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A few highlights of a hyper-accelerated period

Leaving tomorrow for three days at the World Energy Council’s Congress in Rotterdam, where I am due to speak on Tuesday. Since we got back from Normandy – and delightful to see Hania, Jake and Gene again this afternoon – I have been working on my big rethink. Such things seem to happen to me every 5-6 years, the last time coinciding with my product recall for the triple bottom line via the Harvard Business Review.

This time around the driver seems to be a growing concern that however much excellent work we do with individual businesses, it’s can be a bit like putting cleaned-up fish back into polluted waters, in that market dynamics push them away from ambitious goals. We seem to be experiencing something of the same even with Unilever at the moment. All part of the ESG and sustainability recessions I have been talking about.

So I am focusing my thinking on how we can design markets that push companies in the right directions. Along the way, I plan to dig into the histories of attempts to build markets for carbon, biodiversity, fair trade, organic food, water, impact investment and eco-tourism, among others. A strong sense of being. back on the learning curve again.

In the process, am playing with AI in developing the thinking, including ChatGPT for word-based research and Artiphoria for image generation. One of my favorite images this week was one I generated for a Substack post on the Anthropocene, featuring a polar bear hitchhiking away from the Big Thaw in search of ice and deeper snows.

Happily, interest in my new book, Tickling Sharks, seems to be building – with several people this week – in places as disparate as America, Germany and the Czech Republic – saying they were attracted by the fact that I am unusual in. being able to cover the past, present and future of the sustainability agenda. Did an excellent fireside chat on the theme with Elisa Moscolin at a Sage offsite in Clerkenwell on Tuesday morning.

Then, on Wednesday, Elaine and I went across to the Science Museum for a session on the science of taste – with an additional sparkle added by the tasting of Prosecco, English Sparkling Wine and true Champagne. Absolutely fascinating. And perhaps the most interesting bit was when Professor Smith circulated strips of paper and asked us all to put them on our tongues. Some people winced with the bitterness, others experienced a slight sourness, while Elaine, I and some others simply tasted paper. A striking example of how different people’s palettes can be.

Am also managing to read a fair amount at the moment, while buying more books than I could ever possibly read. Am reading Jonathan Clements’ Rebel Island, on the history of Taiwan, at the moment – utterly fascinating. Before that I read The New Cold War by a family friend, Robin Niblett. And am planning to read Daniel Suskind’s book, Growth, on the Eurostar tomorrow.

On the fiction front, I also just finished Tom Brady’s fast-paced thriller, Yesterday’s Spy. Given Iran’s attack on Israel this week, it was riveting to read about a different Iran, back in the Shah’s day.

What an extraordinary time we had of it in Trouville and Deauville. Utterly relaxing – and glorious to get to know our grandson Gene a bit better. Can’t wait to go back.

A few days away in Normandy

Read much of Robin Niblett’s book, The New Cold War, on the Eurostar to Paris yesterday. Wonderfully written, but pretty bracing. That said, it’s surprising how quickly I have relaxed in the new surroundings of Trouville – it used to take me several days to “land”. The weather has been kind, if also pretty bracing when we were on the beach this afternoon.

And bad news landed while we were at lunch in Les Voiles in Trouville, which threw an unexpected shadow over the proceedings. Still, we made our way across to Honfleur to see the Naturospace butterfly collection and to walk around Honfleur, which I had wanted to visit again since we passed through some time in the 1980s.

I experiment with a new channel.

A few weeks ago, I opened a new Substack channel, Surfing the Future. It won’t replace this blog, but it may mean that at times some content that might have appeared here will appear there.

The latest post, my twentieth, reflects on a fascinating week of visits and conversations that helped me refine my thinking on various aspects of system change. It also explains the dragon image above, topical because this is the Year of the Dragon and relevant because of the varying symbolism of dragons in the East and West.

The hummingbird, our Volans mascot, symbolises my year-long quest to work out how I can best advance the change agenda once I have reached the age of 75 in June.

What a wonderfully refreshing break that was, meeting some family and some friends, but otherwise immersed in books and films. Although I worked hard to nail down the theme of a new book, the process was not entirely successfully, in that I ended up with too many themes. But I also spent a great deal of time reading. Indeed, though I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, if I had they would probably have included more time spent on reading and listening to podcasts, something I haven’t really got into yet.

I also spent a fair amount of time soliciting endorsements for my new book, Tickling Sharks, due out in May from Fast Company Press. Happily, some truly wonderful ones have already come in.

One book I had been looking forward to reading was The Year of the Locust, Terry Hayes’ long-awaited follow-up to I Am Pilgrim. While I see why some critics think it goes a bit wobbly towards the end, I think it works well as a slightly mad scramble of thriller, sci-fi and fantasy. And it is always well – tautly – written.

Other books I enjoyed included Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which I loved so much I gave a copy to all members of the Volans core team; The Worlds I See, by Dr Fei-Fei Li, a wonderfully personal exploration of the rapidly evolving AI landscape; Einstein in Time and Space: A Life in 999 Particles, by Samuel Grayson, a truly compelling read; Lawrence of Arabia by Ranulph Fiennes, which filled in some of the gaps in my understanding of the Arab Revolt after our recent trip to Jordan; and, to clear the palate, Playback by Raymond Chandler, his last novel – and a delight.

Now queueing for my attention are books like Toby Wilkinson’s Ramesses the Great, which I’m already half-way through; selected poems of Rumi and of Ai Qing; Barnaby Rogerson’s The House Divided, exploring the 1,400-year-old schism between Islam’s Sunni and Shia factions; and Shane O’Mara’s Talking Heads, billed as “the new science of how conversation shapes our worlds.”

Not sure what sort of year 2024 will turn out to be, one of locusts or of honeybees? But struck this morning to read that falling numbers of pollinators is already triggering evolutionary processes in plants, whereby plants like field pansies are opting for self-fertilization over cross-pollination.

And perhaps we are seeing similar processes at work in geopolitics, with deglobalization encouraging countries and regions to fold back in on themselves? To counter such trends, one of my plans for this year is to undertake at least one learning journey, to get into conversation with people at the cutting edges of related fields.