The Climate Crisis is Also a Crisis of Imagination
IDEO leaders Natalia Vasquez , Luis Cilimingras , Sergio Fregoni , and Indy Saha attended the recent Ellen MacArthur Foundation Summit 23 in London. Here they reflect on what they learned.?
The climate crisis is not only environmental. It’s also a crisis of imagination and creativity. Radical new solutions are needed, but they are in woefully short supply.
But here, at this summit, the power and potential of design was front and centre—and it was hugely encouraging to witness.
IDEO and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation are long-time partners (in 2017, we worked together to launch the first circular design guide). But this year it wasn’t either of us calling for more and better design to address climate challenges: it was senior leaders from other organisations. And it was gratifying to see them reflect a critical truth: design, at its best, is more than a set of discrete crafts, such as graphic design or industrial design. It’s how positive change happens.
Fundamentally, design is the practical application of imagination to a challenge. And we face no bigger challenge than the environmental crisis and our arrival into the Climate Era. To get us out of this situation—and into a better one—everything must be redesigned. Economies. Business models. Complex systems. Behaviours.
It’s the work IDEO has been engaged in for years, alongside countless clients and partners, and our commitment has never been deeper. Much of the conversation at the EMF summit centred on the perennially hard question: so how do you actually redesign everything?
Here are two takeaways from the summit that we believe all leaders should be thinking about today.
1. Design towards Regeneration
It’s no longer enough to think about the reuse or repair of products. Nor is it sufficient simply to reduce what we make. Right now, the conversation is squarely focused on regeneration: creating products that not only minimise harm but also, through their very existence, actually help to restore the natural ecosystem. An informal survey of summit attendees suggested that most organisations agree with this goal. But few, if any, feel like they’re ready or able to reach it.
Going for regeneration means reimagining choices earlier and earlier in a product’s lifecycle. ?80% of a product's environmental impact is shaped by decisions made in its earliest stages. If regeneration is going to happen, it’s got to start at the start. That means businesses producing products and services in radically new ways, drawing on powerful new tools and organisational capabilities—design chief among them.
2. Design towards Leadership Diversity
For better or worse, the products an organisation makes reflect the values of its leadership. At the summit, we explored a provocation alongside our fellow attendees: If a company’s products are expected to be regenerative, shouldn’t its leadership be regenerative too?
It makes sense. Crop monocultures are rarely resilient. The same is true for business leadership: the C-suites of many organisations are their own kind of monoculture, where only a few kinds of perspective or life experience are available to inform critical choices.
Biodiversity drives resilience in the natural world. So it is in business, where cognitive and attitudinal diversity is a powerful advantage, not least when it emerges from a diversity of lived experience. Modern organisations require a diversity of leadership to keep people inspired, to sustain teams through hard times, and to provoke world-class ideas. Leadership that’s built for regeneration—that encourages growth and renewal in how an organisation runs itself—can also more readily embrace a shared vision and see it through to its conclusion.
In other words, designing how you should lead is essential to designing what you should make.
This is hard stuff to tackle. We all do things the way we’ve always done them: our linear systems nudge us to stay in line. Many transformations fail because while people know something has to be done, they aren't able to imagine it or visualise it. In other words, if you can’t see it, you can’t be it.
This was the provocation our IDEO team brought to life at the EMF summit. By prototyping what an everyday home might look like in a not-far-off Circular Future, people were able to touch and feel that possible future, and think more powerfully about its implications.
Design brings possibilities out of the realm of abstractions and into the real world—into people’s hands. And it provides organisations with a set of proven tools to reimagine all the things that, as the climate crisis becomes ever more acute, we have no option but to remake.
How might your company harness the power of design to imagine a better future and to begin building it now? And what would it look like for your leadership to become powerfully ‘biodiverse’??
Concepts and space design by: Andy Deakin , Clio Capeille , Dali Yu , Heeju Kim , Jenna Fizel , Kalle J?nsson , Max Klein , Mitch Carter Jafery , Natalia Vasquez , Reuben Jerome D'silva , Sergio Fregoni , and Stephanie Sizemore .