John Elkington

Caught South African Airways flight to Joburg on Sunday, arriving early Monday. Bracingly cold. Did the keynote for the South African Green Building Council’s 2016 Convention. Noted that every day should start off with poetry, after the convention was launched with an opening act by the young poet Mbali Vilakazi. Her theme: #UnderConstruction. Mine, you could say: #UnderReconstruction.

Talking to her afterwards, she spoke of cross-pollination – at which point I gave her my card, with title. Her tweet:

great human, this man @volansjohn. i was describing what i do as cross pollination when he gave me his card: ‘chairman and chief pollinator’

Then, later, took part in a lively panel session facilitated by Kura Chihota and featuring Sithole Mbanga, Werner van Antwerpen, Kevin James and Terri Wills.

Amazing weather through the days, lightning storms where I could watch the forks of electricity searing into the city. A great one-hour-turning-into-four-with beer-and-wine-and conversation with Gary Kendall. Ex-Exxon, ex-WWF, ex-SustainAbility, now Netbank here in South Africa.

Am reading Ramez Naam’s Nexus on the flights – gripping. Can see many elements of that future a-coming. Elements of Utopia and dystopia scrambled.

 

Out to Heathrow for a filmed interview with Covestro CEO Patrick Thomas, as part of our evolving Project Breakthrough for the UN Global Compact. Our Atlas of the Future friends are fielding a 2-camera team, which is wonderful.

Patrick was brilliant, Richard (Johnson) doing the interview, and Richard (Northcote) updating us on his adventures as part of the support tea for the Solar Impulse 2. Then I was interviewed – and then Richard J and I headed back to Bloomsbury for our planned Garden Party, with rain thumping down as we left the Heathrow Express.

To start with, people crowded into our office space, which was nice as it gave me a chance to have a proper sit-down chat with people like Hannah Jones of Nike and her wonderful son. I still treasure the bloodied, axe-dented Crusader figure he gifted me a few years back.

Then we moved out into the garden – and the numbers continued to grow. Lovely evening, great spirit, and nice wines too, thanks to Jacqueline (Lim). Elaine and I stayed way later than we intended, my exit facilitated by Amanda (Feldman) offering to stand in for me when it came to the tidying away.

Up early and across to King’s Cross, where I met Julie Hirigoyen on the train north to York. She runs the UK Green Building Council, so a great opportunity to catch up – particularly ahead of my GBC ZA Johannesburg trek next week.

We were doing a session with the sustainability team of Sir Robert McAlpine. Their CEO had been meant to be with us in the Royal York Hotel, but the day before the news had broken that he was leaving the company – after just 15 months as McAlpine’s first non-family CEO. Inevitably, some agitation in the Force, but was assured that the next CEO would be selected in part on his/her embrace of the sustainability agenda.

Then back south to Bloomsbury Place and a session with Sam on what’s coming up next. Fairly took my breath away, but some wonderful platforms and opportunities out there …

A stunning start at Rich Mix on Monday evening to the Climate Quest 2016 organised by Leaders’ Quest and We Mean Business. The Quest could have been billed as FoNT, Friends of Nigel Topping, CEO of We Mean Business.

In  any event, Phyllida Hancock of Olivier Mythodrama kicked off the 3-day jaunt with a session on Shakespeare – and, in particular, As You Like It – that left me gasping for more.

Happily, there was a 2-hour session on Wednesday morning with Phyllida, which I opted to join. One element of the process involved a small group of 7-8 of us (including Laurence Tubiana) being handed a piece of timber, being told it was a sword, and – in the spirit of As You Like It – being asked to consider which element of our defensive armoury we would now lay aside in the spirit of the play and of further development.

I chose to lay aside my use of humour as a social lubricant in boardrooms and C-suites, though I undermined the promise by not following earlier ‘It’s a Sword’ or ‘It’s a Big Stick’ renderings, and instead standing the stick on its end, noting that part of my role as court jester has been to stand things on their head.

Whereas some chose to think of the stick as a weapon, considering how they could stop beating their colleagues around the head, figuratively, it struck me that my positioning of the stick was symbolic. My role has often been to say that there is a big stick out there, in the form of NGOs and activists, and using the threat to encourage responsible behaviour – including more open engagement with civil society.

A glorious mix among the 50-60 invitation-only participants of (1) people I knew, (2) people I had heard of and wanted to meet, and (3) people I hadn’t met but enjoyed getting to know better. Happily again, there wasn’t a fourth category.

The Quest really made me think about what I’m going to do when I grow up. And about how to engage a wider audience around climate change and related challenges.

On Tuesday, I was part of a small group of perhaps 10 participants that went across to White City to meet David Gunn of White City Noise. We were introduced to the dynamics of a complex community in a bleak urban landscape where the BBC has traditionally been an oasis, or perhaps a ghetto, and where three developers are involved in what is billed as Europe’s largest redevelopment project.

Took me way back to my roots in city planning and public participation in the early 1970s. The high point, at least for me, was recording three choral (to put it politely) bursts in the stairwell of a high-rise building that will be demolished within three weeks. (My own contribution to one of these channelled a fading air-raid siren.) This was part of an acoustic palimpsest being compiled as a Requiem or Elegy to the BBC Television Centre’s East Tower.

Then, fizzing with ideas, our group took to the Tube again and made our way across to Waterloo for a lunch at the Travelling Through bookshop. We were greeted at the door by the owner, Emma Carmichael, very much like diplomats coming aboard a ship of the line. It only lacked the whistle.

A wonderful lunch in their basement café – then across to Lambeth Gardens, in the shadow of Lambeth Palace. Reminded me of several visits there hosted by Justin Welby, the Archbishop, who I had the pleasure of working with for several years as part of the Friends Life Committee of Reference.

One particularly memorable visit was to interview Justin for our book The Breakthrough Challenge, which I did while he was having his portrait painted for Durham Cathedral. (See 15 July 2013 entry here.)

We were taken under the energetic wings of Susana Silva and Natalia Cerqueira, two buskers who regularly perform on London’s Southbank. Call it denial, but (despite the program) I had simply not considered the possibility that I would be called on to make a musical instrument, co-write a song on climate change, and then perform it to all and sundry on the South Bank – hard by the skateboarding area.

But that’s what transpired, though not without a few hiccups along the way. When we were all asked to say who we were and where we were from, ahead of singing a song that was important to us, I came last in the cycle and dug in my heels.

Although the song Always Look On The Bright Side of Life came to mind later, as we walked to the place of execution, I side-stepped the request for a song, instead drawing the parallels between songs and stories, and telling the story of how Elaine recruited two French brothers who had been busking in Hyde Park Tube station to sing at a SustainAbility celebration.

They sang like the Everly Brothers and did Beatles songs. The one I asked for was Revolution, which for me is pregnant with significance for the work I have done over the years.

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan

[Relevant for Brexiteers too, you might think.]

Then I noted that the sort of song that had first come to mind when I was asked to sing was whale song. One of my favourite albums of all time was Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale, which I bought way back in the early 1970s.

Not being a Humpback or Blue, I find singing like a whale a bit of a challenge. But later in the process I did work out how to do a semi-passable rendition of both by growling and warbling into a large, empty water bottle.

Subsequent incidents meant that I had to kick off the singing on the South Bank, after which I stepped out to film. But enough to say that working with Susana and Natalia forced me to think long and hard about how we can best engage new audiences around climate change and wider sustainability issues.

In many ways, this Quest has come at a critical time for me and, indirectly, for Volans. Recent events in the wider world signal that an old order is coming apart far faster than most people imagined possible, while a new order is struggling to be born. This is the stuff of our ongoing work with the Business & Sustainable Development Commission and with the United Nations Global Compact.

To be in such company for several days has been a tremendous gift, for which I thank the IKEA Foundation among those already mentioned. Being part of such a gathering of such extraordinary people was a real pick-me-up and shake-me-up.

Apart from reading Shakespeare in a new light and following up on the myriad conversations that began as we moved from Rich Mix to the final sessions at the Ugly Duck in Shoreditch, I feel a growing need to help the entire movement jump to a different level.

 

The fish we passed on our way to an event on Tuesday evening at Global Generation’s Skip Garden, in King’s Cross, remained me of the symbolism of our own flying-fish-based logo.

In addition to standing for Fertility, Knowledge and Creativity, fish have also been seen as symbols of Transformation. The fish seemed to be jumping into a new space. That’s the trajectory we are now on, as we may like it or as we may not.

I was busy being bitten by ants in an Ivory Coast cocoa plantation, then winging back across the Sahara, as Britain voted on David Cameron’s disastrously conceived in-out European Union referendum, known by most as Brexit.

June 23, the day of the vote that destroyed Cameron’s political career and legacy, was also my birthday. Having filed a postal vote for “Remain” some weeks before flying to Abidjan, I landed at Charles de Gaulle airport to discover the worst birthday news I have yet received.

That’s how my latest GreenBiz column begins. More here.