 Okay, good morning everyone and welcome to this first in a series of leadership webinars from us at CISL. We're very excited to have so many of you joining us. I think we had about 400 people joining up last time we checked. Here at CISL we deliver executive education to executives and post graduates to around 1000 students every year and we work with around 100 major corporations globally each year as they look to align sustainability and profitability. Alongside that we convene leadership groups on topics through low policy, low carbon policy engagement and sustainable finance and this gives us a fairly privileged position to look across the economy and across the action that's being taken and to really consider what's being done and is it enough and so in 2015 we published a report rewiring the economy which set out 10 critical collaborative tasks for business, government and policy makers to lay the foundations for a sustainable economy and to achieve the sustainable development goals by 2030. Alongside that this year we published rewiring leadership at CISL to publication with the ambition to set out and codify what we've learned in developing leaders for sustainability and to share our thinking and so in this webinar we'll share some of our insights from our research and practice and we're joined here by Lindsay Hooper and we will hear from Sue Garrard formerly executive vice president for sustainable business at Unilever who will share with us her leadership journey as we look to see what we can learn together. So in a minute we'll hear from Sue but first I'm going to invite Lindsay to start by sharing some insights and perspectives from the work that she's been doing at CISL both through authoring rewiring the leadership and also through her work working with companies from board levels and through the other parts of the organisation to embed strategic sustainability across organisations. We'll have plenty of time for questions in the last part of the webinar so please do use the questions function and the team here will be gathering those. We'll do our best to answer as many as possible. I should say we had an enormous amount of questions prior to the webinar and we've done our best to build those in as we go as well. So Lindsay would you like to start with your sharing some insight from our work with rewiring leadership. Thanks, yes. So we've long known that business as usual is not going to deliver the sustainable development goals nor is it going to deliver the Paris climate agreement. Increasingly companies that we're working with and as James said these are predominantly multinational companies are recognising that leadership as usual is not going to deliver the transition that we need. So increasingly our clients tend to be sector leading organisations are recognising that they need to go beyond being less bad. They need to go beyond being philanthropic. What they really need is to stop just reacting and adapting to increasingly pressing social and environmental challenges, climate change, inequality and the ramping up of societal expectations. They can't keep adapting to that. They increasingly know that they need to be proactive in identifying systemic solutions to really find ways to reshape markets, value chains, whole economies to rewire the economy so that they're rewarded in the market for superior performance on sustainability. So that as a result of business performance, they are delivering positive outcomes. That's really creating new demands of leaders. They're having to work in new ways where they haven't worked before. We've got some examples of the kinds of new challenges for leaders, new demands of leaders that we're seeing within our client base. So we have some examples here. So I won't in the interest of time go through all of those, but to bring to life some of how that's showing up practically in organisations that we're working with. So working with boards and executive teams. So over the last year, we have seen a massive upturn in the number of boards and executive teams across steel, chemicals, finance, fishery, transportation sectors who are working both to ask them in terms of their knowledge base to inform their strategy, their purpose as an organisation actually to make sure they're really thinking about risks and opportunities. But importantly, they're also increasingly thinking systemically about where they can have the greatest impact. So there's not just about managing risk and optimising opportunity, but being really clear about where they within a complex system have the most leveraging can have the most impact on systemic solutions. So for instance, steel sector looking at how they can call for a carbon price for a bank with huge access to SMBs and householders, how they can work with government to give them access and data to enable them to to improve the energy efficiency support transition. We're also working at other levels within organisations where leaders are facing practical challenges. So for instance, in the finance sector, commercial bankers, for instance, needing to work in new ways with their with their clients, their commercial clients in particular, where they're facing barriers to transition. So needing to work together to understand those barriers and find innovative financial solutions. So that needing to co create solutions. Or where we're working with the mining sector with huge operations and emerging economies. So for instance, we've been working with Anglo American, that's about equipping their senior leaders responsible for big mining operations, not just to manage within their boundaries, but actually to be proactive and influencing across complex regional systems, working trade unions, local government communities, but also their peers, others who are dependent on the same landscapes and infrastructures to support sustainable, inclusive economic development regionally. And the final example is work that we've been doing with manufacturing companies. So we've been working with them. Yes, to set really ambitious science space targets beyond what they know they can currently deliver. But importantly, working with their supply chain, working with infrastructure like recycling infrastructure, to really collaborate to develop solutions that will enable circular resource use. So that's requiring new challenges, new ways of working, particularly about how they're working with others beyond traditional silos are needing to innovate in all parts of the business. So one, one challenge or pushback could be, well, this is, you know, this is just traditional leadership that apply to new challenges. And we tested that. So we did a piece of work organizationally last year. We surveyed 20 major organizations. So these were multinational businesses predominantly, but headquartered in a whole range of places around the world to see whether they feel that they have the leadership capability to enable them to thrive in the future. And what we found were there were some common gaps and challenges, some deficits that they're working to address. So that there were there were demands of leaders that traditional approaches to leadership were not yet meeting. So the needs that they were identifying, we've outlined here. So a key one was ensuring that individual leaders are clear about their own purpose and their own intention. And that's aligned to an organizational commitment to seeking out systemic challenges. But making that tangible for people in their teams, you know, phrases like low carbon transition or, you know, transforming economies, you know, we know we need that, but making that meaningful to people in their day to day jobs, so people know what their personal contribution is was a big gap translating high level ambition to tangible actions and practical action in teams. Importantly being able to think in systems, identifying leverage points, so where to intervene and having the capability to actually influence to work in these ways to move beyond transactional approaches to relationship to more collaborative approaches, which linked to another key area that organizations are we see investing more in is developing what might call social processing skills or soft skills, being empathetic and understanding stakeholder needs and perspectives, not assuming that people will share your worldview. So really being able to engage effectively with different value drivers and worldviews to build collective purpose and vision to be able to work together. So a lot of organizations proactively investing, building that empathetic approach and engaging more effectively with stakeholders. And then finally, the need to build this culture of innovation. So moving beyond seeing innovation as just a technical discipline and R&D function or a product development focus, the need for innovation across all parts of the business, around business processes, how the business is working with others. So we're seeing some really common challenges and common threads and common areas where leading businesses have been proactive investing in the development of their leaders. So we know that there's an urgent need for leaders to be aligning their purpose and their energies with addressing the challenge that we face, but also need to make sure they have the capabilities to be able to deliver the impact that's needed. Very good. Thank you, Lindsay. So I'm sure already that will have spurred lots of questions and so do send them in on the chat function after we've heard from Sue, we'll come back to those questions and have a good period for Q&A. So that's the experience of CISL across our work. So hopefully some of that chimes with your experience. Perhaps you could talk to us a bit about your leadership journey in particular. Sure. Hello everybody. For those that can see me and great to be here. If I could do this all day to help other people go on this journey, that would be wonderful. So I guess I should start by saying that I am not a sustainability expert and I hope that what I'm going to talk to you about demonstrates that actually there are both real benefits for having a degree of distance from some of the detail whilst not being able to avoid it all the time. And I think for a lot of the people listening or watching, that's pretty important in terms of a level of comfort about needing to know everything and also thinking about how this is a transition in your own life, because all of that is very true for me. So if people want to dig into that in more detail and more questions are very happened to do it. So you've all seen basically what my CV is. I'm not going to bore you with the details of that again. I do think it's worth just making a couple of context points. The first is that I grew up in a family where my mother and my grandparents were Salvation Army officers. And the point is there less around the level of wealth or poverty that we had. It was a very modest upbringing. It was much more that although I'm not a deeply religious person, I haven't quite realised how deeply embedded my set of values were. And I think that there is something really fundamental in the roles that you play in leadership, in companies, senior roles, particularly about your own moral compass. And I think more and more what I found on my own journey was that I was very fortunate in having a very deep sense of my own moral radar that I could fall back on. And so I think I would encourage everybody that's listening to this because leadership is not something that's just top. It's at multiple levels, top to bottom. And we all need to lead in our own ways. But I think it's unbelievably hard to do that unless you know not only your own mind, but your own heart. So I think I think it's just worth that kind of context piece really. And so I was thrown in to the role that you leave. I've been there for a few years already. Obviously, sustainability was completely in the DNA as a result of both the company's history and of course, of poor problems leadership. And I hadn't realised quite how much of that I had actually absorbed in a sponge-like manner. But of course, looking back, it makes complete sense because we were the storytellers and you had to understand the story in order to be able to tell it. But it was only after a few years as a result of some other internal changes that I actually was given the role of being head of what was called sustainable business. And so there was a CSO, Jeff Sebrite, who led primarily on the external facing engagement, which is huge because of Paul's archetype for external leadership. And my role was about how we really took this as the very extensive sustainability plan and really leveraged it inside the business after a few years of kind of live running. And that was pretty intimidating because, as I say, I was not a practitioner. There were lots of things in my background. And again, I've increasingly realised how useful they were. But a lot of people looked at this decision and went, that's pretty odd. That's the polite version of what they said. So again, falling back on your own courage was critical. So with that context, let's quickly cut to the chase. When I got the role, I looked very simply at one thing, which was how was the sustainable living plan, which I'll now call the USLP in the interest of time. How was the USLP a servant to making Unilever a stronger business that was going to be around for the next 100 years? That was really like the key exam question that I set myself. And I then actually spent the first couple of months analysing what I thought the answer to that was. And what became very clear to me was that there was a fantastic plan. And by the way, I was accountable for the delivery of all 72 time bound measurable targets, which again was one of those gulp moments. But in a funny sort of a way, it was less the detail of those targets that I was worried about or focused on. It was much more this big picture concept that we have this enormous organisation with two and a half billion people a day consuming our products. And a business plan on how we were going to drive that and engage with a consumer. And we had a sustainability plan. But the level of understanding about the symbiosis between the two, or even better how the whole became broken in some parts was not clear. And so really my my mission around embedded starting from that point. And I think the most challenging things were first of all, there was no precedent for a lot of what we did. So and you've already referred to that Lindsay's that people say, Oh, these are all just buzz phrases and we've all been there before. Trust me, no one has been here before. And it makes the decision making judgment piece much harder. The second thing, as I mentioned is that getting the business case clicks unbelievably difficult. And what's fun out straight from that at Unilever is actually right at the heart of that has to be the consumer case. What what do consumers think and want and feel? How do you merge doing this well with what Unilever's business is all here to do? And how do you manage incredibly difficult trade offs? And the question of timing. So my tips from that very simply, for the people watching this, who maybe go through the same thing. First of all, it really isn't crucial to be a subject matter expert. It is crucial actually to give yourself the space from the detail to step back from it, to think forward about the future of the world. I mean, these are enormous, enormous things. You have to find that space, the future of your company, the future of consumers or the sector that you're in. And to really think deeply about what will really matter and what the big drivers are for your organisation. Really, very few people have the luxury of doing that thinking. And I think it's central to this role. So that's the first tip. Excuse me. The second one is there are lots of lots of experts on all sorts of aspects of what you do as a business. Suck them dry. Make sure that you get every level of information that you possibly could need, but don't fall into the trap of feeling that you need to know all the answers because you can't. You literally it's impossible. And if you try, not only will you not succeed, but you will completely miss the point of what your role is as a leader. So understanding what your relationship is between deep subject matter experts and how to draw on them and how to actually make the most of the activities they've got is really fundamental. The third one is that as soon as people within organisations get the bug for sustainability, they absolutely love the moral case and they forget the business case. And what you risk ending up with is philanthropy on steroids. So again, I come back to some very simple operating principles here. You have to all the time try and find the highest, not the lowest common denominator solution for combining the moral case and business case. When you do that, and by the way, that's really difficult, but everything you do in brand building is really difficult for everything worthwhile you do in life is really difficult. So the next tip is recognize that this is absolutely a marathon, not a sprint, fix your mind on what the outcome is that you're trying to achieve. And be patient and flexible, but tenacious about path that you take to get there. I've got lots more tips. I'm sure they're going to come out along the way, but I suspect I should probably let you get in and ask a question now. I've got a few questions actually that spring from that. And I mean, firstly, you know, you talked about fine, you know, you had the same living plan, you've got the business case and there's a symbiotic relationship between the two and trying to find that alignment. And I just wondered, you know, are there any examples that you can share either specifically or generally about where where there was real conflict in trying to find an aligned business case of where, you know, you had to make difficult decisions or the kind of leadership approach you might take. Yeah. So I have absolutely got a couple that I think might be useful that operate at very different levels. I think the most fundamental tension point was that when I mean we're talking now five years ago, which actually on the arc of change in this in this area is, you know, forever ago, but five years ago, most people in marketing roles, not just in Unilever, but in most of the other FMCG companies that we dealt with regularly actually didn't have any evidence that consumers wanted or would change their consumption patterns to favor anything that was more sustainable. However, you define sustainable because of course, sustainable is a huge fat word in its own right, which needs breaking down. So probably the most significant thing I think that we did was to recognize that really sustainability was never going to become truly embedded in the business unless we could get to a consumer case. And so we invested a very large amount that time and effort and a fairly significant amount of money and trying to finally nail that question. And of course, that sounds all very logical. It was extremely difficult, and it's the difficulty starts with the fact that in the nicest possible way, consumers lie to you in research, and they do it for all the right reasons, because they tell you what they think you want to hear. It's really unhelpful. So what we did was we started with people's actual behavior, actual purchase consumption patterns. And I think it's probably the only research that's tied. And we then tracked back right the way through why they buy what else they would buy, how that translated into their domestic consumption patterns and so on and so forth. And what that demonstrated actually was incredibly powerful. And it was very simply that all around the world, 54% of all consumers mainstream consumers want to buy or buy more brands that are sustainable in some way. We got the consumer definition of what that meant. We were able to demonstrate that it was already one of the key drivers for a lot of brands. And we understood what it would take to trigger purchase. And very simply what it would take to trigger purchase was that the consumer wanted the brand to be just as effective in for the call recently by that product, hair shampoo, I want to continue naturally. They wanted it to be roughly the same price as the other things that they would buy. But those two things being equal, if one brand was made in a way that was more socially or environmentally responsible as the word they used, they would prefer that brand. And we mapped that onto our existing portfolio and we could see those trends starting to emerge. And that was I cannot underestimate the power of that as a tipping point within the company where suddenly our marketing people who all as human beings wanted to be part of this movement, but didn't understand how it could drive sales, went hurrah. Now we understand where the opportunity lies. We need to work with our own brands to drive environmental performance and a deep sense of social connection. And that's been transformational. So when you so when you map that across the brands, you know, were there examples where the evidence base wasn't there and that there wasn't a clear commercial cut, you know, how would you then navigate that where there wasn't the commercial case and the sustainability case didn't fall into line? Yeah. Well, there were two problems actually. The first was that some brands are born responsible. Others can become responsible. There's a small group of those that frankly, probably will never get there. So at that level, that's that's a corporate portfolio management thing. That's the highest level of leadership where you look across your portfolio and you just say, if you look at the arc of change, what do we expect that arc change to be brand by brand? And we mapped that for our brands. And we were very clear about which brands we expected to lead, which brands we thought would take longer to evolve, and those that we thought might never get there. And the conversations that we were having around that were, what do we do with the brands that will never get there? And when I left, it wasn't resolved. But probably, I think consumers will make that decision for us. And I'm not just talking here about you course, I'm talking about all brands. And we're seeing that that trend now. And then at a much more detailed level in that in a brand that was going on that journey, you get inevitable tensions, which is what you always get with brand management about where you invest the way you cut costs, and what that does to what the cost is that you charge the consumer. So I guess the classic example was palm oil, and everybody will be more aware about palm oil now, particularly in the UK, because the latest ice left out. And by the way, that's a classic example of where our early investment is paying dividends now, because we are in a fantastic position to say we have sustainable palm oil. But in the early days, you know, sustainability source palm oil cost more money. And so each brand team had to decide in its overall pool of costs, did it invest in that or not? And actually, we didn't give them very much choice. So of course, you know, we're looking at a big bold step. It doesn't come without fairly serious tension points. And that exemplifies it. So it sounds to me, what you're saying is that you were looking at the bigger, the bigger context and where the world is heading as well as where's the consumer heading and taking longer term decisions. Yeah. Whilst underpinning that, that direction of travel with some consumer based research, which is the lifeblood of an SMCG. Yeah. And just one of the points I've had on that. So, you know, there are literally thousands of decision points and areas where we couldn't invest it. And you can get completely lost and you can you can atomize the impact of your money and not help your business. So the critical thing there is to actually look at the where the confluence is between what matters most to the world and what matters most to your business. And of course at some level, that's a judgment call. But increasingly, there's a huge amount of data to inform that. And you have to invest at the confluence of those two points. So we had a lot of questions about the question that is up on the screen at the moment as you go back to the last question. You talked about like giving people the bug, but then ensuring that there's still a business case that they're not acting purely from a moral place because they're operating within a business. And we had a number of questions from people in advance talking about, you know, how do you bring leaders along with you? What if your CFO doesn't get it? What if you're operating in a small C conservative environment? And the question that I think we're most interested in is when you looked across Unilever and you realise that to deliver those 70 plus targets, you know, you wouldn't be an expert on everything and other people would be responsible for for delivery. You know, how did you engage those other leaders and were there instances where as an organisation, you had to really look at the sort of leadership you're engendering and whether there were then gaps and changes that you had to make at that kind of structural level in the way that the leadership was developed, not just engaging individual people and turning them on to that agenda. Yeah. So there's a lot I could unpack. Having read some of the questions that came in before, I'm going to try and focus first of all on what I think the problem is that a lot of people watching this have got, which is what do you do when you resistance at particularly a more senior level. And so of course, you know, any company is really just a social group at one level and bigger companies in particular are basically generally largely representative of society. And if you're lucky, you tend to get a kind of a gravitational pull on a value basis or an expertise basis. But of course, in Unilever, like any other company, we had a span of people with different views, different levels of conviction, different knowledge bases, etc, etc. The most critical thing when you're trying to drive change is to put yourself in the other person's shoes. I think it was Gandhi who said, walk a mile in the other person's shoes and the underlying philosophy of that is essential if you are basically a change agent. And most of the people at some level I suspect who are watching this are change agents. Without doing that, you will only ever tell people what your point of view is. And that doesn't try to change. So that's the most essential thing. And what you also need to do is to make clear to people how a driving a change is either both necessary, but also can be done in a way that is more likely to deliver a positive outcome than not changing. So this is a classic case at a high level of where if you believe change needs to happen, simply asserting that will not take you very far. What you need to do is recognise that human beings are complex and that they need to appeal to the left and the right brain and to the heart. And you need to think about how you're going to do all three of those. And, you know, these are influencing skills on steroids, basically. And you need to understand, first of all, how you equip leaders with knowledge that a lot of them don't have. And we shouldn't underestimate that we tend to live in a little bubble where we think of who gets this stuff. And actually, most senior leaders have spent 30 years of their career becoming really good at something which isn't sustainability. And to get to that level and suddenly have the courage to show their vulnerability that they don't know a whole lot that you know that's going to shape the future of the business is an extraordinary thing to do. It really is. So put yourself in that leader's shoes, equip them with the facts, help them understand, broadly speaking, what the macro dynamics actually are, give them the sense of the knowns and the likely risks to your organisation in action. Try and create a partnership once you've got a common understanding about what the alternative future could look like and what the high level moves are in strategic terms. And then how you go about basically co-opting other people at all levels in the organisation on that journey. Now, that is absolutely necessary. But I'm afraid to say it is not sufficient because the other thing that you find, particularly in most big organisations is that they talk to themselves much more than they expose themselves to the outside world. And here, crucially, the biggest changer is when you personally and humanly identify with the problem that you're trying to solve. So we spent a lot of time encouraging people, you know, in a very targeted way, depending on what element of the strategy we were trying to change, to go and experience life. So one really brief story is in our ice cream team, the push to have real vanilla rather than synthetic vanilla was very strong. All those 70 degrees, it tastes better. There's a price issue. And so the team went to Madagascar and they only spent two days there. But in that time, they saw what it takes to grow it. They spent time with largely the women and saw what their lives were like. They saw the sacrifices that they had to make in terms of not spending time with their children, the inability to afford education for their children, the massive stunting of life chances. And what happens when you actually train that order and enable her to balance her life in a different way? And I can honestly tell you that just those two days created a shift from we know that this stuff tastes nicer and we think it's the right thing to do to we're really committed to helping those women and delivering better tasting ice cream. And that might sound like pedantry, but it's really fundamental. So it sounds like there's two really strong things there. One is thinking about the individual and your influencing, putting yourself in their shoes and using your influencing skills, equipping them with knowledge but helping them along with your agenda rather than pushing your agenda on them. And the other one is the value of experience and experiential learning. I mean, Lindsay was talking about the research that we did with organisations who were progressing quite fast with sustainability and the gap that we identified through that research in between a kind of sustainability knowledge experts on one side and HR and leadership development team on another side with it with an unaligned agenda. And I wondered, you know, did you work with colleagues in L and D? Is there something there about aside from people you can take on that experiential journey, you know, are there ways of developing these and engaging them as through working colleagues in learning development? Yeah. Again, I think to be the law of two, not three in my answer today. It's probably a good thing. Yeah. I think you find that actually, I'm not too keen on the cliche millennials, but it works tend to be much more naturally knowledgeable and attuned to these issues because they're looking forward to a life that's going to be fundamentally different at all sorts of different levels. So we found actually, and I would be surprised if this isn't broadly true in a lot of other organizations, that a lot of the drivers for change that comes from a stance of wanting to live a life with meaning comes from that group. So we found that the kind of the natural upward pressure with the right intentions is very powerful there. The challenge much more is in an organization of 100,000 people, 80,000 people, 400 brands. How do you get out of any kind of silo mentality about who's responsible for what and create a very intelligent level of collective endeavor and understand where you need to build capability and what the relationship is between commitment and capability and delivery. So I think some of the crucial things that are enablers to that are governments. Do the senior people make the time to sit down together with this is the only thing that they talk about? And again, I would say one of our biggest breakthroughs was creating a governance group where all the right people were there. They were always there and they were always in and the quality of the conversations and the level of commitment, active learning and driving change and identifying where the next set of change leaders were in the business was fantastic. And part of that absolutely was about learning. But I think I don't think going out and saying learning needs to be fixed on its own would have done trick. Right. So that's very interesting in terms of how you create a kind of broader governance model and that probably leads us quite neatly into our next question. Some people obviously all problems got a very visible and public commitment to sustainability. We had a few questions from delegates who work in organisations where the CEO isn't as visible or maybe not as committed publicly to this agenda. And you might say the government is the answer, but I wondered what advice would you give to those people who might be working in organisations that don't have that leadership from the top? You know, what other approaches might they take? Well, if you don't create belief, you won't get anywhere is my very simple answer. I think there's a big difference between belief and advocacy and Paul embodied both. And advocacy plays a great role. And I'll come on and talk briefly about that. But it comes back fundamentally to the fact that, you know, I'm afraid the burden of proof rests on those who understand sustainability to make the case within business for why it's a stronger business. Because why would anybody change unless there's a strong case? The burden of proof is not on the leaders to get this stuff massively simplified here. And it's the job of leaders actually to be very thoughtful about any change that they introduce, because so much change is being inflicted on business anyway from digital to, you know, massive issues around transparency, the future of AI and what that means for employment. I mean, the level of issues any leadership team is dealing with, quite apart from the unavoidable pressure of quarterly delivery of the numbers, is mind boggling. So again, put yourself in their shoes and understand that it's your job, not to be the techie expert, but to be the bridge. And if you're an effective bridge, and you can create a level of belief at the senior leadership level that's really the most fundamental trigger. And I would expect any leader to have an early kind of funding attempt to rehearse their narrative unless their belief has been embedded and to some extent tested. Of course, when you get to that point, it's fantastic, partly because a vocal leader can drive wider change, which is what we're going to need. But at the much more basic level, we're all human beings and we believe much more strongly, things you say about our organisation when we hear them said outside, so that the kind of the corroborating effect and the triangulation of hearing about your organisation, particularly through your leader, from people outside, whether it's media or stakeholders, doesn't really matter, is massively more powerful than anything someone like me can do in communication terms within the company. So, you know, external communication is a crucial amplifier and reinforcer of an early belief system in an organisation. Sorry, can I just jump in there though? Just a few things that we're seeing as quite common threads in other organisations. Often we'll have individuals who might be in too junior position or not able to have that direct influence. But when we have seen them be effective is when they've identified who is going to be a really compelling advocate that might not be there, but they found somebody else that their leadership will respect. So it might be a peer, Maxon, who stepped out of a business who was previously a competitor. Yeah. Many of them actually are increasingly leveraging what investors are asking for. So so many more investors now are requiring boards to be educated and competent to manage climate risk. So they're using that window of opportunity where investors are starting to to put that into their their engagement with companies and saying, look, let's take ourselves an opportunity to ask if you brought in so you're not always on the back foot. Let's not make that just reactive to an ask around, for instance, TCFD when you disclose it. But they're also often it's an open door, but it's that confidence piece. So often their senior leaders might have a belief or a values driver, but it's not backstopped by enough confidence to be able to be a confident advocate. So we often get them, can you quietly help them because they don't want to be exposed to them at vulnerable. And so they don't know where this important new stuff. So that's equipping them with enough that they can act on what they have with their values and their beliefs. So those are three things that we're seeing, but the practitioners are using to influence change. So sounds like you're both saying in different ways it is important to have visible leaders at the top, but actually the role of the change maker, in your words, Sue, is actually to empower other leaders and not necessarily to be the visible person itself that would claim quite the reverse. In my view, there's very much a kind of usual suspects thing here. Right. And, you know, I'm so consciously reminded of this because of the wretched Brexit debate. And you see all the time that people lean towards the information source that confirms their prejudices. That the reverse is equally true that for better or worse, this is the reality. If you have the word sustainability in your job title, then you you have to make the effort to get people to lean into that message. In the end, success depends on you working with the DNA with the grain that organization. So you need to be, as I say, you need to be that bridge. And you also, I think, inherently need to be very comfortable being low ego and giving most of the responsibility or the praise quite often away for whatever the changes are. And in the end, most intelligent organisations understand how that trade off works. Brilliant. I mean, one of the questions that we got from a lot of participants really was around some frustration around progress. And obviously we had the recent one point five degree report from the mental panel on climate change. And I wondered from your perspective, given that it's quite urgent level of action required from governments, but also businesses to deliver. You know, what what different do we need? What different kind of leadership might we need now to really step up to that? Some of those urgent challenges that we're facing. Yeah. So again, I think leadership is a really broad word. I think everybody in any organisation is a leader. So I think we need just as we do in a democracy, you know, politicians respond to buying signals very crudely. And I think leaders do as well at the top of the company. So the role of leaders at every other level is to push for change within that organisation, using the combination of both the business and the moral case as a construct map. That's the first thing. And I think in the end, people should choose to work for the businesses that they believe are going to contribute to the kind of future they want to live in. And I think sooner leaders and organisational bosses wake up to that reality, the greater an incentive they're going to have to change. So that I think is one crucial element. Another element I think though. And again, this is not just at the C-suite level, but it's most critical there. We need to recognise that the kinds of problems that we're going to have to resolve simply cannot be resolved within an organisation. So we're very used to being able, particularly bigger organisations, to being insular. But actually now, you know, you just take the impact of Blue Planet 2, not just here in the UK, but worldwide. The estimate is 750 million people worldwide watch that programme, which is fantastic. And that in a year, it is fundamentally changing how anybody has anything to do with packaging anywhere in the value chain is operating, which is brilliant. But the ability to deal with that doesn't really exist. Doesn't even generally exist at a national level, let alone at a global level. And yet, waste is a very local and national issue, not a totally different from carbon as a classic example. So why am I saying that? I'm saying that because to answer your question about leadership, you need people who first of all can actually think at a system level. They can piece together end to end the value chain. What needs to happen in order for recycling to become possible? And if you're sitting somewhere like Unilever where you have a target about something becoming recyclable, that's great. But being recyclable is only a step, is only part of the process. It actually being recycled is what matters. And I see lots of companies now focusing on recyclable as a solution and they need to recognise it's really just a step on the path and that if you are a significant contributor to the problem, there is both again a moral case and a business case for looking at how you create coalitions of progressive organisations, not those organisations whose job it is to defend the status quo and actively looking at how you drive change. And by the way, that's crucial at all sorts of levels because most companies will not invest for very long in a disproportionate cost, which in a lot of parts of the world to recycle plastic is, for example. So you need to create tipping points in markets where there's enough volume demand for the price to come down. So again, this is why I think it's very important when you get to a senior position in sustainability that you don't just have a narrow focus and that he's on sustainability. You actually need to understand the economics of our businesses, or you won't have impact on the business. Thanks so much, Sue. We've got a number of questions now have come through. I tried to do the short fire. Yeah. But these are not small issues. I think to be honest, I just looked through the three questions that have been put in front of me in the last 30 seconds. I think each of them we could do an hour webinar. Can we time to go? We'll have plenty of content for future webinars. So don't worry if your question didn't get answered this time, we'll cover it in the future. So, Lindsay, Sue was just talking about how really corporates operate within a wider system. The plastics example is a great one. We're not everything is within your control. We also talked about palm oil and Iceland earlier. We had a couple of responses to that. And in particular, obviously, you know, quite famously Iceland were advised that it probably wouldn't get through the exercise and standards agency. And then there's been a bit of a social media campaign. And I think a lot of us have seen that in our Twitter feeds and Facebook feeds. And there's feeling according to one participant that the mass media doesn't quite get it. And it is that question about, you know, as a company, how can you communicate directly with consumers? How can you also influence what consumers think and do? And I wanted as a question to you, Lindsay, because I think you leave are quite visible in terms of being out there in a number of ways. But, you know, do you see companies, Lindsay, that struggle with this, that are really looking at themselves and not really knowing how to how to shift the wider systems? And, you know, how can they how can they develop that that capability to engage with consumers or to engage with stakeholders in the way you need to? So I think we see, I see a really common challenge, which is there is a mindset she needed that many are locked into a mindset of thinking they can control the communications, that messaging and communications is a one way that the company gets to choose how it's positioned and perceived. And although kind of rationally, they know and they know the trends that that's not the case, the mindset hasn't shifted. So they'll talk about, you know, transparency and and that isn't a two way dialogue, but often default to still thinking we need to message this rather than we need to listen and engage. So we at a high level, that's the challenge I'm still seeing that rational recognition that the world is changing and that it's more of a conversation and the traditional media is, you know, still has a role, but actually, you know, what other people think of you will be visible. It's what society decides is your purpose and your role in your contribution, but we'll define perceptions. So that's the high level challenge that I see within the companies that we're working with. I know there's a wider question about the need to engage across systems. And again, we see the rational, the thinking piece around, yes, we know this, but actually that, you know, walking in other shoes is often a real challenge. And when we're working with companies, we're often overcoming misperceptions, like we assume that stakeholder wants this, we assume that that's their agenda, but not really stepping back and parking biases and saying, let's actually really understand let's just go and find out rather than say we need to contain and control it. So those are some of the big challenges, a positive intent and recognition that that's where they need to get to. But still some, some biases, some historic mindsets that are getting in the way of that happening. So it seems to be about mindsets. I mean, Sue was saying that, you know, it's kind of wave of millennials and future leaders come through the organization, enter the business with a slightly different mindset already. But a lot of the work you do with boards and senior leaders who may be 20, 30 years out of an MBA and well advanced in their careers. And I wondered, you know, what insights you could share about, you know, ways that companies can work to develop those leaders to prepare them for the next 10 years, the next 20 years when they might have developed models of mindsets that actually proven very, very successful. Yeah. And that's still incredibly important because, as Sue said, it has to still be, you know, commercial. It can't just be down to the understeer. It's a great phrase. So there are a couple of things I've seen. One, people like Paul Pullman being vocal as a CEO and talking about his purpose and others like him has created a space for others to do it. So we used to see senior people, you know, in exact level roles, talking about wanting to put something back at the end of their career, increasingly seem saying, actually, I want to do it while I'm in a position of influence, not spend my life doing something that inadvertently is having negative implications. And then afterwards, feel the need to put something back. So we're increasingly feeling that people have permission to say, actually, I would like to find ways to to align. So we've been working with businesses and exact teams over the last couple of years seeing a shift on the language and what's acceptable there. We are also seeing that the pressure from millennials is having a real impact. So investors as a driver, but also millennials. So often that's the thing that really gets traction. So senior teams, of course, looking at the talent that they're having through, that is a point that is landing and that they're raising. So whenever we make the theoretical point, they go, yes, and do you know what our data shows when we have anything internally, we get so much focus on this. So they're really mindful of that. Our challenge to them is they don't wait until they come through because that's going to take too long. You know, be making sure that you are an organization they're going to want to stay with. Don't risk losing them from being too slow. Can I just make a build on the consumer aspect of this? Because I think I'm not even the detailed question, but I think part of what Iceland has done is they've taken a topic which everybody's heard, blah, blah, palm oil. But I'm pretty sure that if you ask most people in the high street in various parts of the world a year ago, we're only a couple of countries, probably Germany being the best example, where people any level could articulate what the issues are around palm oil. And again, it's no coincidence, is it? That's the power of film to tell a story that cuts through and doesn't require people to understand any detail. So I think there's something very, very important about that. And of course, if you look at the amount of money that brands send on communication every year, it's enormous. So don't tell me that brands can't be a force for good. Of course they can. And kudos to Iceland for reskinning. I mean, more notes originally made by Greenpeace. Frankly, I don't care about that. What they've done, which I think people on this cork can learn from is that they've taken almost a campaigning mentality around and invited people to understand a very simplistic level of the problem is and to enable them to have a very simple thing that they have to do to change because consumers are not going to come become PhDs around this and nor should you expect them to. But if you give them a very simple problem and a very simple solution, you can see how viral that has gone. And I have to say, talking about Facebook feed, I was delighted when something popped up repeatedly on mine yesterday, which is a little grid. I don't know who created it, which basically says, what's the product you're buying? Who are the really good companies and who are the really bad companies? So we're starting to see now something that five years ago nobody believed would happen, which is consumers being empowered to make choices and actually caring enough to do that. Now, that is unbelievably exciting in this space. But if you're not a company that's on the front foot, you're going to suffer really quickly. So I think we're going to see that the commercial imperative meeting the sustainability imperative, the business case and the answers to that question about how do you engage is going to shift super quickly now. So that's my forecast anyway. So this, let's hope, we've had a number of questions about how I think people look at you and say, what a great example, what a great exemplar and Iceland is a good example taking leadership on an issue and it felt sort of 10, 15 years ago, it's really NGO campaigns towards company bad behavior. And now the companies that want to lead on these issues are learning how to use those things themselves as you say, almost a campaign on an issue to affect consumer behavior. And that might be the answer to this question, but hopefully there's other answers as well. People are asking, how do we get more unilings? How do we get more companies to lead on this agenda? What is our role in that? Yeah. Well, the answer actually, I'm afraid, I know I'm being a bit repetitive, is pretty simple. It's define what your business case is and marry it with a moral case. Almost everybody on the planet wants to be part of the solution. We now have an innate, fantastic advantage like heavens that most people go to work, top to bottom, wanting to see progress on it. So building the moral case is not hard and that's going to accelerate massively. Marrying it with a business case, even if it's only for one brand as a starter, you don't have to crack the whole problem at once and Iceland haven't even attempted to do that. They've gone in on a single issue, originally on plastics, now they've gone on another issue and clearly that will, I don't know the detail, but that would have been because they have learned what happened with the first one. It will have emboldened the leadership, the morale in the company would have been amazing and we all know, don't we, that when we've got energy to solve a problem, we cannot hold down. When we're just doing our job, then change is iterative and slow. So what we need is we need the energy that is released by a combination of those two things and everybody on this call, I hope is going to leave this, go and work out how they go after that. That's how you create change. Just one build on that is that over the last year, so many of the companies we're working with have an aspiration to be the unilever of their sector. So the fact unilever is there for a while, it was a bit, while they've just chosen to differentiate, that's their thing, but now we're getting a, actually the brief is, how would we get to be the unilever and how would we even be recognized as a leader in the way that unilever is recognized as a leader? So there's that level of ambition that unilever has created. So it's great seeing that track through. One thing that is also leading to that is visibility of league tables, how companies perform with people, companies hate, boards hate, executives hate, their company being low down on the list. So organizations are having NGOs, that have public league tables of corporate performance, we're seeing as a driver moving, we want to be at the top of that table. So campaigning action, that is actually ranking corporate performance, a bit like the grid you pointed to, we're seeing that as a real driver of, we don't want to be like, unilever, all we want to be at the top of this league table, not the bottom. So things like Oxfam behind the Brown Street are, at the moment I think, there's a really useful, very targeted role for NGOs. Then the question is really, how does that create momentum within an organization so that it kind of doesn't hurt itself rather than, so it's the shift from the risk to the opportunity mentality, I think is, so we have now got to that level of an opportunity mentality, but it takes time. So we are getting, We are getting close, I'm afraid. We are getting close and I've got way too many questions in front of me. What I'm going to try to do is to amalgamate three. Ask each of you to give me a very short answer. And this is all about leadership and developing leadership in this webinar. And it feels like some of these questions have been asked by people with sustainability in their job title. Some have been asked from people with learning and development in their job title. But what's the one thing that an L and D team can do to support leadership development, to be more fit for the future and to drive the kind of changes that we know the evidence shows is needed. Very short answer. Very short answer. Understand, help people in the business, particularly at senior levels, connect what the company's purpose with, with what the business plan, what's the business actually saying it's trying to do and how sustainability will support that. Purpose tends to sit on its own. It tends to be kind of a strapline. What you need to get to is it needs to be a concrete driver of decisions and choices. And almost always, that's about how you merge sustainability with the business case. So education about how those three actually fit together. Brilliant. Thanks, Sarah. I completely agree with that. Often missing, but not doing the analysis and not doing the joining up, that's really important. And then beyond that, anticipating, so what is that going to require of leaders? What are the particular challenges that they're going to face and be quick to be able to navigate? What context do they need to understand? So that systems thinking that you talked about and that needing to be able to work beyond the organisation and to critical things, that those are going to be required, make sure people are capable of navigating those. One really quick sound bite on that, as it died. I'm sorry, I'm going to have to... The commitment gap has to be closed before people have the will to close the capability gap. I think that's a fantastic input to kind of end on. And just many thanks to Lindsay and Sue for sharing their insights with us. Hopefully you found that useful. This is the first in a series of webinars. The next one will be early in 2019. So do keep an eye on our website or sign up to our newsletter or follow us on Twitter, which is CISL underscore Cambridge if you want to be the first to find out about that one. We'll be really focusing on the how of developing leaders in that next session. And for those who might be interested in developing their own leadership capabilities, there is, you might be interested in our new eight week high impact leadership program, which is a tutor program delivered fully online with peer group interactions by our digital platform. The latest cohort is made up of leaders from over 49 countries, many with 20 to 30 years experience and they're all looking to gain experience of how to lead differently. And so hopefully this webinar has given you some insight and inspiration for that as well. The recording will be available if you missed the part of this or would like to share it with your colleagues. We'll email you a link afterwards and you can find out more on our website. So with a final thanks to Sue and to Lindsay and to all of you for joining us until next time. Good luck everyone.