Count yourself lucky if climate-related numbers aren’t making you nervous, but facing the basics yourself can be empowering, and increasingly vital.

This year, new regulations will continue to emerge across sectors to try to standardise environmental expectations for business – but embracing change starts at the personal level with one magic word: confidence. What is a good standard for measuring that? Getting some essential short-form learning for yourself and your team can bump them up into a clearer context for vision and strategy, to say nothing of developing leadership.

Numbers are not normally my friend. What I do creatively rarely adds up to nice marketingy algorithmic figures of influence. But last week gave me some good ones. Around some inescapably terrible ones.

Because, last week I was in Tenerife, working with some creative partners.

Now, I was expecting that look. That Really? Working? Mm-hmm… disbelieving look. You.

I was host for a client’s leadership event and, standing on the stage at the beginning of the last morning, I said cheerily to everyone:

“You are a bad person!”

And then I laughed at them all. The room turned just a degree colder.

I kept chuckling and shaking my head at them as I paced the stage area, aware I had a few scant seconds to take this somewhere.

“No matter how you try to add up the maths of your life, it will never total Properly Good – on paper.”?

I turned to them and waved a piece of recycled card we’d all been given in our arrival envelopes.

“Oh yeah, talk about sustainability, Timo,” I said, “this isn’t much of a fig leaf for burning at least 300kg of carbon each to all get together on a rocky island off the coast of Western Sahara, is it?”

I heard maybe two nervous chuckles.

"How do we square our ambitions for sustainability and net zero with targets for old fashioned growth?” I asked them, uncomfortably holding everyone’s attention. I’d better make this good.?

So I said simply: “How about starting by accepting zero shame and daring to keep holding those two apparently opposing things in frame at once. Then personally think about how you can begin to plug in your own passion where you are.”

Representing Carswell Gould , with whom I’ve developed a fair bit of story for their client 海克斯康 , together we’ve gotten to know the global engineering company’s ambitions for re-structuring their business. They’re wanting to raise up leadership that can help to build much more positive futures and, as I’ve written about before , their’s is a corporate test case I continue to find intriguing for its possibilities.?

They have a particular campaign line at the moment that is quite an ambition.

“Your context today is unbelievable crisis and change globally” I continued, “but you find yourself at just this point in history working for a company that wants to do nothing less than reimagine reality.”

I eyed them all with a moment of no-nonsense preacher’s sass.

“You have to decide personally if that is corporate BS or an opportunity.”

Lord knows how the senior leadership let me get away with this but in the closing event survey I scored 79% Excellent as host and almost all the rest as Very Good.

My head might have spun for a second at some verifiable metrics of impact for Momo there but it’s the numbers pouring out of the climate crisis that are more likely to make us all need a sit down when we’re made to pay some attention for work ESG purposes.

So how can little old you and I get more confident in facing the basics, before signing up to corporate aims that will always sound a little unrealistic before they begin to get realised.

The climate crisis –?more numbers in boxes?

Businesses are facing more and more accountabilities when it comes to sustainability. Fields of response they are having to fill in to show a purposeful direction of travel in their impacts on planet Earth. Investors are increasingly demanding evidence of it.

Many more businesses are going to have to build in new levels of accountability, due to the European Sustainability Reporting Standards . As Edie sums it up: “Under the ESRS, large businesses will need to enhance their environmental disclosures by embedding them in annual reports from 2024. The Standards will then be mandated for medium-sized businesses in phases through to 2026.”

Hooking loosely into the idea of Scopes 1, 2 and 3, emissions reporting – ie: direct impacts of your activity, bought in impacts of your activity and impacts from the output of your activity – organisations will have to provide materiality assessments and some rather finer-grain evidence of what they’re doing.

Then an initiative like the new UK Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures is forming a framework to measure risk and damage more explicitly against the thing most suffering the symptoms of human activity – nature. It’s a corporate disclosure aiming to hook corporate governance more directly to bio-diversity and it at least means more consciousness of nature terminology and life systems in boardrooms.

This stuff can seem a long way off to most of your workforce. And, be honest, to you, before you did something about it.

The bit of paper I was waving around in Tenerife signalled Hexagon’s partnership with Cool Earth . An organisation that, as it puts it, believes that: “empowering those who live in rainforests is the key to easing social and climate pressures that lead to deforestation." And they’re pretty excited about partnering with a data savvy global engineering firm.

If we are to be able to hold very different things in tension like this, we’ll each need to be aware of the story we’re really in, when it comes to the evidence of climate breakdown around the world. Open all the post, rip off the band aid. It ultimately empowers you, knowing what’s going on a bit more. Even when it’s bloody sobering. Because it does present some opportunities for change that normal business hasn’t opened up to before.

The real challenge is cultural. Knowing how to change that narrative – firstly in your own head.

But real futures literacy in our current business climate may well start most usefully with the essential data. And so a numbery way into it might not be so bad a start.

Carbon Literacy is one of a number of standards you could turn to to do a crash course in those essentials. As I’ll say in the course I’m setting up to run, this is not all about carbon dioxide, and we should be wary of certain big business’s obsession over such numbers – we’re really talking about behaviours caused by cultures threatening life systems across the planet.

But raised as we are in the robot world machine, tracking the essential evidence that data scientists and sensors are giving us from all directions can be a good lingua franca for us all to be aware of and reference, not just fringe-sounding experts.

It's a privilege always to be invited into rooms to creatively help leaders get their imaginations around the possibilities of crisis. But it can start with arming yourself with key facts and references – which can feel oddly empowering. If you're up for the vision of it.

More soon from me on this.

Crisis and change: how to get more effectively excited.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ME AND MY CLIMATE & FUTURES CREATIVE SUPPORT FOR LEADERSHIP AT MOMOZO.CO >