John Elkington is an internationally recognized authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development, bestselling author, and serial entrepreneur. He currently serves as Chief Pollinator at Volans, a future-focused business working at the intersection of the sustainability, entrepreneurship, and innovation movements. Today, John joins Ross and Paul to discuss his most recent book, Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, we’re trying something new with this episode. Our conversation with John Elkington got a bit spirited. We asked why regenerative capitalism — why not just get rid of capitalism? We want to continue the conversation on Twitter. I’m sure many of you listening have strong opinions about this. You can tweet at @volansjohn — V-O-L-A-N-S-J-O-H-N — and at @nori — N-O-R-I — your thoughts, and you’ll be entered to win a copy of his latest book, Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism. Instructions are at the top of the show notes in your podcast app, at least until the contest ends, which I think will be before the next episode comes out. So you have about five days, but don’t wait too long. Listen to the episode and let us know what you think. Thanks so much.
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Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, I’m here with another Nori-naut, Paul Gambill. Thanks for being here, Paul.
Paul Gambill: Hello.
Ross Kenyon: We have another Reversing Climate Change alumnus on. He just wrote another book — which, John, you’ve got to stop writing books. How many is this?
John Elkington: Yes, like 20-something. This is 20 so far, [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: Wow. That’s John Elkington, founder and chief pollinator of Volans, author of many books, of triple bottom line fame. So much. John, I think you’ve been behind the scenes at basically every company anyone has ever heard of, nudging them along, trying to get them to be sustainable. Is that an okay summation of your work?
John Elkington: That sounds like propaganda to me, Ross. Wonderful to be back in touch with the Nori-nauts — I can never get quite enough of you all. I have worked with a lot of companies, it’s certainly true, but they are a tiny, tiny fraction of the total universe of corporations worldwide, and they tend to be self-selected. They tend to be people who are generally trying to change the way they think and the way that they operate. I mean, they always hit barriers along the way, but that’s part of what makes life interesting.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, absolutely. And there’s the new book, Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism. That’s great. Paul and I both read it. We’re always very interested in your thoughts for how companies are thinking, what’s happening in boardrooms. Clearly companies see that climate change and many other looming catastrophes are bearing down on their companies, and are trying to figure out what to do. And then you wrote this book as a way of hopefully showing them some of the ideas you have for where they might go. So what is the book about? What are you trying to communicate with it?
John Elkington: But I think we probably ought to distinguish right from the start between the COVID-19 world and the pre-COVID-19 world. The book was written substantially before COVID-19 emerged as a pandemic — so the last writing was probably done in December of last year — but the book is basically predicting a world in which, and we use the phrase “exponential decade” for the 2020s, a period of our collective history where all sorts of things start to go much faster and in much stranger directions than we’ve been used to.
And so the notion of green swans obviously riffs off the thinking and work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and indeed his book — he’s done many books, but The Black Swan came out early in 2007, just before the financial crash of 2007 to 2009 happened. And for him, he’s very careful to distinguish what he means by a black swan, as you know, and there are three characteristics that he spotlights. The first one is these things were not expected, they come out of the blue. The second is that they have an off-the-scale, greater impact than most of us are used to. And then third, sadly, after they’ve happened, after they’re sort of waning in our everyday reality, we try and understand what’s just happened to us, but we misunderstand, and therefore we actually set ourselves up for failure.
And Taleb himself has been saying COVID-19 is not a black swan, in the sense that everyone — [unclear] — was talking about pandemic risk being the number one challenge governments face for some considerable time. And the U.S. shut down its White House [unclear], and then, you know, the UK government did something very similar a few years back. So not a black swan, perhaps, but the idea of a black swan was where I kicked off from.
And I’m very happy to go through the green swan idea, but in the simplest terms it’s basically making the point that most black swans take us exponentially in directions that we do not want to go in, to places we really don’t want to be. And the question that the book raises is: are there exponentially positive trajectories that we might follow? And that’s the green swan notion. The simple answer, again, is yes, there are, but people aren’t seeing them very clearly as yet.
Ross Kenyon: In your book, you also introduced a couple of other colored swans, including a gray swan and a white swan. So this seems like a riff off of that. How would you define those?
John Elkington: Well, I think — I think enough already in terms of bad metaphors. And I want to — people have said it’s not only swans, it’s an ugly duckling notion in there, mixed into the stew, into the recipe as well. But black swans came from Nassim Nicholas Taleb after the 2007 to 2009 crash and the contained depression that followed that. And then in some countries and economies, people in the financial sector started to talk about gray swans, which hadn’t had the first, but had the second and third characteristics that Taleb identified. I mean, massive impact and not well understood afterwards, but were predicted, were foreseen in some way. So that’s the idea of a gray swan.
I think there are various different interpretations out there of what a white swan might be, but if you imagine a whiteboard — that for me is what a white swan is. It’s almost a template, it’s a format which can be filled in various different ways, but its characteristic is anything that goes, anything that sort of gets dragged and dropped into it — it could be a technology, could be a business model, it could be a mindset — it goes exponential. So that for me is the white swan.
And then the green swan: nothing is guaranteed to be 100% positive, and one of the things I say in the book is that black swans sometimes have green feathers. So for example, you look at the COVID-19 pandemic and air quality improvement, the canals now crystal clean in Venice, people able to breathe air in a way that they weren’t easily [unclear] for all of us. That’s a green feather on what we might still characterize as some sort of black swan. And equally, green swans have their own black feathers.
So for example, you know, a green swan trajectory is the extraordinary fall in the market prices for renewable energy, renewable-source electricity. But a black feather on that particular green swan might be the fact that now that some of the windmills — first and second generation windmills — are coming to the end of their useful life, we haven’t a clue as to what to do with the rotors. We are ending up with landfill sites because we don’t know how to recycle them. Well, we should have thought about that earlier, but it’s a complicated game. But I think what I’m trying to do is to say there’s bad stuff out there, there’s good stuff there. Let’s try and move the needle towards the second of those.
Ross Kenyon: John, I want to finish unpacking your title too. This is good, we’re setting the nice groundwork here for all this definitional stuff that we’re doing. What is regenerative capitalism? And by the way, I must imagine that a title like this, which is broadly a movement, is provocative. I can imagine people on the left maybe being suspicious that capitalism can actually be regenerative. I imagine someone on the right might be — this might sound a little touchy-feely or kind of hippie for them. Do you find that you’re able to make friends with this approach? Is this movement broadly seeing some success?
John Elkington: Well, I think in a way what I’ve done throughout my working life is provoke — not always, not always intentionally. And it happens that I’ve used the green language for quite some time. So I did a book called The Green Capitalists back in 1987, and The Green Consumer Guide with my colleague Julia Hailes in 1988. And there were many people at that time who basically said, how dare you put green together with capitalism, or consumerism or whatever. And we can get into the specifics of that, but I feel that unless and until the broad social change movements engage with markets and with business, and try and change the rules of the commercial game, a lot of this will run away from them and they won’t have the impact that they wanted.
So, but yes, I think there is a regeneration movement. There are people who have been looking at permaculture and local community solutions to the big sustainability challenges, and there are many purists — I happen to like most of them and do not want to do violence to their approach — but our message is again putting two slightly contrasted concepts together and saying capitalism by its very nature is parasitic, and whether we like it or not, it’s very often destructive. It’s a story of decreasing returns, not just economically but environmentally and so on as well.
So the question is: could you retune, could you reprogram key parts of capitalism in such a way that you got not just responsible behavior by certain key actors, but less bad behavior by a lot of others, but where you progressively move from responsibility to trying to work on resilience in economic, social and environmental systems? And the best way of doing that longer term is to regenerate. It’s to regenerate the biosphere, it’s to regenerate our forests and soils and oceans, it’s regenerating our communities and our societies. And as part of that, we absolutely have no choice but to regenerate economies. I think that’s coming anyway. All I’m trying to do is sort of map the territory.
Paul Gambill: John, you address something in the book that I find myself constantly kind of questioning my own beliefs on and vacillating back and forth on, which is something you were alluding to around, like, the importance of bringing capitalist structures into this regeneration. And in your book you referred to the trial, I think, that New York State had brought against Exxon for pushing the story that fossil fuels are not bad for climate change. Like, how do you hold these things in balance? Like, what is the right amount of accountability that these past actions should be held to by these organizations, versus, like, on the other hand, the oil industry is probably the most well suited to actually be leading some green swan movements in terms of cleaner energy, of course, and even direct air capture from the atmosphere. So how do you balance those things?
John Elkington: With some difficulty at times. And it’s certainly true that a tiny group of major oil companies are starting to declare some pretty ambitious targets around decarbonization, so BP first and then Shell have gone for net zero carbon emissions by 2050. And, you know, I think that’s certainly a bit to be welcomed. But fundamentally, I do not trust incumbents in old economic orders that are starting to be torn apart by new realities. I think the instinct of those sorts of industries, those sorts of companies — with no disrespect to reptiles — is reptilian, that it’s defensive. It tries to undermine the opposition.
And in the case of ExxonMobil, it’s not a grudge match exactly, but I do remember — I mention in the book — an event that I spoke at quite some years ago now, when Rex Tillerson was still CEO of ExxonMobil, and I was on the stage talking about the corruption of the political process by Exxon in particular, as part of that ExxonMobil group. And Rex Tillerson strode into the back of the room with his entourage and started to howl at me from the back of the room saying, you know, that’s a goddamn lie, that they’d never done anything of the sort. A few weeks later the evidence started to come out into the public domain. The New York court case was an example of that. As far as I understand it, that case failed, but it doesn’t mean that the underlying allegations are not true. I believe they’re not only true but have already been demonstrated.
Ross Kenyon: John, why the focus on trying to make capitalism regenerative? Surely people ask you, why not just get rid of capitalism, saying it’s less and less popular by the day. Why are we trying to save it?
John Elkington: Yeah, well, two things. One is, as a health warning, I studied — I went to university first time round to study economics, and I gave it up in 1968 after one year because it seemed to have nothing to do with what was going on in the wider world. So I am not an economics genius, and I know at times I regret it, but I didn’t stick with the discipline. That said, I think it’s changing enormously. You’ve got very different types of economist coming up, some of them older, like Minsky, who haven’t been listened to appropriately, some of them newer, like Kate Raworth or Mariana Mazzucato. I think it’s a very exciting time potentially in economics. I think we’ve got to reboot, reset, refresh economics as the master discipline of capitalism.
But why capitalism, as you say? Why don’t we just sort of flush it down the drain of history? And I think, you know, capitalism is a very specific definition of certain types of market activity. We will not get rid of market activities — you know, for thousands of years people, communities, nations, empires have traded, and I don’t think that’s going to change. I think we happen to have invented a system of capitalism which is pretty myopic, very short-sighted and very self-serving. So, you know, when the Business Roundtable, the 180-plus CEOs, say they want to shift from the shareholder model of capitalism to a stakeholder model, well, I clearly support the intent, but I’m not sure that these people properly understand what that will involve over time. But I don’t think we can throw away capitalism. I think we have to reform it, but for that to happen, governments, policymakers, regulators have got to get very much more actively involved in shaping markets and economic outcomes.
Paul Gambill: I really liked — there were several points in the book where you were sort of kind of weaving between, like, the public sphere when it comes to capitalism, but also when it comes to, like, democracy itself. And so, like, personally, I am very skeptical of the notion of public companies, at least as they exist in the year 2020. I think that a lot of the incentive structures that are in place for publicly traded companies prevent them from sticking to any sort of mission focus, or thinking long term and even medium term. I know you’ve thought a lot about how, like, the finance system works behind these things. What do you think are approaches that people might take when starting new ventures, or reforming existing ventures, to keep this more regenerative mindset in mind while also making sure people can make money off of it?
John Elkington: Yeah, and I think there are several strands of all of this. I’ll come on to that question, but just simply to say it’s not beyond major incumbent corporations to start to be regenerative in at least some parts of what they do. So I once fought a court case against McDonald’s over five months, which we happened to win. So I don’t hold a candle or — I’m not championing McDonald’s remotely — but there’s a company that is starting to pioneer regenerative agriculture methods, where instead of doing the feedlot approach to cattle raising — like that, I should say I’m a vegetarian of 40 years as well, so it’s not that I’m particularly approving of the raising of cattle — but they’re trying to go back towards the dynamics of buffalo on the prairies in their grazing regimes.
And clearly, put McDonald’s aside for one moment, but if big companies can do that, and then part of the value that they start to create is improved soil structures, enhanced fertility of soils, capability of those soils both to capture and retain and [unclear] this carbon, which over time markets will have to evolve which pay them for doing that good work. But I think big companies have a huge impediment in doing radical change, and we all know why, and we’ve all read The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen and so on. And so am I counting on even 50% of big companies to survive the next 15 to 20 years? I’m not. I think they’re going to be torn apart in many ways, but I do think they have an important role to play in the meantime, and some will survive.
And one of the roles they have to play is to bring finance, expertise, technology in support of some of the smaller-scale ventures that you asked the question around. In terms of formats for those smaller-scale ventures, I personally am, you know, very keen, supportive of the B Corporation movement. We’re one of those — I think we’re the first in the UK — and we incubated the B Corp movement for nine months in our London office. So I think that approach is really important, and signals where more and more companies will need to go. And I’m quite encouraged to see bigger companies like Unilever and Danone and Natura and so on adopting at least some of the same principles and approaches. I’m not saying this is going to happen in a guaranteed, automatic way. It’s not going to be easy, it’s going to have to be quite hard fought at times, and the financial markets alongside government are one of the components of the system that we really have to know how to work on and transform.
Ross Kenyon: Your colleague at Volans, Richard Roberts, has a great series on shareholder versus stakeholder capitalism. This fits in pretty nicely, in my estimation, with how some of these rule changes might allow for more flexibility and creativity in corporate governance that allows us to get to some of these places that we need to go. But, you know, under shareholder capitalism, where there’s a fiduciary responsibility to deliver returns to shareholders, that can oftentimes get in the way of doing something that is in the public interest. That’s why B Corps exist and public benefit corporations have come about. So is that an example, then, of something that might be a switch — making that organizational structure more attractive, more doable, easier to work with inside the legal system and regulatory environment? Is that kind of like part of what we could do to see regenerative capitalism start to get its legs?
John Elkington: I think it is, Ross. But I think much of the work that we’ve all collectively done, and certainly I’ve done over 40-some years, has relied on voluntarism, on the willingness of at least some leadership companies to experiment with new stuff even if they’re not being paid to do so, even if they’re not being regulated to do that, and see what happens. But now, if we’re going to have a systemic response that pushes us towards higher levels of resilience, and not just in individual companies and their supply chains but in city regions and in economies and so on, then governments have got to get very much more actively involved.
And that seems to be flying in the face of what we see with, for example, the Trump administration at the moment. But when I first traveled to the States in the 1970s, I went up into the Rockies to a molybdenum mine, and the vice president there said to me, the thing about American politics is the pendulum swings like in a grandfather clock, and when it goes wildly one way, when it comes back the other, it tends to crash through the wall of the clock.
Now, I always remember that, and I think what we’ve got is a violent oscillation, not just in the United States — it’s happening in many other countries at the same time. But out of that chaos, out of that turmoil, out of that really great damage that’s been done to our economies and societies, very often will come a sense of public mood which supports a very much more radical action than people might have dreamt possible, you know, five, six years previously. So I’m optimistic in that sense. I think we’re headed into a historic U-bend where the old order comes apart. Problem is, the old order has to die quite considerably before the new one can really properly find its feet.
Paul Gambill: So, John, I have this hypothesis I want to run by you. It’s — you go through, in the U.S. at least, where we have this stark political divide, red states, blue states, and in many ways it’s urban versus rural, and there are cultural differences, there are educational differences, there are wage differences, of course. And my hypothesis is that I think it’s plausible that an increase of focus into regenerative agriculture especially could potentially be the most equitable wealth transfer that we could come up with right now, in a way that might help heal these political divides.
So the idea being, if there are lots of people and companies and businesses producing carbon emissions in the more urban city areas, and if they’re paying for the carbon storage by these farmers and ranchers who are practicing regenerative practices in the rural areas, how does that help change the way that rural areas perceive their treatment by the government? Does that change their perception of, you know, the society itself and the relationship between them and people in urban areas? What do you think about that?
John Elkington: Yeah, I think if we had an FDR still in the White House my answer would be slightly different, but I think the potential to move in the direction you sketch is very real. But I think politics are very often taking us in different directions, and I think technology is also taking us in different directions. So for example, I think one of the reasons why so many people have voted for somebody who is very obviously not great for the longer-term prospects of the United States, economically or politically — they felt dispossessed, they felt that manufacturing jobs had moved to China, to Asia and so on. Well, I don’t think that’s going to end, and I don’t think ending, you know, green cards or whatever is going to solve anybody’s problem.
And there’s a group based in Silicon Valley and here in London called RethinkX. I’m sure you’ve come across them, but they’ve done two studies to date, one looking at the automotive sector and transportation, and the most recent one looking at the cattle and dairy industry. And the reason I just go through that is that in both those sectors they are picking up exponential trends which will tear apart industries that we’ve got used to, you know, the conventional automotive companies and dairy farming. Now, huge numbers of jobs in Europe, in the United States, elsewhere, riding on the back of cows or cattle. And this most recent study is talking about, over the next 15 to 20 years, something like 60% or more of all of the cattle being removed from the landscape.
Now, if you’re an animal welfare enthusiast, that’s great. If you’re a farmer, it’s devastating, because so many farms work on fairly narrow margins. And I think the political consequences of that, let alone Elon Musk, autonomous trucks, dispossessing over time — what is it, two to three million truck drivers in the United States? The political ricochet effects of all of that, I think, are going to be very considerable, which is why I started by saying what we need, and therefore I think at some point we’ll get, is another FDR. And one of the things I keep saying is that extraordinary times do call forth extraordinary leaders, and in 10 to 15 years we will be led by people we’ve never heard of, because they’ll be conjured out of the vacuum left by the current generation of really quite incompetent leaders.
Ross Kenyon: Except for the women. John, I want to zoom in a little bit, and inviting you on as a way of getting an hour’s worth of free advice — you charge a lot for consulting, I think — so I want to try and maximize this for Nori. But we’re a carbon removal marketplace, and we want to be part of the solution. Is what we’re working on inherently regenerative? Do we qualify as part of regenerative capitalism, or is there more we can and should be doing to really be a part of what’s happening?
John Elkington: It’s very interesting, and I think the simple answer is what Nori’s doing is pioneering into that regenerative space. There’s absolutely no question in my mind about that. We all know that pioneers try sometimes to do one thing, and then when the settlers come they take us somewhere else. And one of my areas of nervousness around the bigger companies which we discussed earlier on is that in a time like this, in the COVID crisis, the people with the deep pockets of the bigger companies — and not that Boeing isn’t being torn apart at the moment, but they tend to be the bigger companies — and they’re going to be on a buying spree, some of them already, of the smaller and medium-sized and more innovative companies.
So that really worries me, and that’s the settler mentality. That’s people with a very different mindset taking over some of the people who wanted to transform the world and make it a more responsible, resilient, regenerative place. And I think we saw those sorts of parallels in the evolution of the internet, where you had people like Kevin Kelly, you know, talking about a free, liberal environment within the internet, and then you had Facebook and Google and people like that, and despite what they professed, we’ve gone a slightly different route over time. So yes, Nori, I think, is directly smack bang in the middle of the regenerative agriculture space that over time, I think, has to become part of the regenerative capitalism story. In fact, it may model some of the things that we need to do in other parts of the global economy. But so far so good, I like what you’re doing.
Paul Gambill: Do you think that there’s a chance that what we’re doing, or what we’re helping pioneer, that the larger movement becomes a green swan unto itself? And if so, like, how do you think we should be thinking to try to increase that possibility?
John Elkington: Well, it’s funny. One of the things about language is that at times it’s very powerful, it helps people think new thoughts or engage others in different ways. But as a species we tend to abuse language over time, we tend to degrade it. And I often say that as terms go into the mainstream — triple bottom line was an example, or sustainability before it — they get diluted. And, you know, some people really do believe in homeopathy and I don’t. I don’t think you can dilute something out of sight and still have a medical or an economic or environmental effect from it.
So I think we’re already seeing signals that people are embracing the green swan concept. For example, I had an email from the Philippines a week or so ago from somebody who’s now describing herself, in a very major company not what I consider remotely sustainable, as a green swan keeper. Now, she was, I think, being playful, but I’m just underscoring the risk that the language gets corrupted over time. I think we will need compass points, north stars and all of those, where people continue to work in the right direction and sustained effort over considerable periods of time. That’s not easy, and we all know that.
And I think Nori is again very well placed from that. I think you’re evolving an ecosystem, other people moving in the same direction. Whether or not you can operate as almost like a standard-setter of what is regenerative and what is not, I don’t know, but I think that whether you plan to do that or whether it’s thrust upon you, that could well be some part of the value you contribute to society over time.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a lot for us to live up to. Paul, you ready for that?
Paul Gambill: I have, I have total faith in you.
Ross Kenyon: Well, we appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, John. Well, to take this in a little bit of a darker turn — you mentioned someone that Paul and I had never heard of, so we both failed what you call the Midgley test. We both tend to be optimistic about technology and its potential to be liberatory and helpful and beautiful, but that means sometimes we minimize, you know, serious dystopian and/or apocalyptic risks to humanity. So basically, how do you know the difference ahead of time? When should we be moving fast, when should we be moving slow? And what’s the story with this Midgley guy?
John Elkington: Well, it’s something I sort of just evolved along the way. And as I talked to people, particularly in Silicon Valley, I was just interested what sort of people they were and what sort of sense of history and particularly of unintended consequences they might have. And I’ve only found one person, and it was the chief software architect at HP, who’d properly heard of Thomas Midgley. But when I probed him on it, it was through something I’d written about the man. And Thomas Midgley is not somebody people know about, particularly these days, because he was at his peak in the 1920s and 1930s. He had over 100 patents to his name. He was a chemist and engineer, chemical engineer perhaps. He worked for General Motors and then DuPont, and he came up with three devices or technologies which I think just underscore the dangers of unintended consequences, however pure our ambitions might be.
And the first one was leaded gasoline, which was a wonderful anti-knock technology, but poisoned the immune systems, nervous systems of young people around the world, millions of young people. The second one was Freons, the class of chlorofluorocarbons, so he blew a hole in the stratospheric ozone layer. He has been described as the single organism in Earth’s history that did the most damage to the planet, and we’ve never heard of him. And then finally, very sadly, he contracted polio in the early 1940s, built himself a rope and pulley bed to cut down on nursing care, and it strangled him.
So I use those three stories just to say, no, we should have heard of him. We should be aware of the risk of things not going in ways that we would expect them to do. And, you know, CFCs in their day were wonderfully safe, wonderfully stable chemical compounds, which is what made them so deadly when they then drifted off into the atmosphere and the stratosphere. So I’m not saying stop, I’m not saying we don’t need synthetic biology, we don’t need artificial intelligence, because there will be risks and some of those are already becoming clear. I think we just need to be very careful about who evolves those new technologies and deploys them, and in what sorts of ways.
And just to go back to your lack of trust in, you know, publicly listed companies: unless and until the economy as a whole incentivizes right behavior, sustainability, whatever we call it, we’re going to continue to have these wild excursions. And it’s going to take us places that we really don’t want to go. And those are, whether you call them wicked or super wicked problems, or black swans, the future looks rather crowded with some of those beasts.
Paul Gambill: How do we do that, though? Like, I was reading an essay by Plutarch yesterday, but [unclear] —
Ross Kenyon: Is that what I sound like? Oh God.
Paul Gambill: [unclear] This is my Ross impression. No, no, I really like Ryan Holiday and all of his work on the stoicism stuff, and he recommended this book. So it’s reading the essay “To an Uneducated Leader,” and the crux of it, and this whole book, is all about teaching political leaders how to do right things, like they should be putting the needs of the community and the state, whatever that is, ahead of their own interests and power. Just reading that and thinking like, God, I wish that was how people thought about it. And I completely agree with your diagnosis of the problem and what needs to happen, but I just have no clue how we get to a point where the people who are pulling the levers are thinking about it in that way, putting the community ahead of their own personal power, enrichment.
John Elkington: Well, I think there’s no cast-iron guaranteed successful recipe for leadership in complex, disrupted times, but there are certain principles. And one of them is to reach out to people you really don’t understand, who make you uncomfortable, and they may be inside your own organization, they may be on the outside. I haven’t talked about groups like Leaders’ Quest, that take groups of very senior leaders to places where they’re uncomfortable, like the chairman of Daimler to Silicon Valley to meet Uber. And, you know, these can be existentially challenging moments for people. But we’ve got to get people out more, and we’ve got to get people in more.
So I think that’s one thing, the challenging, difficult conversations — that’s going to be crucial. And I think the ability to listen for and hear and understand weak signals of change is also really important. We’ve got brains that are designed to sort of shut out evidence that we really don’t want to hear, so somehow we’ve got to relax part of the way in which our brains work. And I, you know, I don’t know, when the exit from COVID-19 begins to get into its stride, whether we’re going to lose the window where people have been open to change, in exploratory mode, because there’s suddenly going to be scrambling for competitive position and profitability and, you know, trying to boost their margins and all the rest of it.
I think we’ve got a very — yeah. Well, I don’t think COVID-19 is going to go away anytime soon, but I think we’ve got a relatively short or small window of opportunity in which to get through to people in a coherent and convincing way. I think we can do it, and that’s part of what we’re trying to work with you and other people on. But it’s a very noisy background environment, as we all know, so trying to get clarity and do that in a sense of positive future and how we work in that direction is challenging.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think are some of the potential COVID green swans that we might want to look out for right now?
John Elkington: Well, I think some of it may be as simple as people suddenly discovering that air can taste actually quite pleasant, and it doesn’t need to make children and old people cough and put them in ill health over time. So I think people — I was reading just around today about cities like Milan, and it’s not just Milan, others as well, who suddenly are seeing these vistas of car-free streets and saying, oh good lord, why have we been headed in this direction for so long? Why can’t we rein in the private motor car and instead start opening up the obvious things, you know, places for people to walk, spaces for people to cycle and all the rest of it.
And one of the things I’m very excited about in my own city of London is that it’s been declared the world’s first urban or city national park. So, you know, it’s a city of many parks and much greenery and people love their gardens, but it’s the first time where a city has suddenly — except for perhaps Babylon — where we suddenly say, how do we green this thing? How do we all play into that? And I think that’s going to get a big shunt, a big boost from the COVID crisis, partly because people are being thrust back into their gardens or public park spaces.
I think there are many different ways in which the pandemic potentially can drive green swan trajectories. But the thing to remember is that black swans happen — for example, Thomas Midgley blowing the hole in the stratospheric ozone layer. That was a black swan. No one really saw that coming, but it was something that he didn’t have to work towards. And the thing about green swans is we absolutely do have to work towards them. We have to invest in them over sustained periods of time, and everyone has to sort of align around appropriate priorities. So it’s a political task, and I think in confused times politically it’s almost unimaginable that we could do that. But we will, we have to. And therefore people are going to emerge who can help us do that.
Ross Kenyon: One of the main unexpected elements that has reared its head during this crisis has been the development of a quasi universal basic income in the United States, out of seemingly nowhere. Which, it’s one of those ideas that, you know, people on the right, even Milton Friedman and Hayek, were relatively friendly to various versions of this, so it’s popular on the market-friendly side of things. People on the left like it too, for obvious reasons. All of a sudden that came out of nowhere, and it seems like people are saying, well, if it was relatively easy to implement that, what was stopping us before from doing something kind of like this?
And then that is tied very closely, of course, to the sense of fairness or lack thereof, where people are forbidden from working yet still either have to pay rent, but then the people that they rent from, they often have to keep paying property taxes to the city, so you can’t get rid of that. So I think people, their perceptions of fairness, I think are really changing. We’ll see if it sticks.
John Elkington: Well, I think I saw a survey just recently of public opinion in different parts of the world, and the concept of fairness was coming up very, very forcefully indeed. Now, I’m supportive of the basic income approach. It’s unfortunate that the main national experiment to date, which was Finland, didn’t work out terribly well. And I think, again, although it’s a good thing to explore, and if we can do it right it’s a good thing to implement, it will turn out to have all sorts of unintended consequences as well.
And I think, you know, I understand why people are nervous about the idea. Will it simply disable people, in the sense that it makes them dependent and parasitic on other people’s labor and value creation, or will it enable people to do stuff that they never previously thought of doing, and you know, whether that’s engaging with their local communities or whatever it might be? I don’t know. I mean, I think it will be culturally specific, it’ll work in different cities in different ways depending on, you know, leadership of mayors, it’ll work in different regions and nation states. I think it’s an experiment we absolutely have to try, but we shouldn’t count on it succeeding in short order. I think it’s going to need a lot of evolutionary fine-tuning along the way.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think you’re right. I tried to say this pretty neutrally, like, this is a thing that is happening rather than I am [unclear] supportive of everything that will come out of this. And then, in philosophy departments around at least the country, if not the world, it’s often referred to as the lazy surfer problem, which is — it sounds great, but how many people do we have to tolerate just going surfing while some people are working before those workers get really mad? How should we think about fairness in there? And that’s an ongoing conversation, and probably is culturally specific too.
John Elkington: Well, I think Patagonia is an example of a company that would be perfectly happy in that future. But most of us, I think, might struggle at times.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, indeed. Well, John, if someone wanted to dive in more to regenerative capitalism, they wanted to learn more — you name-dropped a couple of great scholars; Kate Raworth, we’re coming for you, we’d love to have you on the show too. And you did mention a bunch of books in your book. Where can people get that? Give us the whole dump of where people can get into this world.
John Elkington: There are a number of platforms and networks in the regeneration space. Some of them are looking at regenerative agriculture, some of them are looking at urban regeneration. I mean, all sorts of different angles and approaches. I recently joined a small group called The Regenerators, put together by Laura Storm in Denmark, which has pulled together some dozens of some of the pioneers in this space, including people like John Fullerton of the Capital Institute, who have their own networks. In fact, these people all do. And one of the big points that was raised a few days back within that network was, but there are these other networks out there, why aren’t we working through them? So I think there’s an issue of fragmentation, but I believe in diversity, and I think to have different platforms and networks for a while at least is no bad thing.
There are quite a number of books out there, and I think people like Janine Benyus at the Biomimicry Institute, Biomimicry 3.8 — they’ve been doing a lot of work in this space. I mentioned John Fullerton. But if people want to track that, and we were talking about it in the book — to your question, where can people find the book? Well, you know, if you were wanting to sell a book, you wouldn’t choose to launch it into a pandemic moment where all the bookstores are closed, and even Amazon — I mean, they stocked the book but they got hit by such a wave of sales, they ran out of people.
People can buy the book either by doing advance orders through, for example, Amazon. There are smaller platforms which are more independent that I like, like Bookshop.org. And then we also sell it from our own website, which is volans.com. And if people look for Green Swans and Volans — V-O-L-A-N-S — the book will come up and you can buy it off that website. And incidentally, it’s evolved into an e-book, it’s available in the Kindle version, but I keep getting asked — this conversation is now another example of the trend — when is the audiobook coming out? And the answer to that is, we don’t quite know. We’re committed to doing it, but many of the studios are closed. I mean, all of the studios are closed at the moment in London, so we’re waiting for them to reopen.
Ross Kenyon: I could listen to your mellifluous voice all day long, John. Get on, just do it from home, put it on YouTube, get that going.
John Elkington: My wife of 52 years, Elaine, would probably say quite differently. But it’s always great fun to talk to you, and I’m constantly frustrated in the sense that I know, you know, people, I know, you know, entire ecosystems of work that we’ve got to plug into and understand and just learn from and perhaps sometimes give oxygen to. But I just go back to what I said earlier on. I think what Nori is doing is right at the leading edge of what needs to happen next, and whether we call it regenerative agriculture, or regenerative capitalism, or something else entirely, I don’t totally care.
But the subtitle of the book is the coming boom in regenerative capitalism, and I think in the next 10 to 15 years we’re going to kind of see an incredible explosion of activity in this space that will pull in all sorts of people we don’t like over there — that always happens. But what an exciting time to be alive, and what an exciting time to be engaged in all of this. So I look forward to an evolving conversation.
Ross Kenyon: John, thanks for being here. If you like what John has to say — who are we kidding, you probably like what John had to say — you can find links to his books, all 20 of them, and Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism. Those are in the show notes. Thanks for being here, John, and thank you for all the nice things you said about Nori. We always appreciate that.
John Elkington: Ross, it’s been a great pleasure. Thanks for the invitation, and I don’t say things without actually meaning them. Actually, genuinely, I think you’re very well placed. I think it’s a kind of pretty challenging period for all of us, but it’s great — and today, the day after the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, what a wonderful time to be connected and talking about a better future.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, how did we forget to mention that? But that is true. And thanks, Paul, thanks for coming in. It’s been a, I don’t know, you don’t get to come on as much as you used to. Hot minute. Thanks for making time.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, well, thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: John, thanks for the time.
John Elkington: It’s always a pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: I hope we can come visit you in London sometime soon.
John Elkington: Well, I don’t know when, but I hope so. Yeah, we’re in lockdown at the moment, but as soon as the doors are open and windows, we’ll let you know, and they’ll be open to you any time of the day.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear], you can just watch 28 Days Later or something. All right, so this is clearly the time to end the show. If you like the show, please tell your friends, rate and review us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher. Get the word out there. If you’re running a company or looking to start one, see if you can do it in a regenerative way. There’s a lot of possibilities out there to be creative, and it’s a lot of what keeps us motivated at Nori, is looking into how to do that. So thanks so much for your time and for listening.
But thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and/or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun — hopefully all three — we certainly appreciate your rate and review. You can keep up with Nori at nori.com, where there is a newsletter, that’s nori.com/subscribe. There’s podcasts, there’s a whole bunch else, or you can send us an email at podcast@nori.com. We are also now on Patreon at patreon.com/noripodcast, if you’d like more content, engagement and community. And thank you so much for your support.
