Exploring Sweden, in search of equality

Steven Bland, August 26th 2010, General

What do cycle touring, equality, film-making and wild camping have in common? At first glance, not very much. But from August 4th to September 16th, two young graduates are cycling across Sweden, filming their adventure and asking what it's like to live in a more equal society.

One is a graduate from Forum for the Future’s masters course in Leadership for sustainable development; the other a future solicitor. On the journey, we will be asking if there are things we can learn that can be applied to the UK's political and economic realities, and the ‘big society’.

These questions arose from reading a new book called The Spirit Level, which spells out in convincing and shocking detail the statistical relationship between a whole range of social ills (for example, crime, bad health, teenage pregnancies and lack of trust) and levels of income inequality within developed countries. The authors, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, argue that it is a lack of social democracy, not GDP, which appears to determine a countries ability to tackle the long-standing and fundamental social problems we face. The most unequal countries – the USA, UK, and Singapore – fare many times worse than the most equal: Sweden, Norway, Finland and Japan.

And so we have looked to Sweden: a country of low inequality and poverty, yet high economic growth, health, education, happiness and trust. We want to find out what it actually feels like to live in a more equal society. Are the prejudices many of us hold in the UK true? Are more equal societies boring, turgid, lacking in innovation and places in which it’s hard to be an individual or be ‘successful’? Most importantly, do the Swede’s already have the ‘big society’ many involved in sustainability might like to see? There’s a chance it conflicts with the big society plan the coalition government is calling for.

The exploration will take us over a thousand miles through the cities and lakes of Sweden, wild camping, staying with strangers, talking with both ordinary people and academics alike. We are recording our six week journey via video diary, photo-blog, interview and finally, documentary film.

At the 2010 graduation for Forum’s Master’s students, Ed Gillespie of Futerra Communications suggested we needed to ‘hijack the big society.’ I’m not sure anyone really knows how to do this yet. But I think it is the responsibility of those working in sustainability to use the arguments in The Spirit Level to push for a fairer society.

I hope by learning from the Swedish, we can spark a debate about what our own big society could actually look like in a way that puts us on a platform to tackle our linked social and environmental problems. Tune in at Exploring Equality's website and get involved in the debate.

Let’s get talking about the kind of society you want to live in.

You can follow Explore Equality on:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ExploreEquality
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Flickr:   http://www.flickr.com/photos/exploringequality/
Youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/ExploringEquality

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Opening up innovation for sustainability

Chris Sherwin, August 20th 2010, General, Innovation

In March this year, M&S launched its ‘Your Green Idea’ competition inviting customers to suggest new, positive, green actions the company could implement as part of its ever-expanding Plan A. The winner, voted for by the public, would receive £100,000 to donate to an organisation, charity or company of their choice.

These types of ‘open source’ projects can be a powerful way of tackling the challenges of sustainability, and hats off to M&S for being progressive and creative. But something went wrong and it announced earlier this summer:

“After much deliberation, our judges collectively agreed that we didn’t actually have three brand new brilliant ideas that would meet our criteria of fitting with what we do at M&S, having a sufficiently significant environmental benefit, and allowing our 21 million customers to take part.”

What happened and what can we learn about how you innovate for sustainability and structure these kind of projects?

Your Green Idea is only one example of a recent wave of ‘open innovation’ projects directed at companies’ big environmental and social challenges. Starbucks’ recent Betacup competition invited ideas and designs to reduce the number of non-recyclable cups thrown away by its consumers. Do take a peek at the winning Karma Cup, a behavioural initiative in which every customer bringing in a reusable cup marks a chalkboard by the till, with the 10th person getting a free coffee.

Similarly, Levi’s ‘Care to Air’ challenge invited novel ideas to encourage people to air dry their jeans. This tackled a growing US trend for people to use tumble driers, the energy from which accounts for 60% of the carbon footprint of a pair of jeans over its lifespan.

This year also saw the launch of dedicated open innovation platforms where the challenges or briefs are directed solely at solving social and environmental problems – notably myoocreate and OpenIDEO.

As a formal concept, ‘open innovation’ was coined by Henry Chesborough, Professor at UC Berkeley, as recently as 2003. Fuelled significantly by the internet, in essence it “assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology”.

Companies have been quick to embrace this as a way to open a new dialogue directly with customers and as a way to get lots of brains from outside their business to throw in great, new, and commercially viable ideas. Through its Connect + Develop program, open innovation veterans P&G claim “50 percent of product initiatives involve significant collaboration with outside innovators”.

It’s understandable that open innovation would be quickly turned to sustainability goals. It allows companies to invite collaboration on many of those thorny social and environmental issues outside their direct, operational control. And if ’outsiders’ are involved in creating the solutions they may be more acceptable to that outside world too. Levi’s is a clear case in point with the invite around laundering jeans.

One reason why Your Green Idea may have stumbled where others succeeded is because it asked for ideas from its customers, whereas other initiatives targeted creatives, designers or innovators. Consumers often struggle to express their needs and desires in the abstract world of a sustainable future. But – as we’re finding in our work on sustainability in the UK creative industries – involving creatives in tackling sustainability challenges can lead to amazing ideas and imaginitive leaps: that’s what they do!

It’s surprising therefore that M&S should turn to its customers with the competition given that Stuart Rose, the former CEO and instigator of Plan A, often said that as a leader, M&S needed to be “half a step ahead of consumers”. Why ask them for ideas and innovations if that’s the case?

There’s also a world of difference between asking people to suggest an idea and asking people to solve a specific problem or challenge. Though problem solving alone can be limiting, the invitation to contribute a new idea on such a broad topic as sustainability or going green can be daunting. Little surprise then that M&S’s submissions were disappointing.

What lessons does this give us for open innovation for sustainability? It can be a powerful and engaging tool to help companies on their sustainability journey, but it needs to be used and designed properly. We’d suggest two important criteria are; getting the brief and challenge right, and targeting the right people to ‘open up’ to.

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Coalition must preserve commitment to sustainable development in regions

Jonathon Porritt, August 10th 2010, Forum founders, General, Public Sector

“Dogma-driven iconoclasts” is just about the politest way of describing what the coalition government is up to on sustainable development. There’s a mixture of delight and spite in sweeping away anything that might once have informed policy-making under the old ‘regime’. It won’t necessarily have been everybody’s image of the week last week, but shots of the recycling bins outside the former offices of the South East England Regional Assembly stuffed to the gunwales with copies of its now redundant South East Plan were deeply depressing.

Coping with the problem of overheating in the South East is a compellingly complex problem.  Juggling economic development with community cohesion, quality of life, biophysical sustainability and shortages in land, infrastructure, housing and water is a sophisticated business.  The South East Plan was just that – a sophisticated, inclusive way of managing the all but unmanageable. 

But regions – and all the institutional arrangements that went with them – are now no more.  When it came to determining the fate of the Regional Development Agencies, for instance, the pro-RDA Business Secretary Vince Cable and a handful of stutteringly inadequate Lib Dems elsewhere in government were easily trumped by the Treasury and Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary. 

There was no review; no assessment of the economic benefits which will be lost (with RDAs leveraging at least £4.50 for every £1 they laid out); and no attempt made to work out how best to transition the skills, networks and deep knowledge of the RDAs into alternative arrangements. Done with spite. Done with crass, precipitate indifference.

Civil servants across Whitehall are contemplating the carnage with growing ill-ease. It’s relatively easy to get rid of things you don’t like. It’s a damn sight harder to bring forward better solutions in their place. 

Eric Pickles has announced that the Regional Development Agencies will be replaced with Local Enterprise Partnerships. These Partnerships will, apparently, be much more attuned to local needs. Much better able to leverage community resources.  Much more business-friendly – not least because they will be chaired by business people. The reality, however, is that nobody knows how they’ll work, how they will handle public money (if there is any to be handled), and how they will be held to account. 

Least of all, nobody knows how they will promote genuine sustainable development in their localities.  One of the great strengths of the RDAs was the fact that they had a statutory duty “to contribute to sustainable development” in everything they did.  Performance in delivering on that sustainable development duty was, of course, patchy, but they achieved far more in this area than they would ever have done without having such a duty imposed upon them.

So here’s my next test for Caroline Spelman as she starts living up to her claim to be the champion of sustainable development across the whole of Government: persuade Eric Pickles and Chancellor George Osborne to impose a similar (or even better) sustainable development duty on all Local Enterprise Partnerships, in whatever form they eventually emerge.

Don’t let them bully you with their predictable protestations that it should be up to each individual Local Enterprise Partnership to decide for itself: that’s not how sustainable development works – not yet, at any rate.  Either you mandate them to put sustainable development and the low-carbon economy at the heart of what they do, or it simply won’t get done.

And if Mrs Spelman needs any help with how best to frame such a duty, there’s some very good guidance lying around somewhere in DEFRA’s Sustainable Development Unit – drafted with the help of the Sustainable Development Commission.  Or at least there used to be.

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Porritt condemns “dogmatic” decision to axe money-saving SDC

Jonathon Porritt, July 23rd 2010, Forum founders, General, Public Sector

As the former chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, I’m clearly going to be a bit biased about the government’s decision yesterday to get rid of the commission. So I’ve been working really hard to put myself in Ministers’ shoes in terms of the ‘rationale’ they’ve advanced for this reprehensible decision.

They’ve put forward four justifications:

1. It will save money

The SDC costs the taxpayer around £4 million a year, around 50% of which comes from Defra. The rest comes from the Devolved Administrations and other Whitehall Departments – all of which wanted to carry on working with the SDC. As George Monbiot has pointed out, the SDC’s advice on reducing costs through increased efficiency has already saved the Government many, many times that negligible amount, and would have gone on doing so year after year.

2. Sustainable development is now mainstreamed across government

Defra Ministers are now claiming that sustainable development has been embedded in every department. In other words, no specialist capability at the centre is any longer required, simply because the government ‘gets it’.

Like hell it does. To hear Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State in Defra, make such a totally fatuous claim after a few weeks in power is irritating beyond belief. She clearly knows nothing of the constant slog required (of the SDC and many other organisations) to achieve the limited traction that is all that can be laid claim to today.

There’s a rich irony here. The SDC is a UK-wide body. Neither Wales nor Scotland was in favour of getting rid of the commission, no doubt because both countries have done an infinitely better job than Whitehall on ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development.

3. It will avoid duplication

This is a bit trickier, simply because the SDC does a number of different things. It advises ministers – and there are indeed lots of other people who do that. But rarely if ever from an integrated sustainable development perspective.

It helps countless public sector bodies (from the Audit Commission to the Department of Education, from Local Authorities to Primary Care Trusts in the NHS) to make sense of sustainable development, and no other government body does any of that.

And it scrutinises government performance on a completely independent basis across the whole sustainable development agenda – not just on climate change. And no other body does that.

4. Sustainable development is too important to delegate to an external body

It’s worth recording Caroline Spelman’s actual words here:

“Together with Chris Huhne, I am determined to take the lead role in driving the sustainable agenda across the whole of government, and I’m not willing to delegate this responsibility to an external body.”

Even after nine years working with dozens of government ministers, I’m astonished at such utterly brazen cynicism. The only thing Mrs Spelman has done so far as Secretary of State at Defra is publish a new strategy for the department. This has not one serious reference to sustainable development in it. Such is the depth of her concern.

If Defra’s next step is to get rid of what’s left of its own internal Sustainable Development Unit, then it will have literally no capacity to ‘drive the sustainable agenda’ even within Defra, let alone ‘across the whole of government’. And how can you drive anything if you haven’t the first clue what it actually means? And it just got rid of the only part of the system capable of providing you with a basic primer for beginners?

So let’s not beat around the bush: their justification for getting rid of the SDC is transparently vacuous, if not downright dishonest. This is an ideological decision – in other words, a decision driven by dogma not by evidence-based, rational analysis.

And the only conceivable reason for allowing dogma to dominate in this way is that the government doesn’t want anyone independently auditing its performance on sustainable development – let alone a properly-resourced, indisputably expert body operating as ‘a critical friend’ on an inside track within government.

I don’t suppose the Prime Minister was even consulted about such a footling little matter. But it’s clear that his advisors hadn’t the first idea about the kind of signal this dogma-driven decision sends out, ensuring that his claim that this will be the ‘greenest government ever’ is in deepest jeopardy.

It’s too early to make any definitive judgement about how the green agenda will fare under the coalition. But it’s not encouraging. ‘Greenest ever’ has to mean something substantive. Simply smearing a sickly ideological slime over everything just won’t cut it.

Jonathon Porritt was chair of the Sustainable Development Commission from 2000 to 2009

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Calling all creatives: design the future we need!

Fiona Bennie, June 25th 2010, General

The creative industries are in danger of being caught “napping” on sustainability, according to Lord Puttnam. They risk waking up too late to find the world "has changed out of all recognition".

The filmmaker and politician was speaking at our Creative Industries Sustainability Beacon event, last week - the launch of a challenging project to bring together leaders from the world of fashion, performing arts, film, architecture, design and all the other creative industries, to examine the future of their businesses in a rapidly changing and uncertain world.

Lord Puttnam was “personally convinced that climate change is already the single greatest challenge facing all of us – ultimately dwarfing our present economic woes...” But he said climate change and other sustainability challenges present a raft of opportunities for all creative industries and their  “attitudes and skills… can really help stimulate change.”

This project sets out to help the creative industries understand and seize those opportunities. Water scarcity; energy security; sustainable consumption; population growth; social wellbeing are just a few of the issues which need to be tackled urgently – and, we believe, creatively – for societies near and far to thrive.

Following Puttnam’s opening address, Jonathon Porritt led a Talkaoke debate from the ‘donut of chat’, surrounded by an impressive line-up of contributors (giving Glastonbury a run for its money).

Franny Armstrong kicked off by showing us the carbon footprint of her brilliant film The Age of Stupid. (Haven’t seen it? Get stuck in, you will not be disappointed.) Turns out Franny’s film emitted “one percent of the emissions of the Hollywood film, The Day After Tomorrow”. How cool is that? The film doesn’t lack anything, it’s just as well-made, well-produced and successful (Box office No.1). And therein lies the proof, it can be done. We now have the task of making her model simple and transferrable across the rest of the film industry.

The Age of Stupid - Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

By the virtual magic of Skype, Tim Brown then appeared, from the IDEO studio in San Francisco. As CEO of IDEO, one of the most influential global design consultancies, he’s been in the product and service design world for years. Interestingly, he started out with a confession: that the best part of his career now resides in landfill. The products he has lovingly created over the years have played their part in creating our fast consumption-obsessed world. He now views product design from a systems perspective, something he believes is “important for design but essential for tackling climate change”.

We couldn’t agree more as it becomes ever clearer that we urgently need to change our relationship with the material world to meet the coming resource crunch and deliver low-carbon lifestyles. IDEO’s Living Climate Change website is a place for designers to discuss what they can bring to the debate, and why they should play a fundamental role in finding the solutions we so desperately need.

Frances Corner then boldly answered the debate question, “Can the creative industries lead us to a sustainable future?”, with “a resounding ‘yes’”. As Head of College for the London College of Fashion, Frances at the heart of budding fashion talent. She pointed out that “education has to be part of the way that we address sustainability, otherwise we won’t be able to bring about the constructive persuasion we need”. The new Centre for Sustainable Fashion, which sits within the LCF is working on just that. And their international student awards, Fashioning the Future 2010, are doing a great job at spreading their work far and wide.

“There is absolutely nothing inevitable about the future” said Michael Pawlyn, Director of Exploration Architecture and bio-mimicry guru. He urges us to think about and design the future that we want, not to simply let it unfold. He uses biomimicry, a process that “looks to nature as a source of inspiration for new solutions.” For example, he is exploring the nifty way the Namibian fog-basking beetle stays hydrated in the desert, and using the learning from that natural system in the development of his Sahara Forest Project. He believes designers and architects need to make three transformations: “radical increases in resource efficiency; shifting from a carbon to a solar economy; and transforming from a linear, wasteful, polluting way of using resources to a completely closed-loop model.”

A Namibian fog-basking Beetle

And last but by no means least, Dan Burgess - ex-Naked Planet, now Pipeline Ideas – took us on a rollercoaster of examples of sustainability comms, including photographer Chris Jordan’s stark images of birds’ stomachs full of plastic waste. Dan feels that many people in the creative industries are “wasting their energy” and should get involved in the sustainability agenda, support the great work that’s already going on and put their skills to good use. He reckons we need to get out there and “agitate”.

Photographer Chris Jordan, using shocking images to make his point.

You’re all invited to have your say and contribute to the online community, where you can watch a video of event highlights and share resources. We’ll be running a series of regional workshops in the autumn and launching the project findings shortly after. Click here for more information on this project.

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End of the beginning for the class of 2010

Celia Cole, June 23rd 2010, General, Leadership

We know it's coming. The signs are everywhere. Excitement. Stress. Anxiety. Exhaustion. The clock is ticking down the last six weeks and we Forum scholars are left wishing we could squeeze just a few more hours into the day, a few more days into the week.

I knew it was coming when talk of the 'j' word (job) crept into seminars, discussions and to-do lists. Preparations for life after Forum and our Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development began with a fantastic career session: a professional life coach helped us identify the necessary ingredients for personal success and how to plot the journey ahead of us. CV sessions and job advice have since followed, and now it's down to us.

I knew it was coming when, despite having only just settled into a manic and creative month on The Guardian Environment Desk, I was already walking away from the final placement of the year.  But what a year of placement experiences:  from food self-sufficiency in Middlesbrough Borough Council, to sustainable planning in the Environment Agency, to the plight of hill sheep farmers' at Friends of the Earth, and sustainable food chains behind Sainsbury's, I have learned an incredible amount. When you add my five placements to those of the other eleven scholars, we have generated 60 months of shared experience, invaluable knowledge and lifelong learning.

I knew it was coming when the evenings and weekends started to disappear. It is June, which is crunch time for delivering our completed sustainable business plans.  Combined with a personal leadership analysis and reflection on our year's learning, these form the equivalent of a masters dissertation and, I would argue, are more valuable. Each business plan aims to tackle society’s sustainability woes (or improve a few of them at least!)  And, to top it all off, just a few days before we graduate we'll present these business plans before a 'dragon's den'!

I knew it was coming as we waved goodbye to our tutors at the end of our second and final teaching module at the Leadership Trust. Six of the most enlightening and enjoyable days of the course were spent at this centre for leadership excellence in Ross on Wye; practising, studying, and reflecting upon our personal leadership development.  And the experience helped us scholars bond as a team.

I knew it was coming this side of Easter when one big test could be ticked off. It was my turn, with fellow scholar Sol, to plan the post-placement event after a month working within in the business sector.  Drawing together sustainability professionals from Unilever, BP, Bupa, BT, Sainsbury's and others, the event focused on how sustainable goods and services could be consumed by the mainstream citizen, and in particular, how reusable water bottles and car club memberships could move from a niche to a mainstream market.

I knew it was coming when the final schedule arrived, and time no longer seemed indefinite. Core seminars in science and technology, ethics and values, people and community, and economics, are tailing off. Our ever impressive list of speakers, from social entrepreneurs to political experts, continues, but not for long. A new addition to the timetable has arrived; graduation.

I knew it was coming when it felt like I'd been here before; next year’s applicants have been welcomed, the interviews conducted and our successors announced. 

So, we know it's coming. We're very aware. But it's not quite over yet. Ahead lie hours of business planning, big discussions on sustainability, even bigger debates on leadership, one or two essays, a few thousand words, plenty of reflections, an inevitable panic and certainly one large celebration.

We can see the end but the journey is far from over. In fact, come July, the real journey we have been preparing for will finally begin.

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Green jam tomorrow, as budget looks for better measures of progress

Ben Tuxworth, June 22nd 2010, Finance, General

The coalition’s first budget headlines are all about tax rises and benefit cuts, but beneath the surface there are some interesting hints of deeper change towards a green economy.

The environment certainly didn’t make the headlines, and was hardly mentioned in George Osborne’s speech, but in the full text of the budget, the Treasury has done the unthinkable, and hinted it might dismantle its own obsession with GDP growth. David Cameron’s flirtation with the idea of ‘general wellbeing’ and better metrics for progress seemed to disappear from the rhetoric in the run-up to the election, but on page 10 of the budget they resurface in a box about economic performance: “The Government is committed to developing broader indicators of wellbeing and sustainability, with work currently underway to review how the Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi report [on measurement of wellbeing and sustainability] should affect the ... indicators collected by Defra, and with the ONS and the Cabinet Office leading work on taking forward the report’s agenda across the UK.” Sounds great, but for now it’s all rather exploratory, and this box is the only place where sustainability is used in connection with the environment – the other eight mentions are all in the more limited economic sense.

The nearest we come to concrete green measures is a short section of the budget’s 121 pages devoted to the low-carbon economy. Here the government acknowledges once again that climate change is one of the most serious threats that the world faces, and suggests that the UK needs £200 billion of investment in low-carbon energy over the next decade. To do this, reform of the energy market is in the pipeline, with proposals to be published ‘in the autumn’ for reform of the climate change levy (to better support the carbon price), to be brought into law via the 2011 Finance Bill.  There are also firmer plans for the creation of a green investment bank (but not ‘til after the spending review) and promises of a green deal for households, including pay-as-you-save schemes, to hasten the uptake of home energy efficiency measures. 

The government will also "explore changes to the aviation tax system" such as switching from a per-passenger to a per-plane levy, and will consult on major changes, but for now there is to be no increase in fuel duty for drivers. And there are a couple of tweaks to the structure of company car taxation to favour lower-emitting vehicles, and the promise of legislation in the autumn for enhanced capital allowance for zero carbon goods vehicles.

Does all this add up to a green revolution? And in the round, is this a progressive budget, as the Chancellor claimed? Campaigners on social issues will see the loss of disability benefits (the Disability Living Allowance will be subject to ‘objective medical assessment’ – in time expected to save over £1billion), and the failure to increase duty on cigarettes and alcohol as a step back. For the poorest - pensioners and the unemployed - the VAT increase will hit hard. And much of the cutting is set for October, when another statement will flesh out how ‘unprotected’ government departments  - which include environment and energy/climate change - are expected to cut 25% over the next four years. Tough times ahead.

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Should men leave technology to women?

James Taplin, June 18th 2010, General

I can’t listen to the radio, eat breakfast, AND talk to my family at the same time. If I’m listening to music, I can just about manage the mechanics of walking but making intelligent routing changes is always a challenge. And if I’m on the phone, all other systems effectively shut down. My wife, on the other hand, appears to view dealing with complex financial accounting online, chatting on the phone, monitoring our small daughters, and preparing supper all at the same time as an entry-level multi-tasking problem. She is a wonderful woman & I’m in awe of her.

Curiously, however, I feel I can write a blog, check facebook, shop for a new cycle jersey online, and download a free album all at the same time, albeit inefficiently. So it seems that I can multi-task after my own fashion, so long as it is all through the same portal. I don’t think that I’m particularly unusual in my simplicity, and I mention this not as a plea to other men out there to back me up by admitting that they too find reading and eating mutually exclusive activities, but because of a growing unease I feel about how communications technology is affecting the sexes.

Tanya is the very lovely lady who cleans our offices. She usually has her mobile phone tucked into her headscarf, and for two or more hours she chats with friends as she goes about her business. For her, communications technology adds a layer of richness and entertainment over an otherwise routine job, and enhances the experience. It opens the world up to her, and the people in it.

I leave the office and get on the tube. Many people about me are plugged into some sort of device or other – a number of them with ill-fitting earphones, and I secretly fantasize about a society in which I could cut their cords and get away with it. Or even if could do it anyway, and the aural relief from the tinny spluttering beat would encourage my fellow commuters to back me up in the ensuing fracas. Looking about, I come to the conclusion that they wouldn’t, and not just because it would contravene tube-rule one of never consciously acknowledging any unpleasant ’incident’*. No, the real reason is that I happen to be in a male-heavy area, and most of them are already so engrossed in their blackberry / DS / iPod-Pad-Phone that the real world has shrunk and contracted to a few square centimetres of bright colour which they caress obsessively. If they’re largely oblivious to their few female companions, likewise physically engaged with their technology but still valiantly attempting to maintain real-time human conversation with their Neanderthal grunting colleagues, what possible hope would I have?

The contrast with Tanya is complete. And although this is a slightly extreme distinction, taken in conjunction with my own experience, it does lead me to wonder whether communications technologies shrink male horizons & engagement with the here and now, whilst expanding the same for women. And if so, what will the implications of that be in a world where digital communications are constant and ubiquitous, where we’re always ‘on’, and where the clamour for competing attention is only going to get stronger? What will it mean for social interactions between the sexes as men retreat further into digital domains whilst women get the best of both worlds? And should we be seriously rethinking when & where we consume communications, recognising that unconstrained connectivity is a dangerous thing, especially to men?

* Even, and this is where true mastery of the tube rules comes in, when you have your nose unpleasantly crushed into said ‘incident’s’ armpit, and your foot has gone to sleep under the vast briefcase of the halitosic man nuzzling your ear.

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Vorsprung durch Frauen

IlkaWeissbrod, June 17th 2010, General, Innovation, Metrics

It’s good to hear gender equality being talked about widely again, especially by people in my age group (30+). I’ve overheard many a discussion – and of course took part in them – and the central point is always the same: the higher you climb on the job ladder, the manlier the air. Organisations like the OECD and the ILO agree.

We at Forum for the Future are in a privileged position: four of the seven members of our senior management team are women. I know that I am incredibly lucky to have four different role models I can look up to and, believe me, my girlfriends envy me.

It’s very clear that this is quite unusual. For example, for two whole weeks I was the only woman present in all my external meetings. When I was a kid my dad said to my sister and me that we’d need to be better than men to go the same distance in the professions we chose. I always laughed and said women make up 50% of the population, when I grow up, surely, I won’t have to worry about gender issues anymore.  Well… I was wrong.

It’s not just a matter of equality, there’s also the content women bring. The humble, award-winning astrophysicist Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell aptly put it in the recent BBC documentary ‘Great Minds’: “Women simply bring a slightly different view of the world to the table”.

Some businesses do share this view. René Obermann, Chairman of Deutsche Telekom, said earlier this year: “We’ll simply be better with more women at the top.” This wasn’t just rhetoric. Since March 2010 Deutsche Telekom has set a target of at least 30% women in senior management. This is supported by a substantial HR implementation programme: university recruitment and selection processes, talent pools and internal high-potential development programmes are now all geared to reach this target. The business has also enhanced its policies on flexible working, parental leave (in Germany both parents share a chunk of ‘maternity’ leave), childcare.

Here in the UK, Kingfisher has started to report on the number of women in management positions. But the overall picture is bleak. Cranfield University reported in its annual FTSE Board report that in 2009 only six of the FTSE 100 companies had 30% or more women on their Boards. Sixty-three companies had one woman, or none, on their Boards.

I think that programmes like those at Deutsche Telekom will help women in my generation to overcome barriers to gender equality and, ultimately, bring more women into the boardrooms.

There are other gender-related postings on this Forum blog - for example from Sara Parkin. But, so far, we at the Forum haven’t systematically addressed gender issues in our work. Interestingly both Deutsche Telekom and Kingfisher report on gender through their sustainability programmes. So they see gender equality as a part of the sustainability picture.

Should we do the same and routinely encourage all our Partner organisations to work towards a quota of 30% of female Board members? Or even go beyond this number? Norway, for example, has a government quota of 40% for all public companies. Or should we at the Forum stay well clear of this debate? I’d like to hear your views.

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Smooth operator?

Martin Wright, June 15th 2010, General

So just how clever is Barack Obama, eh?

There we were, puzzling over the waves of factitious “kick ass” outrage pouring from the Oval Office, when suddenly everything became clear: it was all a cunning ruse to trick redneck America into backing green energy.

“Our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardise our national security”, intoned the President. “It will smother our planet… put our economy and our environment at risk. We cannot delay any longer, and that is why I am asking for your help…”.

Slick (pun intended) or what?

At a stroke, a whole slew of liberal initiatives on energy and climate which had been widely derided by an increasingly confident Republican right were repackaged as pure patriotism: all wrapped up in the Stars and Stripes.

It’s been tried before, of course: George Bush famously urged America to overcome its oil addiction in the name of energy security. But that was somehow less impressive, coming after he’d tried and largely failed to secure abundant easy oil by force majeure in Iraq. Besides, you never quite believed a Texan steeped in gasoline really had his heart in all that greenery in the first place. Especially not with Dick ‘Halliburton’ Cheney just that heartbeat away…

With Barack, though, it’s a bit more polished. First comes the fury at the easy target – and let’s face it, they don’t come much easier than that pantomine Hollywood villain, the ‘toffee-nosed’ Brit. It’s sustained just long enough for the slick to hit the sand: a direct assault on homeland security, on primetime Fox News.

Only then, with the country crying out for action and the Brits duly whipped, does Operator Obama slide the green stuff into the mix...

OK, so the banality of day to day politics, especially when lurching from crisis to crisis, is rarely as Machiavellian as I’ve just described. But those of us fearing that the once super-cool President was losing it, big time, might take some comfort from the latest developments.

And at the very least, you’d have to agree that the sheen of oil on the Louisiana beaches could yet turn out to have one hell of a silver lining.

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