Practical Methods for Accelerating Breakthrough Transformation of Climate Change

Just to purge any imposters, I’ll pose the simplest question.? Is your organization serious about climate change and earnestly trying to contribute to the curtailment of emissions?? Or are they hopping on the bandwagon for the sake of brand and reputation, aka green washing? Green washers may struggle to benefit from the guidance here, though keep trying, giving up is obviously not an option. ?

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Admittedly, no organization can or should be devoid or even limited in their self-interest when it comes to climate change. I would suggest without it, we may never find a viable path on time to save ourselves. It certainly won’t be the only thing that gets us there as many have signaled, including and Bill Gates in his book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” and Naomi Woods in “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate” where both emphasize the role of government and policy across many historical innovations. Pitting them categorically against one another feels excessively purist as it’s clear it will take a village of institutions to mobilize a response. The bright silver lining (we all know it's underbelly) of capitalism is that with well-orchestrated financial motivations, rapid collaboration and accelerated innovation has repeatedly been proven possible. For the purpose of this article, we’ll presume at least a modicum of genuine interest and commitment to taking necessary measures in support of saving our planet.

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Existential Empathy – Leveraging Neurobiology, Western Psychology, and Eastern Philosophy

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Let’s start with an admission. If we are to accelerate the mobilization of a response to climate change, we must substantially improve coordination. This specifically means that institutions, organizations and individuals must learn to leap frog humanity’s greatest examples of collaboration. Said even more clearly, integrated decision making across governmental, regulatory, legal, scientific, technological, operational, tax, financial, and commercial domains must ensue. Although I’d encourage us to continue to strive for greater compassion, societal enlightenment isn’t going to suffice here. ?Though, I am greatly encouraged by the increasing attendance to elevating one's purpose beyond worldly status and reward. This is no doubt a necessity for society to tackle so many of our challenges.

Each domain noted above has achieved significant collaboration, but seeking this integrated collaboration calls upon a new tier of elevating purpose. Revolutionizing collaboration is a tall order, in some ways just as hard as the underlying challenge of Climate Change. This is evident when reflecting on the increasingly polarized world we inhabit, something we will discuss more deeply in future postings. So how do we invoke Existential Empathy? The natural system thinkers among us may conjure it more easily, though struggle to compel others regarding its merits. Rather than relying on only those awakened souls among us, we need to find new ways to mobilize a response.

Interesting factoid: Not surprisingly, our frontal lobe – or slow thinking center as detailed by Daniel Kahnehman, has been isolated as the center of empathy. For those curious, our prefrontal cortex has the most agency here. Real-time (rt-fMRI) scans have shown that watching someone experience things causes our brains to act like it’s happening to us. Research shows though, that while we excel at individual empathy, large scaled empathy is subject to a phenomenon called Compassion Fade as noted in the hyperlinked article.

Behavioral Science – Activating Existential Empathy

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Presented with the need to bridge such a complex network of collaborators, most will feel like they are facing the old adage of “eating an elephant in one bite” and will shy away from attempts at coordination. If somehow conditions force the transformation, extreme measures to police the transformation ensue. This imposed path can be missing the ground level insights to succeed. We have all seen the reversion that ensues.

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Systemic change attempts start to feel futile as people’s focus returns to the established domains and measures of each persona. If this is unfamiliar language, persona is just the latest form of describing categories of roles and responsibility. It shouldn’t be a surprise that various professions attract common personality types and their tendencies. Embracing this has proven essential to achieving the ambitious empathy needed for complex multi-disciplinary transformation. It underpins a vast array of behavioral innovation methods and prominently feeds human-centered design principles. In this light, let’s take a moment and reflect on the makeup of climate change actors.

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Personality Psychology – Subject Matter Anchoring

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At the risk of stereotyping and worse yet, alienating anyone, it deserves emphasis that the concept of personas isn’t meant to pigeon hole anyone’s personality. Think of it as a helpful cheat sheet for common themes you may find naturally among populations. I, like you, have experienced all personality types in every field and have seen experienced resources choose styles on-demand. If you take away one thing from this section, it’s that nuanced reception of others is essential to activating empathy and by extension, collaboration. Any married person will appreciate how productive compassionate listening can be. The struggle is real.

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There are many “Personality Psychology” methods originating from the most well known, the Myers-Briggs test, all focused on understanding self and others. The concepts between the many approaches are similar, so I’ve taken a generalized view of personalities to avoid favoring a method. The table below represents my thoughts based on experience and is not the result of any recent surveys, though I have led many programs that analyzed several of the roles noted.? ????

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Debates of the veracity of this summary aside, you can certainly perform your own analysis, this type of work provides a great anchor for understanding how the conversations might go between contributors. It allows for transformation leads to pre-meditate potential barriers in the interest of cultivating clearer communication. It is also essential for the crafting of tailored interactions between the opposing views natural to such a diverse band of pirates.

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One interesting thing, which may seem somewhat minor in the story, is how to enlist the best persona representative. At the risk of diving too deep, I’ll simply summarize it to say that done well, it will vastly increase speed to outcomes. Carefully curating the team is an art, though there are great rules of thumb that merit a revisit later in the series.

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Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that the orchestration of all of these pre-emptive things can feel like a luxury no organization can afford. Compelling leaders to “go slow to go fast” can often be a tough sell for urgent demands, but well worth it. In uncertain and complex work, demystifying the people puzzle is paramount. Furthermore, from experience, I will suggest it will take some very unique skills to lead the effort. There is a great amount of self-awareness, humility and understanding of people needed to maximize the planning and execution of each interaction. Building rapid trust will require an uncommon depth of authenticity, but with genuine compassion, I’ve seen the power of any cohort “form, storm, norm and perform” at a break-neck pace.

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Upcoming in the series…

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Having only touched the tip of the iceberg in this article, join us for the next article in this 3-part segment on “Applied Pioneering for Climate Change” where we will continue to thread the needle on how to get rapid systemic action and outcomes for this complex challenge.? The focus of the next article will be to delineate the prioritized debates surrounding Climate Change and in that context, discuss the importance of Innovation Science, emphasize the merits of a First Principles Based Approach and detail the Iterative Transformation required to validate any formed hypotheses.

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I’ll end this with a quote that speaks volumes about the beginner’s mind essential to pioneering: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” —Albert Einstein