084 Youth Perspectives on Sustainability and Change

084 Youth Perspectives on Sustainability and Change


About this Episode

They are our present and our future, although it’s not quite in their hands. This is the generation that’s already bringing change to pale, male and stale boardrooms around the world, but will they run out of time? We talk about careers, sustainability and the journey of these young women to create a future they want to be a part of.

Serena Coccioli 

Serena is a Colombian-Italian who graduated in Ecological and Environmental Sciences from the University of Edinburgh building her sustainability career.

Belinda Ng 

Belinda is a youth advocate for sustainable food systems who has just completed an MSc in Environmental Technology from Imperial College London. 

Kailin Jo Spencer 

Kailin is a senior at the University of Washington – Seattle focusing on sustainable curriculum advocacy within the Foster School of Business and researching small business sustainability.

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam 0:01
I recently read an article about what the rich are doing to save themselves from the rest of us, and climate change. What are your thoughts when you read stuff like this?

Serena Coccioli 0:11
I mean, sometimes we like to point the finger at billionaires, at people who have a lot of money. But really, we all need to take a step back. And sometimes it's more about taking action like we're in this together, we have to find a solution.

Belinda Ng 0:23
I think I can offer a counter perspective to Serena's, which is that I think it's a very unfortunate reality of capitalism and the world that we have today, there are a very small amount of people that are a lot more privileged. And in many ways, money is an enabler of their current lifestyles. And it's what's been a huge cause of the issues that we have right now with sustainability., and these people have the capacity to save themselves, sucks.

Kailin Jo Spencer 0:47
The ones that are building themselves the bunkers, I say alright have fun, but the ones that are investing in some technologies that will assist in us being able to live with the damage that we've already caused, thank you.

Katherine Ann Byam 1:04
This is season five, the great debates of our times, Season Five will be centred around the great debates. And we will be comparing and contrasting different viewpoints on various topics that are consuming the public discourse at present. The reason I've decided to take this approach is because, we or at least many of us, are losing the skill of debate. And I think this is an essential skill for us all to practice once more. I don't see how we get to the point of saving the world and saving our planet, if we don't know how to discuss our differences. I also think that the solution to most of our challenges is somewhere in the spectrum of views but never at either extreme. I will be working with guests to curate the content and discuss beforehand, I will understand their positions, their areas of genius, and navigate my questions around that so that the conversation is challenging and stimulating without being combative. I hope you enjoy Season Five of Where Ideas launch; The Sustainable Innovation Podcast.

Today, I am blessed to have three amazing talents joining me for this show. I have Serena who is a Columbian-Italian who graduated in Ecological and Environmental Sciences from the University of Edinburgh, building her sustainability career. I have Belinda who is a youth advocate for sustainable food systems who has just completed an MSc in Environmental Technology from Imperial College in London. And I have Kailin who is a senior at the University of Washington, Seattle, focusing on sustainable curriculum advocacy with the Foster School of Business and researching small business sustainability. Thank you so much, ladies for joining me, welcome to both of my podcasts, this episode is airing on Do What Matters, The Career and Leadership On Purpose Podcast, and on Where Ideas Launch; The Sustainable Innovation Podcast. So I'm really, super chuffed to have you all with me. So I'm gonna start with Serena. Serena, I met you on Instagram, you had been following my podcast Where Ideas launch for some time. And you decided to work with me on your journey and on your pivot. So I wanted to learn a little bit about what you've been up to.

Serena Coccioli 3:16
Of course, yeah, it was. Thank you, Catherine, for the introduction for this opportunity. Yeah, we connected quite a while ago now I don't remember exactly, but it was amazing that we connected straight away, and you were straight up inspiring to me because of your incredible career and all the things you did sustainability related environment related, but also policy and changes and, and getting into interesting fields as well that then related all to what you're doing now, and all those experiences are coming together. So it was inspiring. And I guess I see myself as at the start of that. So when I first came across your podcast, and we got in touch, I remember I was looking for work, I was looking for a job in sustainability. I was also looking at opportunities to help other people. And what I'd already learned from my degree in environmental and ecological sciences. So it was a really, it was a really exciting time for me because I was looking and I was working so hard every day and trying to find something and I really appreciate the connection. And then we had that chat about like where I was, looking at almost like a business audit, like what are you doing now? Where can you take this? Where can you go? And it was really, really insightful. And I remember thinking, wow, like I have so much potential to just keep doing what I'm doing and also look for a job and getting experience in the field. And I think for some time I thought that they were at odds like I had to just focus on one. Whereas I brought those together and now I'm living the best of both worlds I guess and getting more experience as I go. So yeah, that's pretty cool.

Katherine Ann Byam 5:03
Yeah really, really well done. And you know, I look forward to learning more about your journey as we go, as we go through this. So I'm gonna switch now to Belinda. So we met on a hackathon. And it was a sustainable hackathon. It was a carbon capture conversation, and you won to place in my career club. So I just wanted to talk to you about about your journey since then.

Belinda Ng 5:24
Yeah, I think, gosh, it really surprises me how fast time has gone by like, it really just seems like not that long ago, that the Hackathon was finished. And the whole experience of being part of the Courageous Career Club. As Sarena mentioned, I'm also at the start of the career. So it was a really good opportunity to get to understand more about different perspectives from people that have been working for quite a while. So yeah, it's been quite a crazy journey since then, wrapping up the masters and figuring out what the next step is.

Katherine Ann Byam 5:55
Yeah, I know. And we're gonna get into that, for sure. And Kailin, we met when you were doing research and my community, Women In Sustainable Business, what's happened with that research? And where are you taking it now?

Kailin Jo Spencer 6:06
So my research is focused on small businesses sustainability. And I got to connect with Katherine via an interview, and I interviewed her as an expert with my environmental studies capstone project. And I found that the kind of main solution is something that you're already working on, which is collaboration and getting people together to share their ideas and their experiences and their resources. Because small businesses don't have the revenues that these large corporations do to invest in research technology, and all of those things that would further sustainable business operations. But I'm now kind of focusing inwards on my school, University of Washington, and looking at how we can increase sustainable curriculum and focus on the ground up approach of educating young business owners on how to implement sustainability from the ground up instead of trying to trickle it in from the top down. But that's what I'm working on now.

Katherine Ann Byam 7:04
Yeah, I think it's great. It's an important thing, because I do get the sense that although young people are the future of this thing, and so passionate about it, there's still so many pockets of people who still don't have enough knowledge about this. And for me, this knowledge is as important as math and english, right? You know, in sort of the the English school curricula. And so I think it's really relevant what you're doing. So really, congratulations on that. I wanna move now and ask you all, probably starting with Serena, again, what made you get into this area? And what was the burning platform for you what, what makes you want to leverage change the most?

Serena Coccioli 7:45
I started with loving nature, as many, many of us do, and really wanting to do something towards animals, I thought of doing marine biology, maybe zoology, things like that. And then when I came across the ecology and environmental sciences courses at Edinburgh, I was really struck by how many different things I could try, I could try the ecology side, I could try the environmental side. And the reason why that was better was because it was more of a broader perspective and understanding the system as a whole, rather than looking into the deep cellular biology, for example. And when I did the degree, it was a four year degree. So it gave me the opportunity to try lots of different modules, and to start to align my degree into whether it was going to be environmental or ecological. And actually, at the end of that, I realised how I loved both so much. But I thought strategically, because of my point in time, I wasn't in the best health, I thought, I'm going to focus a little bit more on the environmental, something where I can do a job that's more aligned with what I need right now. And then it started with that and looking at the jobs out there. And actually looking back now to the things that were offered, then they weren't as exciting. And now even if it's only been three years, I'm looking now it's like, wow, like there's so many cool opportunities, things are springing up so much. So it's really been quite a big shift. And I think that's really important. Really interesting.

Katherine Ann Byam 9:15
Yeah, there's a super head hunt going on for ESG people, and it's a bit insane at the moment. So it's a good time to be in the space for sure. They probably were spoilt for choice. And then when we get there, maybe we're not so sure that the organisations are doing the best work. So that's always going to be an issue and a challenge as well. And Belinda?

Belinda Ng 9:35
Yeah, I resonate a lot with what Serena said about being a nature lover and growing up with that, but I also think, yeah, since we've already mentioned education, in the conversation so far, like my degree studying geography has been a key part in raising my awareness about the actual complexity of the issues that the world is facing in different parts of the globe and for different communities. So really understanding the nitty gritty of that. and the sheer volume like, not the volume, but like the sheer scale of the problem that we're facing has been very key to motivating me to be working in this space and understanding more about what I can do as an individual as well. So the kind of second strand of that is my own first hand experiences, working with less privileged communities that have been directly affected by things like climate change. And that's kind of really made me understand that, given that we all are global citizens, and we need to take, do our own part to also help support those that are less privileged, I think, that's why sustainability is a really interesting feel for me, because there's so many entry points in there.

Katherine Ann Byam 10:40
Love that. And, Kai?

Kailin Jo Spencer 10:42
My journey is actually very, very similar as well. I started out, I think my passion kind of arose when I was growing up with the outdoors is my backyard, and that was my playground. So I grew up on Alki Beach, which is on the west side of Seattle, Washington, and we would go on nature walks with my family, and in preschool, and throughout all of my education. And then I moved to Vashon Island, where the whole island is pretty much surrounded in forest. And so recess was just in the forest. And we would go to the retention ponds, and we would experiment with science observations. And so that was where my passion started. And then on the other side, I was also getting fed with reducing your carbon footprint. So that was my early education was reduce your carbon footprint, turn the lights off, when you go and leave the room, turn the water off when you're brushing your teeth. And I remember asking my mom kind of like, what's going on? And she's like, well, like nature that you love, so much like, is kind of in danger. And so that's where my passion was found. And then in school, I remember it was focused on reduce, reuse, recycle. So then that was the next phase of, and then so I have these three stages. And this last stage very similar to you Belinda is environmental justice. So I, in my higher education, I realised it's not just about recycling, it's not just about reusing, it's about the communities that are disproportionately affected by these environmental impacts. And that was where kind of advocacy has grown from. And I've had a really interesting time learning about the history of Seattle and Washington with indigenous peoples and the history of America. And just grappling with all of that, and realising that it's not so black and white, has been a super interesting journey. And it's been quite discouraging, sometimes, which I think we can all agree on. But I, I'm also excited because I think when you're met with so many questions, that you're closer to getting maybe an answer. It's kind of my thinking sometimes. But yeah.

Katherine Ann Byam 12:52
Yeah, I think it's such a highly complex area and for you to be studying in this field, you have to be sort of versed in all sorts of disciplines, in order to be able to do this work that you're doing so, so it really makes you I think, a really wide open people is my perspective. So I think it's a great time of your life to sort of be here. So what I wanted to kind of explore with you, you all have your entire careers ahead of you at the moment, you know, you're just getting started, some of you or you're just finishing. And what does growth actually mean to you in the context of everything that you're learning? All that you know about our planet? And about our economics? What does growth actually mean to you? What what does success look like? For someone who is an advocate and passionate person about sustainability? What, I'll start with Serena again.

Serena Coccioli 13:47
Sure. I mean, it's such a huge, I don't even know where to start, really. But I mean, for me grow, growth and sustainability, as some of the things that already kind Belinda mentioned is that being open minded to learning and being curious and understanding, and really connecting with other people who are experiencing things differently to you. And it's kind of looking at the bigger picture and trying to find out where your strengths are and where you can contribute in that picture. And from that, trying to learn personally, but then growing your impact. So I talk a lot about, with the business owners that I've talked to, growing the positive impact that they have and trying to create a business model that is inherently trying to do better, rather than taking things away and then compensating for them afterwards. So having that mindset, mindset is such a huge thing of my whole sustainability journey, and just generally what what I think is important to consider, is having that growth mindset isn't necessarily the one that we think economically like we need more, more, more, it's more about how can you make the things that are there better? How can you have better connections? And how can you integrate a better way of relating to nature, relating to communities, relating to yourself as well, all of these things tie in together and understanding them as a whole, which is why I love understanding it as a whole, and the whole ecosystem, things like that is because that is really how we can then move forward, because we need to have that holistic understanding. And we need to realise that we're all interconnected, it's not all about my experience, my experience of what I experienced when I go to Colombia is very different to when I go to Italy, and also here, and all the other countries in between. So it has to be coming from a place of always learning, but always bringing other people up and collaborating in this, in this journey.

Katherine Ann Byam 15:50
Love it. And Belinda for you?

Belinda Ng 15:53
Yeah, I agree so much with what everything Serena said, my first response to that was also being really open minded and try new things. I think I'm a big believer of pushing out of your own comfort zone, that's the best way to really learn. And so a key part of that is also being really experiment, experimental. And, you know, testing out what's effective, what works for me, which I think also applies in the wider context of sustainability. Because how we got here to where we are now in terms of the history of the world, and development has also been quite experimental in many ways. And so we have a shorter window of time to be more experimental, now to really fix some of these issues. But I think a key part of that is having this mindset to do that. And then the end goal really being how we can do more with less essentially.

Katherine Ann Byam 16:43
Kailin...

Kailin Jo Spencer 16:44
When I first saw the question, I thought very similarly to Serena and Belinda have said about learning and experimenting. So growth economically is usually you can visualise it with a linear line up or down. And I think in order to achieve a more sustainable future, we're going to need to focus on a circular feedback loop where instead of just taking from our community, and then giving back from our community, we're going to be continuously listening to our consumers and all of our stakeholders. And in that process, we'll be growing our business and our selves professionally. And I think that the goal should never be an end goal, it should always be development. And it should always be experimenting, and building on what you've learned. And eventually, we hopefully will be able to get somewhere where we can coexist happily with the environment.

Katherine Ann Byam 17:43
So I'm going to throw a spanner in the works for you, for you ladies today. So I recently read an article this week, I think it was about what the rich are doing to save themselves from the rest of us and climate change. And about those billionaires who are building these great bunkers or the ones who are trying to solve ageing, etc. What are your thoughts when you read stuff like this?

Kailin Jo Spencer 18:07
is Serena starting?

Katherine Ann Byam 18:10
Nobody wants to start this one.

Belinda Ng 18:13
I'm still processing the question.

Serena Coccioli 18:14
I don't like the sentiment that technology will save us. And I don't like the sentiment that we'll figure out a solution rather than figuring out that for 1000s of years people have lived with nature in a way that's mutually beneficial. And then all of a sudden, we're just wrapped up in what we are now and just constantly consuming, consuming and doing what Kai said about just a linear approach to just, what is the end goal? Are we just creating, creating, creating, and it, you know, we're not necessarily happier people because of it. So we need to re-evaluate our priorities and the values that we have.

Katherine Ann Byam 19:05
So what happens, what happens, when the billionaires who control a lot of the resource are basically just touting one, one passage, like what do we do?

Serena Coccioli 19:20
I mean, millions are made of pounds, right? Like, I think as well, we can't necessarily, I mean, sometimes we like to point the finger at billionaires at people who have a lot of money, but really, we all need to take a step back. And sometimes we can do something. I mean, not everyone has a choice, but we can take responsibility for certain things and we don't necessarily need to fund certain companies. We can vote with our money in some ways. And obviously the biggest thing that you always get when someone says something like this is like, oh, but they have have more money and we don't have like decision power. But it's, it's taking the focus away from the action and it's putting the blame on someone else. And I think that's the issue, it doesn't really matter who is to blame. It's more about taking action like we're in this together, we have to find a solution. But we're also in the solution together. And I think that's what we need. And the learning part is so huge like what Belinda and Kai were saying we need to learn, we also need to teach the others. And in that circle of growth, we can all come out better.

Katherine Ann Byam 20:32
Belinda, what are your thoughts? What should we do with the billionaires?

Belinda Ng 20:38
I don't know if I can answer the what do we do part. But I think I can offer a counter perspective to Serena's, which is that, I think it's a very unfortunate reality of essentially, capitalism and the world that we have today, which is that there are a very small amount of people that are a lot more privileged. And in many ways money is an enabler of their current lifestyles. And it's what's been a huge cause of the issues that we have right now in sustainability. And, yeah, I mean, it does, it does bother me that, for example, one celebrity can use their private jet, like three times and that'll be the carbon footprint, footprint equivalent of maybe one household in a less developed country for like, a month. But I think it's just kind of, like, I think if I, if I really had to worry about this all the time, it would keep me up forever. And it just really botheres me. So I think it's, it's a tricky situation where it's like, in a kind of more selfish world, yeah, these people have the capacity to, I guess, if they're trying to save themselves or whatever, like they can, and it sucks, really. I really am also trying to address that and, you know, I agree with Serena in that, like, we all can do our part. But unfortunately, it's not an equal playing field for everyone.

Katherine Ann Byam 21:59
Absolutely. And Kailin.

Kailin Jo Spencer 22:03
It's a very, like push pull situation where the ones that are building themselves, the bunkers, I say alright have fun. But the ones maybe there's some that are investing in some technologies that will assist in us being able to live with the damage that we've already caused, in which I'm like, thank you. Because I know collectively, like we could vote with our money and make change as a group. But I also know that that's really challenging to get a bunch of individuals to believe that they, that their voice has impact, especially when there's billionaires on their private jets, polluting more co2 in one singular day than this person will have in their entire life. So it's really hard to say like, we're all in this together when, we're not all in this together. So I guess the answer to your question is, there is no answer as to what to do with them. We just have to keep working together as non billionaires, to show the billionaires what we really care about. And hopefully one day, we'll be able to get to a spot where everyone will be in similar playing fields, I guess. But yeah, definitely a tricky question for ya.

Katherine Ann Byam 23:21
I wanted to throw this one in and not tell you about it. So, so thank you for your very candid answers, which countries or companies you can choose either one, do you think are doing an outstanding leadership job on some of these issues that we've been discussing today?

Serena Coccioli 23:37
I always fear this question because it's, um, it's almost like, I've never really seen that, you know, I never really see, every time I've noticed a country, do something that I admire. And for a long time, it was Scotland when I was in Edinburgh, then things change, and all of a sudden their points of view change. And this isn't necessarily with a change of government or whatever, but also in the same, with the same people. And it kind of gets to me that even though we have a clear way of moving forward, and the way forward is to avoid fossil fuels and start to go towards green energy and reducing our exploitative consumption and production ways. It still tends to go towards that and we still hear our gov, like the government talk about growing after the pandemic and making up for all the loss but it's, it's not the right kind of growth. It's the growth for the sake of growth and for the numbers. So I think it's a tricky one. I would say that Scotland is one that I really admired because of the renewable energy and trying to go forward and generally, like showing actionable steps a lot of the time countries promise things that they're not very actionable you can't see them. Scotland did with a lot of things like transport, electricity, all of those things and shutting down coal power stations and that, but they're I know, they're also very tied with England in potentially, like continuing with certain oil fields. And that's all a bit controversial now again, so yeah, it's like hopeful but also disappointed. I don't think there was one like, yeah, close to home. And I mean, I'm gonna see a wait and see I've got some hope for the other two Italy and Columbia.

Katherine Ann Byam 25:36
Fair enough. This one thing I wanted to mention about this with Scotland, and I'm not sure if this actually happened, but I know that they were talking about citizen advocacy groups around certain topics. And I don't know if they actually did this. But I think if I look at what's happening with politics today, I think that this is one of the things that I would like to see a lot more of everywhere, you know, like actually getting, getting people in their communities together to talk through solutions, because it feels very top down, it feels very, you know, you will let some kind of political establishment, and whatever their policies are supposed to be the same rollout everywhere in the country, even where it's not relevant. So I feel as if this, this kind of citizen advocacy, will, will help. It's just like employee advocacy in companies, right, the the needs will be different depending on where you are, and therefore the solution will be different. And I feel like that's missing a lot. But sorry, to jump in there. Belinda, your your your guess?

Belinda Ng 26:35
Yeah this was a really hard question, because I think it depends on what the metric is for outstanding, and also depends on what the sector is. So I'm gonna give a few examples, rather than one because I think it's very difficult to pick, I think, from a company standpoint, I think Patagonia springs to mind, because it's one of the earliest ones that started this triple bottom line focus on like people, planet and profit. But obviously, they're only in one sector. And so I think right now, there's a flurry of smaller startups that are really doing amazing things in their specific field. And I'm a big fan of innovation and really pushing the boundaries with you know, circularity and what we can do there. So one of the smaller B corps that I recently think I've been doing, discovered, actually and feel like they're doing great job is the eco egg in the UK with sustainable laundry, which is something that is very tangible and applies to everyone on a household level as well. So yeah, that's kind of my ideas for the company part. And then, for countries, Taiwan springs to mind for their recycling rate, which is like 55% for household collection, which is huge. And it comes a lot from the ingraining of recycling and why it's important in education from a very young age. So yeah, I think there's loads of promising things happening. So they're very, I think that's a great thing.

Katherine Ann Byam 28:03
No, that's great. That's a great message and Kai.

Kailin Jo Spencer 28:05
Kind of similar to Patagonia is a company that was founded in Seattle, REI Co-op. And that's been one of the companies that I've, my stepmom actually got to work with them, and, and one of my friends also has worked with that company. And it's one that's kind of been a mentor, in a sense, when I'm thinking about if I wanted to start my own business, what would it look like? I think the setup would be pretty similar. And I definitely don't think they're doing outstanding, but they're doing work that is quite different than the other organisational setups of other businesses. And just some examples is they're focusing on that circular economy. So they're working with their suppliers and their partners to reduce their waste and promote reusing instead of throwing away. And then they also have that people over profits, sort of mission, but then the one that's my favourite is how much they focus on their members of the co-op and the members opinions and how those opinions are formulating the business's decisions. And so that, in turn, you're, you're not just giving your consumers a survey, and then like, looking at the data of that and making decisions, you, your members and your consumers are physically making the decisions for the company. And it's led to, in my opinion, an amazing, amazing company that everyone that I've spoken to loves to work at too, so it's, it's not just caring about the environment or caring about your consumers. I think that the value that they put on their employees and allowing their employees to opt, they have this thing called opt outside, so I think it's every other Friday. They pay their employees to just go outside and hike, or go to the lake, or something like that. So it's it's creating that good workplace environment to formulate those ideas that are going to help us get to a more sustainable future.

Katherine Ann Byam 30:01
Love that love that example, really, thanks for sharing. And now we want to move to the second to last question. If you could change one thing about how your, I want to say your current country, but you pick the country you want to pick, is currently dealing with the climate crisis. What would you change?

Serena Coccioli 30:21
I suppose leading, continuing from the one that I said earlier about moving towards greener energy, it's not the be all and end all like we don't just have to go towards green energy, we need to also do like one of the Sustainable Development Goals, whereas like responsible production and consumption and trying to go into those circular loops, like Kai was saying, so I guess focusing more on that circularity and circular business models, regeneration, those things and moving away at the same time from things that are directly affecting the climate crisis, like fossil fuels and petrol based products. So that would be the thing that I think just needs to happen, like, very quickly, and that transition cannot be hindered because they think that then people might have jobs, because that's an excuse to say, well, actually, those people can contribute to this industry. It's not these people are skilled, and they're valuable people. And they deserve to be part of something that's contributing to something bigger that they're also going to align with. So part of bringing those things together.

Katherine Ann Byam 31:32
Perfect. And Belinda?

Belinda Ng 31:34
Yeah, so my home city of Hong Kong has quite a few ambitious climate plans. A lot has been focusing on renewables and also building retrofitting. But I think there could be more focused on reducing household level and industrial level waste, especially food waste, which is very difficult to process. And a lot of the kind of emissions come from landfills, which is also a big problem in Hong Kong with like landfills running out of space. So I think, more focus on really embedding recycling and setting up the infrastructure for that, which is also very challenging, but I think, more focus on that would be really needed.

Katherine Ann Byam 32:14
And Kailin, you've got a really interesting country to talk about.

Kailin Jo Spencer 32:17
It's challenging because I'm from Seattle, where we're known as the Emerald City. So we're known as a green city. And we have probably one of the biggest sustainability efforts in the United States. And so I'm definitely coming from a bubble where ever I turn, I see all of the programmes that I hope to see in America. And then it's when I get out of Seattle, where I'm like, oh, wow, like other cities don't even know what compost is, or don't even know why they need to be recycling. And so I think America has quite a far way to go in all senses of sustainability. Because not only do the citizens not really understand the importance of it, but also like our government isn't really putting money into the right programmes. We're continuously making wrong choices on an international scale. And if I had the answer, I think I would probably be president because no one seems to really have the answer. But um, yeah, I think that there's just so much work to be done that I think everyone should maybe follow after Seattle, and start looking at what Seattle has been doing and implementing some of our, our programmes and legislations into other cities and states, and hopefully, we can get there someday.

Katherine Ann Byam 33:41
Have you read about is it Dubai or the Emirates? The Emirates walled city? The new line? I think it is. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that?

Kailin Jo Spencer 33:49
I, I have no idea how that's possible. See, it's like so futuristic, that even it doesn't even seem like it would happen in this century. It's,

Serena Coccioli 33:59
Is that the one where they want to control like the weather. Like almost like the climate, it's an internal thing. Yeah.

Kailin Jo Spencer 34:06
Yeah. Yeah. It's not like...

Serena Coccioli 34:10
Like, I've not seen videos of it or anything. Like that, I'd be intrigued.

Kailin Jo Spencer 34:16
Katherine, what do you what are your thoughts on it? I'd be interested to know.

Katherine Ann Byam 34:19
I mean, look, if that solution does work, and really helps us to manage waste, then, then why the heck not right? Because I think one of one of the things that it does that we haven't yet started to talk about enough is the whole concept of biodiversity loss as well right. If we can wall all humans into this narrow space, that might actually be a good thing. So from that perspective, I quite like the idea like, like if we can just reduce our impact to just, to just this confined space, then then why, why not right, and then we can, we can go out into nature and enjoy it like, like a native to nature. But I think there's, I don't think that that's entirely the intent. Right? I mean, and that's where you know, the mix the mixed messages comes through with with stuff like this. Belinda, do you have thoughts that you want to share?

Belinda Ng 35:10
Yeah, I actually, this is quite new to me. I was initially thinking of something else when you mentioned it, but kind of based off the conversation so far, I guess one question that comes to mind is like, who really is controlling who? Like, can you really control nature or people? In that way? It'll be interesting to see I guess, only time will tell.

Katherine Ann Byam 35:30
Yeah, exactly. Ladies, so final question to wrap up one piece of advice that you want to give parents raising teenagers today about career choices, or even the teenagers themselves. Your choice.

Serena Coccioli 35:43
I'd like to echo a piece of advice that Katherine, you gave me a while back all those months ago, and it's to get in a room with people who you don't necessarily agree with, and experience that environment, experience that and feel the discomfort and learn from it, and have those discussions, those difficult conversations. Because that was a really powerful piece of advice that I remember you gave me. And it stuck with me since because I'm more curious about being in those environments, about listening to other people's point of view about what they think is the better thing to do regarding a certain problem to do with sustainability or the climate crisis. And so that would be my advice to young people today.

Katherine Ann Byam 36:34
I don't even remember I said that. It's always good when you have a mirror sometimes. Belinda, what are your thoughts?

Belinda Ng 36:41
Yeah. So mine would be 'you don't know what you don't know'. And also 'be patient'. So I think both are kind of applicable for, I guess, teens and parents. The first part being more open minded. I think that's applicable in the sense of for the teenagers, it's sometimes there's very fixed misconceptions on maybe what career paths should be like, or what would work for the current situation. But yeah, it's always good to experiment and be open minded, learn new things. And the patience part, I think, really comes from the fact that career journeys from what I've learned as well, the past few months is never linear, it's always evolving. And so sometimes it does take a bit of time before, there's a bit more clarity about which path to step on and which path to go. And I think in Hong Kong, especially a lot of parents want their kids to be doctors and lawyers, because it's very stable. And I definitely also got a few comments from people being one of the very few people that didn't pick some of these conventional paths about what I was doing and would I even have a viable career. And so I think having that patience, and being open minded to this, from a parent's standpoint is also very important.

Katherine Ann Byam 37:53
Yeah, great advice. And Kailin.

Kailin Jo Spencer 37:56
Yeah, both of that was, those were great pieces of advice that I'll probably take for myself as well. But I think my biggest thing is, 'don't be afraid to fail'. And 'don't be afraid to quit'. So I think there's a lot of stigma around quitters. And I know, at least in America, it's like, if your, if your child signs up for the soccer team, like they're not quitting, even if they hate it, and that was something that my mom did to me. And it's something that a lot of my friends and I have had discussions about, of our parents never really let us say, we didn't want to do something when we really didn't want to do it, because there was that commitment. And I think to an extent, when you commit to something, follow through on it, but also know when it's your time to leave and know when it's your time that you've outgrown whatever, whatever position you're at, knowing your position that you're at is not fulfilling you anymore. And I think that, that's a lot of, Katherine, what you've been working on with people is be ready to pivot and pivot is a better word than quit or fail. It just means that like, you kind of hit, you didn't hit a dead end, you hit a corner. And it's time to, it's time to change. And I think that, that's something that myself along with a lot of people struggle with is change and failure. And all of those things are some of people's biggest fears. And little do they know that they will lead you to places that you would have never expected one of which being on a podcast with Katherine. Just don't be afraid to try new things and put yourself out there and surround yourself with people who you disagree with. But then also people that like are going to boost you into the person that you want to be.

Katherine Ann Byam 39:39
Lovely, ladies,I have enjoyed this immensely. Thank you so much for your valuable contributions for sharing your experiences and for helping people coming behind you as well with, with your insights. So thanks a lot and I will let you know when this is already as well. See you soon.

Kailin Jo Spencer 39:56
Thank you so much. Thank you.

Katherine Ann Byam 40:03
This podcast is brought to you today by the brand new Women In Sustainable Business Awards that kicks off in 2023. If you're a business owner who's starting a business with principles of sustainability in mind, and you want to preserve some lost skills, some handcrafting, artisanal work, or you're a social media manager supporting purpose driven brands, or you're creating fashion, or something that is relevant to the sustainability and green transformation, you are more than welcome to join us, and to get involved in these awards. Check out our group, on Facebook; Woman In Sustainable Business, or follow the podcast; Where Ideas Launch, on Instagram to find out more.

079 Do What Matters

079 Do What Matters


About this Episode

Do what matters… today and for your future. You are more than your ego, and this is your moment to own that, whatever it means to you, and do something purposeful with it. Career transitioning on purpose is more than a suite of skills you can gain mastery over, It’s a way of life. 

This career guide is for people in leadership, management, consulting, change programmes, projects, freelancers or contractors working within medium to large organisations. 

Your voice has never had a more powerful sound, than when it’s coming from a place deep within. Let’s learn how to use that to have a greater impact. Doing what matters also means getting things fantastically wrong, before things change at times. The key is in the long game.

 Explore a wide range of perspectives with me on this journey. 

You will:

Katherine Ann Byam is an author, sustainability activist, coach and consultant for business resilience and sustainable change, partnering with leaders committed to a shared future.” 

A professional with 20+years change leadership experience in the FTSE Top 10, she started her consulting firm in 2019 to support sustainable development within SMEs. Katherine holds an MBA with distinction, specialising in Innovation Management as well as certificates in ESG, digital strategy, and sustainability management from established universities. She’s also a Fellow of the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants. 

She’s the host of the internationally acclaimed Where Ideas Launch - Sustainable Innovation Podcast, ranked among the top 5% globally, achieving the top spot in 5 countries, and the top 10 in 19 separate charts. As a sought after leadership and career transition coach and keynote speaker, she facilitates workshops and learning sessions for communities within global brands such as Amazon, Women Tech Global, ACCA, Stryker, Speak Up, Mind Channel and more.

She loves spending her spare time in nature, walking the western and southern coasts of the UK, France and Tobago, or on the Northern and eastern coasts of Trinidad with her partner Christophe.

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam 0:00
I think my favourite exercise when I started this book with my book coach was to write the publishers headline, and think about what I'd want people to say about the book. So this is what I wrote, you, tell me what you think, insightful, unconventional, structured, and providing the reader with a framework that flexes to their needs and individual contexts and encompasses storytelling, practical advice and coaching in one comprehensive stream of thought, and provides you with the tools to make those tough career decisions with greater ease. It is a remarkably easy, yet thought provoking read. I cannot tell you the feeling and excitement you get when you produce something that could potentially even have something close to that sort of review. And I feel really proud that this book today, is ready for a mass audience.

This is season five, the great debates of our times, Season Five will be centred around the great debates. And we will be comparing and contrasting different viewpoints on various topics that are consuming the public discourse at present. The reason I've decided to take this approach is because we, or at least many of us, are losing the skill of debate. And I think this is an essential skill for us all to practice once more. I don't see how we get to the point of saving the world and saving our planet. If we don't know how to discuss our differences. I also think that the solution to most of our challenges is somewhere in the spectrum of views, but never a type of extreme. I will be working with guests to curate the content and discuss beforehand, I will understand their positions, their areas of genius, and navigate my questions around that so that the conversation is challenging and stimulating. Without being combative. I hope you enjoy season five of where ideas launch; the Sustainable Innovation podcast. T

hree years ago, I started a journey to build an independent business built around my strengths, the needs of the planet, my passions, and my economic needs. Very much the ikigai of Japanese philosophy. That business had a clear roadmap, build a digital transformation consultancy using skills I already had in change management, and my partner in IT and data science, and then integrate sustainability into the practice, as I learned more about it myself. Life, though had other plans. After the pandemic hit, I naturally gravitated to fill in two voids that I found opening up making career transitions on purpose, was the first, and starting businesses with ethical and triple bottom line values, as the second. I started my first career transition programme in the summer of 2020, and became the leader of the women in sustainable business community on Facebook in October of that year. Since then, I've met and had business collaborations and relationships with hundreds of people, all of whom have shared rich experiences with me that I've integrated it into my courses and programmes as well as the series of books I will be releasing into the wild over the next three years. Book One is called 'Do what matters: the purpose driven career transition guide'. And it is a blueprint for supporting you with making a strategic shift to include more of your concerns about the planet we share, I want to take this opportunity to share with you the outline of the book, and to advise that it will be available on or after the 22nd of July, along with a podcast of the same name. I'm really excited about this work. And it's taken a lot to produce it. But it's been immensely rewarding. Here's the table of content, I start with what is purpose? And this is an interesting conversation to have at this point in time in our world. Because businesses are talking about it, people are talking about it. And we're not entirely sure where it's going to all land. We're starting to learn more and more about science, we still have philosophy on our side, we still have religion, and these ethical and moral debates that are influencing our perception of what purpose might be. So let's get into how to find your own. The book is then shaped into an introduction section and three parts. In the introduction, I present to you the context and the case study for change. Here I talk about the planetary dimension, the socio economic dimension, and governing the system as a whole. These are all fascinating and interrelated concepts and as we start getting into the complexity, I think it really starts to open doors as to how much opportunity there really is, if we were to take the deliberate step toward more purpose. Part one is about your environment and you and your pathway to self mastery amidst all of these rolling tides. So chapter one we talk about if it's important, build a model. So creating a conscious self improvement plan. Chapter Two is 'who are you really?' and how to begin your own journey of self discovery. Chapter three, we talk about career models. These are the types of career paths that you could attempt to deliver on your purpose. And I have to say that it isn't restricted to sustainably driven careers. This really is about any sort of path that you want to take. And what I would actually advise is to blend your paths. So make sure that you're doing enough of all the things that give you that feeling of completion. Chapter four is the constant leaner and developing a growth and net-positive mindset. A net-positive is something that I want to help people to embrace because I think we need to go further than net zero if we're actually going to hit any of the targets that we've set for ourselves. Chapter five is about your goals needing conscious action, and how to take action towards your purpose. Chapter six, is a nine step career transition framework. And this one is where I sum up all of the things that we're going to cover overall, for the whole book, even though it's coming in at chapter six. The reason it's coming here is that I think you need to appreciate everything that's come before it before you appreciate what these steps really mean. Part Two goes into social credible and responsible you, and how to show up, build an audience and become an advocate for change. In chapter seven, we talk about 'what's the point of your job really?', and why you do what you do not from your perspective, but from that of the business. In chapter eight, we talk about persuasion, influence and manipulation, and how we get others to follow or lead, and whether or not we feel right about doing so. In chapter nine, we talk about money and wealth, because I think any conversation about sustainability needs to deal with money and wealth. And then in chapter ten, we look at your digital twin, and how you show up credibly and responsibly in the spaces that you're interacting in online, chapter elevn, we bust some HR myths. We want to improve in general, the human resource management landscape, or at least your understanding of it. So I want to touch on some really important points here, that may implicate how you go about doing what you have to do. Part three, we get into 'jump but controlling the landing', and governing that first 90 days. And the first chapter in the section is about onboarding. So this is navigating your new job and the change agenda by understanding what's fundamentally important to what will come next for you. In chapter thirteen, we talk about habits and context and creating a compelling mission driven personnel playbook. And this is something where you blend the past playbook that you had that had made you successful, with what your understanding now about the world and the change that you need to make. So this is going to take some integration of the learning that we've done together. In chapter fourteen, we talk about how to create the perfect pitch, and how to earn in funding for your projects and your innovations, regardless of what type of role you're doing. In chapter fifteen, we want to talk about being better than average, but not perfect. And whether or not that's good enough. In chapter sixteen we're dealing with duds and explosives. So this is about the toxic boss, or the weak boss, and how that affects the culture of the company that you're in. And then we talk about the support needed for your journey and how to know if coaching or related services are right for you in any way. The final close will come in the epilogue, and this looks towards the aligned mission and the net-positive action toward the future. And then I finally close with an afterword to tell you about the other projects that are coming up soon. So I really look forward to this project. Being live at the end of July, there's still a lot of work to do. But thank you for your support and your ongoing encouragement. And I do hope that you enjoy it. Do get in touch with me on LinkedIn, on Facebook, follow me. Let me know if you've got the book, if you've read it. Give us our reviews on Amazon or wherever you found the book. And we'd love to hear from you, any thoughts or interesting insights that came up for you as you did these exercises. Thank you so much for your support.

This podcast is brought to you today by the brand new women in sustainable business awards that kicks off in 2023. If you're a business owner who's starting a business with principles of sustainability in mind, and you want to preserve some lost skills, some handcrafting, artisinal work, or you're a social media manager supporting purpose driven brands, or you're creating fashion or something that is relevant to the sustainability and green transformation. You are more than welcome to join us and to get involved in these awards. Check out our group on Facebook women in sustainable business, or follow the podcast where ideas launch on Instagram to find out more.

076 The Profit Maximising Goal of Companies

076 The Profit Maximising Goal of Companies

About this Episode

Should companies focus exclusively on maximising profit?
Nothing in life is that straightforward, and certainly not today when our understanding of how our world works has had quantum leaps.
In this episode I explore the legacy of Milton Friedman with some needed food for thought on profit vs purpose.

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Episode Transcript

What does the raging debate around ESG actually mean to you as an economic actor in society?

I’ve been buried in research for my upcoming book - Do What Matters - The Purpose Driven Career Transition Guide, as well as completing a course from University of California, Berkeley - School of Law on ESG, and preparing micro learning on sustainability for the team at Mind Channel.

What’s been central around discussions of late is the role of purpose in organisations, and whether or not boards or shareholders have the right 

Since pursuing learning on ESG matters, I've read much on the role of Milton Friedman on the theory of shareholder primacy and the profit maximisation purpose of companies. I've referred often derogatorily to his doctrine, but I’d never read it end to end until recently.

I quote now from his article

“In a free‐enterprise, private‐property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. Of course, in some cases his employers may have a different objective. In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation and his primary responsibility is to them.”

Now in that quote he talks about the basic rules of society as embodied by both law and custom, but this idea of custom doesn’t work the minute an organisation crosses borders, and even the law isn't uniform, and this again leaves the door open to fuel and incentivize irresponsible corporate action.

Milton Friedman also scoffed at the idea of corporate responsibility - as corporations don't have responsibilities except to the law that created them. but individuals do. Either way, the flaw in much of this article in my opinion is in a lack of integrated systems thinking.

I've listened to countless debates among professors that argue that even when shareholders act in the interest of profit maximisation, they are more likely to develop solutions that address long term social and climate concerns because it is fundamentally within their interest to do so, once ensconced in an appropriate tax structure that considers negative externalities. 

Others argue for director primacy, challenging boards to embrace a north start or purpose in balancing the interests of all stakeholders in determining their actions. 

You will see from Friedman’s article that he believes this role assigns boards powers they do not have. Whilst Friedman's arguments are interesting and worthy of some design consideration, The arguments remain as academic and removed from real life as are the doctrines of economic theory itself in my opinion.

When economists, lawyers, historians and politicians debate these issues, they are ignoring fundamentally important disciplines from their discourse. We live in a series of interconnected systems. From the individual, the household, the community, the state/county, the country, the global economic system, and all of these are bounded by biological, geological and atmospheric systems that support existence itself. 

If we want to debate what's right, appropriate, legal, fair, just, we can't do it in the same bubbles we have in the past, we need the voices of engineers, biologists, botanists, geologists, chemists, artists, physicists, statisticians, theologians, activists and a host of other siloed characters before we even understand how the system works in order to improve it.

We live in the Anthropocene; a widely disputed fact of geology (don't worry I'm not oblivious to the contradiction in this statement), which means that humans now more than any other factor are impacting on climate and other major geological systems on the earth, and increasingly in space. That this is happening isn't inherently a problem; risk always walks in the hands of opportunity.

With the capabilities we have today on data, technology, systems science, modelling, design, we can create a new trajectory for humans within the context of society and natural systems to correct, and potentially reverse the damage we've done by the weaknesses of our past understanding. It will take a strong and compelling desire for a legacy of having a continuously livable earth, at the expense of individual egos. 

When Andrew Winston and Paul Polman speak of net positive, this I believe is what they challenge us to envision. When Kate Raworth discusses doughnut economics, I believe she also addresses these gaps. Have a read and share your thoughts below.

“The purpose of business is to profitably solve problems of people and the planet, and not to profit from causing problems.” The British Academy

Perhaps this is the simple idea that we can all get behind!

#esg #sustainability #netpositive #netzero #esginvesting #esgreporting

059 Communicating For Impact

About this Episode

Melissa Hobson is a communications consultant with a love for nature and the ocean. Melissa is passionate about making a positive difference to our planet and to people's lives. Combining her passion for the ocean with her extensive PR communications and copywriting experience. She helps charities B Corps and mission driven organisations achieve tangible results. Melissa has worked with companies and charities big and small, both in house and agency for around 11 years, helping them achieve their communication goals. And her brand experiences include just giving Go Fund Me, Cancer Research UK British Deaf Association, marine megafauna Foundation, Madagascar, whale shark project, and more recently guide dogs.

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam  0:03  

 Melissa, thank you so much for joining the show. It's incredibly my pleasure to have you and to have someone with your experience coming to talk to us about this topic of PR in the space of sustainability.

Melissa Hobson  1:40  

Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here.

Katherine Ann Byam  1:42  

Yeah, it's really awesome. So what inspired your choice of career in communicating for positive impact? Tell me a little bit about your backstory.

Melissa Hobson  1:51  

So I'll go back some way. And I think actually, one of the key things that's inspired me, I didn't realise at the time was going to end up being to do with my career. So when I was at university, I went on holiday to Australia, and my travel agent talked me into learning to scuba dive. And I absolutely hated every second of the training in the pool. And I was just like, I need to just get this done. And then I never dive again. Because what is this? Why am I doing this? And then we went out on the boat to the Great Barrier Reef. And just as soon as I got into the open water, everything was just a complete other world. It was amazing. And I just switched and did a complete 180. And I was like This is incredible.

Like, you know, I saw sharks, we saw turtles, they were just fish everywhere, these beautiful corals. And at the time, I kind of thought, well, this is cool, but I was living in Bristol at the time. So that's a shame, I won't be able to do that again. And then over the years, I went on holiday by the coast, I managed to go diving. Then I started planning my holidays to go diving.

Then I started writing for a scuba diving magazine, kind of on the side around my PR work. All this time I was doing PR originally for a big consumer agency and then moving kind of towards the charity space. So I work for Cancer Research UK. And then I worked agency side with as you mentioned JustGiving Funmi, various other cause based organisations.

And then I got to the point that I’d been in London for about a decade, I needed a break, and I quit my job with nothing to go to at the time. An amazing opportunity came up after I'd quit or while I was working my notice period to move to Mozambique and help a marine conservation charity. So that's the marine megafauna foundation. Mmm. And I spent about eight months volunteering with them out in Mozambique. And that was kind of the big step I guess into marine conservation specifically and sustainability, which is my core niche kind of around other charity stuff that I do as well.

Katherine Ann Byam  4:15  

Yeah. Now that's a really powerful story. And I think reefs do have this effect on people definitely as a child. You know, the twin island of the republic that I come from Australia and Tobago and Tobago has used to have really beautiful reefs, and we would travel there as kids and stuff and even as a little kid you can get out there not with any snorkelling device because it was so easy to access, and eventually has been bleached, like a lot of other coral reefs around the world. So it's incredibly powerful to witness that in your lifetime. Something that you'd never expect.

Melissa Hobson  4:51  

It's such a shame, isn't it to see you know, within a few years the landscape completely changing for for the negative yeah

Katherine Ann Byam  5:00  

Yeah, so it's definitely a cause that we all support. I think anyone who lives near an ocean, I definitely am an island girl myself. So it's definitely a cause I support. And you've worked in some really amazing campaigns with some great brands. Can you tell us a little bit about your favourite impact campaign and why it was so important to you?

Melissa Hobson  5:20  

Yeah. So we were chatting before and you said, Oh, this is going to be a really easy question. And actually, this is probably the hardest of all the questions you've given me. I've worked on some amazing campaigns and with various kinds of charities and organisations and I've been thinking about this for a few days. And everyday, I changed my mind about which campaign I'm going to tell you about. So there was one, originally I was going to talk about, which I just touched on briefly, because when I was at Cancer Research UK, I was involved in the no makeup selfie campaign, which I don't know if you remember, people were taking photos of themselves, or then without any makeup on and tweeting it, basically.

 And what was really amazing about that was, it wasn't actually our campaign, people were just doing it to raise awareness of cancer research, small C, small R. And our social media manager at the time, was, I think, in the evening at home on call because we had a rotor of covering out of ours. And he jumped on it and just sent out a tweet saying, you know, by the way, this isn't us. But if you would like to support Cancer Research UK, the charity, then you can do so. And the next day, the team scrambled around, and we actually had an unused Text to Donate number.

So we tweeted out the text to donate numbers. And that was it. The phones just didn't stop ringing from that point. And I think what was amazing about that campaign, apart from the fact that we raised something like 8 million and in about a week. And it just kept going. But from a PR perspective, I was playing just a very small part in the team kind of managing the press response to that. It was so measurable, which usually NPR, you know, we talk about it being such an important piece of the puzzle.

But you know, digital marketers will have stats around, you know, social media and retweets and how many views and all that kind of thing, which PR can be really unmeasurable. So this was a campaign that was really exciting to see a communications campaign that had a direct tangible impact. And we knew every penny that came into that number was because of the no makeup selfie, because it just kind of sitting dormant, the number otherwise. So. Yeah, so that was one that was kind of exciting to be involved in, even though I was Yeah, just a very tiny piece of that puzzle.

Katherine Ann Byam  7:50  

It's such important work as well, I can't, can you describe what it feels like to have been involved in something so game-changing.

Melissa Hobson  8:01  

I mean, at the time, it was just hectic. We had Cancer Research UK, a brilliant organisation, and they have a fantastic comms team. And we probably had 10, or more than 10 members of the team kind of working on comms at that point. And it was just tools down on everything else. You know, it was completely overwhelming. The social media team were just flooded with tweets that were, you know, responding to engaging with sharing, but from a PR point of view, obviously, news organisations were picking up on it.

So they wanted the press release, they wanted the latest figures every morning, we were trying to check, you know, what's the donation gone up to now and it might have raised an extra million or a couple of million. Obviously, also being conservative that with Text to Donate campaigns, the figures are slightly in flux, because people might then decide not to pay that donation when their phone bill comes through.

So there's a little bit of that as well, but also getting, you know, finding which aspects people were free getting them onto TV onto radio doing comment pieces. So it was literally I mean, yeah, working in a bit of a call centre at that point, as soon as you put the phone down, it was ringing with another journalist. So it was just everyone really working together and just powering through to try and spread the word even further as much as we could. So it was exciting. But it was exhausting. Once that couple of weeks wrapped up and we suddenly realised your to do list had been on hold for probably a good two weeks. We didn't really, you know, have the time to focus on anything else. It was a lot but it was incredible, as you say,

Katherine Ann Byam  9:48  

and I guess it's probably the reverse of what happens normally when you're trying to book that spot. You know, you're trying to get the news media to take the story, but now it's really them coming To you, and I guess this is the beauty of a fantastic campaign.

Melissa Hobson  10:04  

Absolutely. And I think also one of the things with that campaign was, the reason I think it worked really well is that we didn't create it. I know after that happened, and there was another there was the Ice Bucket Challenge, there's been a couple that have gone really big. And the ones that do really well have come from real people and just taken off. And I know for, you know, when I left Cancer Research UK, and I went to my next agency, there was often you know, clients would say, Okay, how do we do the next no makeup selfie. And there are things that you can try to do. And there are ways you can try to create a really strong story. But I think sometimes the ones that just really take off are the stories, they're already, it's already happening. And it's how you engage with it. And, you know, don't force your way in, because I don't think that works. But if you can make yourself a relevant part of that story and use that as a way to tell your own story. And I think that can be, you know, a really successful campaign.

Katherine Ann Byam  11:02  

Yeah. And just going more into the whole topic of PR. So we had a conversation actually recently, sort of by text inside my group and my community because I realise that a lot of people in the sustainability space or at least as small businesses, in women in sustainable business at the moment, they're not necessarily aware of the power of PR. And maybe there's a perception about greenwashing about PR. Do you want to speak to that a bit about why people may have that perception and how to use PR for good?

Melissa Hobson 11:41  

Yeah. So I think the first thing that I find when I'm working with new clients who haven't done any PR before, and often that's a small startup or a solo business owner who's kind of launching their company, and they might come to me for a Power Hour. So you know, 60 minutes delving into, what's their issue that we want to overcome from a PR perspective, and often with those people is not so much necessarily what is PR, they probably have a bit of an understanding and awareness of it. But people feel really, really nervous about it. And I think part of it, I think, is in the sustainability space.

The greenwashing point that you mentioned, I think people are really nervous about any clap back, you know, what if I say the wrong thing, or, you know, do the wrong thing. And I think also, there's, as soon as you're speaking to a journalist, a lot of people just get really nervous, you know, they're happy to I've seen clients who will have a long conversation with you telling you all about their company, and what they do, and they're really eloquent and passionate.

And then, you know, say in their head, even in a mock interview situation, you're saying, Okay, so now I'm a journalist, and we're going to practice running through these questions, and they just freeze. And I think there is something that people, yeah, and nervous about the media, they sometimes forget that journalists or people do. And I can say that because, you know, on the side, I do have put my journalist hat on now. And again, even if it's mainly writing about fish and things underwater.

 But I think it's kind of getting people comfortable with the human element of PR, it's, you know, sharing your story with other people in a way that, really, a lot of the time, your goal is thinking about the type of story that if you come down to the pub, or the coffee shop, or wherever you meet your mates, and they say, oh, did you see that thing where, you know, and it might be an amazing fundraising challenge.

Or it might be some epic photos of marine life that they've never seen before, whatever it might be. That's kind of the end result that you're really working towards. So thinking about it, like that, and then working back and thinking, you know, what do I have to tell that I'm passionate about and that people are going to be really interested in. And I think that makes it more, more manageable. You're just trying to tell your story rather than kind of do PR in, you know, quote, unquote, that intimidating way.

Katherine Ann Byam  14:27  

Exactly. And that's the thing you can do really organic forms of PR, just on your social media, and then it's a matter of it being picked up by the press. Sometimes it's just as simple as that as well.

Melissa Hobson  14:40  

Absolutely. And social media is a great tool, particularly if you're new to PR. And there are things like the hashtag Chennai request, you can put that into your, you know, Tweet Deck or just search it on Twitter, and you'll see what journalists are looking for. So you don't necessarily need to have the big two databases and all those kinds of things that maybe a consultant or an agency might have access to, you know, you can keep an eye on little things like that.

And it might be that a journalist is, you know, at the moment, we've got the budget coming up. So journalists might be looking for people to talk about how changes in the budget are affecting them. And there's going to be a lot of stuff that's not relevant to you. But it might be that they're talking about green energy, they're talking about, you know, some of the things that are happening at COP 26, when that comes up next week, and you might have a really pertinent point on there. And yeah, you know, drop them a tweet back, give them a little introduction to you and what you do, and that can be a really great way to kind of start getting in touch with the media and putting yourself out there. Yeah,

Katherine Ann Byam  15:48  

no, absolutely. And I wanted to ask you the next question as a positive question. But unfortunately, we've had some actually really crap news, literally crap news about what's happening with the voids and, and putting sewage into the wards in the UK and stuff like this. I guess what I want to ask is maybe I'll make it a two part question. What are your thoughts on what's kind of happening at the moment? But what are sort of the positive signs that you're getting about how we're going to care for the oceans in the future? What, what, what do you think gives us a reason to be encouraged?

Melissa Hobson 16:23  

Yes. So to the first part of your question, to the first part of your question, in terms of the way things stand at the moment, I think it's very much a sliding scale, you know, when you turn on the news, or you listen to the radio off, and we're hearing more about the bad things that are happening, the ways that we're destroying the planet, which is a huge concern. And I think there is a lot of change that needs to be done. And I think it's going to be really hard work.

That said, I do think we're starting to see a groundswell in terms of people that care, people that want to make a change, whether that be some of the amazing business owners that you work with, who are starting, you know, with sustainability at their core, trying to change the system, and you know, the cultures that we've been brought up in, or whether that be a family that are thinking a little bit more carefully about their waste, they've, you know, planted a vegetable patch in their garden, or whatever it might be all the small steps are really important as well.

From a communications perspective, I've definitely seen lots more companies thinking about sustainability. Some of that, if I'm being cynical is probably from a, you know, there is greenwashing out there, and potentially people thinking, this is going to be good for our brand for us to look good. So that's why we need to do it. But if that is why they're doing it, I think it's important that they are still doing it right. You know, even if their motivations aren't necessarily pure, we are seeing more people trying to make a change. So I do think we've got a really big challenge ahead of us. And I don't know exactly where we're going to end up. But hopefully, I think, you know, there's some really positive things going on. And I hope that that continues.

Katherine Ann Byam  18:29  

Are there any things that you want to highlight that are really going well, for the ocean in particular?

Melissa Hobson 18:34  

Yeah, I think I told you before, Catherine, if you asked me about fish, I just go off, so he might have to cut me off if I get too excited. But there are some really amazing campaigns going on. So as I mentioned, I'm working with or used to work with mmf and with the Madagascar whale shark project as well who do incredible work into the ocean giants megafauna in our ocean, you know, looking at populations and also looking at how, you know, how is tourism behaviours affecting these populations.

 Stella, who's a good friend of mine who runs the Madagascar Wireshark project, is doing a lot of work into codes of conduct in the area. So making sure that boats don't go too fast. Don't go too close, you know, you're not having loads of people jumping on the animals getting all excited to see the sharks because it's a great way to raise awareness. Like, you know, seeing these enormous creatures in front of you in the ocean is absolutely spectacular, but we do need to do it in a responsible way. So charities like that are doing some amazing work. The Manta trust as well I know is doing some amazing work around responsible tourism. And then there's also things closer to home in the UK.

There's a big seagrass planting project that's been going on. Seagrass is a really important carbon sink. And it's often overlooked, because people are talking about coral and coral reefs. And so lots of great seagrass projects are going on. And then there's also and this, I promise, I'll stop after this.

There's also lots of citizen science projects that people can get involved with. So, again, thinking about the UK, if you're on the coast, and you're having a little beach walk with your dog or with your kids or whatever, you might spot mermaid purses, I don't know if you've ever heard of them, Katherine. So mermaids' purses, their little black look almost like packets. And they are the egg casings of sharks and rays. And they're called mermaid purses, I presume, because they look like a teeny tiny pass. And the shark trust is doing some amazing citizen science work around those.

So if you see one, you can take a photo of it, and upload it to their database, and basically help them work out which sharks and rays are laying eggs in the area, which obviously helps them with things like population studies, and all that kind of thing. Just by uploading a photo. So something like that is something that, you know, anyone by the coast can do. You just need to keep your eyes peeled, maybe pop your phone away while you're working and walking and you know, have a little look at the pebbles or the sand and see what you can find.

Katherine Ann Byam  21:25  

Oh, that's a really powerful story. So my last question, or second to last question, actually is what's next for you?

Melissa Hobson  21:34  

Good question. So it's been a really busy time for me. And I'm actually, from a professional point of view, I'm booked up until 2022, which is a bit scary, and also quite exciting. So I'm continuing to do some work with guide dogs, they've got some incredible campaigns coming up. And I'm also going to be starting some work in the coming weeks with another marine conservation charity, I'm sure there will be other things popping up. There's always exciting projects on the horizon.

And then from a personal point of view, I'm heading up to Glasgow, on the train next week for cop 26. So hopefully going to meet some really exciting environmentalists and activists kind of during those couple of weeks, and then into 2022. I'm not sure if I mentioned but when the pandemic hit, I was living abroad. I hadn't been living in the UK for quite a few years at that point. So I was brought back to the landlocked town of Redding. Initially, obviously, thinking it would be temporary. But that's rolled on for a little while. So I think next year, I'm going to be trying to find my way back to the coast as well

Katherine Ann Byam  22:50  

As I live on the coast, but it's not the world's best coast, I get to see container-ships.

Melissa Hobson

Whereabouts are you?

Katherine Ann Byam 

 I'm in Southampton. So there's an entire side of the coast that we don't actually get to access at all. Because there's a marina. And then there's the area that the boats that cruise ships come in, and there's the area that sort of passenger ships come in for the wide. And then there are lots of containers, you really have to work hard to find the actual ocean. Which is amazing. So the last question that I wanted to ask is, is it to give advice and advice for people who are budding copywriters, who are bloggers and who really want to get that impact message across? Because I think what we struggle within this space? No, my guess is what we struggle within this space is that we're all very passionate, that's for certain, but we struggle to be able to communicate to get the people who are not as passionate to convert. So what advice or tips would you give?

Melissa Hobson  23:56  

Yeah, good question. So I'd say and I think for me, this is probably relevant. across the different comms disciplines, whether you're a PR person or a copywriter or marketer of some description, is to really come from the point of view of your audience. So that might be your customers or, you know, a specific target target group that you want to, you know, engage and maybe kind of try and start changing their behaviours. And to be able to do that you really need to understand who they are and what makes them tick.

So, first of all, thinking about, who are you talking to? Because if you don't know, and if you're still at the point that you've got a great message to share. That's amazing. And, you know, there's some really passionate people doing some brilliant stuff. But who do you want to tell that message to? And maybe you know, why that specific group of people because it might be that you mentioned, Katherine, you know, it might be a group of people who aren't at Actually not involved yet in sustainability.

So telling them that it's better for the planet, and you know, this, that and the other, it's gonna save the turtles like, they might not care. You know, there are people, unfortunately, that don't care or that they have other pressing matters that are priorities for them. But, you know, if you're thinking about what actually makes them tick, it might be, for example, thinking about the energy crisis and insulation and green energy and all of that. Maybe, for them, protecting the planet isn't going to be a big influencer. But saving money on their bills, so that they have a bit more to spend looking after their family might be a really big influencer. So I think coming from their point of view, and trying to understand what makes them tick is then going to help you really work out how to weave your message in a way that resonates with them.

Katherine Ann Byam  26:00  

Yeah, that's really great advice. I think, when I started this podcast, my mission was to take organisations, leaders and organisations who weren't even thinking about sustainability yet, and try to take them along a journey. So that was the reason that I started and that I had so much business focus on the message I was carrying as well. And now I think, you know, I've moved people a lot in three seasons. And I feel as if people are ready to be on any journey that I'm on, which is, which is great, that's exciting. But I can feel like I've done that, at least with the few people who stayed with me.

Melissa Hobson  26:40  

And it's funny, because as well, I think one of the reasons I've been quite busy recently is because, you know, we had the IPCC report, we've got cop 26, coming up, everyone suddenly talking about sustainability. And so they come to you, as you know, a PR person copywriter with experience in conservation and sustainability. And often one of the first questions is, okay, so you've got great contacts with the sustainability press, right? And I'm like, Well, what actually, we maybe should be asking is, you know, why do you want to contact the sustainability press? Like, that's maybe an element of what you want to do.

But if you're a sustainable beauty brand, we need to look at the beauty press, if you're working, I'm working with a sustainable lingerie brand at the moment called Confident Tiger. And they're brilliant. But our focus there is with fashion titles with women's titles with entrepreneur titles, you know about the founder herself? And obviously, yes, you know, there is a sustainability element to it. But it's really important not to get stuck in that echo chamber of, you know, I love all my echo buddies, and we can all chat about the planet. But actually, you know, we need to break out of that and start to get this message seeping through all the other types of media as well, because that's when it starts to affect wider change.

Katherine Ann Byam  28:01  

Absolutely. We need to nudge and we need to nudge with a shelf. Thank you so much, Melissa. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thanks for joining the show.

Melissa Hobson  28:11  

Thank you for having me.

037 So You Want To Build A Business

037 So You Want To Build A Business

About this Episode

"Abundance is a lie, but it doesn’t have to be. We can all thrive on this planet, but it’s going to need us to rethink how we design our lives and the planet.”

Welcome to season 3 of Where Ideas Launch, where we explore how we build a better planet, one small business at a time. This is series is a guide to small and medium-sized eco businesses or green tech businesses.

Katherine Ann Byam is a consultant and strategic partner to leaders in SMEs on sustainability, resilience and business transformation.

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam  00:25

I got started in earnest on my sustainability journey in a classroom in Grenoble, France, the year was 2015. The topic was innovation, and frugal innovation to be precise. And the principles of frugal innovation were not actually foreign to me. My mother practiced them all her life. In fact, so much of who she was and still is, has become more precious to me as I navigate and build my services to support sustainable and impact-driven entrepreneurs like myself. Businesses continuously design new solutions for problems that come with an increase in price, but not always with an increase in value.

We've built a machine that's designed to make a few rich, and others, to keep them rich. In some countries, we don't really have a history of doing business any better. We move from the property of the crown to the property of the Lords and Ladies to the property of the privateers, pirates and the independent land owners that arose after the New World was discovered. Yet there are examples of designing social systems that work for business and society. So why don't we spend some time trying to study these?

This podcast is about addressing the problem of “how do we do business better?” not just taking a netzero box without substance behind it, without considering the social side of the story. So follow me down this road to build a better and greener business. When I started, they considered that there was no resource where I could find the complete big picture, the how to land firmly on my feet, as a sustainable business-minded person. There are pockets of information for sure, specializations in one domain of one area of the job, or another, but the experience of being an entrepreneur is not specialized or siloed and the challenges of being sustainable throughout your offer and your operations requires systemic and more integrated thinking.

Most entrepreneurs start solo or with a small team, and have jobs with multiple facets. To be successful, you need enough exposure across all the various aspects of the business that you're building, so that you can be prepared for the relentless stream of decisions you need to constantly make. Decision fatigue is absolutely real. In particular, when operating from a place of low trust. Low trust happens when brands, suppliers and service providers greenwash what they are doing. We don't want to be caught in a greenwash affiliation. If we are working hard to build an ethical reputation. So we need to do the checks and the disclaimers, to make sure that who we're working with stands up to the values that we ourselves have.

When I understood what this journey was going to be like, I began to prepare a manual to walk with me as I step through all the hurdles along the way. I wanted to solve the problem of where to start, and what to consider for the millions of people who want to make a positive impact but are overwhelmed by all the things that just come up. I wanted to create sign posts to great resources, templates, maps, and a navigation system to find the triple bottom line that's good for the planet, good for the people, and let's face it, what you need in your pocket. You're likely a specialist in an area, and you want to trade either a service or a product, or software as a service, perhaps in your zone of genius, while having a net positive impact on the world around you to round it off.

If you intend to start as a solopreneur, get prepared to be uncomfortable in your first six months, as you figure out the market, consumers, their behaviors and how to serve them better. More often than not, the product you start with is not the one that will make you ultimately successful. You also need to be prepared to pivot and reshape your offer as many times as needed for as long as it takes. I'm starting with the fundamentals and building forward from there.

Katherine Ann Byam  04:25

This episode and season is going to be a guide, but the workbooks that will come alongside it at the end of the season will really help you to personalize this for yourself and make the best use of what you're learning. It is widely acknowledged in the scientific community that we are in the Anthropocene epoch, where the activities of mankind have the most important impacts on the evolution of our planetary systems. The evidence for being in a new epoch has been building since the 1700s, but became clear in statistical records post the 1950s. What changed in the 1950s, is that we became a world with no wars, women contributing more equally to the economy and to growth, democracy and capitalism, and perhaps the most impactful of all mass marketing and advertising and increased use of synthetic Parliaments.

Most experts believe that given the boundaries of current tipping points to irrevocable climate change, we have between 10 and 15 years to radically change the way we operate in order to maintain the stable conditions that have led to the exponential growth that we have seen. The nine tipping points that you need to know about are the Amazon rainforest and preventing savanafication, and drought and converting that forest into a net carbon producer. We really need to look at that and make sure that it doesn't happen or it doesn't happen any more than it already has. Then we have the Arctic sea ice, and preventing the full melt that we now expect to happen during summertime. Atlantic circulation slowing down, is happening as a result of the other tipping points being shifted. So, the increased sea ice into the ocean is creating that slowdown in the current span.

The boreal forest decline, caused by fires and past changes, is also an area of concern. Coral Reef bleaching has been occurring everywhere on the planet at this point in time. And the Greenland ice sheet melting is another area of great concern. All sorts of permafrost thawing everywhere that it is can expose us to risk that we have not even understood yet. And the West Antarctica and East Antarctica ice sheets and the other final areas of tipping points that we need to be aware of. What this implies is that we need to make radical shifts, cutting your annual carbon footprint in both your personal and professional life by half every year is a start. But can we do it? I talk about these things because we need to understand when we get into business that it's not just for us.

When we get into business today, we need to think about our impact down the road, and how we're going to be influencing what happens for our kids for the next generation and for this blue earth that we all love. So I wanted to create that setting, but I also want to create another setting for you, which is a bit about the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Okay. So beyond the Climate, the climate has other tipping points that haven't even been discussed yet, which is around the other aspects of social life. The UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals captures these very well.

They are: no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, decent work, and economic growth, industry innovation and infrastructure, reduce inequalities, sustainable cities and communities, responsible production and consumption, climate action, life below water, life on land, peace, justice, and strong institutions and partnerships for the goals. Of all of these platforms to leverage for change, which of these are impacted by your business. It is possible that your business has both positive and negative impact on more than one of these goals. The first thing to do is to know which. Can you articulate the impact, and in the long run, will you be able to measure the impact that you're having. Even if you've already started in business.

 This series aims to provide a supporting guide to position yourself to create the positive impact you want to, and to articulate it over time. There's also tremendous opportunity. We are all today creators and designers of a new economics, and a new way of interacting with the planet. The dominant solutions are, how are we able to convert to renewable sources of energy, how can we rewild and regenerate in nature and in our lives. How can we generate novel designs and creativity towards some of the solutions and problems that we face? And how do we use artificial intelligence, as well as bio engineering and technology to change the game. The growth of green tech solutions and advances in artificial intelligence can be truly transformational if well-guided in the context of complexity, and the risk we face as the dominant species on this planet. 

This episode was brought to you today by vehicle Business Growth club by Katherine. And by the space where ideas. Eco Business Growth club supports positive impact SMEs with coaching and community support to achieve the impact and reach they set out to meet. You can find out more by connecting with where it is launched on Instagram following the hashtag, where it is across all of your social Media.

036 Decency & Equity

036 Decency & Equity

About this Episode

Katherine Ann Byam MBA, FCCA, is a Business Resilience Coach and strategic partner to leaders on sustainability, leadership and digital transformation for marketing and operations.

This episode of the podcast covers Sustainable goal #8 Decent Work and Economic growth, a common thread of the podcast.

Katherine examines:

• Equality vs Equity

• Brewed Indecency

• The International Labour Organisations take on Decency

• And contracts that favour the larger of 2 entities

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam 0:01
Equality versus equity, I'm about to head off on vacation. But a few things have happened in the last weeks that have prompted me to record one more podcast before I take off to the coast of Cornwall without any access to my phone or my apps.

I'm really looking forward to this. But before I come to the many topics I want to discuss, I feel the need to bring us all on the same page on equality versus equity. There's a super popular meme that shows a father, a teenager and a toddler, looking at a game over a fence equality is represented by each having the same size of box to stand on. Yet the toddler still can't see the match.

Equity is represented by each having the size of crate or box relevant to enabling them the same experience. Now in another meme, they show a third option of this equation, which is capitalism where the fence is raised so that neither of them can see and so that they pay to have a seat in the stands. And yet another meme, there's a fence instead of a wall, where everyone can see through it. And this is labelled justice.

Now the point I really want to make here is that everyone you knew and everyone I knew once for basic things, respect, reassurance, recognition, and a sense of responsibility. When we act out of integrity, or out of alignment with any of these things, well, we are brewing in decency.

So speaking of brews, let's talk about BrewDog. For a moment, I've been following and watching James Watt for more than a year. And I've used his presence, his branding his public relations on LinkedIn, as an example for many of my clients, and how to show up consistently with a message that everyone resonates with. The company has supported the NHS, they've pledged to be carbon neutral, and from the outside, they're punching way above their weight and the impact that they are creating or have created on LinkedIn.

There's no reason to believe from the open letter that good and positive things haven't been achieved at the company. But at what cost and are these costs justified? Before we assess the cost, I want to look at what decent work means in reference to goal number eight of the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Now there are four overarching ideas that we can bite our teeth into.

These are dignity, equality, fair income, and safe working conditions. Those four ideas are backed by three fundamental principles rights, inclusivity, and protection. Now, decent work is a key thread in this podcast and the work I do in sustainability consulting. So in both in treat, and invested in what is unfolding in this story, all of the principles, tenets and ideas here are subjective measures that leave a lot of room for GRI. The UN, for example, mentions equality and non equity.

So we can even poke holes in the concept of itself. But all of floored by our inability to measure them. So no matter what words we choose, we still have a problem of measurement. The only reasonable way to measure if dignity exists, if fair wages exist, if respect exists, or even recognition exist, or any of the other examples is to have full transparency.

 This means all the data being available, so everyone can interrogate it, we can all do the comparison, and we can all assess whether this exists. And then we need to be able to severe everyone on their perceptions of whether or not these conditions are being met. Transparency, unfortunately, remains an occlusion. Now let's get back to BrewDog. We have largely lost connection with the original founders of large companies in FMCG industries.

And it's perhaps easier to treat the company as the external presence that works to its own culture and rhythm that we don't assess, you know, largely I have lived and experienced my career as believing in this idea of a company in a culture that I could believe in. And I know many of us do.

But this idea of a company isn't real, it is all created, it is all perceived, and it is created by the people who found it and who run it. When a business is found to run. There's much more tied up in the public perception and the perception of the founder personally. This is usually inextricably linked from the company. What the open letter refers to as the cult of personality is therefore unsurprising.

All the way didn't speak to its veracity I've never worked there. But what the employees have described is not an experience uncommon to employees in many companies, if you read Glassdoor reviews, but when you build your brand on a foundation, you have to make sure that that foundation is well embedded. Public Relations starts with who, why, what? And the stories behind the founders and the founding story of the brand. A good publicist understands what the business owner wants to create and where it comes from. From this perspective, I consider the BrewDog public relations team to be exemplary. What appears to be missing is an alignment between the vision and the actual reality.

But as James rightly said, my fault he takes responsibility for the culture of the company. I also have tremendous respect for this paragraph where he says in his response, it's hard to hear those comments, but it must have been harder to see them. We appreciate that. And we will endeavour to honour that effort and courage with a real change of deserves. We aren't going to make excuses. We're going to take action. From our commitment to sustainability to a passion for bear BrewDog has always been defined by taking responsibility and continually improving, this is no exception.

Now it took a bit of a public bollocking and rolling over the coals as they say, to acknowledge a need to listen and to change. But we do have to celebrate this outcome for people who are working toward decent work in the world. I really want to congratulate the punks with Cooper's organisation for what they've done not just for BrewDog employees, but for employees everywhere, who need the courage to say enough is enough. And I'm going to take a stand.

So many employees around the world and indeed the UK are not free to speak their minds and have become slaves to their golden handcuffs and their lack of belief that they can start a new career or give up some of the comforts they have come to enjoy, because of indignities that they have suffered. To James what I see that we are all watching.

We are also rooting for you to set an even greater example than you've done with your public relations to what you will now do to transform your organization's internal culture so that the values of decency tribe shine right true. Beyond James and the BrewDog. travesty, the International Labour Organisation explains the challenges we face globally on the decent work front employment growth since 2008, has averaged only 0.1% annually compared with 0.9%.

Between 2002 1007 Over 60% of all workers like any kind of employment contract, fewer than 45% of wage and salaried workers are employed on a full time permanent basis. And even that share is declining. By 2019, more than 212 million people will be out of work up from the current 201 million and 600 million new jobs need to be created by 2030. Chess to keep pace with the growth of the working age population. Now, these stats are a bit dated, but they're still relevant.

So what do we do? Well, many of us start businesses and season three of this podcast is going to be all about building a business from the ground up going from idea to see you. But starting businesses is also not the full answer because the exam question is much bigger than this. How do we balance what we need for the well being of people, plants, pets and other organisms on the planet in such a way that we achieve a sense of belonging, of contribution of personal and vocational growth, and of economic growth, because we all perceive this as a necessary thing.

We can debate this. Now this is the challenge that we face in levelling up those who are not having a decent quality of life, and those who have more than what they need. Now, before I close, I want to speak about something closer to home for me. A few weeks back, a small but still significant consultancy, started discussions with me to join them as an associate on their team. You know, initial conversations, the CEO of the company joked, let's sign the contract and put it in a dark place never to be looked at again.

 Contracts are complicated little beasts, and they are generally not needed in good times. It's when times get bad that they become the first thing anyone reaches for. To suggest, therefore, that a contract is something that could sit in a dark place never to be looked at again, is a mark of professional disrespect. And as such, I was pretty sure I knew how this relationship would turn out.

As I could already tell we had different values. I received a 35 page contractual document assigned from this company stipulating our rights. Yet none of these terms favoured me or acknowledged the unique skills I honed on my own before encountering this company skills that they do not currently have. Still unlikely The previous time I received the contract of this nature, I decided not to simply throw the contract in the Delete bin along with the relationship. But instead I chose transparency.

And there's that word again, I chose to disclose what I would be doing with this document, before I considered signing it. I advised this guy, that there were a few clauses that were not satisfactory to me, and that I'd have my lawyer check it because I didn't want to misspeak. I received no response from that meal. My lawyers no spring chicken, it took her 30 minutes to hone in and respond to the red flags in the contract.

She told me the following. I have reviewed the agreement and do find that more one sided than normal, and answer to your question, there is no guarantee of any work or even if the rate of PII, they reserve the right to reduce the fee from the scheduled periods if they have a business need or a given a client volume discount or a bulk discount, and you have to wait over a month for payment. You're giving up the intellectual property in what you work on, and provide for them, and you be restrictions, you have to give them longer notice when they gave you and you were bearing the risk and liability if something goes wrong.

 I asked the owner about his willingness to negotiate and that my lawyer would like to mock up some revisions on a Word version of the contract. And his response was this, I have reflected on our exchanges and your request to edit our contract and negotiate in quotations on its tunes. I think it best if we pause our relationship for now, my sense is that you expect a far more formal relationship than we are used to. We have never operated like this in over 20 years. And it does not feel right to start a relationship on such a formal footing. Now,

I wish you the very best of luck in your endeavours and perhaps we can pick up a discussion at another time. Dude, I will tell you this, without an apology for your disrespect, there will be no other time. Many people signed contracts like these because they are scared of not being able to take care of their family of not getting another opportunity elsewhere, of not being able to show up the way they need to. And to get the great opportunities that are perhaps just a stretch away. I am not that person. The first thing in any relationship for me is whether or not my fundamental core values can be upheld in that relationship.

My fundamental core values are rooted in freedom, equity and decency. When these are not present, no feasible working relationship as possible. It's that simple. If you want to make changes, you need to be prepared to speak up and say what's not right with the world around you. Even if it excludes you from that will by default. We don't get to inclusion, by not expressing an opinion that is not inclusion, that is a false sense of let's all go go along with the stream. Alright, so I think I have covered the full spectrum of things related to decent work. If you have any queries on this topic, do feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.

I'm always open to connections and conversations. If you've enjoyed this podcast over the past nine months and the last two seasons, do let us know by giving us a rating, reviewing and commenting on the stories that have meant something to you and share with us anyone you believe would be a good fit for the show, and whose views you would like to be represented on the show. One challenge I faced in finding guests is the diversity of the lineup. But I am proud that there is a broad international representation on the show. I urge you to participate connect with me, as I mentioned on LinkedIn, start a conversation because who knows where that conversation may lead. Thank you for listening to these past two seasons.

And we're coming in just two weeks with a full season three of the show. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for listening. This podcast was brought to you today by career sketching with Katherine Ann Byam and the space where ideas launch. Career sketching is a leadership development and coaching brand offering personalised career transition and transformation services. This space where ideas launch offers high performance, leadership coaching and strategy facilitation to businesses in the food and health sectors. To find out more contact Katherine Ann Byam on LinkedIn

032 Transcending Work

032 Transcending Work

About this Episode

These are the notes from the TED Styled talk I gave at the Bee Inspired Event in April 2021. Enjoy this session.

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam  0:01  

From what I can tell, we have always believed in stories and narratives woven into the fabric of well-being, and the identity of the society we are a part of. Many societies once thought that the world was flat. This was until philosophers and mathematicians and scientists proved otherwise. Well, for some of us at least. But the process of facilitating this transition of beliefs involved colonisation, slavery, murder, and eventually the reeducation with new stories. There are still tribes in the Amazon forest in Brazil and Venezuela, and other places around the world too to be fair, who believe that children have been fathered by all the lovers a woman takes during her pregnancy. Scientists have proven that this isn't true. But the social impact of that belief meant that all men who had relations with that woman would take a role in that child's upbringing. That child belonged to a community. 

For many of us today, we believe that a large house, a powerful car, and the ability to travel in style and in luxury are a sign of success that will attract not only more wealth, but more community and more well-being for us and our families. We believe that we can have infinite growth. We only need to put our minds to it. Growth Mindset they say. But can we really have infinite growth on a finite planet? My name is Katherine Ann Byam and I'm a business resilience strategist and leadership coach, helping leaders design a path to sustainable transformation for their businesses, careers, and lives. I am inspired in particular by one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals,  Goal No. 8 Decent Work and Economic 

Growth. And to explain what that means to me, I'm going to have to take you on a trip to 1982 in the suburbs of a tiny island, called Trinidad and Tobago. My parents were typical middle-class boomers who lived a comfortable life in a house with land and space for multiple cars and a garden. My parents did decent work. My dad was a lawyer working for the government. His promotions at the time were primarily based on his time in service. My mom was a High School teacher of Biology and food and nutrition.

My grandparents lived a life more closely linked to nature. My grandmother was not allowed to go to High School, so she lived her life as a homemaker. I never once heard her complain, though. When I was born, my grandfather was already retired. And he was the proud owner of a permaculture regenerative farm. He did not call it that, I assure you, he called it “the garden.” I remember it distinctly. His garden has beautiful fruit trees for as far as my tiny eyes can see. And as an adult, it looks smaller than I remember. But at the time, that place meant the world of adventure to me. He had an area for growing beans and pulses, an area for flowers, an area for chickens to rummage around and to feed off the land. The first time I witnessed a chicken being killed was in that garden.

 My granddad would take the chicken and carry it to an area out of the eye range of the other hens and the coop. He would slide the entire chicken into a paint can with a hole at the bottom, and then hold the chicken’s wings and legs in place with that can so he could swiftly separate its head from its body. The chickens don't die immediately with this method. But they also do not suffer for very long. This would probably disturb most five-year-olds who live in cities today. But at the time, although it was difficult to watch, it fit the context in which he lived and in which that chicken lived. My grandfather was a sustainable farmer and sources 40% of his food from his garden. Bread, rice, and fish was still sourced from the grocery. What happened to the chicken felt like a natural part of being on a farm. We eat fresh eggs laid by the chickens who eat a bit of corn and a lot of bugs. My grandfather did decent work. His reward was seeing his garden grow and sharing the fruits of that labour with his family and his neighbours, who in turn also shared the fruits of their labour. Much of the local community with sustainable farmers.

No one would walk past my grandparents while they’re relaxing on their porch in the evenings, for example, without stopping to say hello, having a chat, or coming to collect or to receive or to give food. I'll be honest with you, I didn't know how much I valued that part of my upbringing until very much later. 

I wanted to take on the world. When I got my first job at a multinational company, I was earning more money than my mom did. Within a few years, I was earning more than everyone in my family. I was travelling the world and acquiring knowledge of how to make decisions that favour the shareholder of a major corporation.

 At one point, I would fly through Miami twice every month, each time asking the travel agent to schedule the connecting flight late enough, so I could take a trip to Dolphin Mall for shopping. My footprint is huge. And even though I donated much of my clothing to charity, I still have four suitcases and Ziploc things that I could hope to wear again. Sure, I have a Finance and Audit background, I prepared financial statements. I sat on the board’s Audit Committee. I travelled to more than 50 International offices to review our business practices. I had decent work and a massive consumeristic appetite. When I joined the company, there were more than 120,000 people globally. By 2010, the number halved.

 My grandmother died in 2010. Seven years after my granddad, she was 92. I learned that while I sat quietly on my own in a church in Santiago de Compostela. intervene. I received a voicemail message and I knew instinctively what that message was going to say. At the time, I was actually there because I was beginning to wonder if I made the right decision leaving my family behind for the glamour of life and work in Europe. My view of decent work had begun to fracture.

By 2014. I was on a list, one of those lists that no one likes to be on. There was a list for information and consultancy. There was a chance I would be made redundant. I kept my job. Yet I started to wonder what else I could be doing? That's not this that would bring me more joy, and be better for the planet. Work is decent if you as the individual believe that it is. My grandfather was a police officer before he retired, but his dream was to form a garden. He changed his life immediately and completely upon retirement. And he continued to work in that garden for 20 years until his death.

 That garden never paid him a cent. But it gave him a great community and food on the table. My grandmother was never paid for her entire life for her work. But she was fulfilled by raising and caring for her family. She showered us with completely unconditional love. I was paid very well for my work. But I felt a growing misalignment between what I valued and what my employer valued. And when I went off to do an MBA, and during one of my classes, it was the first time I realised that my income was in the top 1% globally, and the top 5% in the UK. Before that, I felt like I wasn't making much money relative to my international peers, for example. I started to understand the systemic inequalities that are creating further and further distance from the richest, let's say 2000 plus billionaires of the world and the poorest 20%. Income inequality is an important subject we need to address. 

And sooner rather than later, we tend at times to conflate climate change with sustainability. Yet sustainability could be understood as an entire system of economics and activities that maintains or improves the quality of life of people on our planet. The very foundation of our lives has been disrupted by reality. Yes, reality. Many of us esteem to be wealthy, financially, in real assets, and in our relationships perhaps. Yet we ignore the signs that things are not going as planned. And that while we build toward Maslow's idea of self-actualization, the base of our pyramid is fracturing under the weight of our desires. Food is impacted by toxic chemicals, significant water use, and antibiotics.

Water is impacted by industrial pollution, climate change farming methods, and simply where you live in the world. Air is impacted by toxic chemicals being released by industries and by farms, and shelter is being disrupted by the atmospheric conditions that are causing us to emit vast amounts of CO2 and CH4, and other toxicants into the air. So what can we do? The really great news is that everything, absolutely everything is open to being redesigned. So I want to call you to action today saying, “Start with you!” Recognise that sustainability is self-care. It is the care for your health and well-being. It is the care for your family's health and well-being, and others care for your community. Understand the data.

Do a baseline assessment. You can do this for your personal life by checking the World Wildlife organisation site, for example. And for your business, you can take the free assessment available on the B Corp site. This can tell you where you are across a variety of measures and help you to decide where to celebrate, and where to start taking purposeful action. Collaborate. Look for collaboration opportunities among business units or across your community that design solutions for a problem you see at work or where you live. Diversity created the rich planet we live in today and inclusion will help us save it. Innovate. Remember that innovation doesn't have to be new to the world.

Most of man's best inventions have come from observing nature. Observe solutions and other spheres that can be repurposed, adapted, and used to address new solutions in your area. Do you remember the book, “So You Got Innovation?” It was one of the greatest books I read during my MBA. And in that book, there was an example of an Indian potter, who designed a fridge made simply from clay and water. Simple, elegant. If you have the capital to invest, think big. We live in an age where we have the most advanced tools and data are available. Much of the technology for many of the solutions that we need already exists.

Volunteer to support the transformation of urban spaces into areas for community farming and other forms of integrative activities. This concept of “interbeing” is something that I think is so powerful. We are connected to the flora, the fauna, and the people who live around us. And we need to find ways to preserve that connection. Where should you work? I say work for companies who have taken a stand. But you don't have to. You can do things where you are and change and influence a better tomorrow. The companies who have taken a stand - I can bring some examples for you, Patagonia. They were one of the forerunners in B Corp assessments, and they say that we are in business to save the entire planet. Then we have our favourite bamboo roll company Who gives a crap. This one currently gives considerably to charities to support toilets for places that do not have sanitation, appropriate sanitation in Africa, for example, and also to help them repurpose that waste matter into soil manure for farming. Oatly, the oat milk brand that's disrupting the milk industry.

Then we have the Impossible burger. And that's a company that has found a way to make plant-based burgers smell and taste like the real deal. I want to leave you with this. What we believe as humans have changed and evolved any number of times throughout our history. The more we learn, the better decisions we can make. But this only works if we are willing to be curious enough to suspend our beliefs and stay in the question. We have precedent for being able to make a significant change for the better of our planet. We slowed the destruction of the ozone layer with the Montreal Protocol, for example, in 1987.

The Paris Climate Accord in 2015, has had a rocky fight for six years, with us pulling in and out of it. But we see that nations are recommitting, the global pandemic showed us that we can all slow down and even live with far less than we thought we could. This tells me we also have the ability to redesign the engines of growth. And think of it as much more than wealth in the form of physical capital, we can start to appreciate our natural capital and our social capital as well. The only limit we have in making this change a reality is our imagination. Whatever you believe you can do, believe we can all change and save the world. And we will. 

030 Future Talent

030 Future Talent

About this Episode

In this episode, we are going to be discussing future falent with an old friend of mine, Harry. It was such a pleasure to reconnect!

Harry Vargas is a dynamic HR leader and change agent.

He’s passionate about driving transformation for capacity building and growth, through commercially relevant and pragmatic organizational and talent strategies.

He has 20 Years of multi-market & cultural experience, successfully leading and developing diverse teams at local, regional and global levels.

Harry joined Microsoft in 2020, to lead HR and the culture & people transformational agenda, for the growing regional hub based in Costa Rica, serving LATAM and the US.

Harry is Costa Rican and grew up in Colombia.

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam  0:01  

Harry, welcome to Where Ideas Launch.

Harry Vargas  1:13  

Hi, Katherine. I am so happy to see you after a few years now. Thank you for having me.

Katherine Ann Byam  1:18  

It is really wonderful to have you on the show. Let me set the scene a bit. We have had about five years of digital transformation happen in one incredible year that has been 2020. And looking at the world stock markets, technology firms have significantly benefited from this upheaval whereas, traditional industries have suffered from the decline in overall spending and the closure of retail. The impact on jobs has been significant but buffered by state assistance in many places. And many more people are now in what we could describe as the hustle economy. My first question for you is how did these changes affect traditional organisations from your background; and how do you think they can effectively respond?

Harry Vargas  2:01  

Sure, I think this is one of those things that when you get a real challenge, it brings an opportunity. And I think that is what has happened in this new environment. If you talk about digital transformation - I think in most companies, we have been talking about this for at least 10 years - every time it gets to the point where you have to prioritise the investments and put some money behind it, it doesn't get prioritised because there are other things before doing this. So in this new context that we live in, I think companies simply did not have an option to wait any longer. And started to rethink how to work around this.

That was for me, an opportunity, but at the same time, a huge challenge. So as you have seen, some companies have been able to move faster than others. But everyone is trying to do something about it. The other thing that I noticed is that at least over the last year, consumers adapted way faster to the digital environment than companies did because we didn't pretty much have a choice. And we have to adapt the way we do things in many aspects of life. So again, it was one more challenge and burning platform for companies to really do something about this and do it quickly.

Obviously, it had an impact on cultures and especially for more traditional organisations. We stop and rethink the way we do business, the way we engage with consumers and our employees inside the organisation so we can be faster and more agile. Agility is one of those terms that also we have been using for quite a while. But now, it is a must. You really have to be agile to adapt to everything we need to do differently. So the traditional ways of making decisions in companies were pretty much centralised or maybe too slow. That being said, they may even need to have specific space for innovation. We simply have to stop and do something different, and it impacts the culture. So I think that's the first thing I noticed.

Then, there was an impact also on rethinking what are the skills that we need, what sort of profiles we will need to bring into the organisation so that we have a more diverse way of looking at the opportunities in the market and understanding consumers. And again, diversity and inclusion and all of those things are not new. They have been around for years. But finally, we get organisations to see the imminent value of this and any matter of life or death. Sorry for being dramatic but now we are facing it.

 So I think it is very challenging. It puts every company in a situation where they have to simply change the way they are doing things and come up with a new picture of success, and different ways of doing business. Even for HR, I spend most of my time working on HR strategies and programs. And there were very similar conversations that we have had over the years in terms of having a more flexible working environment that is (maybe) more agile and may have an opportunity to integrate different technologies and be simply closer to people, acknowledging that we are not just working with machines.

And those were very complex conversations for things that today are so obvious, like remote working and those kinds of things. Again, many companies were discussing that for years and did not make any decisions around it. But simply, they did not have any choice any longer. I think, overall, we have faced a cultural shift in finally putting the consumer at the core and bringing this flexibility into the organisations to do whatever it takes to rethink and survive.

Katherine Ann Byam  6:26  

As you touched on it. I wanted to get into your thoughts on the implications of skills for organisations. So I know that you're sitting now from the perspective of Microsoft. And I am going to come to that for sure. But what are the implications on individual skill sets given that we have had so much transformation happening so quickly?

Harry Vargas  6:47  

I was reading a paper from the World Economic Forum on the future of jobs. If you put it simply quite cold, it is a world that has been split into these: essential workers, remote workers, and then the ones that have been, unfortunately, displaced. And if you look at the situation, what we have is a workplace that requires a good combination of some of the classic skills like leadership and good management - "the good old things," but now bringing in more agility and some more specific skills like data science, understanding of artificial intelligence, innovation, adaptability, remote leadership, managing hybrid teams, being more resilient, a full understanding of how teams need to be self-directed in this remote world, and the capacity to help your teams to connect virtually while still maintaining the cultural feeling even if we're not together physically.

So it's a good combination of some of the skills that we used to work around for the last few years but maybe with a lens that is more agile,  modern, and integrating technologies, and those sorts of things. If you look at the kind of jobs that will be more required in the future, all of them have to do with the facilitators of digital transformations, to begin with. People will have a lot to do with data analytics, data science, machine learning, learning expert specialists since all of that is changing. They are engineers, software developers, and information security. We have had many threats over the last few years.

You are seeing now what is happening. So those specific modern skills are the things that we are seeing. It obviously does not mean that now everyone has to know and be an expert around those things. At least, we need to be very aware of how to live in an environment that requires those skills, learn some of those skills and adapt to the new ways of working.

Katherine Ann Byam  9:22  

Yeah. I know that this one is gonna be an interesting question, I think, for my listeners. So we know that as we get older, the ability to learn new things and assimilate rapidly with ease sort of diminishes. That we can always be lifelong learners is obviously something that we can maintain throughout our lives. However, we know that we get slower. And as we get slower, things are accelerating. Right? The rate of change of technologies is way faster than anything we have ever known. What would you recommend for people in their mid-career stages, in managerial type roles who may be in their 40s or 50s who are either out of work or looking for new jobs? What would you recommend that they do? And how do they overcome the natural bias we might have to adult learners?

Harry Vargas  10:10  

Yes. That is an interesting question, a challenging and a very common one - I guess - in this particular time, with many of us trying to adapt and look for new things. I would say, maybe it sounds very simple. But I would start by looking around and assessing who my competition is in terms of talent. Because when you get to a point in which you are already a manager, middle manager, or have relevant experience, it’s good that you feel confident. But look around and see who your competitors are? What sort of skills do the other people have that you will be competing against to get those nice jobs? What do they have? What have they learned more recently - which of those skills that

I mentioned that they recently possessed that you still don't have because you can bring all of that experience which is great. And there must be a good balance in organisations with new talent. At once, that helps us navigate through changes with more experiences but we need to be realistic. We will be competing with those that have more naturally learned than our abilities. So once we assess who we are competing against, then we can prioritise where we need to go on and learn? And yes, maybe we will take some more time to learn a few things. But you really need to be very conscious and intentional about the two or three things that you need to acquire in the next 12 months. Then go and get them and reskill yourself quickly. I think this is the one thing that I would prioritise. 

The other one is the world of having good connections and good networking. Again, that is nothing new but what is new is that it is completely remote. Now, again, it's completely virtual. How do you keep a network that is serving you and that you can learn a lot from it? You can also get access to the opportunities that are around more than 70% of jobs that are open especially at the managerial level.

That the first time they open, they will do it just internally. And only when they have decided that they don't have an internal talent or they don't know someone from outside, they would open it as a vacancy, let's say. So the more connections you have, the higher the chances that you will at least have visibility of one of those opportunities. So connections more than ever, and being creative about getting those connections. Being active is the second point. And then the third, I would say be flexible. Many people have, and especially around the middle management of today, have probably built careers more traditionally. And it is simply different today. We don't even talk about careers per se anymore.

We talk about skills and we talk about experiences. And we talk about, you know, the type of very specific needs that our company has. And then what is the profile that we will bring but we don't bring any more traditional careers, let's say for the new jobs. So you have to be flexible and then assess again - what are the skills that I have? And where do I fit in the new opportunities that might be around? And that flexibility will help in bringing more opportunities in opening up conversations and being flexible about everything. So I think this is one of those concrete things that you could do.

Katherine Ann Byam  14:05  

I had an interesting conversation on this podcast as well with someone who's looking into learning futures. And one of the things that he said was that purpose is sort of akin to attention and where the purpose is, attention goes. And I reflected on this in terms of as organisations start to introduce things like ESG and get more alignment to bigger goals that are not just about stakeholder wealth and the impact this could have on people's ability to learn and assimilate faster. I don't know if you have any reflections on that. I thought it was an interesting way to put it.

Harry Vargas  14:40  

Yes. I think learning faster, as you said, is one of those things that are a must today. And it starts with being humble. If I've learned one thing over the last couple of years it is how can I be more humble in terms of asking “how much I have to learn?” And then that opens up great opportunities for you to, first of all,  feel better because you no longer feel like you know everything because you've been around for 20 years or whatever. And it even brings self-motivation. I mean there's a lot I can do differently and of course, that I can learn. Again, it goes back to these abilities that you need today. Because even if you go and learn one of the most in-fashion skills of today, maybe in 18 months, there will be something else for sure that you will have to learn. So it just has to be continuous. We got to get good at it.

Katherine Ann Byam  15:45  

Yeah. I heard another quote that said, “Typically in the past, we have been able to maintain competitive advantage within eight years or so. But now that competitive advantage has shrunk to one year” which is why the acceleration of learning puts a lot of implications on the workforce. So I want to move to potentially the last question. When we look at the future workplace in three to five years, I potentially see a blended workplace - machines and people. What are your thoughts on managing in such an environment? And what does it actually mean?

Harry Vargas  16:26  

Yes. Hybrid work - that is one of those challenges that companies are discussing every day that passes. We see it closer. Last year, there were lots of conversations that the world is turning hybrid in terms of working. We are there almost depending on the region you live in. But it is a challenge. I think, first of all, it does not mean that machines will take over human value. Right? Because that is one of the big fears around is that machines and artificial intelligence, and all that it will eliminate all the jobs, that there will be replacements.

There will be some evolution on that side; but the value of human knowledge and agility to learn and make things better, etc. will always remain. So I think, a good manager would make the best use of the skills that he or she has to add value to the processes that they are dealing with and to make it challenging for people at the same time; so that they understand that they need to keep on learning, rescaling and acquiring these new abilities. That is one thing. The other thing that I think is even bigger than that is that it's a challenge for companies and obviously for managers. You talk about purpose earlier. No matter what sort of jobs they end up in, having a purpose, more than ever, is one of those things that people are seeing or valuing as the thing that will move, engage, or keep them.

So companies are very clear in articulating what their legacy is and what their purpose is. But as an individual, when you come in, what you will be able to do with that is an advantage that we have been talking about - the quality of life and fulfilment of the work you do for years, and these sorts of things. But now again, it is more important than ever because people are prioritising differently what they value and what they want to dedicate their energy and time to. So in this future workplace, hybrid or not. people will ask -

“Where can I get the best experience?" 

"Where can I balance my life in a better way?" 

"Where can I learn more?" 

"Where can I have the flexibility to do different activities and jobs and not have to wait five-eight years to do something different?" 

And then organisations are rethinking:

“How to do this?"

"How do we manage careers differently?

"How do we plan for talent management differently?"

And everyone is learning at the same time - companies and people. So I think it is a challenging environment. It has already started. The companies that are more likely to succeed are those that are listening actively to understand. “Okay, what are the new things that people value and therefore we need to adapt?” Inside the company, you cannot force people any longer just to wait and see what the company will do now. They will have many options somewhere else, and you have to be prepared for that.

Katherine Ann Byam  20:02  

This one has to do with probably the health and well-being aspect because we kind of touched on it last year. I think that we are in a situation where all of these accelerations, as well as the general wear and tear of the pandemic, create a lot of mental health and anxiety issues that are increasing as we go. How are organisations responding to that?

Harry Vargas  20:27  

Yes, that is one of the priorities. At the moment, it has been a year, at least, for most people in this situation. In the beginning, it was more around basic things like learning to work remotely or virtually like learning to manage your time and tasks and all of that. But after a long period of time, people got burned out.

Then, we are also lacking in social contact not only with families and loved ones; but also with the things that we used to (maybe) take for granted when we were in the office like interactions, collaboration, faster decision-making, less complexity when dealing with issues that would involve people from various areas and those sorts of things; or simply having a conversation in the water cooler with someone, just talking about something else that is not about work. So people need that, and organisations have been focusing more on the good ones like - Let us first learn what people need at the moment but let us also respect their space.

In an ideal world, a great company would come up with a menu of things it can offer - wellness activities, meditation, physical exercise options, or simply additional days off to disconnect and recharge, or get in and learn something new. There are a number of things that have to do with mental health, physical health, learning different things, and simply getting out of the current environment. But there is also the option for you to choose whatever you want whenever you feel the need. So the combination of having various options and also letting people deal with it in their private space whilst having the support of the company. Behind this, I think, is a good balance because at the beginning it was very much programmed. "So now, everybody is gonna come on Fridays for yoga." Those things were nice at the beginning but now people are just tired of it. 

“So just give me my space. Give me the options and I will do whatever whenever I need it.” So that is something we are learning from the technologies. It is supporting a lot of those things. Thank God! We can still have that yoga meditation or cooking lessons or whatever it is you like. Virtually, it has not been a restriction of a year in that sense, but the variety of it and how you keep it creative is one of the challenges we are facing. 

Katherine Ann Byam  23:28  

For sure. Harry, thank you so much for your time. This has been a wonderful session. 

012 Managing Learning & Change

012 Managing Learning & Change

About this Episode

I met Nicole during a women tech workshop, and later joined her Women in Stem Reimagined Course as a guest Speaker. I interviewed her as part of my courageous career show, and decided to share her advice on my podcast as well.

We talked about:

Dr Nicole Tschierske is a scientist and positive psychology coach who helps women in science and tech use their heads and heart to get seen and noticed in their company. She's an experienced change manager and coach, and we are going to be talking about her experiences and learnings on the change journey.

Nicole lives in Hamburg, Germany, is a food chemist by training and holds a PhD in chemistry next to certifications in coaching, positive psychology, change management and advanced problem-solving.

When she’s not buried in research papers and books on Positive Psychology and Positive Leadership you can find this scientist-turned-coach taking long hikes in the German countryside or mesmerised by Mary Poppins on the screen.

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam  0:05  

Welcome, Nicole.

Nicole Tschierske  1:19  

Hi Katherine.

Katherine Ann Byam  1:21  

So you are a food chemist? How does a food chemist find her way into people and change?

Nicole Tschierske  1:27  

Yeah, it takes a crisis. So I was working in product innovation as my first job or the first years of my career in the industry. And then as it is, within those big companies, sometimes there's a merger. Then it takes quite a while to reorganise and resetle things. So what affected me was experiencing change, or the impact of it firsthand, and ending up or being put on hold for quite a few months. And I had hardly anything to do because they were sorting out things and discussing and trying to agree on how to move forward. I like working, not working was really, really horrible.

So that led me to seek out a coach to help me get out of this energy slump. And then within a few sessions, he had me all going up again and pursuing new pathways and so on. And so how did he do this, I want to be able to do that too, for people. And that's when I then started coaching, training, and getting into all this kind of space. And then as luck would have it, the opportunity arose within the company to lead the change management workstream for a big business transformation project. And it's like I have this newfound passion and destined opportunity. I know the team is great. And so I jumped right in.

Katherine Ann Byam  3:03  

Well, that's amazing. And how have you transitioned this change management work? In this time of remote working? How has that worked for you?

Nicole Tschierske  3:15  

So basically, I started in the role before COVID happened. So there was a lot of travelling involved, going places, meeting people doing training in person, having those types of conversation, and this engagement and working with the team in meeting rooms and all that. So the way you would think about project work. And then we couldn't travel anymore.

And what has changed is really the level of intention needs to be a different one. So really, what are we doing? So being really more focused and prepared and being mindful also of what's going on? And being mindful of what we don't see that's going on? So there's a lot more checking in. So the mechanics of it are fairly simple. You just sit on the same chair every day and dial into different types of meetings, but the intentionality needs to be different. But I'm happy to report that the team found a way of working and probably having become so cohesive beforehand, through all this great collaboration.

But this really took it up a notch, so we really stood even closer together. And we're just really very intentional and conscious about how we interact and how we run the project in different phases. So it worked out fine so far.

Katherine Ann Byam  4:56  

No, that's brilliant. And what skills do you consider to be the most important for employees in large organisations, given what's happened with COVID, given the kind of inflection point that we're in right now? What skills do you think are the most important that people should be focusing on now?

Nicole Tschierske  5:14  

So three things for me. And there is no particular order, I find them all equally important. So one is learning - learning not just in the sense of taking part in a training or reading a manual or textbook but actually learning from life and from what's happening. And not just every half a year when you do lessons learned or review or something, but on the go. Having these heartbeat retrospectives every week, asking yourself, what's working? What are we going to change? And then really learning on the fly, so to speak. So that's one. And by that, also always being able to get ready for what's next because we noticed this.

And this kind of prepares you for change properly. Second one is emotional intelligence. And I know sometimes the big buzzword, but really knowing how to stick with data, not drama. And just knowing how to navigate uncertainty, taking a step forward, and taking decisions even though everything is volatile and ambiguous. If we want to use those words. It is just a reality and you need to learn how to cope with this; not only how to cope with it,  but how to still excel in those types of environments and make progress.

 And so that's emotional intelligence. And the third one is relational intelligence. So building relationships, connecting with people and having those. Even now that we are missing being in one room, having almost feeling the social fabric, we have to put so much more effort into creating our relationships and maintaining them because that is what's needed to really be affected and get anything done.

Katherine Ann Byam  7:21  

Yeah, I think you've raised three very interesting points. And on the point about learning, there's an element of experiential learning, I guess, that we need to bring out. But how would you recommend people get into that experiential learning? Because, if I think back, maybe some of the ways that people did this in the past would be to take a gap year, for example. So before you even get into the job, you take a gap year, you tour the world, and you experience different cultures, and that already gives you something new, right? Something experiential, how would you recommend people go about bringing an experiential element into their learning journeys?

Nicole Tschierske  7:59  

One thing is learning from the things that you do every day. It's something that I established with,  let's say you implemented a change, and then you still need to ramp up phase and stabilise it, and really embed it in the ways of working. And so what I then do with those teams that just went through this is go live implementation phase, to really have a monthly learning loop session where we just pause and just reflect on. "Okay, what's really going on? What have we achieved in the past months? What are the gaps that we're having." - so being intentional about learning from the experiences that I make every day in my job. 

But what you mentioned about creating other experiences for ourselves, I'm pretty sure there are a lot more projects going on in everybody's company once they touch your own role. And so maybe there's an opportunity for that, for you there to volunteer. Maybe there's an environmental working group, or diversity and inclusion versus working group or whatever. People create stuff all of the time. So you can find those types of projects that are outside of your role where you can engage.

Katherine Ann Byam  9:21  

What are your best three tips for approaching a transformation? So getting into big scale transformations, what are your best three tips?

Nicole Tschierske  9:30  

Actually thinking about it - it's not so much. The strategy is really how you set yourself up. So one thing is, from a company perspective - allowing the resources to take care of the change management and having a dedicated change manager is very good.  It's a perfect point to start - so you have someone who can operate and orchestrate the whole people's side of change. But having just one person managing change for 500,000 people that are impacted is just not sufficient. So all of your project team members, all of your subject matter experts, all of your line leaders, they all need to play a role within change.

And for those that are heavily involved in driving the project for what I think at least 20%, allowing for them to spend on really just engaging and taking the rest of the organisation with them. That would be a good place to start. So that is one thing -  allowing the resources. The second thing is really integrating change management and project management. You may have two different people doing this but the activities and the tasks need to be in one plan. You cannot have a plan here and the other plan here.

They should be combined in one so nothing falls through the cracks. And the third point is increasing your organization's capacity for change to upskill people, both leaders and frontline employees, to know how to go through change successfully and how to implement it because when you ask something from someone, I'm always a fan of giving them the tools to be able to meet those requirements.

Katherine Ann Byam  11:19  

Absolutely. Really good points and thank you for that. Can you talk about your bigger vision for women in tech? So I know this is an area of passion for you. You know, and you've you've transcended tech, and you've taken your skills to another level in terms of that organisation playing field that you have now. Tell me about your vision for women?

Nicole Tschierske  11:38  

Yeah, so I'm going to cheat a little bit. I'm going to say it's my vision for everyone who is an employee, or who works for a living. I work mainly with women in the STEM fields, because I can relate most to them, because it's my own background. And our brains are sort of wired in the same way.

But really, my vision for workplaces in general is that just people can thrive and have an opportunity to be their best at work and really enjoy going there every day because I don't know how you feel but if we have to work over four decades, we better have some fun doing it. And so that's really important for me and in creating those environments, and showing people how to really step up and be there and seize opportunities, but also providing those opportunities equally for everyone. I just would love to see things going that way.

Katherine Ann Byam  12:39  

I agree with you. This is one of the reasons the show is called the way it's called, right? This idea of transcending work is something that I've fallen in love with simply because it no longer means work? So if you want to bring yourself to doing something that aligns to your purpose, that you feel a more intrinsic joy from rather than the extrinsic rewards that you get. This for me means so much.

And we have a comment from Joe. “Change Management is often seen as the nice to have on projects. What's your approach to companies that take this view? How do you get them onboard and see the benefits of proper change management as part of transformation?” Excellent question.

Nicole Tschierske  13:21  

So Katherine, I know you have an opinion on this as well as you'd like me to go first. So when you speak to companies about this, they always think about finance, finance, and finance. So I always bring it back to - change management can really help you given that the technical solution you provide is the same proper quality. But change management can really help you increase that return on investment or even get this return on investment. Because no perfect system or great process will do you any good if there's no people out there who are willing to use it and use it in the way it was intended.

And so that is one thing, maximising return on investment, and the other bit is really minimising the disruption to the business during the transition phase. So because change creates upheaval wherever you go. Things won't go as smoothly as before, and that's natural, and it's normal. But how can you then accompany and enable the organisation to go through this so it doesn't have customer impact?

Katherine Ann Byam 14:40  

Yes, I agree. I would probably add that the pace of change now is no longer human scale? So it's accelerated beyond our ability to cope naturally with it. And therefore, this is why you need that extra support? You need to bring people along in the journey. And you know, they say that most people are actually aversive to change? They don't want to step into change. And now we are accelerating so many things.

The shift to remote work was supposed to happen three years from now. We've all got pushed into it while being pushed out of walking on the streets and having things that are normal. So you really need to hold people's hands through this journey. So this is part of the process. And without it, you don't have an engaged workforce and what you really want, is the point we spoke about before, is people brought into a greater journey, a greater and bigger picture. What do you hope for a new beginning in 2021? Difficult question. 

Nicole Tschierske  15:52  

2021. Well, I think we all had a really great reality check this year. This year it feels like so much has happened. It could fill a decade. You have the bushfires in Australia in the beginning. Then somehow, COVID hit. Then there were all of the racial injustice topics in the US and all over the world. And we have all of the crazy elections. And I'm not even talking about the U.S., but also Belarus.

And also there are many, many things happening all over the world. And it's just looking around and say, "Man, this is a real reality check," and I hope for many of us a wake up call to pay attention to how we treat each other, how we treat our planet, and to make not a small New Year's resolutions, but actually starting to change the way we live and how we conduct ourselves on this planet, to create a world that can sustain peaceful living for everyone.

Katherine Ann Byam  17:09  

I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much for your thoughts and for your generous sharing, and thanks for joining the show.

Nicole Tschierske  17:16  

Thanks for inviting me, Katherine. I always love talking to you. 

Katherine Ann Byam  17:20  

Alright, see you all next week. Take care. 

011 Fresher Food Fitter Planet

011 Fresher Food Fitter Planet

About this Episode

I discovered Mathilde on another show and had to get to meet her, as her story and business was so inspiring to me.

We talked about Fresh.Land and how the idea for her sustainable business came about.

How she overcame challenges in the start up process

Advice for others wanting to make a positive impact on the planet.

Mathilde Jakobsen is CEO and Co-Founder of Fresh.Land, an award winning green tech startup with an innovative and disruptive model to the food industry.

The company shortens the journey from farm to table by connecting farmers, logistic partners and consumers in one integrated digital platform. With Fresh.Land's just-in-time model, instead of months, it takes just a few days from harvest to delivery. By cutting out 3-5 middlemen, farmers secure 20-50% more value and consumers get fresher, tastier products.

The model has a lower carbon footprint compared to that of the conventional chain — 88% lower, according to a study by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) — as it eliminated the need for cold-storage and ripening chambers, which are large greenhouse gas emitters.

Fresh.Land has been identified by Forbes as "truly pioneering" and "one of the most promising green start-ups in the EU", and awarded the "Climate Solver Prize" by WWF. We thrive to be the lighthouse of the food industry, setting new standards and leading the way for green transition. In Fresh.Land the trees and fields are our "natural warehouse" and products are only harvested after the order is placed by the consumer.

Our model disrupts the giant old food industry that has long been ripe for disruption.

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam  0:02  

Welcome Mathilde!.

Mathilde Jakobsen  1:33  

Thank you. I'm really happy to be here today.

Katherine Ann Byam  1:35  

Thanks for joining me. So I'm inspired by your work. And I'm sure my listeners would like to know what prompted this idea and how did you bring it to life?

Mathilde Jakobsen  1:45  

So it's very interesting because when we started out, the intent was not actually to do a platform, it was more a small hoppy project where we were trying to help Filipe’s dad who is an orange farmer. And the thing was that he was struggling to sell his oranges every single year to the middlemen, because the middlemen always wanted to pay a lower and a lower price. And they were criticising his oranges saying, "Oh, they are tasteless, they're imperfect," and so on, instead of actually appreciating them for what they are. So we started exploring opportunities for him to cut the middleman and go straight to the supermarket.

And that's actually how the idea started. Now, what we saw was that a lot of other producers like avocado producers, tomato producers, they had similar challenges with that business. And, we saw the new generation of farmers, which Filipe represented, not willing to go into farming, because there was no future in farming in that perspective. So we were kind of thinking, Okay, how do we make sure that our food system can survive? We need to invest in the farmers, we need to give them better opportunities.

 And that's kind of how the idea to Fresh.Land came along. And then the other side of the coin is that Fresh.Land actually brings the products so fresh from the farmer to the consumer that you don't need all the chemical treatment you normally would have. And this has huge benefits in terms of, like what you're saying, the health of the fruits and the taste of the fruits, because they are fresh. So when they come four days from harvest, it's really a whole different product and the product you normally find in the supermarket.

Mathilde Jakobsen

 3:29  

Yeah. Now it's really fascinating because if you think about the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, you're able to hit several of them with this one idea. In what ways is it special and sustainable in your view? Can you express exactly how you do it?

Mathilde Jakobsen   3:44  

So what we're doing first is really kind of re-engineering the food system. So where a normal orange would have to go through three to five middlemen and be on his way to the shop. In Fresh.Land, we get straight from the tree to the final consumer - no warehouse, no cold storage, no ripening chambers.

 And this is actually quite interesting because 72% of all carbon emission in the food industry is happening post harvest. So we can reduce that journey and reduce the time the fruits and vegetables have to lay in cold storage and in ripening chambers. We can actually cut almost that entire emission. It's not the transportation that is the biggest issue, it's actually the storage. So by eating fresh products, we can really have a significant impact on the carbon emission in the food industry. And that's what we're doing with Fresh.Land.

We are selling the fruits in the season that is right now on the trees growing on the fields and bringing that straight from the farmer to the consumer. That has huge environmental benefits and it also significantly reduces food waste because it just comes fresher and we are less picky about quality because for us, even an ugly tomato is a good tomato. It's about the substance. In FreshLand, and we didn't want to, we rethink the food supply chain and bring both a more sustainable food supply chain, but also more equitable bringing more value back to the farmer.

Katherine Ann Byam  5:13  

So tell me a little bit about how politics has been in terms of shaping this idea? Have you met a lot of opposition?

Mathilde Jakobsen  5:23  

Oh, yes. So when we started out, actually, one of the first experiences we had was that the middlemen that our farmer stopped working with, they basically took advantage of them having access to the farm. So they went there on the weekend when no one was there. And they picked all the unripe lemons. And this basically meant that our farmer couldn't sell lemons for the next half year, because all the new fruits that were supposed to grow and be ready to sell in half year time, were basically harvested too early.

Mathilde Jakobsen  5:53  

Oh, my goodness, well,

Mathilde Jakobsen  5:55  

And we saw similar actions taken on the middlemen side closer to the final consumer. So when we received the products in Denmark, we didn't understand how come our products are all the time disappearing, how come that the palletes, we are shipping, they are going to the green market in Denmark. But then our logistic partner tells us that somehow they've disappeared, and then they appear again a week later. And what we then found out was that our logistic partner, he subcontracted to one of the big middlemen in Denmark. And they didn't want us to bring the products fresh because it was competing with their business. So they purposely delayed the shipment. So it only would arrive One week later, and thereby not be as fresh as we were promising.

Katherine Ann Byam  6:39  

How have you overcome these challenges?

Mathilde Jakobsen  6:42  

So I think it's about being persevering, so when you have all these challenges against you and you somehow find strength in that because you think it cannot really be true. It cannot be true that a farmer cannot sell his fruits and actually make a living from it. It cannot be true that we cannot get the products fresh out to the consumer because someone is interfering in the process. So we just continued and continued and tried on the way to do small fine-tuning and adjustments. And somehow it has worked.

What we saw in our business is that when we were selling B2B. Of course, it made a huge difference both for the farmer and for the consumer in terms of a fair payment and the taste, and so on. But we still didn't solve the last bit of that puzzle, which was to make sure that from the supermarket, it would also get fresh out to the consumer. So last year in August, we actually changed our business a bit. So instead of focusing mostly on B2B, we also launched a B2C business. And that has been very successful and very good timing in terms of COVID. Because then, when COVID actually hit, we have been able to elevate and help a lot of Danish farmers that used to sell B2B but lost the sales due to COVID. And now they are making a success selling B2C.

Katherine Ann Byam  8:09  

Well, so how long have you been around?

Unknown Speaker  8:12  

So we started out in 2015. Back then it was a B2B business mostly. And then we have been steadily growing year after year. And then we launched our B2C as a focus area in August last year. And that is the majority of our business today.

Katherine Ann Byam  8:32  

Well, and I can imagine that this is also encouraging younger people to get into agriculture. Now what have you seen in the markets that you're in?

Mathilde Jakobsen  8:43  

So what we've seen is that especially the small and medium sized farmers, which are often young agriculturists, as they are lacking a sales channel, they're subject to these middlemen that only value price. And the way they have somehow found an alternative has been selling to restaurant business. But during COVID, the restaurant business has closed down and they have really been left on their own. So in that sense, it has been really, really a great success for them to have Fresh.Land as a platform where they could suddenly sell business to consumers. And that has allowed them to sell between 80 to 100% of their production.

We had a farmer doing mushrooms. And he called us saying he had 200 kilos of mushrooms that was going to waste and he said, Can you help me? And at that time, we had kind of closed our sales cycle for the week. But we then sent out a message to everyone that had ordered and said would you like to also order some mushrooms. And within two hours, we sold the 200 kilos of mushrooms to the existing orders that were already in the system. And this just made him so happy. But it was important for us at the same time that we were not just doing a fine sale but actually building a sustainable business for him.

So he would also want to continue after COVID. Now this farmer is selling 100% of his production. And we have advanced paid him so he could invest in a new vertical farm where he can double his production. So when the restaurant business is actually opening up again, he will be able to supply both his B2C  customers and his restaurant customers. So this is like a true success story that instead of actually having to rely on these help packages, this farmer actually managed to double his production during COVID.

Katherine Ann Byam  10:31  

This is really impressive. And I think a lot of my listeners will be super fascinated by the story. Can you tell us a bit about how you built the resourcing that you needed to do this? Did you go initially through bootstrapping? Did you go straight to VCs? How did you manage that resource build?

Mathilde Jakobsen  10:48  

So it's really about being resourceful with your time. So in the beginning, you do everything yourself, and you learn to do things you never thought were possible. Like, my worst subject in school was accounting, for instance. And I just learned how to do accounting because there was no way around it. We couldn't afford hiring an accountant to begin with. So in this sense, you realise that your capacity is way beyond your thoughts.

So actually, this is a huge boost of self esteem, I would say because you realise you're so capable as an individual. And then of course, in the beginning, you have to somehow get the people you can onboard. You're not so attractive, because you are a small startup, and people don't really believe in you. But I think now we have moved to this scale up phase, where we were Fresth.Land is really the hot startup in the environment here in Copenhagen.

And we're seeing a lot of interest from investors, we see a lot of interest from applicants with the job post we have open right now we received more than 2000 applicants for the open positions. So it's really kind of a different ballgame now, where we have proven we can be a success. A lot of people are coming to us and want to take part in this success. 

Katherine Ann Byam  12:07  

Yes, it's really encouraging. And my final question to you is what advice would you give to young sustainable intrapreneurs? I currently lead a group of 650 female sustainable business owners, what advice would you give them?

Mathilde Jakobsen  12:25  

So one piece of advice - that's difficult, but I will try to compress it. First of all, I think it's really important that you believe in yourself, you believe in your intuition, and you believe in your ideas because belief can move mountains. So what I mean about this is that when Fresh.Land started out, no one believed we could do a kind of a food tech platform without owning big assets and trucks and warehouses and bringing fruits just in time, no one believed in that. But what we have done is basically proving them wrong.

Because if there's any theoretical possibility, it is possible. You just have to insist and insist and insist. And I believe that perseverance is the strongest predictor of success. It is not your skills, your abilities, your network and so on. It is your perseverance, because if you don't let anyone bring you down, you will eventually succeed. So that would be my recommendation, continue and don't let anything come in your way.

Katherine Ann Byam  13:27  

Thank you so much, Mathilde. This was a lovely session. Thanks for joining the podcast.

Mathilde Jakobsen  13:32  

Thanks.