan Schot, Jonas Torrens, Transformative outcomes: assessing and reorienting experimentation with transformative innovation policy, Science and Public Policy, Volume 48, Issue 5, October 2021, Pages 739–756, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scab045
David Bent 