Helping companies build back better: Reinventing Responsibility
For someone who has been passionate about climate change since squelching around in peat bogs to find ancient pollen during my undergraduate studies about 20 years ago, there’s been times when I have felt that I was fighting against the tide. My first graduate role in business communications in a “Green Team” was found to be superfluous three months later as there were not enough corporates willing to pay for our services!
You will be pleased to hear that this experience did not put me off. And now, thanks in part to a hideous global pandemic, the world’s communities, investors and importantly businesses have truly woken up.
To quote Fink:
“I believe that the pandemic has presented such an existential crisis – such a stark reminder of our fragility – that it has driven us to confront the global threat of climate change more forcefully and to consider how, like the pandemic, it will alter our lives.”
We all need help right now, managing this disruption on a personal and professional level. Never has the future felt so uncertain and change such a constant. Disruption creates the conditions for new opportunities, but only when we can identify and seize them. And that means being brave. Asking questions of others and ourselves even if we might not always like the answers. Cognitive diversity has never been so important.
The key to thriving right now is listening. Listening to our stakeholders, taking in a range of different perspectives, and then taking time to think. How do we turn those valuable insights into real foresight? How can we plan for an unpredictable future? How do we ensure that society and organisations are thriving 15 or 20 years from now, and no doubt facing new disruptions, threats, and challenges that we cannot even comprehend today?
The future is exciting, every day we partner with our clients to help them understand, navigate and seize control of the emerging multiple risks of our time – while helping unlock the opportunities that are there for the taking.
Later this year all eyes will turn to COP26 (the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference) in the hope that the world can come together to address some of the biggest challenges that society faces. It will not be a panacea of course and the leaders of COP26 will be looking to all of us and businesses to take the initiative and build back better.
In the build up to COP26, listening to and making sense of all viewpoints will be especially important, from the scientist to the man (or woman) in the street. I’m proud to lead a team focused on exactly that. With services including strategy development, stakeholder engagement and reporting and disclosure, at the heart of Reinventing Responsibility sits a richness of insightful perspectives from a diverse range of experts – all motivated by helping our clients thrive in this new changing landscape.
Society, of course, has a long way to go to meet some of our biggest global challenges, and at Instinctif Partners we truly believe that as individuals and organisations we all have a part to play in creating a more sustainable future. Twenty years later, I’m now more passionate than ever about making that happen.