The start of the new rugby season gives me an excuse to write about how my team, Harlequins, won the Premiership last year. Lessons: crafting your own group identity matters more than merely stating your purpose; enacting the identity creates coherence, which makes a path for success; be different in ways that make a material difference; collegiate leadership exists, but unstable; and, all success is contingent on circumstances.
The lively debate in the US on a Green New Deal shows that rich countries are not yet ready for a ‘war economy’ footing on climate change. But the extreme threat of the climate emergency mean that the time has come for innovation policies that prepare us for that shift in the near future.
The Young Foundation have recently released an anthology, celebrating the 60th anniversary of Michael Young’s classic ‘The Rise of Meritocracy’. I had a go at answering their question – what lies beyond meritocracy? – and my piece was published. This post expands a bit more on some of the themes and thinking.
When reflecting on a recent piece on the physics of eternal growth, I was struck that the fundamental challenge is not about physics but biology. Specifically, unless nature can cope with human activity, then it will collapse, taking civilisation with it. But conversely, if we can find a more of human activity which we value more and more that co-evolves with nature, then in principle we could have eternal growth.
Earlier this week I spoke at on Industrial Strategies and a Stakeholder Economy at an event on ‘Redesigning Capitalism: From shareholder to stakeholder capitalism’.
The event was run by Promoting Economic Pluralism, which is creating and supporting spaces for diverse voices, perspectives and approaches to understanding our economies to help co-create truly sustainable, resilient and inclusive ones. PEP is run by the inimitable Henry Leveson-Gower, who deserves great praise for pushing for requisite variety in economics.
Some people from the session were asking for the slides. Here they are. In a perfect world I would write a blog post of my talk, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. So, better than nothing, here are the key points from the talk:
A short post to salute an initiative of Vigeo Eiris (where I am a non-executive director), which I hope will have a big contribution to shifting the finance system by making ESG information the norm in investment decisions.
At the end of November, I had the honour of giving the Keynote speech at the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce Best Corporate Citizen Sustainability Awards 2017. I was there as an affiliate of Good Karma, a Sri Lankan consultancy I’ve had the pleasure of working with this year. You can read my speech below on why economic transformation is inevitable, the best way to win the future is to invent it; and, that Sri Lanka can choose to grow towards a sustainable future.
“Rather than burden our children with our mistakes, we can inspire them with our example.”
What do we mean when we talk of ‘sustainability leadership’? This is addressed by Jem Bendell et al in a new paper, who use critical theory to unpack both ‘leadership’ and ’sustainability’. After reading it, I find myself framing sustainability as about shared dilemmas (not problems), regretting managerialist capture, and pursing a restoration approach (rather than reform or revolution). I also suspect we need to find a pragmatic, fundamental approach to change, though I’m not sure what that will be.
Last week I was at the annual Oxford Energy Day, which focused on Energy in Growing Economies. Here are ten things I learnt (any errors are mine!).
Below is the current draft of a chapter for Fast Future’s ’50:50 – Scenarios for the Next 50 Years’. They’ve given me permission to test my thinking so far. I’d love your thoughts – positive or negative – and connections to other, better thinking.
It is an attempt to imagine the world in 2050 as if what we do now matters. The speculative vision below will be wrong, but hopefully it will be useful. It is one path I can imagine to a sustainable footing. I don’t like all of it, and I don’t necessarily think it’s the most likely future. There’s so much more I’d like to add (links to culture or knowledge production, for instance) – but I’m already twice the word count! It applies some of the analysis from my work on industrial strategy, which you can watch here or see a rough cut here.
Please do let me know what reactions, comments below or via email!
Here in 2050 we ask: given how uncertain the world looked in 2020, how is it that most people are thriving? How did we deliberately and rapidly reduce our impacts on the Earth so nature to thrive? (Gaffney and Steffen, 2017) And, how did that lead to us becoming a two-speed world?
The short answer: back in the 2020s one group of countries tried ‘good growth’ as an open and future-facing strategy – and were able to renew as crises happened. These countries are now the Primary World, where people are thriving in ways that work in synergy with nature. Another group wanted security by preserving the past – and, when the crises came, weren’t able to adapt. This Secondary World is not in sync with nature, but at a much reduced pace and scale that nature can cope with.
Now for the long answer.
David Bent 