Beyond Business as Usual with John Elkington & Louise Kjellerup Roper

[Music] Hello, I'm Daniel Val, author of Designing Regenerative Cultures and you're listening to the Regeneration Rising Podcast. And I'm Josie Warden, head of Regenerative Design at the RSA. In this series, we explore how regenerative practice is helping people in place to collectively redesign their communities, cities and economies and create a thriving home for all on our planet. [Music] Hello and welcome to the Regeneration Rising Podcast. I'm Josie Warden and this is Episode 5 in our seven-part series. Today, we're focusing on the role of companies in shaping our future, are the businesses of today doing enough to build a better tomorrow and should we expect them to? What would a regenerative approach to business look like? To help us answer these questions are guests John Elkington and Louise Keller-Up-Roper from Volan's Ventures, where they work with business leaders to affect change for people and planet. John founded Volan's and has been a leading voice in the global sustainability movement for decades. As well as supporting businesses around the world, he is the highly acclaimed author. His book Cannibals with Forks in 1997 popularized his triple bottom line concept and laid the foundations for sustainable business strategy. His 20th book was published in 2020, Green Swans, the coming boom in regenerative capitalism. Louise is the CEO of Volan's. She started her career with cutting edge software companies before focusing on the role of business for good. Today, as well as being responsible for the work of Volan's, she is a guest lecturer at both Crampfield University and the University of Exeter and part of the Elmer Carthor Foundation's CE100 network. Welcome to you both and thank you for joining us today. Forlanz is a leader in supporting businesses to adopt regenerative strategies. John, you founded Volan's after a long career in sustainable development. What brought you to this regenerative thinking? Well, it's a long story. Joseph Sock had it extremely short. In 1987, I'd set up a company with several other people called Sustainability and we talked about the triple bottom line and we engage business around the world. But in 2007, 2008 with the sort of financial crisis hitting, I got to something of a personal crisis where a sustainability grew in numbers of people and so on. I was slightly struggling, but I also felt there was a process of capture going on where companies were basically pronouncing that they had embraced and embedded sustainability. My sense was that they really hadn't. And what we needed was systemic change. And the reason for that was that the current system was driving us towards degenerative outcomes, whereas what we needed was the opposite and regenerative outcomes. It was designed to be relatively small because I don't like large organisations. It was designed to do what sustainability had done, which is to work very close in to selected companies over considerable periods of time. But it was meant to move the needle from D to re-generation. And Louise, you're the CEO of Volan's today. Can you tell us what that shift to regenerative business looks like in practice? Well, it looks like a business that acknowledges its place in the world, that there isn't a society out there, an economy out there, a market out there, but organisations, every business organisation is deeply embedded and nested in that and really takes the responsibility that comes with that. And is there anything you add to that, John, around what makes a regenerative business? Well, because I've worked in this field for so long, I've seen a series of feeding friends, where new concepts, new agendas, new language comes through. And I've been sort of complicit in doing some of that myself. But it's been really striking to see how regeneration as a concept has taken off in the last sort of two to three years with very large companies like Walmart, PepsiCo, you know, leave General Mills and so on, making really quite extraordinary pronouncements about how they want to become regenerative organisations. So in that sense, I think it's a mental exciting, but as we've seen with the ESG environment, social and governance investment space, there will be corrections, there will be moments where suddenly people wake up to the fact, it's not as easy as they thought when they set these goals and targets. But I think it's crucial, I think this is an immense, important mid-course correction for the whole global sustainability industry and the sets that we wake up to the fact that this isn't just a round incremental change, it is systemic and it has to be about regeneration. And finally, that regeneration has to be across the economy, across our societies and our politics. And crucially, it has to be across the environment, the biosphere, the atmosphere and all the rest of it. John, how would you compare those early feeding frenzies in the early days of sustainability? Because you just used the same word, people pronouncing intentions. And now we're in a new wave of pronouncing intentions of large companies like the ones you just named. But your intention or your understanding always was that we need fundamental systems change. But how deeply is that conversation actually starting in business? Because that's not just a business conversation, that's a governance conversation, as you were just saying. It's a sort of chicken and egg situation between do we need to change the economic system so companies can behave differently or the companies have to behave differently so we can fundamentally change the economic system? Well, one thing that Louise and I included quite some years back was that there was no point in sort of corporate social responsibility if you thought of it as cleaning up individual fish, corporate fish and putting them back into polluted dirty waters. You have to address the market conditions and incentives within which businesses swim. I do think that this needs to be systemic. Just very quickly to your question around what previous feeding friends this have been like. They've been pretty much like this one, but with one distinct difference, which is that for much of the history of this change agenda, most people have wanted to kill it. Most people didn't want that change agenda to come through. And now I would say, as a risk to say, but most ordinary people know that climate change is a major issue. They know that biodiversity losses are major issue and so on. They would like to see somebody practically and effectively addressing these sorts of challenges, but they don't want it to cram their lifestyles and they don't want to cram their future opportunity spaces. So there is this sort of tension, but I think there's been this cultural shift where there's now a felt need for real change, even if we're not yet properly delivering it. Can you describe what that shift from incremental to systems change would look like? So as John said, the analogy we used a few years back that we sort of have in our minds is we can clean all the fish, but if the fish go back to that dirty sea and are still measured on the same things, then we're not making progress. So one thing is moving from just one organisation or several organisations improving incrementally to the way they are being judged. So we talked about cultural change, but also governmental and policy change. It needed to move with it on one hand. And Daniel mentioned sort of chicken and egg earlier, is it the company or is it the system around the company which one do you change first? And I guess our approach is you have to do both, but our main focus is around the organisations and the businesses. So one of the things we're working on is how do companies engage more in that system? There's been this tradition that companies, if they just improve themselves, do better reporting, have less bad impact, that's okay. Now we're at the point where companies have to step forward and actively try and shift the system. So it's not, oh, we're just going to try and shift government over here, separate to business, but businesses have to engage. Because actually they have the knowledge of what's needed, what are the rules that they should be playing by if everybody's going to come up the learning curve? So a little bit different. You know, so I think there's more to it than we're going to shift the system and we don't have a tendency to map out the system and go, oh, we need to now stop working with business, we need to work with government or activists or whatever. We do engage with all of those and make bridges, as John would always say, we bridge from business and into business from other actors, but really business needs to keep moving and move a lot faster. And Josie and Daniel just to pick up on that, I think, if you look at the history of the Royal Society of Arts itself, it's a gender, it's a change agenda. It was partly based on education and informing citizens, but it was fairly broad. I mean, it was on science, it was on technology, it was on commerce, as we then called business several hundred years ago. And I think without necessarily stating it, the RSA has been involved in the art of system change for a very long time. And so when we do think about system change and we think about the system to which commerce or business responds, it is about the law and it is about regulation, it is about compliance, those sorts of things, but it's about much more fundamental things as well. It's about economics, the discipline that sets our expectations around value and feeds very directly into our politics. It's also around education. I think one of the things that Luis and I found ourselves very much increasingly pulled into is the the world of education, particularly for business. So we're working with quite a number now of universities and business schools around the world on a range of different issues, but all clustered under this sort of sustainability rubric. And at the core of it is education. It's not that we have to do all of this in the next three to five years or we're dead in the water. This is something that we got to invest in for generations. This is something that is the biggest and most consequential investment that any society makes. When we think about system change, that's the headache that we endure. I absolutely agree. The thing that I just would like to highlight because unfortunately because of the way we've been doing education, it could be easy for the listeners to think of education as something that happens in the first third of one's life. This is still saw in our culture that we think it there's a time when you get educated and there's a time when you work. And what we really as we rethink work, we need to rethink education. And that brings me to another word which is very similar, which is participation, agency as citizens becoming responsible for our actions again and aware of their impacts and holding each other responsible for that. So that becomes a learning process. And for me, there's a sort of link between how do we bring education, participation, personal agency back into all of this. It's about how do we anchor all these conversations and business in place, whether this is at the local or the bioregional or even national scale to some extent. The place in this census fractal, but it very much needs to be specific, real ecosystems, real people, real businesses. And what I've been burning to ask you, Louise, is the role of corporation in this. And particularly as you see work with businesses, how important this shift into businesses becoming corporation partners, not just other businesses, regenerative enterprise ecosystems, but also with local and regional governments over long periods of time with universities and with the people of places. So again, it's a thing, companies and human beings. And by the way, organizations are full of human beings, right? And we've kind of ignored that. And that has been part of the problem for the last 50 odd years is we've brought into this economic man. And there's still a lot of management theory, an organizational theory that assumes that there's a different type of person inside an organization and outside. And all those things, I think, and we're going to see this surge of personalized business. And it's been coming. There's been more and more companies over the last, I guess, 10, 15 years that are sort of saying, well, bring yourself to work and so on. So just one thing, I think that's a really important space that organizations have to shift inside and give agency to the people inside. To your main question of organizations, they have to take you're absolutely right, a place-based approach both to their business models, but also to how they collaborate. They have to collaborate and build capacity in the local area, which will benefit them, yes. But actually for most of them, it will look like a longer term investment before it will pay back by by normal terms. They have to understand the context that they're working in. So be that the community and what that demographic needs, not just now, but in the next 10, 15 years, as well as what the environmental situation is, so the biodiversity, the climate and so on. All of those things, I come in, you know, we work with big infrastructure companies, you know. And one of the things we looked at was, well, they might get a request to build a bridge, let's say in Madrid. But ordinarily, you know, they would go in and say, okay, how do we make it less impact on the environment, on the community, et cetera. But if they're really taking a longer term view, they're actually going, well, if you look at Madrid, just from a climate perspective, very simply, Madrid will be 10 degrees hotter in the next 10 years. So if you put another road in or big bridge that might, that will increase traffic by all the models, then you're going to increase the health hazards because of the pollution from those cars. And you're going to cause a massive impact on the local system, both the people, but also the cost of health to the local community. And if they can start looking at those things, so they have to collaborate with locals, they have to collaborate with experts. But also, what does that community actually need? Then you're zooming out and you're looking at, well, how do you intend, something that will last 10 years, because bridges do, and last longer than that, how do you create something that works in that system and in that future system? You can't do that without collaboration. And in terms of the businesses that you work with, where are you seeing this appetite for change? Is it coming from the leadership team or is it coming from the staff that work in these organisations? At the moment, often it is leadership driven, the move towards regeneration. And to a certain extent, it needs to be, however, leadership is seeing it partly as a necessity because of a groundswell, because we see civil society, so to speak, that sense that something needs to shift. Companies are seeing it within their employees. And one of the conversations we're having quite a lot is, if you don't do this, how will you ever attract talent? So I think the regeneration agenda is coming from leadership because we're in a crisis situation, and leaders are the first to know that really, or their teams, if they have sensible teams. So the companies we're seeing move, there's not one of them where the CEO or the chair or the board or top management team isn't thinking this is where we need to move. As I said, none of them will move just because a leader says so, because organisations are complicated, so they need to unlock the knowledge that has already in the organisation and that imagination of humans. And again, it comes back to Don referred earlier to sort of as an economic species. It's just a really interesting term, I guess. I think we're how we've looked at ourselves and how we've looked at ourselves in business has to change as we move forward with this regeneration agenda. One of the things that I've been quite struck by, and I saw it last in the 1990s, particularly then in North America, was the number of CEOs and other senior executives within business who are saying that they're acting because their children are beating them up at the breakfast table or whatever. So this has become personal. And there was a nature magazine, did a survey, published a survey just a few weeks back and I'm sure you saw it, but what was striking about it, 10 countries around the world, 10,000 young people, so not a huge salple, but significant. And the three countries where climate angst, anxiety and younger people was really at almost crisis proportions. The first one was the Philippines, the second one was India, and the third one was Brazil. So this is not simply an OECD developed world problem. This is something that is becoming increasing global. And among the more developed nations, Portugal was in there. As we see across southern Europe this week, the fires are absolutely raging, very often out of control. So I think younger people are increasingly agitated about this. They want to see effective leadership. My suggestion, my prediction almost, is that over the next five, seven years, they will not see enough of that constructive, effective leadership in the political system. And therefore, they'll start to invent other ways of doing this. I think that's deadly dangerous for democracy. But I think that's where we're headed. Democracy is actually in many senses failing us. You both said something about kind of the way we're responding to the crisis at the moment that made me somehow question, how deep is this crisis? And are we seeing what we're moving into? Like as a thought experiment, if we somehow could see where this exponentially spirals into a completely unpredictable new context, that we find ourselves in 10 years time, how fundamentally different would we spend our time and our resources over those 10 years if we had that brief glimpse of where we're actually going? I feel we're somewhat oblivious to the fact how profound we now need to restructure how we provision basic needs to populations everywhere, rapidly, over the next 10 years time. And if in 10 years time we suddenly get this insight, if only we had known 10 years ago, it would be really a shame. Yes, I think you're absolutely right. I don't think anyone, even us on the core here who are dealing with this every day, really can comprehend how deep the change is for all of us at all levels, at organizational level, at country level, at personal level. And it's quite frightening when you have John Kerry last year. I think it was about this time last year, you know, saying, well, we can still maintain the good American lifestyle. And he was talking about net zero. And of course, that's pure fantasy, really. There are things that will make it, you know, there are technologies and things that could help us exponentially improve the situation. But right now, we have to accept that major changes is needed. John referred earlier to business education being important. It seems a little bit late, but we are seeing more and more demand for top people wanting to understand and wanting to learn because they have to grapple with this. And I think that is hopeful. Those people who have the levers that their hands so to speak, if we're being mechanistic, but they are at the top of the systems, if they can be prepared to learn new things now, to cope with the crisis they are seeing, then there is a ripple effect that can be useful. One thing I just like to reflect on, which is that in the Renaissance, and it's been said before, people didn't think we're living through the Renaissance, hallelujah. It was going on all around them, and it was bloody mess, so much of the time. And here we are again, you've got these future conflicts starting to happen, and exactly the time, when as a species, we have to start thinking about things in integrated a coherent, a longer term, a manner. And it's one of the reasons why I'm an optimist. I was born that way, but I think the next 10 to 15 years are going to be staggeringly complicated, challenging and brutal. I think we're panicking in Europe about relatively small numbers of migrants coming from Syria and North African conflict zones and so on. Once climate change really gets its claws in, the numbers of people wanting to move from Africa to Europe will just go off the scale. And we're not able to think about it, goes back to an earlier question, because we haven't lived through that sort of reality, and we constantly reassure ourselves and our politicians do likewise. This is a momentary glitch, and then we'll get back to business or reality as normal. I think this is the biggest change opportunity that we've had in over a hundred years. I think it's very likely to be squandered, because our current political classes are completely incompetent. They've never been there before. They don't know what to do. But if we get this right, we can drive more and more systemic change than ever before. Certainly in my lifetime, and I'm now 73, so I go through and period some absolute bewilderment and depression at what's actually now really coming at us hard. And this sort of extraordinary possibility to work, particularly with younger people, to shift the normal, the sense of normal, just that one is really worries me is the normalization of what's been happening recently. So in the United States, they're not talking about a million people dead from the pandemic. A sort of normal that whereas if you go back two or three years and look to that prospect, you would have been appalled. And it's the same with climate change, with sort of 41 degrees in your 51 in 10 years. And we'll find a way around that air conditioning or whatever. So it's a very challenging time. And Josie and Daniel, thank you, Mesty, for the way that you severally do in this space. But John, when you say that, if you really dig into what you just said, and I had this privilege of two years ago talking with Dennis Meadows about limits to growth and what kind of regenerative future is still possible. And he really kind of washed my head a little bit in terms of me being far too optimistic. And basically saying that we're running at a scenario where there will be such trauma and such enormous loss of human lives. And this normalization could easily affect all of us and is actually already affecting all of us because there are people dying in the tens thousands because of climate change in the global south every year. Add another two or three zeros. How do we live as human human beings with this inequality? And how do we respond wisely to addressing these and the inequalities on the global scale? The fact that we've exploited through colonialism the global south, then through new liberal economics and the effect of the world we've created on the basis of this exploitation is now coming home to hit those hardest who've already been exploited twice. And I'm saying this from my position of privilege as well, and all our positions of privilege, how do we actually respond to that? Sensibly. Well, the first thing is not to expect the people who've driven that neoliberal exploitation to sort of suddenly get religion and shout, "Hallelujah, they're going to double down." And they're going to invest in the defense industries. And you think about the Trump era and this dream of a wall. There are going to be walls of all sorts of different types constructed and people make a furious amount of money of that dysfunctional future. One of the reasons why the team at violence is quite interested in not just history, which I think is an important source of information and ideas as to where we may be headed, but science fiction as to in the sense of what may be possible over time is that we need radically new thinking. And very often you don't find that in the mainstream of literature you find today's world and people living through it and their stories. Whereas what we actually now need to think about is future generations. And that's not 100 years in the future. That's people within 25, 30 years. It's the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. And I don't think yet politicians are able, because of social media and all sorts of other influences, to stand back from all this and saying to their voters and their populations, let's tell you what the world is going to be like. And then let's have a sensible conversation. I mean, Louise is Danish and Denmark for a long time. They've had these citizens' juries. And so on. We need radically different forms of democracy to address where we're headed. And so I'm extremely excited by people who are experimenting with that, but God, we got a long way to go. And it brings us back to education yet again, which I think is a nice theme to connect it with business. If right now we know that change is going to be so fundamental, that the kind of approach of we have a problem, let's find the solution, solution-earing is just most likely going to fail or create patch-up solutions that are partial, that create more problems later. At the same time, we need to explore new technologies and implement solutions. I'm not saying we don't. But really, the capacity that we need to form through education in people of all ages is how do I journey with not knowing? How do I journey with uncertainty? How do we in place sit together and make sense and make meaning out of the unpredictable when it has happened? How do we pull together rather than apart? So I'm increasingly thinking when we talk about education, the capacity building we need to do in order for people to continue journeying in uncertainty is what regeneration is about. Not helping people to solution near new partial solutions. How do we do that? What are the skills like the way of counsel sitting in circle and really listening from the heart? I don't know, but they might be ancient technologies of the sacred that have been useful to us for centuries and we talked to Ann Polina about Aboriginal wisdom 60,000 years ago. But how do we bring these technologies of the sacred which are actually about human relationships, their warm data? Nora Bateson asked this beautiful question on a conversation I was with her. She said, "How do we educate for the flexibility we don't yet know we will need in the future?" We have to learn how to dance with uncertainty, we have to learn how to sit with two completely opposing concepts, but not even that, not knowing what the other one of the concepts is, right? And we have to try and hold it with grace. And I think actually that's where business is interesting to me, because for the you know a few decades management theory how do you do things? Those are things that have been discussed in business and in business schools across the world. They haven't found the right answers in my humble opinion, but businesses are good places to experiment with this because there are teams that have to do something. And instead of saying, "Oh, we're going to build a curriculum over here that's separate to the life that most people lead," bringing in some of that learning, and I want to call it learning rather than education actually, into the business forum, as they are grappling with some of the biggest challenges they've ever faced, right? There's not a business leader now that isn't facing a crisis really, and if they don't think they are then they haven't even a bigger problem. I can only agree with you, it's about the uncertainty, it's about learning human connection, and that's what business has hadn't had. They haven't had that human injection in a very big way. So I think that comes in and then the experimentation within, and again that's where we're lucky to work with some of our clients, there's some big corporations who are starting to look at this. How do you do it? Do you do it by your learning journey? How do you make sure that it affects the people inside, but also the system of the company or the organization? So you're not just creating more enlightened people in your team that are then going to go off because they can't break through that system. Daniel mentioned the sort of deep traditional historic knowledge, and I've always been fascinated by language, but I gave up Latin when I was 14 because it made no sort of sense to me, but one of the STEM meanings in Latin that always stuck with me was that for education. And as you know, it's a do carry, I don't know how to pronounce it, but I mean it's to lead out from, and in the early days of education, no doubt that was lead out from ignorance into the bliss of Christian believe or whatever it might have been. - Part of Plato's cave. - Exactly. But now I think it's to lead people out from an old system into the potential for a new one and the need for co-evolution to make that real. And the thing I would say is that the group of people in our societies, which needs education more than any other, is the older folk and the aging folk. Because increasingly our societies will age, they are aging. Their politics will go more conservative in the process. Their investment strategies will become shorter term. They will become very prone to saying, we tried, it's not the younger generations. That's deadly because when Louise talked about the spectrum from despair through to sort of hopeful belief and co-creation of a future, there is actually a middle zone. And the middle zone is where people don't just give up and despair or constructively engage. They become furious, they become angry, they become depressed and they become bitter. And the politics that go with that are very, very different indeed. And I think we're going to face that. And I think in some ways the Brexit vote and there's this ghastly experience of these shipments of people at least proposed to a place like Rwanda. I mean, that is sort of an early signal of the politics that we're moving into. My prediction will be that in sort of eight, 10 years from now, the political leaders that we will be dealing with will be people we've never heard of. Because that's what happens in these times of historic turmoil and disruption. And so on, part of our challenge is going to be, make sure that either those are people like us, or there are, or the people that we support. So we've got to become very much more political. And in some ways, I think the sustainability discussion has too often been apolitical. And I think Dennis Meadows, let's go through all of that. He's absolutely right and he's absolutely wrong. Because if you believe that the world is screwed, you're going to do very little, except by another home in Patagonia or New Zealand or whatever it is if you're a billionaire. And for the rest of us, just hunker down and build a seller and stock out and bake beans. And that's not going to get us terribly far. We've got to believe on the basis of at least some evidence that the world is improvable and then really work and commit. I think one of the critical barriers to change is our legal structures for business, which are designed to maximise shareholder profit. And there's a lot of innovation happening around new forms of ownership, like land trusts or member owned cooperatives. Are these the models that we need to embrace if we want to embed regenerative approaches in our businesses? I think ownership is crucial in all of this. And I would love to believe that the sort of cooperative movement, which has been an extraordinary influence on the wider world, but still even other millions of cooperatives around the world, still relatively local and narrow impact. I'd love to believe that the B Corporation movement would really shift the needle as sort of larger companies come into that field, although they tend to become as like Netoro or Unilever, which are already under loan, which are already quite active. I think that sort of pulse will have quite a big influence over time. But I think this is political again. And it comes down to how we charter businesses, what we license businesses to do and how we then enforce compliance. And I think you go back to the East India company, the British and the Dutch equivalents. A whole series of assumptions were laid in place at that stage around limited liability and so on. And I think we really have to revisit-- I think the RSA through its tomorrow's company and Aguara and things like that, has already been looking at elements of that. But I think we-- if we do not think about ownership, we do not think about how we charter businesses to do what they want to do in the world, but to achieve as a consequence what we need to happen. This is all going to blow away in the wind. So you're asking a fundamental question. I think it needs to be asked. I don't know yet what the ultimate answers will be. And I can add a little bit to that, not much. I think there will be forms of business that we've not even thought about yet. And so all of the things that are happening now, all the experiments with legal trust and land trust and co-ops and so on, what I would describe-- they're still horizon two. The ways of just spreading out what a business is, I think, to allow our imagination to go wider. And we're going to need just as much imagination on the legal structures from government. And I don't think they're as far yet. But we just don't know yet, because we are making it up as we go. When I was doing economics, which I gave up after a year in 1968 at university, first time around, one of the economists who really lived on were two Ctrl+E, from Shumput, but are both saying the same thing. But these huge cycles of creative destruction and then new things building, this is where I'm going to go feral. There have been very large businesses that have been agents and very active agents in building the degenerative system that we're all now part of. It's very easy to point fingers. These are agents of destruction, and we've got to bring them down. It's like an ecosystem. We've got to have the wolves in there, and we've got to bring these agents of destruction down. Because if we don't, they're going to continue to lobby out of sight. They're going to buy off people who might otherwise damage their future prospects. And that will sound a little counterintuitive to people who think we can all do this by having everyone being nice to each other and increasingly transparent. That on its own will not do this. We have to have signal very clearly that doing that by thing and over a protracted periods of time and corrupting politicians so that you can continue to do that is absolutely unacceptable. And people who do that must go to prison. They must be subjected to personal fines and their companies where they persist have to be brought down as well. That's a big challenge, but I think it's doable. We will do it. Thank you, Louise and John, so much for joining us. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed episode five of our seven-part series, "Regeneration Rising." If this episode has inspired your thinking, please check out the show notes for links and resources, and to find out how you can be part of the regeneration. [Music]