Green Swans Take Off In Aviva Basement

The Green Swan agenda really began to take off at the Tomorrow's Capitalism Forum, co-hosted by Aviva Investors and Volans on Friday 10 January. The Forum attracted over 300 leaders and influencers to hear and test the conclusions of the first round of the Tomorrow's Capitalism Inquiry. To call it a runaway success would be to understate the audience reaction. At the dawn of the 2020s, people were clearly ready, to quote the conference strapline, to "Step Up - Or Get Out Of The Way". And pretty much everyone was keen to step up.

The Forum was held in the extraordinary conference centre underneath the Aviva HQ, 1 Undershaft, sometimes dubbed "The Trellis". The picture above was taken from the control room from which the conference was run. The images used here are either mine (e.g. above) or scooped from Twitter, where there was a tsunami of commentary (see #TomorrowsCapitalism). We will shortly be posting filmed coverage of the main sessions of the Forum, together with professional photographs taken during the day.

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Aviva Investors Chief Responsible Investment Officer Steve Waygood and his colleagues for supporting the Inquiry and the Forum. And that steadily moving image of the Earth from space was incredibly powerful, a demonstration of the power of the "Overview Effect" as the Forum began, to a soundtrack featuring Queen's A Kind Of Magic.

Our CEO, Louise Kjellerup Roper, and Inquiry Lead Richard Roberts conducted the proceedings, which was a joy - given that, unusually, I could listen and talk to the extraordinary range of interesting people taking part. That said, I did chair four sessions.

One on "The Exponential Decade," featuring the RethinkX work on the coming disruption of the cow economy and 20-year old climate activist Dominique Palmer (details on this page) on what I have dubbed the "Greta Wave" of activism now shaking the political order; one featuring John Fullerton, who gave the first Tomorrow's Capitalism Lecture; one on "Stepping Up Collaboratively" with speakers from the Capital Institute, Covestro, Forum for the Future, The Good Growth Company and Neste; and one, the final session, on "Stepping Up Systemically". There I chose to focus on Green Swans, as this image from Twitter confirms:

A major highlight of the day was the first Tomorrow's Capitalism Lecture, already mentioned and delivered by John Fullerton, founder and President of the Capital Institute. No-one denies that sustainability will be with us for decades, generations and even centuries as a North Star concept for change, but John's point was that both resilience and sustainability must be seen as emergent properties of the health of our economic, social and, crucially, environmental systems. As a result, the emerging regeneration agenda will be central to the change agenda in this Exponential Decade, a time of Black Swans and Green. And, to that point, here is part of one of John's slides, featuring a Green Swan:

A central point I tried to make was that system change is way above most people's capacities and pay grades, but history is full of examples of leaders who have shown that it is possible. Examples include William Wilberforce, Samuel Plimsoll, Nelson Mandela and Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Now, to identify, spotlight, celebrate and support their modern day equivalents, we have launched the Green Swan Awards.

But who to spotlight as champions of exponential change, as changemakers who have helped make the seemingly impossible not only possible but seemingly inevitable?

In that final session of the Forum we celebrated two extraordinary exemplars if the breed: Sir Tim Smit of the Eden Project, which has attracted over 20 million visitors and injected more than ￡1.5 billion into the regional economy, and Sacha Dench, known as the "Human Swan" (see below the page grab from The Times profile of Sacha last December), whose death-defying flights have underscored how crucial it is in this Anthropocene epoch of ours to overcome the borders, barriers and silos that impede structural change. And how important it is for us all to overcome our fears to drive the necessary scale of change. Filmed versions of Tim and Sacha's acceptance speeches will be posted shortly.

Almost finally, here is a shot from Twitter of the final panel, featuring Tim and Sacha - and, on the right, Nicola Godden, the sculptor who is developing the Green Swan Award trophy. Nicola created the wonderful monument to WWF co-founder Sir Peter Scott that I have long admired at the Barnes Wetland Centre, near my London home.

The statue features Bewick swans, which Peter helped reintroduce into the UK - and which Sacha is now championing in the face of a range of existential pressures from Siberia through to the UK. A photo of the evolving trophy, currently in clay maquette form, can be found on the Green Swans page of the Volans website. Some further background, from my own blog, can be found here.

As we edit and distil the results of the Forum, we will also be working on the next stage of the Green Swan Awards initiative. We plan to launch a formal call for nominations and applications in April, with the first major round of awards to be announced in the Autumn/Fall. Meanwhile, we are recruiting the judging panel, with an eye for people who can help us think through the sort of positive exponential dynamics that will be needed to deliver the systemic change required by the UN Sustainable Development Goals and relate climate agreements.

For more information and updates on all of this, please sign up here.