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To Madrid to work with Acciona yesterday, with Louise (Kjellerup Roper) and Tom (Farrand). Acciona are a global leader in sustainable infrastructures and renewable energy.

The event drew together fast track leaders from across the company and across the world, to consider how the company can switch on to exponential sustainability in the coming years.

Great group – and, for me, an urgently needed injection of optimism as the UK moves inexorably towards a hard-fought (if idiotic) Brexit.

On 10 January, we opened our doors – or, rather, the doors of Aviva Investors’ HQ conference centre at 1 Undershaft, aka ‘The Trellis’ – for over 300 delegates taking part in the Tomorrow’s Capitalism Forum.

As they arrived, they came downstairs through a portal fashioned by our oldest daughter, Gaia, made out of reclaimed plant materials. The central element picked up the overarching theme of flight and uplift, which would be centre-stage towards the end of the event.

In the event, the Forum – kicked off by Volans CEO Louise Kjellerup Roper and Tomorrow’s Capitalism Inquiry Lead Richard Roberts – proved to be a runaway success. And people loved the laser-cut wooden badges, one of which is shown below, featuring the Volans hummingbird logo:

The plenary sessions were also filmed – and Volans will be posting edited footage shortly. My own write-up on this blog has been slowed by the fact that we have been rebooting my website, ahead of a relaunch next week. But here are some highlights that have stuck in my memory – as we introduced the idea of the 2020s as “The Exponential Decade.”

That said, and speaking of reclaimed materials, I tackled exponentiality in my opening presentation by going back to Lester Brown’s work – particularly his 1978 book The Twenty-Ninth Day – to spotlight how poorly equipped our brains are to detect and respond to exponential trends. He was a huge influence on my own thinking – and I had the pleasure of meeting him several times, both in Davos and Washington, D.C.

You have almost certainly heard the riddle Brown based that book on. If waterlilies go from a standing start to clogging an entire lake, on what day is the lake surface half-covered? You guessed it.

The same theme of exponentiality was central to later presentations, including that given by Dr Catherine Tubb of RethinkX, spotlighting their work on radically different mobility solutions and, most recently, the coming disruption of the cow and cow-based industry sectors. Her point was underscored by the following slide, showing increasingly exponential adoption of a range of new technologies:

A series of quick-fire panel sessions drew on the collective wisdom of some stellar speakers, covering ways to step up personally, organisationally, financially, politically and systemically.

Speakers came from such organisations as Aviva Investors, The Body Shop International, the Capital Institute, the CBI, Climate-KIC, Conservation Without Borders, Covestro, Forum for the Future, the Good Growth Company, the Impact Management Project, Neste, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), the UK Green Building Council and Women for Women International. Glimpses of some of the sessions follow:

The quality of the discussions and the audience participation was impressive. And the audience numbers held constant throughout the day – a testament to real audience engagement. Some early conclusions can be found here in a summary from Richard Roberts.

Then I took over again for the final session, focusing on the rise of the Green Swan agenda – and announcing the first two prototype Green Swan Awards. They went to Sir Tim Smit of the Eden Project and Sacha Dench, aka the “Human Swan”. Details can be found here.

Here are some images from that session, including Louise (Kjellerup Roper) thanking everyone for coming – and steering them towards the evening reception.

Elaine spotted a large article in The Times about Sacha Dench, known as “The Human Swan”. So impressed were we that I got in touch via LinkedIn and email – and it just happened she was in Holborn that day, 2 December, so we agreed to meet in Somerset House. Blown away by her – and now she’s speaking at our Tomorrow’s Capitalism event, sub-titled ‘Step Up – Or Get Out Of The Way’.

Yesterday, Wednesday 13 November, Elaine and I went across to the Royal Academy to see the Anthony Gormley exhibition, Highlight, at least for me, were his sketchbooks. Pretty busy, so made our way across to Waterstones, where I bought a number of books, including on the history of calculus and exponential thinking: Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz. Then on to Somerset House, where I joined a meeting with The Body Shop and Elaine met Roxanne (Tibbert) for the first time.

Today, Thursday 14 November, I headed off early to ZSL London Zoo for the latest meeting of the WWF UK Council of Ambassadors. Great talk by Henry Dimbleby on the future of food. Later, walked back through Regent’s Park with WWF UK CEO Tanya Steele, both of his headed back to Somerset House, where WWF now have an office at the same end of the same floor as us.

In the evening, Elaine and met up at Cahoots, part of Kingly Court in Soho, for a gathering of the SustainAbility UK and US teams. Hadn’t realised that there was an old Tube station there – and rather liked the décor of the underground restaurant, where we managed to squeeze some 40 people into a reproduction of an old Tube train. Struck by the Christmas decorations in the Carnaby Street area, huge plastic models of oceanic life forms. Not sure the irony was intended.

Then on to Science Museum for the launch of the Wellcome Galleries on the evolution of medicine and medical technology. They were serving canapés from stretchers and staff were dressed in emergency response uniforms.

Drove across to Little Rissington this morning, to see Pat – now heavily sedated on morphine. House was full with my three siblings, three nephews, our cousin Toby Adamson, a nurse Tanya and another, Sharon, from Kate’s Home Nursing. Kate’s have been beyond wonderful at a taxing time.

Left the trip back until quite late, around 21.30, but hit all sorts of problems on the way back to London. The Oxford ring road was closed eastwards, so I found myself driving right through Oxford and Cowley to get back on track. Then the signs said that the M4, where I would normally head after the M40, was closed. So I stayed on the M40, only to find the junction with the M25 was closed, too. Having been watching Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials on BBC1, am beginning to hanker after my own airship.