 About 10 years ago, I was doing a postdoc with Mary and with a very smart, somewhat curmudgeonly and always really fun to work with economists named Mark Plummer. And I was really excited about the work I was doing, modeling the benefits provided to people from eelgrass in Puget Sound. And I was really excited about taking this information to decision makers who would see the light and make better decisions. And Mark in his very sort of crusty way said to me, you know what Ann? One day I'm going to write a paper called The Myth of the Enlightened Decision Maker. He said, this work that we're doing together is going to help change the conversation. It's going to help put new information in front of people who are going to make better decisions, hopefully. But it's going to be one tiny piece of that. And what we can do is try to shape the conversation. So fast forward about 10 years. And recently I met a leadership coach named Drew Kugler, who very clearly distinguishes himself from a motivational speaker because he believes that we can't motivate anyone to do anything. It has to come from within. So he teaches that the job of a leader, just like Mark Plummer said, is to create spaces for the right kinds of conversations to happen, like these participants at a NACAP training in Bhutan puzzling over ecosystem service trade-offs. Drew also talks about his work with surgeon and writer Atul Gawande, who wrote a book called Better. Listen to this passage from Better. Arriving at meaningful solutions is an inevitably slow and difficult process. Nonetheless, what I saw was better is possible. It does not take genius, it takes diligence, it takes moral clarity, and it takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try. His Better was changing the culture of operating rooms so that people would use checklists. Our Better is slightly different, but just like him, we have a vision and we've got to figure out how to get there. Our Better is integrating the value of nature into decisions so that we can motivate internally, within others, more targeted investments in natural capital so that we can improve the well-being of all people and nature. So the question I'd like to explore for the next few minutes is how do we, as a community of practice, create those conversations where change can happen, where we can affect the fundamental shift in decision-making that we would like to see? How do we lead in this space? So if you read the Harvard Business Review or online things about leadership, there are generally three things that come up over and over again that are qualities of leaders that rank highest. And these attributes of leadership, I think, are important for each of us individually, but they're also important for us as a community to think intentionally about how do we affect this change that we would like to see because decision-makers are not going to see the light if we give them more information. So how do we lead in this space? One of those qualities of leadership is competence. Leadership requires competence. Do we have the skills that we need to do the work? At NatCap, we're trying to make it easier to gain competence by building things like the natural capital platform, where we're doing the science and bottling that science up into software to make it easier for people to measure and map and value the benefits provided to people from natural systems. But the technical modeling skills aren't the only things that matter in terms of competence. We also have to have good listening skills, we have to have people skills, and we have to have the skills to include different ways of knowing in the work that we do. Leaders are also inspiring. We have to think about whether or not we are inspiring change, helping people to think about doing things differently. So we need to think about making sure we're listening and speaking in a way that makes people see that we understand them, that helps people see that we know where they're, we understand where they're coming from, and that we can together envision a future that we're all a part of. I think that's a really important piece of the inspiration provided by leaders and that we as a community can be those leaders. And then finally there's honesty. Honesty is really important in leadership. Can we do what we say we're going to do? Can we follow words with action? And some of this natural capital stuff can seem like all talk until we have real stories to tell about how this kind of information can inform decisions. At NACAP we're working in many different geographies and many different kinds of sectors around the world to try to make those success stories so that we can show that we've got actions to follow those words and we're trying to create those stories to show that we can make a difference in decisions. And I want you guys to all listen to the stories that you're going to hear over the over the course of this week so that we can share those stories across this community and spread as Mary was talking about these kinds of messages that this is possible. Honesty is also talking about the hard stuff like for example these two women are playing a game that is exploring the vulnerability of the San Francisco Bay area to sea level rise. And we've got to admit that we don't have all the answers that this is the kind of thing that we need to work on together to try to figure out how we can use this sort of information to make better decisions. So in closing one thing that I really love about this meeting is that we as a community have an opportunity to hone those leadership skills. We have an opportunity to build our community's competence to share those skills spend some time in the training track and learn how to use some software to help measure ecosystem services. And then we have the ability to share those stories of inspiration so that we can help spread those stories around the world. And then we can talk with each other to ensure that we can follow our words with action and figure out how to use understanding of nature's contributions to people to make better decisions for people and planet. So thanks so much for listening and I hope you'll help us figure out how to lead this movement together.