Time takes on a different meaning; we are cutting out those (unproductive) meetings, the train, car, and flight times, and we have the luxury to do what?

Well, it is offering us that luxury of actually having time to think and reflect. Now that is dangerous as it takes us off our ‘chosen’ treadmill of pursuit.

I was pondering some thoughts around the quest for growth, the demands for change, and the need to become nimble, agile, and more dynamic in what we do. We crowd out our days and never stop to reflect.

So I started to think a little more. Now that can be dangerous, and I am not too sure it gave me answers, just more questions. My starting point was the endless journey of innovation.

We seem to be confronted with an endless journey when it comes to innovation.

We continuously want to change what we have, even when it patently does the jobs we need ‘it’ doing.

There is this nagging feeling of chasing for relentless destruction or maintaining disturbance with new products, features, updates, or adjustments. Often products and services never have time to settle, and the shift to ‘greater’ adoption can take place, we instead return to making change.

Change that simply meets a budget requirement, a belief it gives us a competitive advantage, in this constant update chase we are all caught up in. We seem in ‘pursuit of destruction,’ and arguably, this is wrong on a planet of limited resources. We are indeed a throwaway society.

Much of our quest for change is caught up in the search for new products. If we don’t have these, this will limit us in new growth. New growth is not just new products or services, it can also come from deepening the value of the existing, but that takes a shift in our current thinking.

Would shareholders reward us as highly, if we just extended the existing? That would be kind of boring, right?

Yet, are we getting so caught up in this chase for change?

We deliberately build into our systems the following mantras or ways we should work:

• As we are all becoming far more digital, fluid, and agile, we are absorbing and responding at faster rates, and we are adapting to a constant, multifaceted world of connections, systems, and knowledge piecing, so as to combine up into different new solutions. The outcome must be new products or services as a result, right?
• To get there, we are seeking out new ways to be far nimbler, so we need to learn different navigation skills and become far more assignment driven, less exploratory in many things, and relying on technology to take on this role. We sit back and interpret the results. We need to cut out the time-consuming parts as they make us look inefficient, but do we learn or just dependent on what our data provides us, do we have the time to deeply think, applying human intelligence to artifical intelligence?
• As we feel we are becoming increasingly agile, iterative, experimenting, and continuously determined to execute to drive our results and value-add, we simply focus on delivery and collaboration outcomes far more resolutely but do we fail to deepen a lasting relationship, in our determination to achieve the final result needed?

Yet with all this push to become different, we stay trapped

We fail to change the fundamentals. If we don’t change these all the energy as individuals, we deploy to be seen and valued as nimble, fluid, and agile have such limiting impact. We still seem to be trapped

We still have an over-reliance on past models – when the near future closely resembles the recent past, relying on existing models to determine appropriate actions and investments is rational, but it traps us, never to wriggle free and break out.

Given the increase in the pace of change and the amount and impact of innovation and its impact on business models, it’s evident that the near future does not resemble the recent past, so we must challenge and change these past models but do we, are we brave enough?

Do companies make the necessary profound assessments on the conditions and amplitude of change, driven far more from external factors; they tend to stay locked into the existing, and no amount of individual flair can a new organization learning emerge?

Change proficiency/capability – in most companies, people receive training and develop skills based on their specific roles and responsibilities, but rarely develop skills that enable or accelerate change.

The training received is to enact a specific change; it is static as it addresses a point of time. Change proficiencies should be fluid, dynamic, and constant.

There should be NO change managers. There should be evolutionary managers, keeping the organization in a “creative tension” where it becomes the natural form of everyday work.

We cannot expect companies and cultures to change frequently and capably if people don’t have the skills, capabilities, or proficiency to (change) evolve effectively.

We have this preference for stability over change, but we expect what we sell as consistently in a state of change, yet our people, organizations, and cultures prefer stability to change. We can take a different approach and look to, perhaps a return to deepen relationships, not reply to CRM management tools, extend existing products, increase their adoption, and we still can grow.

To learn a language, we have to keep practicing. To gain more out of Microsoft Word, we should continue exploring the existing features of the program, instead, we get taken over by a new release we never deepen our learning, or we simply brush up our language skills just before we need them. We are proficient, but we are not fluent or assured, in total command.

Of course, stability reinforces itself; that desire for security leads to inertia and, over time, active resistance to change. If we took the evolutionary perspective, would it be different? So Companies today must create a preference for more change, reducing inertia, and building change capabilities.

Focus on short term profits rather than longer-term viability – Since change is uncertain and distracts from that productive day-to-day in operations, there is an ever-increasing focus on short term profitability. Change always takes a back seat to efficient operations and short term profits until the ‘system’ or organization finds itself in crisis.

Longer-term viability suffers because of an over-reliance on an increasingly out of date business model, infrequent innovation, and a lack of planning that the evolutionary pathway of building and extending existing capacity can provide.

Changing our ways

How do we move to a real sustaining value creation that is based on the existing, not just on the new? Is there more sustaining value in stopping product change for the sake of growth, when we seem not to have any in the Western world today and alter our thinking to extending what we have simply got?

We can’t continue to keep throwing away what we have, simply because there is something often just slightly better or giving us a certain “bragging” point as having the latest shiny tool. Can we change how we approach innovation for finding and extracting growth out of the existing, not out of the pursuit, always of something new?

The post Everything is changing faster- can we respond differently in our Innovation work? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In the last few months, I have got increasingly nervous about where we are NOT going on climate change

I have never before published one article on each of my three posting sites. This post I just had to. It is shaping me in how I look at innovation, collaboration, the power of networks, ecosystems and most of all, in our world of energy transition needed to reverse climate warming. So apologies if you see it on three separate sites but I don’t apologize for my real, underlying concern on where we are seemingly heading as a world.

The bush fires of Australia have been shocking, devastating, and crippling. They catalyze the concerns we all should have.

Each of us might or likely will face a shocking, devastating or crippling “event” in our lives in the next ten to twenty years. I feel it is inevitable, irrespective if we stopped all the debates and did the level of investment, we need to reverse the climate warming.

The next ten years of our investments in cutting emissions and refocusing our energy needs must go towards clean energy (renewables). Our ability to make a change will determine if these events recently will become the new norm, as our planet spins even more out of our ability to control climate-warming through greenhouse gases.

So I have to move through this shocking, devastating, and crippling effect but have I have begun to accept  the reality that our world is in a “state of climate alarm,” not just a “climate emergency.”

So my emotions are swirling at the moment.

Shocking and devastating was the size, the velocity, and how the fires caught hold and devasted so much of parts of Australia in land, plant and animal life, as well as the human cost and tragedies. As you read of one fire breaking out after another, you became “in awe” of the firefighters. Lacking decent equipment to fight this scale of the fires, they showed all the “Australia pluck and fortitude” they are known for. What a battle. With the intervention of some significant rains recently most, if not all of the blazes seem to have been extinguished; thankfully

Crippling has been the debate since then, and it is only just started. Australia is caught in the middle of the global and country debate on coal. Our need for it versus the need to stop using it. Asia is so reliant; at present, on coal for its energy, we are caught in a real problem.

Energy security is for everyone, irrespective, but while we have this Asian dependence on coal, we are going to struggle very hard with combating climate warming. The carbon emissions from coal are our equivalent “runaway train.” It needs stopping before the damage is beyond repair to our global planet.

Each time I return to the Australian bushfires, and all this means for them and us, I keep wondering is this the “crippling” debate we are going to have in all parts of the world? Can we afford this? The political pressures for coal to be still central to Australia’s thinking is simply staggering.

Then I heard the comment “politics, economics and climate” and the different perspectives.

Another alarm bell suddenly went off for me. I was listening to a podcast by Giles Parkinson and David Leitch “There is no new normal in climate change” (listen to the first 5 minutes if nothing else) introduced me to David’s “its the difference politics, economics, and climate.” Actually, that sums up nearly each “debate” I am reading, engaged in or listening too in recent months. It is politics, economics, and climate differences are today’s debate.

How much longer can we afford to wrangle over these? Saving our climate should be in most if not all our debates and decisions, politics and economics need to get behind, otherwise, they grow in size and scale.

Can we be so much nearer to some (horrific) tipping points?

In the last few days, I have also been reading on the nine different “tipping points” going on. This is an article from Carbon Brief on their “explainer of the nine tipping points that could be triggered by climate change”.

“ Imagine a child pushing themselves from the top of a playground slide. There is a point beyond which it is too late for the child to stop themselves sliding down. Pass this threshold, and the child continues inevitably towards a different state – at the bottom of the slide rather than the top.”

“The persistent march of a warming climate is seen across a multitude of continuous, incremental changes. CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Ocean heat content. Global sea-level rise. Each creeps up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.”

Passing an irreversible tipping point would mean a system would not revert to its original state even if the forcing lessens or reverses, explains Dr. Richard Wood, who leads the Climate, Cryosphere and Oceans group in the Met Office Hadley Centre.

This leads me to an article by Bob Watson. Does it seemingly get worse- oh, yes? In Bob’s “Nature is being eroded at rates unprecedented in human history, but we still have time to stave off mass extinctions.”

He states, “We have all assumed that nature would always be here for us and our children. However, our boundless consumption, shortsighted reliance on fossil fuels and our unsustainable use of nature now seriously threaten our future.

Environmentalists, scientists, and indigenous peoples have been sounding the alarm for decades. Our understanding of the overexploitation of the planet has advanced with grim, sharp clarity over that time.

We have entered an era of rapidly accelerating species extinction, and are facing the irreversible loss of plant and animal species, habitats and vital crops, while coming face to face with the horrific impacts of global climate change”.

Now I do not want to get into a bragging right position, but I have known Bob Watson since our teens. I stand in “awe” of him and all he has achieved in the years. He is now Sir Robert Watson and has been chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has influenced my thinking a lot on all of what matters on climate. How he crystalizes the issues is impressive whenever I have bumped into him or in what I read.

The other part of my past few weeks has been the “sense” the climate debate is shifting.

The message is we must take action”. It needs to be decisive and immediate as it is vital.

We need nature conservation and energy change.

In an article written in May 2019, John Vidal, a former Guardian environmental editor he wrote: “Has the politics of climate change finally reached a tipping point?”

This extracted from the article sums up our need to address and resolve:

“Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels would clear up air pollution rapidly and save billions of pounds a year that the NHS must currently spend dealing with heart attacks, asthma, strokes, and respiratory illnesses. Cities would become more liveable, the countryside more attractive. Instead of being regarded by the government as a costly imposition, action on climate and nature regeneration could be easily recast as visionary politics offering huge public benefits.

But what happens when the voluntary measures run out and the warming is not seen to slow because greenhouse gases are so long-lasting? Really addressing climate and biodiversity collapse means rationing carbon. It means no more free ride for extractive industries such as mining, palm oil and forestry companies who profit from environmental destruction. It means heavy penalties for polluters, the axing of food and aviation subsidies, and taking a torch to vested interests. It means addressing the indirect causes of the crisis, such as population growth and consumerism, even rethinking the whole idea of progress and wealth.”

We are facing a crucial point in time; this decade is our last stand

How do you put together and explain the devastating effects of the Bush fires of Australia and put them into the context of where we live and what climate change will mean for each and every one of us? It is floods, crop failures, deteriorating air, fires, global epidemics, loss of habitat, loss of jobs as we increasingly live in a world of dealing with disruption and dislocation.

“What we’re seeing are the effects of climate change. Sometimes, it’s said that Australia is the canary in the coal mine with the effects of climate change being seen here most severely and earliest… We’re probably looking at what climate change may look like for other parts of the world in the first stages in Australia at the moment,” said Professor Dickman from the Faculty of Science.based in Australia.

If this comment is the reality then what this really will mean in any global action on climate, what will happen if we do pass a tipping point, how much more can we afford to lose in nature, in plants, in animals in our air we breathe before we face something that becomes “catastrophic”?

Do we have any alternatives? Is this too dark for you?

I come back to what made me sit up and realize. Today’s evaluation of anything we do is going to be based on “Politics, Economics and Climate” in what it costs, what it means, and its impact on us.

Which one dominates the others is not the issue; it is we need to make sure all three are of equal importance, yet we need to recognize climate action ‘determines’ the other two in bringing global warming under control. We have nowhere to hid in decades to come and if we do, it is only going to get a whole lot hotter.

I close by quoting Bob Watson “As policymakers around the world grapple with the twin threats of climate change and biodiversity loss, it is essential that they understand the linkages between the two so that their decisions and actions address both.

The world needs to recognize that loss of biodiversity and human-induced climate change are not only environmental issues but development, economic, social, security, equity, and moral issues as well. The future of humanity depends on action now. If we do not act, our children and all future generations will never forgive us.”

The post Politics, Economics and Climate need to come together. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.