 I think we're in a period of correction where we have to snap back from some of the delusional thinking that we got involved in. Question is, and then what? John Elkington is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media Innovator's Magazine and the Aloha's Regenerative Foundation. John Elkington is a world authority on corporate responsibility, sustainable capitalism, a best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur. John is founder and chief pollinator at Volans, which works with leaders to make sense of the emergent future to unlock tomorrow's market value. Volans tackles some of the world's most challenging problems, helping key actors expand their focus from the responsibility agenda through resilience to regeneration. Much of the work is at board or C-suite level. John's thought leadership is evident in ongoing in Volans inquiries, including project breakthrough, tomorrow's capitalism inquiry, and the green swans observatory. John has helped create and incubate movements, including the global sustainability movement and powerfully shaped initiatives like the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, the Global Reporting Initiative, and B-Lab UK. He was a faculty member of the World Economic Forum from 2002 to 2008. And in 2009, he was named fourth in an international survey, top 100 corporate social responsibility leaders after Al Gore, Barack Obama, and the late Anita Rodick. John has addressed over thousands of conferences globally and served on over 80 boards and advisory boards. He is the author or co-author of over 20 books, the latest being Green Swans, The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism. I've got your book here. It's one of my favorite. I recommend it all the time, John. This is one of the most amazing books of our decade and probably our century. I thank you very much for it. We've talked in other forums, Future Iow Institute. We talked about your book before. And I really welcome you and thank you for your time that we can finally meet and have this podcast. Mark, thanks very much for the invitation. Firstly, secondly, when you introduced me, sounded almost like I was listening to my obituary, strolling down. And actually, to be honest, I feel that I'm only just getting started. And hopefully we'll get into some of that in a moment. But again, looking forward to the conversation. Well, I'm amazed because I hope it's okay for me to mention your age. You're getting into 72 now, right? I'm 73 in June. 73 in June. Yeah. So instead of birthday celebrations, you're having these birthday celebration events on regeneration and doing amazing things. And when I look at you, when I hear that you were on a meeting before our podcast, that you just have this insatiable drive to keep going. Is that because you don't see it as work? Because it's this movement, this mission? Where do you get that? And can you tell us a little bit more about that? Well, it's odd because I think my father had was just a human dynamo. And he ran pretty continuously until he died about three years ago. And my mother died the same year. They're both in their very late nineties. So I think there's some sort of genetic component to it. But also, I grew up with the environmental movement first. And I've always found anything to do with the wider environment. Absolutely fascinating. So it's been an extra constant set of learning curves, then I got into sustainability, then I got into everything and throughout work with business. And if you're working with agendas like that, and a world like the business world, which is everything, it's economics, it's technology, it's people in combinations and so on. It's absolutely fascinating. So I think to your point, I don't think it has totally been work to me. And if I'm not writing a book, then I need to be writing something else. So I find it hard to account for, but I'm sort of quite pleased it's worked that way to date. So right after Green Swans came out in 2020, you received in 2021, last year, the World Sustainability Award. Unbelievable. And that just goes to what you say, this drive and to do this work, to speak, to write and talk about these things. I want to write out the gate, talk about the triple bottom line recall. For those on the call who've never heard about the triple bottom line, you came out with a, what is it, 29 years ago now, almost, right? 1994, yes. 1994. And then you recalled it in 2018. I'd like you to tell us a little bit about that. And then I want to maybe explain for some of those individuals how to look at a recall. Is it similar to a product recall that we see out there? And for those who still have it in their models and who are still talking about the triple bottom line, how do we make sure that they have the re-crawl product or the new version of that mentality? And where are you going with that? Well, it turns out to be easier to recall something and create the shock waves that go with that, which I did with the product recall. In this case, for the triple bottom line, people, planet profit, as you said in 2018. It's not quite so easy to then reintroduce the new version, although we haven't done that. And the book that you just kindly brandished, Mark, is part of the answer to the question, if not that, then what? But the idea of the product recall, I'll come on to the history that built up to it, was not that we were sticking the idea of the triple bottom line on the spike. I mean, we couldn't. How dare we, in a way? I mean, it had got a life of its own. Now there's something over 4,000 B corporations around the world who are chartered around versions of the triple bottom line. You mentioned the Dow Jones sustainability indexes, the reporting initiative, all of these different initiatives have had the triple bottom line of their core. But the original idea, the original intent when I launched it in 1994 was we needed system change. And capitalism, it was currently configured, was not delivering this forms of value that we needed. In fact, it was actually very often destroying critical forms of value, particularly natural capital. So the idea was that the triple bottom line would help people think. And I have to say for the first couple of years, it was difficult. I mean, even in my own company then called sustainability, which we'd set up in 1987. When I came up with the triple bottom line, one of my key colleagues, still a great friend, he was also a co-founder of finance back in 2008. And I worked with him for well over 20 years. And he basically said, I didn't join an organization that was doing all of this economic and social stuff I wanted to do environment, because that felt to me, the most important agenda. And it took me 18 months to take him through a process where he at the end he thought, actually, now I see why you're doing it. It's not against environment. It's not in replacement for it. It is actually a way of addressing the environmental challenges that we have. And then out of the blue, I mean, pretty much a very major company, Shell came to us and said, we want to embrace the triple bottom line. We want to do the first report on all of that. This is the dawn of sustainability reporting. They actually used without consulting us the phrase that I come up with people, planet and profit that was in 1995. So I mean, a huge amount of activity have happened. But the problem was, at least in my mind, the problem was that when I looked at what companies were doing, businesses were doing, very often what they were doing was trading off different aspects of the triple bottom line agenda. So they'd say, we're doing the economic bit because we're making a profit tick. Well, the whole point about the economic thing is it's much wider than the financial performance agenda. But let's leave that for the moment. And social, we're doing that. We provide jobs. We give people products and services. They need, again, tick. It's a shame about the environment. Or it might be, we're doing really well on the financial and the environmental side. We're saving and making money by doing the right thing environmentally. Shame about the social side. Now, you might see Walmart with its work on energy efficiency and some sort of solution to the climate crisis as an example of a company that's been gone stronger on the green and sort of financial side than it has sometimes perhaps only the social side, like sort of social conditions of labor and things like that. So to your question about replacing the original idea, in every opportunity that we get, we talk about why we think the triple bottom line was flawed, why we think it remains, despite the fact I'm saying it myself, I think it's a very useful idea and it won't disappear. But it needs to be thought in a slightly different way. So that's what we're trying to explain. Thank you for explaining that. Really, a lot of people are still, even though it's 28, 29 years ago now with the triple bottom line, still kind of hearing about it, realizing, oh, there's something that sounds pretty good and whether they're a startup and they're starting it. I want to kind of ask a couple of questions. So in that explanation, you basically said that Shell came out. They didn't really ask for full approval. They started using it and you started seeing companies not only Shell but others using the triple bottom line in kind of this skewed way. I know you've done a lot of work with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, UN Global Compact, other international business related environmental pushes. Was it also a little bit that frustration behind the scenes that you're seeing these organizations talk or use that and just not the way that you originally attended? Is that also kind of that nudged you or kind of led into that recall as well? Well, I'm going to say something. It'll get me into a lot of hot water. But I imagine that Jesus or Confucius or Muhammad or whatever got frustrated because their followers who were normal people bent whatever they were hearing to whatever they wanted to hear or what they wanted to do. So I mean, there's nothing unusual about a new idea of being to some degree distorted in use. And I've always said that if something is going to go mainstream, then necessarily it dilutes because something everyone is talking about. If everyone is thinking about it and they're all just taking their own little bit sort of in their own direction. So it wasn't any sort of surprise. But I think what had happened during the 20 some years since the idea was first launched was that the scale of the challenges that we face and the evidence, the scientific evidence that we were seeing on things like the climate emergency and biodiversity and all of these different things was becoming so pressing that what I was prepared to put up with in terms of, well, you know, it's a bit like a teacher with students. They're not quite getting the whole story, but enough of it. They're getting enough of it to pass the exam. So let's leave them to it. It just started to feel wrong in key elements that people were thinking that they were saving the world when they weren't. And they were thinking that when they had very little chance of doing things that would properly save the planetary systems that we all depend upon. So the old thing was I didn't come at it with a very deep, well articulated view as to exactly why the thing was wrong. Exactly how it need to be repaired and timescales or whatever. I just I did it. The Harvard Business Review said it was the first time any management concept in their knowledge had been recalled. And I was quite lucky because with a few exceptions, the response was overwhelmingly positive. But people did us and then what? If not that then, as I said earlier on, what? And for me, the point I got to was that I'm going to do something really glib and it's going to sound like a management consultant. I apologize for it. But the three P's, People, Planet and Profit, which I came up with in 95, that was a way of trying to make the triple bottom line a little bit more accessible to people. Now, if you if you take the three P's and you just step up one letter in each case, you get three hours. And for me, those three hours are responsibility, which is where most people who were practitioners on sustainability, triple bottom line, all this good stuff, they would focus on responsibility. How can our company and its supply chain and its value web and all the rest of it become nicer, better, more transparent, more accountable, engage more of its stakeholders, all of that good stuff. What the business around table in the United States tends to call now stakeholder capitalism. Well, that was a very contested term when I first started to use you back in the early 90s. So responsibility is fine. We've got to do that. And the responsibility agenda keeps expanding. But the problem is that all of that good effort is not properly addressing the nature and scale of the problems that we now face. And that goes to soils. Lastly goes to bleaching of coral reefs, but most conspicuously, it's the fires, the droughts, the storms, the, you know, the floods that are coming with with climate change. And particularly now you look at both the North Pole, which at times has actually literally been on fire. And you look at the eastern Antarctic, where temperatures are now somewhere between 50 and 90 degrees beyond where they would normally be. This is outrageous. We've never seen this in recorded history. So it's in that sort of context that I was thinking that the way that the triple bottom line is currently being practiced is not improving the resilience of the systems on which we depend. So our economies, our societies, our politics, our biosphere environment, they're all wobbling in a different way. And they're all starting to wobble in a slightly integrated way. So in a way, I think that the war in Ukraine is one part of that bigger sort of accelerating disassembly of an old world order. And then the question is, well, if your systems are losing their resilience, what do you do? Well, some people might feel you can just get down in your knees and pray or just hope. I think you've got to invest in all of those systems. You've got to restore them. You've got to regenerate them. And that's where the regeneration element of the story came from. So its responsibility is not enough to stop the resiliency problems that we now face. And you've got to regenerate all of those systems that we depend on in order to produce long-term system health. That, as simply as I can state it, is where we got to with the triple bottom line. And if within that framework, those three sort of frames in a way, you've continued to... It's part of the endless re-imperatives. There's the endless re-imperatives, repeat, recycle, reuse, responsibility, resilience, regeneration. They go on, but those three responsibility, resilience, and regeneration are fabulous. I've heard you say before, so I'm glad you brought that out. The other thing is, in the book, it's really on the cover. It says, the coming boom in regenerative capitalism, which is really interesting for me. And I need your explanation in it. So you already tickled the third R regeneration on the cover. But as well as in the recall, the green swans is addressing kind of how are we looking at that? What are some of the tools? How can we make this product? We're not removing it. We're not getting rid of it. We're kind of saying, hey, there's a way we can fix it or do a better understand the world a little bit more with this experience that we had, that it's not just an accounting principle, surely on profits and the other two aspects totally get overlooked. How do you define that regenerative capitalism? And what does that look like? How do you get, can you explain that a little bit more to us? Well, I can try. And it's not uncontentious in the sense that I was trying to be slightly provocative when I put regenerative capitalism together. And one of my great friends, Paul Hawkin, who subsequently did a book called Regeneration, he was already working on it when I asked him the question, I asked whether he would put an endorsement on the cover of my book. And he said no, because he didn't like the capitalism focus. You know, a lot of people are much more comfortable talking about a regenerative economy or regenerative business or something with sort of less hard edges. But I actually think that unless and until we can properly make capitalism regenerative, this isn't going to work. And when I talk about capitalism, I'm not, as most people would assume, talking about financial capitalism only or physical capital. I'm also talking about social capitalism, human capital, natural capital, intellectual capital, all of these different forms. And within each of those, there can be individual regenerative strategies. But equally, if you do it particularly well, you can actually do things like, for example, if you're regenerating a city, and part of what you're doing is rebuilding the physical infrastructure, but you're putting in educational systems, you're putting in natural environments, which helps sort of sponge up floods and clean up the air and things like that. You're creating a system which is regenerative in multiple dimensions. And that is, I think, what we've increasingly got. In fact, you kindly mentioned that I just come off a call. And the call was with a very major infrastructure company, which is working on becoming regenerative by design, that there's Spanish company called Actiona. But the context in which we were talking was a pretty brand new course on regenerative economics, which the Capital Institute, John Fullerton and his colleagues are developing now. And in the first cohort, I guess it's over eight weeks, over 250 people signed up. And this is, there's a fee to join. And that to me is an indication of the way in which this sort of regenerative change agenda is starting to find its feet in a way. And it's not just now Walmart announcing it's going to become a regenerative company, believe it or not. But I mean, Paul Hawken has helped Doug McMillan, the CEO there with Think All of That Through, or PepsiCo, or Unilever, all these different companies are now sort of wanting to go in this direction, because they feel in their bones that this is the next big thing. They don't always know how to do it. And it's often easier to do in an area like farming than it might be in transportation, for example. But it's coming. Definitely is. And I'm glad you brought that up. Before we go too far off that, I just want, you know, Nestle was another company and Paul Hawken even talks about Nestle as well. Pentagonia and many others who are kind of using this regeneration as an economic model, as a model in general for their organization to restore, to regenerate, to have responsibility, to have that built in resilience as well. It's a drastic step. And you say it many times over that it's a big step away from Friedman's notion of the single bottom line into something that's, I mean, totally different. You I think the term you always use is he'd turn over in his grave if he knew what we're what we're doing. Well, in a way, people talk about shooting fish in a barrel. And if you're if you're shooting an economist who happened to be dead, and, you know, peak period was a long time ago, you're probably going to score some hits. But I think Friedman was an extremely intelligent man. I mean, he was in many ways a genius. And I do not believe that he if he were brought back alive and kicking in today's world, he would either leave his original idea unmodified or accept the views of some of his more rabid disciples. And I'm aware that in using a word like rabid, I'm being pejorative about people. But I mean, these people have run riot with a global economy than neoliberals and so on. And they've largely run us off the rails. So I think we're in a period of correction, where we have to snap back from some of the delusional thinking that we got involved in. Question is, and then what? Because the one thing that the Montpellarans Society, I mean, that the neoliberals had 50 years ago and some was what they called the brick, which is a 3000 page plan for what you would do if you were taking a national economy and turning it on to sort of neoliberal rails. We don't have that brick for the sort of sustainable, climate friendly, regenerative, whatever it is future that we so we're happy to talk about the stuff, but not yet to sort of make it absolutely inevitable that the track of history goes in the right direction. But that's what we've now gone to do. And we've got to bring together very much greater levels of political and economic critical mass, if we're going to really move this one forward. Now you tickled upon it a little bit. And I'm glad you did because it's one of my follow up questions as well. It's really besides the green swans book and the green swans observatory and kind of creating your own sense of regenerators within the observatory and kind of the group or movement that's growing around Bolans and green swans book and things that you've created. You're also working with the world's best minds and leaders out there around regenerative economies, regeneration and doing a few courses. What the one that you mentioned was through the Capitol Institute and John Fullerton. And it's a course on regenerative economics. I just want to read a couple of the people that are included in this Paul Hawken, Jeremy Lent, who was also on my podcast, Louise, who is your CEO of Volans, Hunter Lovens, Allery Saban, Laura Storm, who wrote the book Regenerative Leadership. Daniel Christian Wall from Designing Regenerative Cultures, I believe, or yeah, the book he wrote. Yonka Kaporta, the Janine Benes of the Biomembrachry Movement and Organizations, 3.8 billion years of biomimicry. And it's amazing. I am so glad it's there and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that these courses would be well accepted and people would be jumping on them in droves regardless of the price that's been charging because the level of content, the level of the people who, and I've only named a few of them who are in these courses is unbelievable. But I would like you to kind of in the guise of a separate question that comes up a little bit more often, tell us about these courses and your role and what the bigger picture is on your contributions of these courses. Because in this day and age, and even since 2015, since the Sustainable Development Goals in the Paris Agreement, we have been bombarded with donut economics, circular economy, planetary boundaries, mission economics, ecological footprint, you know, on and on these different type of economic models. And do they all belong together? Are they all part of the regenerative economic model? And which one's right? Is it regenerative economics or is circular economy part of regenerative economics? And how do we understand now these are the good movements of economic models, not the bad ones that you just talked about or the bad actors that are out there. But can you tell us a little bit more about those and how we make that bigger understanding of those? That's a big set of questions, Mark. And one thing I want to make absolutely clear right from the start is that in no way are we trying to push a particular prescription against everyone else's particular prescriptions. So, I mean, in a way, for me, a green swan might well be the expression of circular economics, it might be an expression of, you know, the donut, it might be of shared value, different or by memory, different elements of all of this. So, in a way, what we're talking about the dynamics within which new ideas, new concepts, new frameworks and so on, new technologies in the soft sense of technology evolve and then become implemented. I think one of the things that is a problem for our entire field is that we've grown up in an era of resource starvation where everyone had to be fighting for their own corner and their own branding and so on, which is one of the reasons why we've got so many different terms. But at the same time, I think it's going to get worse because now the mainstream has woken up to this whole space and you've got the very big consulting companies, you've got big research institutes, you've got big financial institutions, you name it, they're all coming into this space now. They will all want to some degree to have their own language and their own frameworks in a way. So I don't think this model is going to sort of resolve itself anytime soon. But at the same time, I think we need genuine openness from people in every one of these sort of sometimes armed camps to accept that what they're doing is not the complete answer to all the problems that we face. But at the same time, we've got to acknowledge that even some of the camps that have been most intensely sort of held, I think about the circular economy space, long history, I mean, it goes back 50 years, even hundreds of years in Silesia and places like that in Europe where people developed circular economies, but they didn't have the particular branding that Ella MacArthur came up with. But to be generous with Ella MacArthur Foundation, they've done great work, they've really got the circular economy onto the agenda and they've always had regeneration in the mix somewhere. So we're talking about a component of what is already part of some other people's work. And then you think about organic farming and things like that. Regeneration has already been to some degree part of that world. So it's a bit like music where I grew up in the 60s when there were endless bands and just a joy because they were always competing with each other and coming up with new ideas. And that's where we are, I think, at the moment where people are competing, bouncing things off each other. And that in terms of evolution is really interesting because things evolve very rapidly. But in terms of dissemination and scale and all the rest of it, it's not that great because rock and roll remains in this particular metaphor, a sort of trap somewhere and it doesn't actually take over the world in its case it did. So I think we've really got to firstly work together much more closely across these different sort of sub movements. We've really got to understand what others are saying. So for example, one of the things that we've done, Valence is a very small organization by design. We want to be catalytic, we don't want to do everything ourselves. So we're putting our entire team through the Capital Institute course. And then in May, we're taking the whole team, you mentioned Daniel Weil, we're going to spend a weekend with him, again with much of the team, including a couple of people just joining us, to just work some of this stuff through because we all have to go up learning curves. We all have to some degree re-educate ourselves and that's part of what we're trying to do. So very much in the spirit of a rising tide floating many different ships with a very strong sense that those ships are going to have to come together into a martyr of some sort, if they're going to do anything useful. Absolutely, I love that. And so I know Daniel Christian Weil, he's done a lot for education as well and some instruction and training in many different places, Schumacher College and fabulous books. And so boy, that's going to be a nice, nice training. As I mentioned as well, it's Laura Storm that did regenerative leadership, which I have right here as well on the bookshelf. But pretty much have most of the regenerative books and that movement and that it's not only a big fan, but I'm one of the bigger fans of the past of ecological economics. So Herman Daley, Kenneth Boulding, you know, I like Buckminster Fuller a lot and a lot of his not economic models. But if we don't like the world, let's create a new model that makes the existing one obsolete in that respect. And so getting us out of this machine view of the world and how the world works into more of one that's a regeneration and working along with nature. This course that you're participating in not only from your volants, but also, I guess, giving a section or a lecture is made up of eight weeks of different courses. And, you know, what is regenerative economics thinking and systems, the eight principles of regenerative vitality, organizational design, macro regenerative economics, finance and service to life, learning to lead together, and a roadmap to transformation. I can transformation sounds a little bit like Jeremy Lent or thinking and systems might be Jeremy Lent, who knows, but sounds absolutely fabulous. This and then I mentioned as well that the other courses from Laura Storm and Giles Hutchins, who wrote this book, regenerative leadership, they're doing another course where you're listed as well as many others. And I think their course is is also six modules, probably longer than six weeks, some physical, some online. There's more and more of these courses, these opportunities to get this education to get this this learning emerging every day. And I want to know how do you feel about that and how is it just because you've kind of been on the front runner this whole time talking about these things that that you get drawn into this or how to those people during the COVID who who've kind of woken up and had this awakening that says, Hey, this world is not working for me anymore. And they're on this search. How do they how do they find the right places to look and to get into these new models or making sense of the world? I think part of the answer is that certainly I was born nosy. So I'm constantly poking my nose into other people's business. Laura Storm I knew years ago through Sustainia, which is something that she did in Denmark. Giles Hutchinson who did the the as you said, they put to the book jointly. We took our senior team down to spend a day with Giles and his woodland. And that was actually profoundly useful. But I'm going to say something that is that is not intended to be remotely critical. I think what's going on in this regenerative space is phenomenally important. I think it's the mulch from what a lot of other things will come. You mentioned some of the early ecological economists, I would add to the daily like, yeah, if Schumacher and so on, there were some extraordinary talents. But what we're involved in is a shift of paradigm. And Thomas Kuhn used to talk about real paradigm shifts taking about 70 to 80 years. And I think exactly. So I think I've got five copies of that in different parts of the house. I found myself looking for them recently. And it's had more of an impact on me than any other single book. Although I don't think it's particularly well written, but the idea at the heart is very, very powerful. But what I'm about to say is that the experimentation, the laboratories, the innovation that's happening with the people that we're talking about is absolutely crucial for what comes next. It's like in the early days of computing, personal computing, you had the homebrew computer club in San Francisco where everyone from all of the companies that would eventually form came together and just shared tricks and so on. To some degree, it happened in music as well. But I think where we are now is we've got a major crisis. And the crisis that is in a way, it doesn't really matter what all of us are doing in the regenerative space, if the mainstream education system and business schools and so on did not wake up. So our small team at Volants is spending a quite disproportionate amount of its time now working with particularly business schools in different parts of the world, involving their students, particularly masters and MBA students in projects that we're doing around regeneration. Tomorrow, for example, I have a session in Denmark, well virtually into Denmark, but with the Copenhagen Business School. We're working with them, but we're also working with the Japanese Shisenkan University, which is basically a new university saying they want to become a university for the 22nd century. That's a sort of level of ambition, which I think we need is it's a sort of ambition you tend to find in the Schumacher College and so on parts of the world, Finton or whatever. But as Volants, what we're trying to do is understand all of that good stuff that's happening, but then start to move some of that across into the mainstream without doing violence, hopefully to the content that's being transferred, ensuring that it's not just us capturing the language and then spreading it as the missionaries, but actually it's a model I've always used with stakeholder engagement or whatever. Don't listen to us. Let us help you bring in, it might be Greenpeace, it might be Oxfam, it might be social entrepreneurs, it might be whatever it might be. And again, that's what we're doing with the regenerators. We're trying to say, who's out there doing really good work? What is it that they need to be telling people in the mainstream of business and markets and so on? And how do we make that happen? So I think education is crucial, but it also is going to have to be backed up fairly quickly by working case studies of people trying the good stuff and some of it working and a lot of it, at least initially not working and now having to learn very, very rapidly from all of that. But when we first spoke offline a year ago, we talked about Thomas Kuhn's book, Structure of Scientific Revolution and you're absolutely right, it is a hard read, it doesn't flow that, but it's also an older writing style. Yeah, it's a totally different world and I love that as well. Today, and I read a lot, but I am always looking for the meaning, the book, the culmination that brings it all together, the educational spot that you can go to that says, hey, there's a thousand academic books or a hundred academic books and even other books that are out there that we've kind of compiled into this regenerative model or this model that is pretty sound and structured and you're in one of these courses for the regenerative economy is with Jeremy Lent, he wrote the Web of Meaning, I don't know if Louise spoke to him or not or if you have, but just a fabulous book that really kind of brings it all together. Highly recommend it, but I'm just saying are there other books that you know because you're also well read, you're also out there kind of looking and learning and educating yourself in this process and the volans team of regenerators, what other recommends do you have sources to go to of knowledge and wisdom that are bringing these things that we weren't taught in school that you know aren't common knowledge for those who are kind of awakening? Well, it's difficult to recommend to other people what they might or might not read. I mean our small offices in Somerset House in London are just stacked with bookshelves, but one of these I noticed is that younger people, I still tend to buy a lot and read a lot of books, but younger people tend not to and a lot of their information comes online and therefore I'm quite different about sort of pushing books as the answer to any of these areas of need. The web of meaning I bought years ago and skimmed but didn't properly read it and your encouragement is making me feel I should do that, but part of the reason is I buy so many books, I'm dipping into them and every time one will strike and I'll go deep, but if I had to, this isn't the first time I've said it, but if I was trying to recommend to people in business of any age what they should read it wouldn't necessarily be the sort of books that we're discussing. I certainly wouldn't recommend Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions because it is such a headache of a book, but what I would very likely recommend is science fiction and I say that because I mean I started reading science fiction in the well probably early 50s but I mean no late 50s and early 60s but I've been very struck by the way in which science fiction as a field almost goes through these waves of being to me at least interesting and then becoming less interesting and going through the 90s we moved away from sort of deep space travel and all that sort of stuff towards sort of more mutated presence. I mean I always think of William Gibson and his sense that the future's already here just not evenly distributed and his stories as you almost certainly know are they're disconcerting because they're today's world and yet they're not and so the future is sort of almost belling into our current reality. But what's happening at the moment is you've got a whole raft of science fiction authors including in China some really interesting ones there too looking at the realities of the world which we have been creating for ourselves and I was in Costa Rica about two weeks ago just trying to visit some of the regenerative projects around the country and as I was traveling I was reading a book called The Waterknife and it's about the southern states of the United States in a relatively close near-term future where water has become hideously scarce. You'll know that in the southern states at the moment that they're enduring their worst drought for 1200 years. Now the thesis here is to some degree it's not based on that evidence but just saying let's assume that that becomes the reality what does that do? Well that book The Waterknife describes a world in which civilizations we know largely collapses so for example Texas Texans become like Mexicans today streaming across borders trying to escape being mercilessly treated as they sort of trying to get back to where water is found. Now it's shocking I mean it's one of the most visceral and violent books I've read for a very long time but I think it serves the story and there are people like Kim Stanley Robinson who you know was at the Glasgow Conference one of the major speakers there talking. We were actually in resilience frontiers a resiliency lab together and work together I moderated one of the panels with them. I've got his ministry for the future here and I highly recommend it. I think it's brilliant but I said to somebody not long ago that it looks like a novelized or it reads like a novelized MBA thesis so I mean it's getting a lot of good stuff across the readership and in a somewhat digestible way. I don't think it's this liveliest novel but it's I think it's probably his most important so very very highly recommend that so do your question. I know again I don't push people towards science fiction or clarify climate fiction or whatever because you know who knows whether they're like it or not whether it'll put them off or switch them on but I find it incredibly helpful because it helps me imagine my way into the unimaginable spaces which I think we're headed towards and that's not all bad I mean it you know as a entrepreneurial innovative species we will make the best of what we find ourselves delivered with but I just find that sort of fiction really really helpful and books like American War which is you know most of us want fossil fuels to go and the American War as you probably know it looks it's out in the 2080s and it just looks at a world where you know you people long to smell gasoline powered engines again if they live in the south and it's like the slavery dynamic of the American Civil War and the mid 19th century you it's a civil war again but this time it's around energy and people are trying to get the south wind or foil it's it's yeah I just I find I find that sort of that brings up a unique question for me does that does that is that because as humanity how quickly we tend to forget big history I mean you talked about the book on water and in that same area Texas and and and then the United States there was actually a big era during FDR where there was huge dust bowls and major issues around soil degradation and things that we turned around for a while and then now we're really kind of back at that same point same thing with you know how quick we forget that even if we go back further to the invention of the automobile and production lines and Ford and however where very transformative you know at one point we were dealing with the the big manure problem from horses and cows and pulling carts and the unbelievable smells and the troubles there to then switch to to automobiles where nobody had a license there was no roads no infrastructures no gas stations there and a lot of troubles on that transition to get us there we made it but now you know I I was saying I'd like to get your viewpoint or your thoughts on this there's always this discussion about Americans that you know you can pry their guns out of their dead cold hands as definitely don't want to get up give up their guns but I think there's a new kind of a an emerging topic is you can pry my car out of my dead cold butt I guess so to say because they everybody in America I just got back from three months of being in America is really likes to drive and and loves their cars and loves the smell of gas and that and and the revving engines and the loud things and they'll drive to the mailbox if they could in in some respects where in Europe where we live is as much it's a much different view on that not everybody has a car a lot of people take public transportation so how do you think it's just we're forgetting that there could be a better transition or a better world and we're we're driving to that how are your feelings on that but I wouldn't probably do what I've been doing in recent decades unless I felt that the situation was improveable and I do but I have a very peculiar mental model and it is one in which and it's it's based on when I was at school I spent a lot of time going off-piste or reading history that wasn't set for me and because I was raised in strange places like Northern Ireland or Cyprus or Israel all of where all of which had conflicts going on the 1950s I read a great deal about civil wars and I read it read a great deal about religious wars you know in my early teens mid teens and what I learned from all of that is that there are rhythms, periodicities, cycles, waves in our societies and economies and then when I went to university first time around to do economics and studied the work of people like Condratio from Nikolai Condratio from Joseph Schumpeter both of whom were absolutely loathed by my economics professors at the time in the 60s what I reinforced that same sense so where I think we are now is in a period of our collective history where the international global order that we've grown up with dates back to the brilliant courage of politicians particularly from the United States in the Bretton Woods and Marshall Plan eras and then sort of the rolling out of the UN institutions and so on that's starting to unravel and I've been saying this for quite some time and well before Putin started to do what he's doing I don't think what he's doing is an aberration I think it's almost an inevitable pushback against what started to happen and then just to twist this slightly towards pessimism, optimism what gives me quite a lot of optimism is that it once would have been that you'd have a new set of technologies it would be rice paddy farming 8,000 years ago or it would have been you know the horse you mentioned you know the domestication of the horse or it would have been steam and steel and coal and all the rest of it or it would have been chemicals and plastics and gasoline and the automobile and aerospace and so on and now it's just everything everything's coming at the same time and it's synthetic biology and it's artificial intelligence and it's novel materials and it's drones and I just the list goes on and on and on it's interesting when you look at most of those technologies used in the right way they could all bring a radical shrinkage of our problematic footprints so for example rethink X which is a group based in London and the United States and Silicon Valley have done a series of studies looking at different technologies just to take one you you were talking a moment ago about the car in the United States I don't think there's any way that short of something radically different coming on radically better that people will be persuaded to abandon their cars and yet I think in some parts of the world certainly in Europe you're setting neither of my daughters as a car they're in their 40s and there is a shift where younger people no no no longer need if they live in cities or near cities to have cars the point rethink X we're making was that if you look out into the 2030s and you look globally what you what they see is a world in which the revenues sorry the mileage or kilometerage covered by passengers around the world goes up 50% into the 2030s but the the revenues from all of that activity come down 70% because of new technology because of new business models because of you know it may not be Uber but maybe somebody else entirely but now even if that's off by a couple of orders of magnitude that's still a from profound impact and if you think just on the United States where you've got what is it two to three million truckers driving these huge grates the dual Steven Spielberg bikes like sort of 18 wheelers or whatever um again the prospect is within 50 to 20 years pretty much all of those will be gone and be replaced by electric trucks now what happens to all of people who are shaking out of those forms of employment so if you steer this in the right way the outcomes could be environmentally socially governance related in those areas positive but if you mishandle it the the sort of repercussions could be profound also history suggests that we won't actually do it incredibly well much of the time and therefore the repercussions will be profound but I live and hope and you know I try and help people I do too we we touched a little bit about models and I believe there are some telling tales of civilization frameworks or models the way we've worked and we're continuing to work with those with regeneration regenerative economies yeah there's these new models emerging and a lot of people when you talk to them about it there you know oh this is a buzzword this is new this is the new trend that everybody's jumping on and it's really kind of hard to grasp what these models are like I'm not sure if you're familiar with the organization called boundary less i o dot i o that's um simon sitzero and luca rugeri they created a fully open sourced methodology it's very pretty successful now it's based off of platform business models and this platform design kit which is really how most software developer organizations all the big top 10 companies run on a platform model but there's an aspect there that you can plug in regenerative ecosystem platform business models or models for life or models for civilizations that are very much in tune with the the lin margolis's and the symbiotic earth or with systems thinking from friends of kappa complexity science is the systemic approach and they've already got 70 000 practitioners and a lot of organizations every day jumping on board to flip their model and in that flip or in that shift the sdgs are being plugged in environmental social governance is being plugged into that entire model so that the triple bottom line is addressed in the three r's you know responsibility resilience and regeneration i'd like to know what your feeling is on on the shift from past civilization frameworks that we've had that really have always always failed and always been the same they've always been hierarchy they're not self-organizing they're not circular they're not regenerative but yet we continue to to go after that pursuit of those type of models and what what your thoughts what you're seeing as a pioneer in the area on that well the first thing to say is that the more platforms of the sort that you describe boundaryless it the better and and i haven't i i've heard of what they're doing i haven't yet visited and now i've made a mental note to do exactly that when i was doing that work off my own account on my own account at school looking at civil and religious wars i also looked at the collapse of civilizations it sounds like there was a fairly merry child but i was i was just genuinely interested in the pulsing of civilizations and what drove that and and very often the religious and civil wars were symptomatic of other fracture lines in in civilizations so i was really riveted i know probably about 15 years ago to read some of the diaries of some of the portuguese sailors who first went up the amazon and as you will know they they recorded evidence of not only extraordinary civilizations which then largely disappeared as disease and so on ricochet through but they decide they they found extraordinary areas of fertility in the amazon basin and and when that's been those areas analyzed subsequently it's all to do with charcoal and with organic content and something re-injected into the soil in a circular system so for periods of time our civilizations seem to be able to hold the tensions between creativity and evolution and collapse for long enough for us to sort of breed a number of generations very often the i think there's a it was i was reminded on it with something you said earlier on mark that there's a economist called who's known for the minsky moment the the the point at which there is this profound sudden profound correction in markets and very often the principles that underlying underlying minsky moments is that people forget what stability is and what it looks like and how you get to it so in our economies we have this boom and bust cycle and the longer you go and this was his point without a bust the more likely it is you're going to have one and it's going to be a bigger one than you might otherwise have had it's almost like a hydraulic model that has to settle out i think minsky moments also have no warfare and conflict in the sense that my parents were both involved in the second world war they remembered what a war was what it was like they also had some memory of what started it and then over time that you have a generation or two who don't have that experience they don't care very much about war they don't think very much about war until suddenly it presents and i think that's what we're seeing at the moment now whether that is a antifragility war where you know you think about nasa and nikolas taleb and this notion of things that don't kill you make you stronger to use the the sort of proverbial way of stating it i think what putin is doing at the moment is clearly making some elements of our world stronger but i think it's also symptomatic of an era of decay on the one hand and he's pointing at the west as decadent i think russia has many elements of that as well but it's also of a new order beginning to sort of find its feet and assert itself and in those conditions talking about sustainability talking about climate talking about biodiversity talking about soil loss all these sort of things suddenly becomes a bit more problematic and i got i got a session with a scandinavian companies board later this week where i'm going to make the point that sustainability has often been seen to be a soft concept it's about being nicer about being better it's about being more engaging all that good stuff actually it's about security and security is one of the hardest hardest edged agendas that we face now clearly defense is crucial but energy security food security water security all of these different elements it's no accident that as you again you know the security forces and armies and navies and so on are increasingly exercise concerned by what they're seeing in terms of the risk of climate change destabilizing populations and driving huge numbers of people to europe or into north america so i i'm actually optimistic but from the base that suggests to me at least we've got an incredible 15 to 20 years to go through history has absolutely not ended everything's in play and very different leadership is going to have to emerge our current leaders really aren't fit for purpose in in most respects we discussed taylor and his black swans but also what you described is that the you bend that you talk about a lot this moment kind of it's in the book and it was just a simple diagram it's partly based on these um kondratiev cycles i don't believe that they're predictable but i think there is an underlying rhythm and it may be it's every 50 to 70 years you have one of these periods of massive disinvestment from an old order and investment in new orders very often you have then a shift of the geographical locus or focus of the global economy it's often gone west so for example it started off 5000 years ago in china and it went gradually to india and to the middle east and it went into eastern europe and it went to germany then it went to france and britain then it skipped the atlantic went to the east coast of the united states and then the west coast and now it's gone to china again and that's very crude but there is there is something in there about this sort of itchy feet that that that sort of civilizations often have and i think we're at an extremely dangerous point in all of this for european civilization where it's extremely easy for us to look in inward and think we have a very particular history and therefore have special rights actually i think we have special duties and responsibilities to the rest of the world and we have a very narrow window in which to express them or to be i don't know i mean i'm sounding a bit sort of old testament but run over by history you speak a lot about getting away from you know incremental movement growth is is okay but that we need to really get into systemic changes to some major transformations and actually get up to speed with our exponentially growing world and you know we need to do some of these these corrections and transformations that are on an exponential pattern they're impactful and in the book you talk about not only green swans but gray swans blue swans ugly ducklings you know and obviously it's emerged from what you read from from black swans and kind of this own answer to the recall of the triple bottom line how do we come back with something that's really an awakening education moving forward what is what is your biggest hope or takeaway when people read the green swans that they're getting out of it that they're getting the re imperatives that they understand that there there is some hope i've heard you mentioned that the b corp is kind of the ugly duckling and some could be the ugly duckling in some respects do you want to describe that and kind of give us your hope or vision happily i mean i just very quickly on all the different colors of swans it's a bit like the different colors of hydrogen or whatever it happens to be it's it's a bit muddling but the idea of a black swan is that it comes out of the blue and you don't see it coming a gray swan is something that you do see coming so uh nasim nikolas talib has been asked many times as to whether covid 19 was a black swan he says absolutely not we saw it coming government inquiries and investigations showed that we were actually overdue for a pandemic and particularly covid a pandemic and that's what we got i mean the the blue ones are people are thinking about what what can you do around water and ocean and so the idea of the green one was just simply it was a bright positive color and and if and i'm going to do violence to talib's thinking to some degree if blacks ones are largely going to take us at least initially exponentially where we do not want to go what would it be like if you could create the conditions in which reality could take us exponentially where we do want to go and so you might for example think of something like fusion power endlessly predicted 50 years in the future 30 years in the future whatever but what if it suddenly erupted that that that could both be a green swan in terms of energy in the sense that it's exponentially unleashing clean relatively clean power but i remember amary lovin's um ravi marten institute probably 30 35 years ago saying the worst thing that we could do would be to have clean cheap energy actual capital hunter yeah hunter and what he did and paul and hunter there i i loved um but even earlier he was saying um the the worst thing would be if you had abundant clean and free energy because it would be you'd use energy in all of the inappropriate ways it'd be like using as he put it a chainsaw to cut butter and so you know whatever we do as a species there are always unintended consequences and one of the institutions that i really admire immensely historically was the u.s. office office of technology assessment at ta which was shut down after it done something like 700 studies but we really really really need a global um version of the ot a which can actually scrutinize uh these new technologies engage the people developing them track them as they do what they do um and and inform regulators and policy makers and so on about how they're best controlled and and where where there are positive benefits those how those might be best incentivize um yeah i mean i it's um i find this one's helped me but and the ugly duckling is just the the the idea there simply is just as in hands christian anderson's fairy tale and the the ugly duckling looks ridiculous it looks weird it looks like nothing we've ever seen before and yet it may contain the answers to some of our most urgent questions if we just pay enough attention and support it in the right way absolutely love that and when i've heard you speak i followed your work uh for for many years it's just a sheer pleasure to to exchange ideas and to hear uh what you're working on and what you've brought to the world it's really nice to hear how you speak about the sustainable development goals because you say it's a it's a seismic shift in business it's a it's a exponential change change goals is probably what they should have called them that they are tied together in systems and you really talk positively about them most people don't even know what the stgs are they've never heard of them they're like what what are those who are they for cities countries governments you know how for are they for business they're for us as individual they're like mazl's hierarchy of needs they're a reflection of the basic needs that we need to to raise the bar for humanity and say you know we're going to raise the bar to this level and never let humanity get below that level again and it's this push towards what is development it's uh commercial and residential but what is sustainable development is creating that infrastructure of the future that's solid base to then springboard off into those our imperatives those endless re-imperatives that that that you mentioned so responsibility resilience regeneration how do we be prepared along with our exponentially growing world to be ready for those futures and i and i love that for the un i wrote this sustainable development goal manifesto to give people a vision of what it would feel like to be standing december 2030 in a world that had achieved them all because i don't think we have enough stories never narratives or media that really gives us a vision of why do we want to achieve a goal if we don't even know what exists or don't understand what it would feel like or what it would mean to us to be standing in a world like that and so i wrote the manifesto for that specific reason but i just i wanted to thank you if anything to to say thanks for all your great work and speaking positively about the sustainable development goals no matter all the negativity that we've maybe heard lately about them i think they are a singular achievement in the sense that so many people came together and properly what was one of the biggest democratic expressions of hope for the future and ideas about how a better future might be delivered and guided so in that sense i absolutely support them i have a slight concern in the business world where companies i've seen engage the goals have tended to say what are we already doing how does that map on to the the goals oh good we got four or five you know maybe even six um uh that's great that's you know for them that's almost the end of the story which i think it's only the beginning of the story in it one of the things that just flashed through my brain a moment ago was um probably over 10 years ago i was working with a supply chain organization called two degrees and um they they were talking about big solutions to problems and i said it's a bit like waiting for alexander to stride in with his sword and cut through the gordian knot was maybe what we need is an absolute storm of razor blades they're just just going in and and and starting to tackle um problems all over the place somewhat independently but underneath a sort of an overarching blueprint roadmap manifesto whatever and and the the person i did it for that work keeps repeating that spectrum it's stuck in his memory but i really do think there is something about that that there will be these major strokes that people can take but um a lot of this is going to have to be done on the fly in the local environment without totally knowing whether it's going to work or not and that's again why i think reporting back to other people about what you're trying what has worked what hasn't where you need help all of that's incredibly important so mark thank you very much for the work that you do um and for the conversation today yeah i really appreciate you and there's no no thanks needed i gladly do it i've run into the exact same thing that you've run into where this this kind of skepticism on business where they are writing their annual report at the end of the year and then they look back and they say what did we do this past year that we can fit into certain sdgs yeah well isn't that a sad way to do it or if they started out at the beginning of the year and say hey let's have some actions campaigns and goals around all of the sdgs or quite a few of them that we can address and report on our achievements and on our success then we've actually done something if they go back casting so to say and say hey what did we do this year that fits to the sdgs nothing ever happened and so so that's something great i'm glad i'm glad you really brought that up the last question i have for you and then i'll let you go um is really the hardest question i have it's an it's a question of what does a world that works for everyone look like for john elkington look like for you um i it has a lot of laughter in it um it smells good it doesn't mean that there aren't bad smells but but you know if you move into a an ecosystem that is healthy you can smell it and it actually influences your your health um it won't be without challenges as a species we need challenges otherwise we go we grow bored and grow grow useless um so i we need to be um challenged i i i think it's it has to be a world that takes the futures and the future health and well-being of its youngest uh members very very serious indeed a lot a lot of tribal peoples had elements of that there have been different experiments over the years but we haven't really properly engaged that i don't think and it will be under a world in which learning comes naturally um to everyone uh and the the ability to learn in terms of accessing uh knowledge and all the rest of it is it'll never be evenly spread but but much more evenly spread and accessible than it currently um is and i think fundamentally people will have hope hope for the future in a way that they once perhaps in a rather one naive way did during the sort of victorian era and the united kingdom and europe and then united states and japan and so on they felt the world was going to improve uh well i'd like it to be better founded but i would to me that would be a symptom of um the sort of world i'd like to see but the laughter to me is key if if people are laughing uh that's a good sign that's still beautiful john thank you for green swans thank you for everything thanks for letting us inside of your ideas it's been a sheer pleasure and i hope we our past cross again i know you're still got plenty work to do and i'm looking forward to following it have a wonderful evening you too mark and i just i was just thinking is the swans on the cover are taking off they're probably cackling but they're probably not cackling in the way that i would like them to but it's been a joy and uh look forward to a continued conversation thanks very much