Hope in a North Sea crucible

IMAGE CREDIT: Mary Pizzey

It’s taken a good few weeks to digest an extraordinary experience, best summarised by early morning swims in the North Sea in the company of climate campaigners, energy sector leaders, investors and management consultants, among others. We were gathered for a new event, Moving Beyond, to further and accelerate the conversation on how we can work together towards Net Zero. Now it has all sunk in, I’m ready to share the themes that lingered long after my toes had thawed.

Hope over fear

The climate change narrative has been dominated by doomsday scenarios, what we must give up, and the cost of the transition. Though this narrative has basis and has played a role in catching the world’s attention, the double whammy of “climate change is bad for me” and “tackling climate change is hard for me” can easily add up in our minds to “it is bad whatever we do”, eliciting an entirely natural head-in-the-sand response. But another narrative exists and is equally relevant. One where “change” and “different” don’t have to equal “bad”. Perhaps in letting go of old ways of living, we will find better ones. Any leadership book will tell us that leading with a vision for a better future will prompt wider spread and longer lasting followership than the fear story.

Businesses can be part of shaping this more hopeful narrative both by innovating alternatives that are better than the harmful option. The power of their marketing narratives almost goes without saying.

Cancel culture

A fine line exists between accountability, cancelling, and even sabotage. Genuinely calling out baseless claims of reducing harm or doing good, or “purpose-washing”, is an important part of keeping businesses honest and accountable. However, as companies state their intent to operate with greater purpose, and begin taking steps to do so, the sheer scale and complexity of the challenge means results won’t come overnight. They will also never be perfect, at least any time soon. As collections of people, businesses are just as prone to good days, bad days, experiments that don’t pay off and in-built imperfection.

There is a notable pattern of businesses stating their intent to transition to a more purpose-driven approach, and very quickly being “cancelled” as they are held to their aspirational standard rather than one that reflects a responsible approach to transition. As a result, businesses that are serious about having a positive purpose are sometimes choosing not to highlight it publicly for fear of distraction, as they work out how to halt production without decimating a town or tanking the investments that underpin pensions.

Those shaping the public narrative on the nature and future of business have an opportunity, and perhaps responsibility, to mature the conversation from one of heroes and villains to one of empathy and support for those who are genuinely, authentically, trying.

Support in transition

Consulting in the noughties exposed me to the earlier days of customer experience in financial services: typically, this consisted of a few dedicated individuals a few layers down the organisation, trying to work out how to get five minutes on the board agenda to show there was a business case for investing in a better customer experience. They were smart people with a strong case, but couldn’t always get their message through. Fast forward to 2011, and anything short of gold plated customer experience meant difficult conversations with the regulator. Customer experience was now reporting to the executive, if not on it. Customer experience budgets boomed, so research and best practice followed.

Conversations around purpose-driven business take me back to those days. The case for purpose-driven business - that it can help tackle big social and environmental problems and be a more successful and profitable way of running a business - has its champions but is not yet lived and breathed throughout business, political and economic systems.

The few individuals and organisations making a break for it by transitioning to a purpose-driven model might be the majority before long. We can get ahead of the game by understanding the merits of these models and what a good transition plan looks like, before we are forced to react to it.

Investors and commentators have a particular responsibility in making sure they understand what it takes to transition well to a purpose-driven model, and know a good transition plan when they see one. Rejection on the basis of purpose being ‘fluffy’ risks a repeat of the customer experience journey, where the link to performance was often dismissed but ultimately well evidenced.

Change is here, now

Put together, one thought rises to the top: we are already in the transition. Society and our systems are no longer in the position to choose whether we change. The planet has already changed. Covid has turned the world we knew upside down. We are now in a period of migrating to a new way of living.

Business leaders, investors and politicians can use foresight to plan for an orderly transition, or wait until they are forced to react with a vastly reduced set of options.

I keep imagining the summer of 2019, and how we, the public, might have responded to government policy and even taxation directed at pandemic planning, an ask of businesses to ensure virtual working was possible, and restrictions on Christmas travel plans as the pandemic took hold in China. Despite foresight by scientists, it is not a stretch to imagine that we might have found these disruptions unpalatable and rejected them. There is something innately human about needing to see, smell and feel the crisis before we believe it and react.

All actors can choose what level of foresight to apply, and whether to do so in a spirit of self preservation alone, or lifting our heads to re-imagine and redesign what an orderly transition and our new normals could look like. We can also choose whether to lean into a narrative of hopeful “even better if” rather than one of loss and fear.

The risk for leaders and politicians is that if we take steps to save ourselves from the worst, most will never know we were spared, and the heroes will go unsung. So perhaps the kind of leadership that is needed is the kind where we take the right steps over the heroic ones, and let history speak for itself.