2020: Time to Think the Unthinkable and Imagine the Impossible

The period in between Christmas and New Year has long been recognised as an opportunity to reflect on the past while anticipating the future. No wonder then that the name of the first month of any year is based on the Roman God Janus, the animistic spirit of doorways, the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. 

It’s no coincidence either that “the root word of 'leadership' is 'leith' which means to cross the threshold, to let go of old ways, mind-sets and logic in order to embrace the new” (1). That being so, it could be argued that this period in the calendar year is the time when leaders are born or rejuvenated. Furthermore, never has there been time when wise leadership was so needed at every level – national, regional, local and personal. 

The date 01-01-2020 probably represents the biggest doorway we humans have ever stepped through in our entire history as a species - decisions each of us make over the next ten years, starting today, will determine the fate of our current civilisation and the future of countless other species affected by our choices. According to scientists, CO2 emissions will have to be cut by 45% by 2030 if we are to have a fighting chance of keeping temperatures rising no more than 1.5 degrees Centigrade this century. 

By the time Greta Thunberg and her peers are 26 years old, and become active participants in the workforce and seasoned voters, sea levels may well have risen by 0.6 feet, extreme weather events will be more frequent, and the impact of climate change on food supplies, biodiversity loss, disease, mobility will be impossible to ignore. There is no basis for assuming that the rising tide of public concern, as expressed by student strikes and Extinction Rebellion, will slow down as fires, floods, hurricanes and tornados occur with increasing frequency and the numbers of homeless rise.  

Note: failure to act now will not mean that the world will come to an end in 2030 but it will seriously curtail our chances of preventing unimaginable levels of human suffering that will befall our children and theirs.

Truth is, the time pressure is far more challenging than described – the next 12 months will be critical as the political decisions to enable the necessary cuts in carbon to be made, will have to happen by the end of 2020 – 363 days from now (2).

So, in this context, what form of leadership is required of the travel and hospitality sector? Four words come to mind: focus, honesty, courage and imagination.

1. Focus While I have consistently argued that we need to think holistically and acknowledge the complex interdependencies associated with the change drivers that affect tourism, I now have to plead for focus and prioritisation. 

The Carbon Issue has to move to top of everyone’s agenda - not only because major decisions have to be made, but also because this issue can provide both the impetus and the thread to understanding and dealing with all the other compelling issues such as over/under tourism, waste, conservation and biodiversity, social justice, wealth distribution etc.  They are all connected. Failure to curtail temperature rises will undermine any other aspirations for a better tourism.

Fearlessly and thoroughly addressing the carbon issue, while assuming that each of us are contributors as well as potential victims, will require us to examine, question and re-frame all the assumptions, values and beliefs that underpin the current operating system. Wicked problems cannot be fixed with tactical gestures nor with the thinking that created them in the first place. Neither can issues that are systemic in nature and experienced both globally and locally be addressed by any single agency. Never has the need for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and co-creation been more acute. Destinations, consultants, business leaders and academics need to step out of their boxes, stop protecting their turf, and join hands in a collective effort.

Failure to reduce the negative effects of a warming climate will render overtourism the distant memory of a nice to have problem. Over the next decade, a combination of factors will significantly slow down or interrupt the growth rates we’ve taken for granted and which underpin the optimistic growth forecasts and inflate the order books for more cruise lines, aircraft and hotels. These include: 

• Infrastructure damage and disruptions to supply chains affecting food and water supplies due to rising temperatures, extreme weather events
• Rising costs, scarcity of insurance provision and capital for rebuilding damaged infrastructure
• Collapse of land values, equity capital and access to financing
• Changes in consumer awareness, behaviour and preferences
• Internalisation of externalities that leads to less cheap travel (taxation, pricing)
• Outbreaks of disease, famine leading to political unrest, increased migration etc.

Is your business, your DMO, your community preparing yourself for these probabilities? Do you have both a mitigation and adaptation strategy? What should such strategies look like? Who should be involved in their preparation?

2. Honesty Given the magnitude of the challenges facing us, isn’t it time for a little less spin and a little more honesty and humility. In a world where corporate, brand and personal reputation count and matter so much, but can be trusted so little, admission of failure, confusion, denial, and ignorance are perceived as costly. So can’t we learn from other sectors that our shortcomings are in fact universal. 

"I've failed," says Mike Barry, architect of M&S' sustainability strategy Plan A. "I've spent 20 years trying to make existing businesses less bad, but all we've managed to do is make existing business one, two or three per cent less bad each year, and that's been swamped by the growth in consumption. Barry notes when he joined M&S in 2000 the global population consumed 80 billion garments a year - now it consumes 120 billion garments, and is heading towards 200 billion by 2030. (3)

The situation in aviation is the same. As highlighted in the recent report, Airline Initiatives to reduce climate impact by Susanne Becken and Paresh Pant on behalf of Griffith University, Surrey University and Amadeus (4), international flights and emissions increased by 4.7% and 5.2% respectively in 2018 over 2017 but efficiency gains hovered around 1%. Note: the average annual reduction in emissions required if we are to prevent exceeding an increase of 1.5 degrees centigrade is 7.5%. Is this vast gap between current performance and what is needed the cause of paralysis, denial, cognitive dissonance?

How many airline executives or CEOs of destination marketing organisations have proved willing to stand up and say “I’ve failed” when their board members or political masters still expect them to keep on growing. Until we in tourism are willing to stand up and admit our vulnerabilities and failures along with fellow executives and policy makers in other sectors, we will miss the opportunity to makes the changes needed to create and sustain a better version of our sector. As other sectors do find the courage to admit they are to be part of the solution and tourism continues to procrastinate, won't we find a shredding of our social licence to operate using obsolete and damaging patterns of the past?

The elephant in the tourism room remains a persistent unwillingness to address the addiction to volume growth which is seriously impeding the need: to develop adaptation and resilience capacity; to improve performance and net benefit to host communities; and to integrate tourism more creatively and productively with other sectors of the economy.  This unwillingness is masked by the promotion of the “sustainable development goals” on a voluntary basis without a clear understanding that sustaining “business as usual” will, in the end, undermine survivability let alone thrivability. 

Having said that, we must recognise that in the context of fierce competition and the need to keep up the appearance of being in control, such truth telling can be very difficult indeed. So, this is not about pointing the finger at CEOs. Until we the public, we the customer, we the voters put pressure on Board Directors and the political masters that control jobs and budgets of the public bodies, it won’t be safe for their “leaders” to be honest. And this situation leads to the third attribute needed to turn us around fast enough – the courage and a willingness to lead by being different not conforming. 

3. Courage to Think the Unthinkable - As illustrated by famous story-teller Hans Christian Anderson, it takes enormous courage to tell the emperor he is wearing no clothes, unless, of course, you are an innocent child (with or without Asperger’s syndrome). 

The source of the phrase Thinking The Unthinkable (5) comes from a compelling book of the same name published in 2015 by Nick Gowing and Chris Langdon.  Their research, which involved over 60 lengthy,  one-on-one private conversations with CEOs, suggest that less than 5-10% are managing to acknowledge the existential threats to their business – not just those associated with climate change and biodiversity loss but those reflecting unprecedented turbulence in the spheres of politics, economics, values, social cohesion. It isn’t that CEOs don’t sense they exist, but it’s too risky to question them publicly especially if they don’t have a plan in their back pockets to fix them – and who has that?  

The challenge is the sheer speed, scale and unpredictability of change events that can be as unpalatable as unthinkable. Think of Brexit in the UK - who'd have thought a country showing strong recovery after years of austerity would inflict such uncertainty on itself? Think of the Trump win. Think of the fact we allow a foreign country to openly poison a British citizen and systematically use social media to undermine our democracy? Think of water crises in major cities that aren't going to disappear? Think of the unilateral whimsical decisions of a US President made in the first week of 2020 to assassinate a general and potentially start WW3 without any consultation? Think of the thousands of miles of coastline ablaze with residents forced to the sea by forest fires in Australia?

Gowing & Langdon quote NESTA’s Geoff Mulgan’s presentation to the European Political Strategy Centre in 2016  where he says it is time to let go of “zombie orthodoxies”  defined as familiar practices and beliefs that we cling to even though we know they no longer work, simply because they are now part of the culture (6).  

It takes courage to think the unthinkable especially out loud; to question the prevailing zombie orthodoxies;” and to admit they don’t have all the answers, but those who do few quickly find they are in good company so that the probabilities of seeing round the curve to a better future increase rapidly. 

Here are few “zombie othodoxies” at work in the tourism sector that come to mind: 

• More visitors to a place equals greater prosperity
• Prosperity is primarily about money & spending power
• Inbound tourism can sustain volume increases of 5% into the foreseeable future thanks to the growth in developing economies in Asia and South America
• We’re too remote to experience overtourism
• Digitalisation will solve many of our problems
•  We can manage our way out this 

What other zombie orthodoxies can you add to the list?

4. Imagine the Impossible Shortly before the end of 2019, I re-discovered the words of famous, pioneering systems thinker Donella Meadows and her colleagues who wrote the prescient Limits to Growth in 1972. After 28 years they updated their observations regarding the non-material factors needed to enable systems change described as “essential characteristics of any society that hopes to govern in the long-term.” They include Visioning, Networking, Truth-telling, Learning, and Loving and justify an essay devoted to their applicability to tourism later. But here, we’ll focus on the first: Visioning.

What we’re seriously lacking in the travel, tourism and hospitality sector is the capacity and effort needed to imagine an alternative to the model playing out today. We’re so captivated by our own sales rhetoric, so enchanted by our own zombie orthodoxies that we failed to see the negative impact of sustained volume growth until it had become a virtually unstoppable epidemic. Until there’s a compelling vision of what could be, we’ll always be dragged back to the current, prevailing and familiar system. 

Tourism is not a vertical industry that can be controlled from some central source thanks to the decisions made by a handful of senior policy makers or the CEOs of those big corporations with influence and control. It’s a vast, complex, loosely coupled network of thousands of self-organising agents, with no one in charge so that change can only occur one community at a time. That’s why we are focussing on building capacity to restore and regenerate at the community level. The most effective way community action and engagement starts is not by adopting a plan, checklist, template or set of practices from outside the community but by a process of alignment and co-creation of a shared sense of identity, purpose and aspiration that are place and people specific.  

Our next few posts will look at some of the issues raised here in more detail.

Thank you for your readership and support in 2019. I wish you a happy and fulfilling New Year and hope this can be the turning point in public attitudes and activity we sorely need.

Reading

1.    The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization By Peter M Senge

2.     Climate Change: 12 tears to save the planet? Make that 18 months by Matt McGrath in Science & Environment 24 July 2019

3.     Quote from Thinking The Unthinkable, by Nik Gowing and Chris Langdon 

4.     Airline Initiatives to reduce climate impact by Susanne Becken and Paresh Pant on behalf of Griffith University, Surrey University and Amadeus

5.     Thinking the Unthinkable – a new imperative for leadership in a disruptive age. Nik Gowing and Chris Langdon, John Catt Educational, 2008 

6.     Thesis, antithesis and synthesis: A constructive direction for politics and policy after Brexit and Trump, Geoff Mulgan, Nesta