Business supporting rapid shifts

There’s an urgency in the air, a sense of dis-ease. We’re feeling imperatives for greater care and simultaneously struggling – withdrawing inwardly in the face of polarization.

In more measurable terms: We know crises—climate change for one—are absolutely solvable. Despite that, we feel powerless or small but it is always individual people who change the world.

This is where events like Climate-x come in. It’s an entrepreneurial start-up program to create climate businesses. Critically, it’s addressing problems with a different level of thinking from the one that created them. 

However, what does it really look like to do this? To break out from the current rules of the game?

Climate-x was established in Aotearoa, New Zealand this year. It is supported by over 100 of the country’s top companies, the Climate Leaders Coalition.

It is asking and assisting groups to put together concepts that are beyond business as usual – a quantum shift – fostering entrepreneurs to outcompete the current system. What’s different is joined up holistic answers, keeping the old – harness talent and uniqueness – while climate and social imperatives become an integrated driver in the business model.

We are naturally conditioned to think within the way today’s world works. In the environmental and carbon emitting space this is to mitigate and ameliorate impacts. These are the rules of the game. That’s what government, a lot of early clean-green energy development and much of our civil society’s effort focuses upon. 

Those current approaches are vital and worthwhile. They are only part of tomorrow’s solutions.

What’s emerging, with activities such as Climate-x, is synergy. For example, a business that’s removing atmospheric carbon, increasing yields (and profits probably) and addressing localized ocean acidity. Another? How about enhancing farming profitability, reducing variability and uncertainty and, at the same time, assisting the reversal of global warming. 

That is climate benefit is directly related to success – the larger the businesses becomes (and those who copy and collaborate with them) the more carbon is removed from the atmosphere. That’s a different leveled up business model.

Creating movement

Climate solutions are fertile territory for new thinking and disruptive business creation. This is particularly the case as we’ve had the technological solutions for decades but implementation is way too slow. For example, profitability – we’ll make changes when we make money – is always a paradox. It is only true within boundaries. The lie is easily revealed when simple, very low risk, quick money making opportunities are ignored by individuals and organizations.

If this seems perplexing, it is! Yet, there’s an overwhelming wealth of examples and research demonstrating we do this. 

Are we dumb? The fact that these behaviors do not change points to our sense-making. We need to break the game, change the rules and our own thinking.

That’s the promise of Climate-x and similar practices. More of the same while vital – e.g. government discussion, policy, financing, activism, media, science – is unlikely to overcome the dilemmas outlined at the start of this article. 

Events like Climate-x ground heady discussion in practicalities. On climate they offer a much more concrete answer to ‘what’s in it for me’. That is, people are engaged in some clear and meaningful steps with big scale potential.

Does this stack up for reversing climate change and alleviating oceans of suffering for all sentient beings? While that still seems challenging we don’t need everyone to get engaged. For example, the industrial revolution rapidly created our the modern world. It’s likely that only 1 or 2 percent of people thought in such a modern way at the time. That small group’s extraordinary success was creating systems that outcompeted the old and could profitably harness many folk’s efforts. 

Beware! 

Approaches like these are not silver bullets. They are scaffolding abilities to think differently. 

People will be quite set on some conventional ideas. For example, education was prevalent at the recent Climate-x sprint event. We believe it creates understanding and, with this understanding, we will get behavior change.

That is, give someone information and they will act. Largely this is not the case. If it was the answer the stellar work from the first United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (1990) would have fixed us a long time ago.

Yet, it is a very strong modern day paradigm. Many groups at the sprint were building business concepts from this thinking structure. Just saying something, providing information, won’t change our minds and actions. It is a little like Banquo’s ghost. It keeps coming back to haunt us no matter how much we try to rationalize it.

Bugger I’m wrong 🙂

This is why approaches such as Climate-x have legs. Participants are confronted with their own inconsistencies. We’re forced to remake how we make sense of the world – ouch! Problems get answered with a different level of thinking. 

These entrepreneurs from the sprint and their ventures rewire and reprogram the old, well past moribund, game.

Game breakers with synergy – that’s the promise of supporting interventions like Climate-x that create carbon-eating, benevolution. Changes like the two brief business outlines above.

Posts and links

A Climate for Change – for a detailed review of the profitability/action paradox see The Profit Paradox here>.

Tools to assist us to confront our inconsistencies – The lean canvass was part of the Climate-x sprint – see this post.

Modern thinking – what does it mean? See: meta-modern business will outcompete common practice.

Climate-x is a growing collective of talent and passion on a mission to deliver innovation, systems, products, and new behavior. More here>

Photos: Climate-x