Green Swans

The Coming Boom In Regenerative Capitalism

John Elkington

• Editorial: Greenleaf Book Group Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781732439139
• Categoría: Economics
• Categoría: Sustainable Development

Even leading capitalists admit that capitalism is broken. Green Swans is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people, planet, and prosperity. In his twentieth book, John Elkington—dubbed the “Godfather of Sustainability”—explores new forms of capitalism fit for the twenty-first century.

If Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swans” are problems that can take us exponentially toward breakdown, then “Green Swans” are solutions that take us exponentially toward break through. The success—and survival—of humanity now depends on how we rein in the first and accelerate the second.

Green Swans draws on Elkington’s firsthand experience in some of the world’s best-known boardrooms and C-suites. Using case studies, real-world examples, and profiles on emergent technologies, Elkington shows how the weirdest “Ugly Ducklings” of today’s world may turn into tomorrow’s world-saving Green Swans. 

This book is a must-read for business leaders in corporations great and small who want to help their businesses survive the coming shift in global priorities over the next decade and expand their horizons from responsibility, through resilience, and onto regeneration.

CHAPTER 1

MIRACLES ON DEMAND

Making the Impossible Inevitable

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously concluded. In much the same way, anything that cracks a major economic, social, or environmental challenge that had previously seemed impossible to solve is likely to be loosely described as some form of “miracle.” And truth lurks in that loose use of language.

Miracles may have gone out of fashion, but they are exactly what we now need in the Anthropocene—as our species increasingly bangs up against the planetary ceiling. Some of the most interesting thinking about what constitutes a miracle has come from author Charles Eisenstein.¹ Here are some things he has said about miracles and the overarching story, or stories, shaping our understanding of the world we live in:²

•You could say that [. . .] we are in the business of creating a miracle on Earth.³

•[A modern miracle is] something that is impossible from an old understanding of reality, but possible from a new one.⁴

•Stories, like all beings, have a life span. In their youth, their immune system is strong, but as time goes on they become increasingly unable to withstand the contrary evidence and experiences that pile up.⁵

•Working on the level of story has two dimensions. First is to disrupt the old, which says, “What you thought was real is just an illusion.” Second is to offer a new [one], which says, “The possible, and the real, are much grander than you knew.” The first, we experience as crisis and breakdown. The second, we experience as miraculous.⁶

•That’s what a miracle is: Not the intercession of an external divinity in worldly affairs that violates the laws of physics, but something that is impossible from within an old Story of the World and possible from a new one.⁷

•A miracle is [. . .] both a glimpse and a promise.⁸

I have developed antibodies to most forms of religious thinking, but there is something about this definition that attracts me. I am not suggesting that we teeter on the edge of a brave new world, where miracles will be available on demand—some form of miracles-as-a-service. Instead, the message is that our old “Story of the World,” which Thomas Kuhn would have described as the prevailing paradigm in which our science, our societies, and our economies operate and evolve, is itself being transformed.

What follows is a glimpse into a future where the overarching paradigm is no longer as likely to produce Black or Gray Swan degenerations—and, in the process, massively increases the chances of Green Swan regenerations. This is not magical, “with one bound she was free” thinking. Instead it draws on a serious inquiry into the sort of psychological, cultural, political, and market conditions that massively enhance our chances of making exponential progress.

For skeptics, and there will be many, it is worth noting that we have been here before, though one current problem is that interest in history seems to be waning in some key societies, raising a real risk to democracy.⁹ As far as our economies are concerned, some potential Black Swan events through history include the longer-term consequences of the 1929 and 2007–2008 market crashes. Societal Black Swans might include the Holocaust, though some foresaw it, and the profound impact of HIV/AIDS. On the environmental front, there is the catastrophic die-off of insects that some call “Insectageddon,” and the glutting of the world ocean with plastic debris.

Now on to Green Swans. In the economic domain, recent Green Swan breakthroughs have included the rapid spread of cell phone technology and the internet, linking us in new ways and massively boosting the prospects for self-education, and the staggering cost reductions for solar and wind power systems. The accelerating shift to electric vehicles is a linked example, especially when coupled with the rapid evolution of battery technology and the impact of digitalization on autonomous vehicles, the internet of everything, and the sharing economy.

In the social domain, Green Swan trajectories have been followed by universal schooling in many countries, the evolution of vaccine technology (despite recent anti-vaccine rumors and propaganda), and the growth of social movements focusing on environmentalism, social enterprise, and impact investment.

When it comes to the environment, we have seen pollutants like asbestos, DDT, lead, and CFCs largely driven out of the economy, coupled with the emergence of concepts like sustainable development, the circular economy, and biomimicry. Equally impressive on the ground have been such ecosystem restoration projects as the progressive recovery of the Iraqi marsh ecosystems destroyed by Saddam Hussein’s forces, and the progressive re-greening of China’s Loess Plateau, a cradle of early Chinese civilization.¹⁰ The scale of the regeneration in such places of past ruination has to be seen to be believed—and is hugely encouraging in terms of the longer-term prospects for our core task of planet-level regeneration. But to ensure we prevent future destruction of such ecosystems, we need a new crime of “ecocide,” ranked alongside war crimes.

PLACEBO BUTTONS

Any breakthrough—or breakdown—of significant magnitude will have impacts across all three dimensions of wealth creation and destruction. Swans of whatever color create cascades of effects in our three dimensions and beyond. For a profoundly negative example of such interconnections, recall the European colonization of the Americas, already mentioned, resulting in between 50 and 80 million deaths among indigenous peoples, the collapse of a range of civilizations, and, as farms reverted to nature and the recovering forests drew carbon out of the atmosphere, the onset of the Little Ice Age in Europe.¹¹

A positive example of a Green Swan, which surfaced as a response to Black Swan problems of widespread pollution and disease in cities, would be the spread of clean water, sanitation, sewerage, and related infrastructures. Still only a partial success globally, but nonetheless an extraordinary one. As it happens, our London office is in Somerset House, overlooking the River Thames, and alongside the Embankment—created in a massive project that reclaimed marshland by the river, created expensive new riverside property, and, critically, from the 1860s on included a huge new sewage system. Over time, such projects turned a river into which almost everything was dumped, and in which almost nothing could live, into something in which even environmentally fastidious salmon could, at least potentially, swim.

As technology evolves, the nature, pace, and reach of Green Swans evolve in surprising ways, as in the case of the so-called Blue Planet Effect. When the BBC screened Sir David Attenborough’s TV series The Blue Planet, with its hard-hitting footage of wildlife caught in drifting plastic waste, the response was almost instantaneous—and hugely damaging for the international plastics industry.

But these are exceptions in a storyline that more typically sees change operating on the basis of too little, too late. Indeed, one key reason why I decided to announce that product recall for the triple bottom line was that I concluded that, at least in the context of the so-called wicked and super wicked problems haunting today’s world, the concept was suffering from what we might call the Placebo Effect. Let me explain.

Every now and then you see or hear something that crystallizes a thought that has been nagging at your brain. That was my experience when I downloaded a CNN article that asked a simple question: Have you ever pressed the pedestrian button at a crosswalk and wondered if it really worked?¹² Many times, as it happens, not least because I worked on pedestrianization schemes way back when. And I have often suspected, as the article concluded, that “the world is full of buttons that don’t actually do anything.” It went on to say the following:

They’re sometimes called “placebo buttons”—buttons that are mechanically sound and can be pushed, but provide no functionality. Like placebo pills, however, these buttons may still serve a purpose, according to Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who pioneered a concept known as the “illusion of control.”

Langer pointed out that “doing something typically feels better than doing nothing.” But what, I wondered, if many of the things we have been encouraging business leaders to do to create a better world are little more than market versions of the placebo button? What if their main effect is to make us all feel a bit better, while the real problems remain out of sight, out of mind, and, as a result, out of control?

Having worked closely with business since the late 1970s, helping CEOs and other corporate leaders to change their priorities and even their mind-sets, I saw this as a chilling possibility. People in the change industry increasingly discuss the impact they have in the wider world—but are we simply equipping cabinets, government departments, boardrooms, and C-suites with a plethora of handy placebo buttons? The answer, I believe, is an unstable mix of “yes,” “it’s too early to tell,” and “no.”

Yes, because the impact of all the effort invested by business has so far had a limited effect on the systemic challenges the world now faces. As CDC Group CEO Nick O’Donohoe put it, “Today over 90 percent of major businesses have specific programs dedicated to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Most CEOs talk about their organization’s commitment to a wide range of philanthropic, employee engagement, and other benevolent activities at almost every possible opportunity.”¹³

All well and good, but O’Donohoe, an investor who has advised the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, concluded, “As long as CSR stays fundamentally altruistic in its motivation it is unlikely ever to be considered as being core to business and is unlikely ever to scale or to provide lasting solutions to critical social challenges.”

So, yes, we see placebo effects at work. But, on the other hand, and to the same original question, no—at least in the sense that momentous progress has been made since I began work in this space. Back then it was almost impossible to get companies to talk to outsiders about ethical, social, and environmental issues. When we set up Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978, it took us nine months to get inside the first company—even though our parent company was highly respected in the world of industrial relations. Now access to the boardrooms and C-suites of major companies is pretty much taken for granted by serious change agents.

But, finally, what about that middle option, “it’s too early to tell”? Well, the penny is beginning to drop. Leaders in the private, public, and citizen sectors increasingly see long-predicted problems becoming everyday realities. As a result, even some laggard leaders now talk about disruptive change driven by social and environmental factors. Growing numbers have committed their organizations to one or more of the expanding spectrum of business-to-business platforms launched to help companies address such issues at scale. But who is keeping a close eye on our—and their—progress overall?

As already mentioned, too often it seems as if we busy ourselves cleaning up corporate fish, only to release them back into murky market waters. We should ask the following questions: Have we picked the wrong unit, or units, of analysis? If so, how do we begin to think about changing the wider market environments within which businesses operate? Or, to use a rather different angle of attack: Have we been focusing too much on people like CEOs and other leaders, and spending too little time thinking about the market operating codes that drive corporate thinking, priorities, and behavior? The answer, I believe, is yes—even if business leadership remains crucial in all of this.

CORPORATIONS ON THE COUCH

In that context, how do today’s business leaders really think? Where is the leading edge of their knowledge taking them? And what is it that they do not currently see that they need to be made aware of? In a moment we will look at prevailing business mind-sets through ten lenses provided by business terms that have been in common use for ages, but are now mutating and evolving as new change agendas surface.

In effect, it is time to psychoanalyze business. When asked what I did late in the last century, I would often reply, half seriously, that I was some sort of corporate psychiatrist, putting corporations on the couch. At a time when many business leaders were wondering if the wider world was going mad, with its calls for everything from human rights for future generations to apparently impossible cuts in greenhouse gases, I saw it as my job to ...