Disrupt the Model for The Sustainability Revolution (The Revolution will not be televised)

NEEDED RADICAL TRANSFORMATION OFFICER 4 year contract to change the polarity of the business model to Planet Positive, drop dead date 6th October 2025 in line with 4 year transformation window IPCC AR6. Senior Executive position reporting to the CEO. Keyword is RADICAL to disrupt the status quo, to transform the business from the inside-out, to make sustainability the outcome of core strategy and the result of everyone's job. RADICAL integration of sustainability into everything the business does and how it makes its money. Must be able to ask "WHY?" a lot, say "NO!" a lot, and is FREE to speak their mind and challenge anyone to justify their arguments for the way things are usually done. Advocate for our primary purpose DO NO MORE HARM. Must deliver a RADICAL diversification, product substitution & innovation strategy for the business to stop making products that are Planet Negative, to start making products which are Planet Positive for the new ecological economy. NEED for RADICAL COLLABORATION and employee empowerment. NEED for RADICAL HONESTY to call-out inconsistencies anywhere in the business between what the business says and what it does. Former whistleblowers and disruptors should apply.

But, we need an army of transformation officers everywhere in businesses, communities, schools, of all ages from all backgrounds. One RTO, or CSO, or CTO in one business is one person alone.

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Edible cities. Deliberative democracies at work. Doughnut Economics. Sustainability Accounting. Regenerative Agriculture. Integrated Education for Sustainability. The Sustainable Development Goals 2015 - 2030. The 1.5 degree life, and the life well lived. These are just some of the radical and revolutionary ideas and models of transformation that are still just hatching. They stand in opposition to what we do now, and are bold enough to warrant use of the term "transformation", which means a fundamental shift in the nature of things. But that word, so beloved of CEOs, politicians, consultants and MBAs, is hardly ever about the kind of transformation we need.

The thing about transformation is that it always seems to be somewhere out there in the far flung future about something hardly transformative at all. It's rarely here and now. Still, we may have no future at all given the CODE RED warning from the UN's 6th Assessment Report*. The evidence is clear, the systems that support life are collapsing. We did this by how we live, and while the root cause may link back to the 1st Industrial Revolution, most of the damage has been done by us in the last 50 years* or so. Did we really ruin the Earth in just 1 generation? We stand accountable to the 400 generations before us tracing back to the dawn of civilisation in the Agricultural Revolution, as well as to the few generations that might come after us, those who aren't here now to defend the futures we are ending.

We have 4 years left to change our ways and reverse the polarity of all our models

If you want to create a sense of URGENCY, and really put that textbook Kotter model of change into effect, then understand and communicate this fact: we have 4 years left* to change our ways and reverse the polarity of all our models social and economic from Planet Negative to Planet Positive. If by 2025, and most certainly by 2030, our spiralling environmental indicators haven't come down, then we are in dire straits and dealing with an irrecoverable situation. This is the most important decade in human history, the decade of tipping points when the dominoes start to fall*. When a life system collapses, whether its the ecosystem of the Amazon, or a human being, its gone forever.

Here we are then, in such desperate need of so much transformation, yet stuck, and disengaged and disconnected from each other and the issues. Feeling unempowered we leave it to others, the government and corporations, and buy things we don't need to help us feel better. Don't challenge the status quo, keep your head down, ignore the problem, get ahead. This culture of conformity and mass consumerism is the root of our undoing. Human mind-sets and patterns of behaviour set early, and unfortunately our training for life did not include how to live sustainably in coexistence with each other and with Nature. There was no circuit break along the way to interrupt the current, no switch to protect us from the damage we were doing. We should have received the jolt we needed at school. Our teachers weren't meant to tell us what we needed to know to survive.

There is potential for true transformation, it happens so rarely because it requires a shock to the system, a temporary state when mindsets and patterns become unset. The financial collapse of 2007 was the moment to reset and rewire capitalism. We know that didn't happen. Terrible as that collapse was, it is insignificant compared to what is coming in the 6th Mass Extinction Event which is upon us. Time to wake up and hit the big red button on our production line to STOP any more errors from our human dysfunctional world moving into the 3 billion year old natural world.

Transformation involves pain and sacrifice

Lets be blunt, transformation involves pain because it's radical change from the inside out. It means becoming something else, and there’s a sacrifice to be made. The person or the business must choose to do different things, to stop putting out there what’s adding to the problem. A person or a company remade and on a mission. That’s sustainability, the outcome of a transformation so that people and products solve problems instead of causing the climate emergency, the biodiversity emergency, and toxic food, air, and water. It's a life designed for 1.5 degrees and living within planetary boundaries. It's not a better ESG rating or off-setting responsibilities to someone or someplace else.

Never has there been a better time to challenge the status quo. To stand up and question the model and even call into question the sanity of people at the top. Rid yourself of the illusion that people know what they are doing. Take a hammer to the old models and break them up. Look again at what's wrong with the lack of employee empowerment, attitudes to risk, products and their design and supply chains, the model of customer engagement, how decisions are taken, who stakeholders are, who gets paid what and why, what goes back into society in tax. The whole thing. Endeavour to persevere, to unlearn what you have learned about the business of business in college. That education let us all down. Now universities are scrambling to finally teach the right stuff?

Be warned. The Chief Strategy Officer may not know a thing about strategy. The Chief Sustainability Officer may not know much about sustainability. Same goes for the Chief Transformation Officer. Lots of chiefs with little appetite for change or radical disruption. Besides, isn't that the problem, that we shouldn't expect one person or a chief to solve things for us. We need radical empowerment and collaboration and diversity in so many ways, especially neurodiversity in the way people think. For a while on LinkedIn people started to get creative with job titles, retro-fitting what they actually did onto the out of date label to stay relevant or get picked up by the algorithm, or they took on new identities as "gurus", "disruptors", "zen masters" and "thought leaders". OK some of that was a bit lame. But I've never seen the title of Radical Transformation Officer or similar with a description that mentions freedom to get radical and call everything into question. How do you write that job description and find that person? Same goes for a radical anything, if they exist at all they'd have gone rogue long ago. The system hasn't been kind to people with a different point of view. They remain outliers.

An Act of Resistance is saying No or asking Why

We are on the brink of something big, this could be either The 4th Industrial Revolution aka The Sustainability Revolution that will rewire the economy and society for the better, or we are on the brink of something else, The Last Revolution, a violent chaotic response to system collapse. That's how serious things are, when things can't go on any longer they end. I wrote this article for my fellow sustainability practitioners, first contact responders, to call into question all our efforts up until this point, in working within the system and within our normal routines and boundaries. We are not outside on the street picketing, though sometimes we want to march, we are inside companies with a special position as "the go-to person on sustainability issues". We know this is an absurd idea, that the breadth and complexity of the challenges is beyond the understanding of any one person, that its everyone's responsibility to do their jobs in a way that delivers sustainable outcomes. For the moment anyway, let's take advantage of our position, knowledge and voice, and use them in a more radical way. It's time we thought about our own Acts of Resistance. If we've just heard our CEO speak about the need for transformation, then lets hold them to account. Say NO to things that work against that, that conflict with the new Climate Action Plan. Lean on the community of practitioners in your sustainability network to test your defenses and externally validate your assumptions. Find good evidence to justify your arguments. There is already enough information in the public domain so its everyone's responsibility to read up on these issues, it's not your job to convince people anymore. In Lean Manufacturing, it is expected to challenge the status quo to eliminate waste and prevent no errors forward, the 5-Whys tool is useful for root cause analysis after a problem has occurred. Start with 1-Why to try to prevent the problem in the first place if something seems like a bad habit, the same old way of doing things.

In my own Town of Dublin, I am reminded of the courageous shop workers who refused to handle fruit from Apartheid-era South Africa in the 1980s, who were out of work as a result, the business pursued profits and rejected employee empowerment, and shoppers crossed the picket for low prices. Today, we have two national emergencies, the climate one, and the forgotten one. That latter one is the ecocide from biodiversity loss, driven by land use change, farming practices, and the release of toxic pollutants into the environment. Given how much is already known of causal links between the use of chemical herbicides and pesticides, and the lethal effects on all life from bees to humans, and Court actions leading to $ billions in settlements, why do we continue to handle these poisons and pass them along from importer to retailer to farmer? What's legal is not the same as ethical or safe, it takes time for the laws to catch up. There are other examples, like designing university courses or buildings or anything to deliver a 1.5 degree world. If a client demands a 2nd or 3rd option on the basis of cost that's non-compliant with a sustainability boundary, would you say "NO, WE DON'T DO THAT HERE". Because that's we're at now, hard choices, turning away from the old path because that's only headed one way. We should think of ourselves as understated Earth Defenders, the quieter ones on the inside of companies doing the next necessary right thing. We aren't Climate or Sustainability Celebrities on the telly lecturing others, we are working the problems using our skills and involving others to change mindsets. The revolution will not be televised, there are many lines along the front. We know our responsibilities, but an old saying comes to mind "to know and not to do is not to know". Big picture, it is possible to avoid overshoot and collapse but it is going to require an extraordinary effort (Jorgen Randers*).

What next necessary right and radical thing can you do? And what's holding you back?

Remember, resistance is not futile.

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED.

You will not be able to stay home, brother

You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out

You will not be able to lose yourself

And skip out for beer during commercials, because

The revolution will not be televised

The revolution will put you in the driver's seat

The revolution will be no re-run, brothers

The revolution will be live

The revolution will not be televised

Songwriter: Gil Scott-Heron Excerpt from The Revolution Will Not Be Televised lyrics ? Warner Chappell Music, Inc, Carlin America Inc

“The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. So when we said that the revolution will not be televised, we’re saying that the thing that’s going to change people is something that no one will ever be able to capture on film. It’ll just be something you see and all of a sudden you realize, I’m on the wrong page, or I’m on the right page but I’m on the wrong note.” —Gil Scott-Heron, speaking to Skip Blumberg for the award-winning Public Broadcast System series ‘The 90’s.’?

Johnny Meehan will be in conversation with fellow sustainability practitioners on Day 2 of The Sustainability Revolution series Oct 6th hosted by Business in the Community Ireland.

Practitioner Tip: Read Paul Gilding. Watch Jorgen Randers. (see links below)

*References:

IPCC AR6 The Sixth Assessment Report. Climate Change 2021:The Physical Science Basis Accessible: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

"Humanity has just four years to peak and start drawing down global greenhouse gas emissions, coal- and gas-fired power plants must shut down within a decade, and wealthy lifestyles and behaviours will have to change to avoid climate breakdown", according to a leaked draft of an upcoming working group report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). IPCC AR6 WG Leak

Wunderling, N., Donges, J. F., Kurths, J., and Winkelmann, R.: Interacting tipping elements increase risk of climate domino effects under global warming, Earth Syst. Dynam., 12, 601–619, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-601-2021, 2021. Accessible: https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/12/601/2021/

Paul Gilding Why I welcome a Climate Emergency

Paul Gilding Why the Climate Emergency is the Methane Emergency

Jorgen Randers Limits to Growth 50 Years in the Past 50 Years in the Future

Workers refuse to handle Apartheid goods