The Hillary Symposium

Live from the Hillary Symposium Trading Floor

June 5th, 2009

“…icons of our time…Julia Roberts, George Clooney….Al Gore – Global Warming is the theme of the whole (Vanity Fair) magazine – this is something very different. But we face a triple crunch, financial, energy and climate and we need, all of us, to respond.” Jeremy Leggett, the UK’s most prominent renewable energy CEO and the Hillary Institute of International Leadership’s international Laureate — 2009.

The best stories are those that defy convention and resolve conflict. The second annual Hillary Symposium did the first and had little need of the latter. It set out to model a cross-sectoral trading floor, based on the moot of a ‘Carbon Positive’ Christchurch city-state.

Leggett’s initial provocation as the Hillary Laureate was a graphic, and very powerful exploration of the coming together of three primary challenges, one which held his audience riveted throughout and in the Q&A that followed live from London. “As we head toward Copenhagen, we know what we’re capable of collectively, if we manage to get to tipping-points where progress in society occurs at the pace of epidemics — that’s what we have to angle towards…”

High level influencers across sectors had from the very fine ‘Crumpet Club’ breakfast to lunch to be strongly provoked, reflect and respond. By the time the first two of a six hour intensive series of provocations and reflections were done,  no-one on the local ‘trading floor’ was debating the issue, or seeing the challenge as too hard — energy in the Crumpet Club’s intensive space was palpable — deals were being done. Business commentator Rod Oram and entrepreneur Melissa Clark-Reynolds followed Leggett’s initial provocation,  laying out the opportunities for NZ and Christchurch. Oram described the nation’s ‘must-do’ next  leap forward as sustainability, Clark-Reynolds called on government to get fully onboard for the December global climate round in Copenhagen — a breakthrough US/China climate deal at its core. And Excelerator Institute Director Lester Levy reminded participants of one of Leggett’s key assertions, “It’s not enough to say we care (mildly) — we are all leaders — and need to step up”.

A cacophony unfolded as the trading floor process got underway — senior players from EECA to CECC to Canterbury University, Ngai Tahu, City and Regional Councils, Alliance, Buddle Findlay, Synlait, National Bank to generation Z & Y jockeyed for opportunity and profitability — just what might Christchurch city-state do to become Carbon Positive? Nick Marsh reminded delegates the Danes have done it driven by the oil crash of 1973 — not rocket science, just a national imperative!

Then a pause — taihoa,  for breath. Bishop Victoria Matthews eloquently articulating the ethics of challenging our behaviours, putting the planet’s health first.  Ngai Tahu’s  Sacha McMeeking on the need/opportunity to value cross-cultural conversation and Project Litefoot’s Hamish Reid re-posing a recurrent core question — what about Mom and Pop? — as his sports-star cohorts  the Evers-Swindell twins, Michael Campbell and Conrad Smith talked in plain language about making a garden, offsetting travel emissions and changing light-bulbs.  By lunch, the ‘carbon positive’ initiative outcomes flowed and two major themes emerged.

National Bank led the charge on Energy mooting new reduced-interest loans to match Government’s budget initiative. Trading with EECA and MfE on the policy and metrics, drawing in City Council on energy best practice and insulation beyond the building code, and professional service firms Buddle Findlay, KPMG and Deloitte responding with goodwill for the necessary support. Chamber of Commerce and CDC offered ‘form and function’ to sustainable start-ups. Ngai Tahu reflected on how this might be applied to its Wigram development – 2,500 houses to be built ‘just down the road’ in the next decade.  Federated Farmers and Hikurangi Foundation’s Tom Lambie  tied in progressing water as a key Canterbury issue — farming dams that can be models hill country storage, an energy, win-win-win –  gravity pressurizing water for all of Canterbury, eliminating deep-well pumping and making irrigation electricity-neutral. And Air NZ chimed in with the development of bio-textiles for uniforms.

Generation Y & Z delegates from Wayne Francis Trust and Ngai Tahu challenged all sectors to help their 15% of the population forward with the global  message of 350 ( 350 ppm  the safest concentration of CO2 for all eco-systems), with October 24 the global celebration of this campaign. Inspired by the extraordinarily successful Obama campaign youth-base , they were invited to social network with LA-based Zaproot TV, the unconventional news show covering the modern Green Revolution with millions of viewers world-wide.

And finally Canterbury University’s deputy Vice Chancellor Ian Town — “The future is in the hands of the people we’re training today”. Finalising its sustainability strategy, he indicated new investment will be in extra-summer student-ships (a 50%  fees for sustainability courses challenge coming from The Press’s own David Williams). Celebrating collaboration between UC and Lincoln University, more dialogue with all sectors was invited and an outcome may well be a think tank, where cross-sectoral ideas are debated, thrown around, and given back to this Christchurch, city-state community. All symposium content was web-cast and is available to all on  HillarySymposium.com.

Given the Institute’s mission of leveraging exceptional mid-career leadership on Climate Change solutions (2008-12), its international event later this year in Leggett’s home-town, London, will continue momentum and progress from both will be fed into the Copenhagen mix in December. June 5th, Christchurch, 2009 celebrated the fact carbon-positive, economic opportunity from climate change is absolutely doable.

Institute Trustee and Symposium facilitator Peter Townsend thanked all for their contributions individually and as financial partners in the event and Hillary Summit Chair David Caygill’s closing acknowledgments reflected on the governor’s demonstrably fine choice of Jeremy Leggett as the Institute’s first Hillary Laureate and upon the day’s other key message.  Leadership is needed from all levels of society, a sentiment with which Sir Ed would heartily concur.

Mark Prain, Executive Director, The Hillary Institute for International Leadership
June 5, 2009

From the programme: Nick Marsh is the Managing Director of Next Corporation. Nick studied at Nottingham, and Leeds in the United Kingdom, and received his PhD in Cross Cultural Industrial Psychology from Bath University. He was a member of the founding team of the Management
School at Auckland University and Director of the Auck.MBA. He has published many articles & business books, including:

1. Theory K-Case Studies of Excellence in NZ Management;
2. The All Star Company- People, Performance and Profit;
3. Strategic Foresight- The Power of Standing in the Future.

He has been involved in many Strategic Foresight Projects, the largest of which was the New Zealand National Foresight Project in the late 1990’s which was a precursor to the National Innovation Strategy. During that time, he has worked with government and local government bodies, private and public companies, and NGOs in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Europe. Nick has originated many new thinking tools in strategy and change management.

We’ve been around the planet at this symposium, and he wants to come back to Christchurch. There are many in the room familiar with the idea of city-state, and this is the idea we’ve had to come back to: this city-state, the idea that we have to govern a particular place in a responsible way.

He’s also going to talk briefly about the Denmark story.

This is a way of thinking about Christchurch and Canterbury. We’re not just talking about the CBD; we’re talking about the fringe, the urban-facing hinterland, and the rural-facing hinterland (too far to commute to the city). It looks like concentric circles.

This is true for all cities: Hamilton and the Waikato, Melbourne and Victoria — it’s this idea of city-state. When you look at knowledge workers who might want to leave the UK, do they want to live in Auckland, Christchurch, Portland? They’re looking at boutique cities with great lifestyles. We’re competing for those people or for their investment with a number of places. We’re not talking about carbon here — we’re talking about the whole idea of competitive city-states.

The supercity in Auckland was designed on the basis of competing with Melbourne, with Vancouver, etc. There is nowhere on the planet that has adopted the Auckland single-city model, so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. Hamish talked about Mom & Pop; how do we make decisions around the kitchen table when it comes to fundamental things, like do we live in Fendalton or Nelson? We look at four factors:

• Livability: How attractive is it for me and my family to live here? Mobility, crime, safety, boy racers, schools, ambience, how does it look? He got to Christchurch yesterday; it was a sunny day and the city looks magnificent.
• Workability: How attractive is it for me and my family to find work here?
• Investability: How attractive is it for me to invest there? Buy a house, make a commercial investment?
• Visitability: What kind of attractions does it have? What would draw people to enjoy themselves here?

Imagine this:

Canterbury: The Carbon-Positive Region

There’s a surprising number of severe skeptics about climate change. The NIWA data shows Canterbury going up by 1.8 degrees centigrade, becoming a lot drier and a lot windier, and it’s a pretty juvenile attitude to think that’s a good thing. So we’re just going to take a trip around the world to somewhere else, thanks to Google Earth.

The Canterbury region has exactly the same landmass as somewhere else in the world: Denmark. Denmark’s got a few more people than Canterbury: 5.2 million — and they’ve done something rather interesting.
The Danish Tipping Point

• Oil crisis 1973: OPEC price rises — an economy dependent on oil
• National security — burning platform — we have to decrease our dependency
• Appetite for government to act — incentives, taxes, regulations — for the good of all
• Shift to renewables — wind is all we’ve got.

This was before climate change was even particularly a conversation. One of the things we’ve done disastrously here in New Zealand is that the climate issue has become politicised. It has to be a national consensus, otherwise it’s very very difficult to have a consistent policy.

In Denmark, they put in incentives, frameworks, etc, but said, ‘Don’t change them every time the government changes.’ At the time, all Denmark had was wind, and New Zealand was the leader in wind technology, so they acquired the technology off us because nobody here was interested in wind.

They’ve grown their economy 40% since then, but they haven’t increased their energy demand. Total greenhouse emissions have declined. They’ve changed the mix, so renewables represent a significantly higher proportion and oil is significantly smaller. The country collectively decided to do this. Economists rank Denmark as the best place in the world to do business. They’ve got a higher GDP and lower unemployment than anyone else. They’re collecting NZD25 billion in environmental energy taxes but it’s a virtuous circle; they plow it back in to the green technology.

They’re world leaders in water consulting; the demands for their services are enormous. Carbon positive agriculture — they’re dealing with the exact same things as we are, and they’re doing extremely well.

Green ICT, energy efficient housing… they didn’t have any of this before the national security imperative of removing their dependence on oil. And we need to find this here, in the region. If we can’t do it here where we live and where we care, we won’t have the incentive to do it anywhere.

Our economy has fantastic skills in R&D, IT, food science, etc. There’s a hell of a mix here, this could seriously be a growth area for Canterbury. That’s the challenge that’s there, and when you think about the Denmark situation, the thing they have that we don’t have is a sense of national urgency.

From the programme: Hamish commenced his career in marketing with Pepsi Co in 1990 followed by NZ Dairy Group and then Groupe Danone. In 1999 Hamish was transferred to Danone head office in Paris and latterly, London. In 2005 Hamish moved from client to agency-side to assist with the establishment of Saatchi & Saatchi’s London based sponsorship consultancy. Hamish founded his own business, WaypointOne, in 2006. Hamish became interested in environmental sustainability that same year and has since experienced a great ‘awakening.‘ His view is that sport and the world’s sports heroes have a role to play in transforming culture. “Sport touches the hearts of billions of people every day; people listen to their heroes and act upon their lead. It is through sports leaders that we hope to inspire change for the better.” Hamish moved to New Zealand from London in July 2008 in order to launch Project Litefoot – an environmental awareness and action campaign jointly founded with Michael Campbell. Seven prominent sports people lead Project Litefoot. Together, Project Litefoot Ambassadors hope New Zealanders will rise to the challenge by following their example, and in doing so, inspire people in other countries to do the same.

In 2006, Hamish and Michael Campbell experienced an abrupt environmental awakening after they saw Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. Project Litefoot was their response to that cathartic experience. It’s a communication campaign to raise awareness and provoke action on climate change. They plan to launch the programme in partnership with TVNZ later this year, and they’re very much going to be targeting Mom & Pop.

So how about Mom & Pop?

It’s difficult to say how much carbon Mom & Pop are responsible for — some sources say 50%, and some say it could be as much as 2/3 — but one powerful statistic is that half of China’s 45% growth in emissions between 2002-2005 came from creating goods to export to the developed world. Those goods are being purchased by Mom & Pop.  The big questions is what role can Mom & Pop play in reversing us out of this predicament?

Hamish spent a lot of time in marketing for large consumer product organisations, and he grew to understand the power of the consumer. Nothing else was of consequence to their business other than generating more consumer demand. If their consumer insights worked, it wasn’t difficult to surprise people with ideas about things Mom & Pop just had to have.

This isn’t surprising because we absolutely live in a consumer-led world. Should that paradigm prevail, Mom & Pop could represent a continuing threat to the environment — or they could represent the solution.

We hope that governments will take unprecedented action in Copenhagen, and we hope businesses will follow the lead of Ben & Jerry’s and Walmart and we hope that the collective actions on all of these fronts will come to our rescue. But all of these organisations on their own are simply not wired to make the changes we require — individuals also have to be drivers. Compounding that challenge is that we have less than 10 years to make the changes we need.

We also know citizens can be smarter. We can reject the notion of limitless expansion. We can move from well-having to well-being. Transformative citizen action could be the model for a solution to climate change.

If businesses see citizens transforming, their consumer-led culture will be forced to follow.

This virtual cycle means putting faith in humanity. We must put our faith in humankind, and believe that with raised consciousness Mom & Pop will make better choices that their children will be proud of.

Citizen-led transformation — the beginning of the virtual circle — is underway around the planet. So if you’re with him so far, you can see that the great challenge of climate change is one of communication. How do we reach middle America, and middle Australia, and how do we reach Mom & Pop?

Like thousands of others before him and with him, he suffered a period of panic and confusion about climate change. His epiphany came when he fell back on the power of consumer insight. He had recently established a business in London providing marketing advice to professional sportspeople — and Project Litefoot is built on a series of insights that they hope will drive mass transformation.

Emotion leads to action, while reason lead to conclusions. The issue with climate change is that it has all been too rational, leading people to draw conclusions, not take actions.

Project Litefoot’s mission is to inspire deep loyalty to the cause through emotional engagement.

It’s very easy to separate your own life from the life of Mom & Pop, but the reality is that each one of us represents Mom & Pop. The challenge is with us; if all of us do a little, together we’ll achieve a lot.

Sacha is here in lieu of Anake Goodall, the Chief Executive of Te Runanga O Ngai Tahu, the organisation that services the tribe’s statutory rights and ensures that the benefits of the Settlement grow for future generations.

She understand that the role of reflection is to be provocative but in a nice way. It’s all too tempting to see a nice marae photo, but she thinks there are deeper issues that Ngai Tahu represents.

She’s like to draw some analogies between colonisation and climate change, and hopefully this is a provocative start. They’re both fundamentally connected to the land. They’re both potentially devastating in their effect. They both seem to be brought by external, unmanageable forces.

For Maori, it may seem that the process of colonisation was one that saw us being duped and unfortunate victims, but that’s not how Ngai Tahu sees it. They were dynamic in early trade settlements. They created the treaty framework. Throughout Ngai Tahu’s history, they’ve displayed a fierce dynamism to adapt and take initiative, and that’s how they see the reaction should be to climate change.

They also understand the role of the human agent to be transformative. We are the same as a shag perched on an ocean rock. The tide encroaches, and we are forced to fly away.

New Zealand’s history saw Maori as a dying race, and they saw their role as the provision of a pillow to smooth the transition.

There’s no room for apathy. We need collaborative and collective responses to climate change.

Ngai Tahu is a microcosm of the North-South divide. They have been locked into underdevelopment for a long time, and those pecularities are still there. But they also represent the cutting edge of the indentity of New Zealand. What is unavoidably New Zealand is the presence of our indigenous peoples. For Christchurch, that’s Ngai Tahu.

In order to have our contributions to that identity, there needs to be the notion of integrity.

We have a very high risk situation of using culture as a clip-on accessory. Culture can’t be tacked on. We need to design real and enduring solutions.

Don’t talk in metaphorical abstractions — we need fundamental pragmatism. If we do bad things to the Earth, then bad things happen to people. We need to understand the timeframe. We will not look for short or quick solutions; we are looking for the intergenerational good.

Some would say that the Galileo contribution to knowledge is that of exclusion: to remove factors until we have the bare minimum that our brain can comprehend. Ngai Tahu instead prefer to look at the complexity and interconnectedness of the system. That logic of inclusion, that ability to embrace complexities, is critical, and it’s something that Ngai Tahu has to offer.

How do we do this? It could be really hard, but it could be deceptively simple. The answer is about talking. They valued the opportunity to be here today and talk with everyone, and they hope to do more of the same. They’ve always been loud and they’ll continue to be so.

The Ngai Tahu experience is very much one that is based on intercultural exchange, but their pragmatism comes with hard bargaining.

The responsibility we have to safeguard is an ethic based on a primary right to the landscape. In terms of the diamond that we’re here to discuss, to make Christchurch carbon positive, we want to feel confidence to invest in the city. We want to offer hospitality to those who come to visit. We want our people to come to live in the city, in a place of culture and health on all dimensions. And ultimately, we hope to make this a great place to live for future generations.

From the programme: The Rt Rev’d Victoria Matthews was Bishop of Edmonton for 10 years from 1997 to late 2007, and Suffragan (Assistant) Bishop of Toronto from 1994-97. She narrowly missed being elected Primate of Canada in 2007. Announcing the appointment (March ’09) the Primate of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, NZ and Polynesia, Archbishop Brown Turei, said he looked forward to welcoming Bishop Matthews into the church of these islands. “I’m sure that, with all her experience, she will make a good contribution to our life and witness,” he said.

Bishop Matthews, 54 and unmarried, is only the second woman to become a diocesan bishop in New Zealand. The first was the Rt Rev’d Dr Penny Jamieson, Bishop of Dunedin from 1989-2004. Bishop Matthews previously chaired the Canadian Primate’s Theological Commission, and is on the Windsor Continuation Group, which is looking at crucial questionsabout the shape of Anglican common life around the world. She has been in high demand as a retreat leader and guest lecturer, enjoys leading youth pilgrimages to holy places such as Iona and Taize, and has served as a trustee of Yale University. In 2004 Bishop Matthews underwent major surgery for breast cancer. She walked the 800km pilgrimage trail to Santiago De Compostela in northern Spain last year to celebrate a clean bill of health. In her spare time she enjoys hiking and walking her Anatolian shepherd dog Jethro, swimming, and reading history and theology. Her installation as the eighth Bishop of Christchurch took place in ChristChurch Cathedral on August 30 2008.

She moved to NZ 8 years ago, and if you think NZ is sleepy on climate change, try Canada. In Edmonton, people used to say ‘What’s wrong with climate change?’ She was inspired by Sir Edmund Hillary in her 20s, and the glimpse of that inspiration stays with her today.

Nonetheless, the comment that NZ is a land of great integrity and we can make a profit out of this doesn’t sit well with her, and she wondered earlier today whether she was in the wrong gathering. Is it all about ethics or is ethics a side order? Ethics can never be a side order. In many churches this Sunday they’ll be celebrating Environment Sunday, a call to churches to pray and act on the environment. The whole of the Chuirch of England has a campaign called ’shrinking the footprint’. In short, the question is, ‘What’s the biggest possible picture for us to look at?’

Why do Christians or people of faith believe this matters so very much? We don’t own the planet Earth — we’re holders of a sacred trust and caregivers, the appointed stewards of all that has been entrusted to our keeping. From the beginning of Genesis, all the way through the Bible, the message is clear: we are not the owners. Planet Earth, our island home, belongs to God, and to treat what is on loan to us so poorly is profoundly wrong.

We also know that a very high and detrimental effect is caused by the wealthy nations of the world, with their greed and their hoarding, taken out on the poorest nations in the world. This means we’re sinning against the second great commandment of the Judeo-Christian convenent: love thy neighbour. It means we have to do all we can to prevent climate change.

Thirdly, climate change caused by our greed and our waste demands justice. We need to act responsibly and do all in our power to alleviate the damage done already, as well as seeking to live responsibly in the future. If I go next door or down the street and do damage to my neghbour’s property (or ‘environment’), I’m held accountable by the justice system, so why aren’t I held accountable for the damage I do to the planet?

Fourthly, the Sctriptures say that the whole universe is being caught up in God’s plan of salvation and God’s plan for a new creation. It isn’t as though the created order had nothing to do with our identity. We’re linked. Paul uses the image of the ‘whole of creation groaning as a mother groans when about to give birth.’ There are cosmic forces at play here. We don’t understand them, but we know enough for our children to be able to say to us, ‘You knew what you were doing, and you knew it was wrong, and you did nothing.’

So why is it that the human population is having such a difficult time facing up to the ethics of the environment?

For too long, we’ve bought into an anthropocentric view. Thus, too many believe that the nonhuman things in nature are mere instruments for human use (or ab-use). We need a more wholistic understanding of life. There’s another view, the view of deep ecology, opposed to that human-centric view of life, a relatively new understanding that the Earth on which we live shares something that is sacred with us.

That is not as far as you might think from Moses being told to take off his footwear because he is standing on holy ground. It is, however, a countercultural understanding of human life.

There are those who see deep ecology as being outrageously elitist: keeping the world’s pristine ecology accessible to the few who can afford to use it as their playground.

In the end the problem is remarkably simple: we need to change people’s thinking about what is acceptable behavior. Many in this room remember a time when people joked about drunk driving. That changed. A number of people said repeatedly that those jokes are unacceptable — and it changed. People remember a time when domestic violence went unacknowledged. We’ve begun to change our thinking about environmental stewardship, but we’ve only begun. To give an example, Earth Hour here in the square was preceded by a concert with huge speakers, massive lights, attended by people holding their disposable drink containers and takeout food. It was well-meaning — but it missed the point.

We have to make people rethink their lifestyle. We need to speak to the head and the heart and the will, and assist people’s realisation that how they live their life makes a difference to someone on the other side of the world. To live recklessly is more than selfish; it’s sinful and possibly criminal. But telling someone not to do something is less inviting than creating a vision for them to work towards.

We live in a society that cares about and expects health care for every person. We want a cure for cancer, diabetes, arthritis. It’s a time also, however, to heal the environment. To address climate change. To understand that the relationship between creation and creator is meant to be a journey towards wholeness. Perhaps the healing of the environment is the banner to bring folks on board.

Picture a photo: planet Earth, taken from space, with the caption:

What on Earth are you doing, for Heaven’s sake?

From the programme: Lester Levy is the Chief Executive of The New Zealand Leadership Institute at the University of Auckland and Professor of Leadership at the University of Auckland Business School. A graduate of Medicine and an MBA with his formative management background in multi-nationals 3M and Beecham Research Laboratories, he is best known for leading a number of organisational performance transformations, as Chief Executive, in both the private and public sectors. He has previously been seconded to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet as a strategic advisor and has been awarded the King‘s Fund International Fellowship from the King’s Fund in London. Lester is a Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Management and is the author of the book “Leadership and the Whirlpool Effect”. Over the past 15 years he has been a frequently invited speaker and presenter on the subject of leadership, in New Zealand and overseas.

He teaches leadership, strategy, governance and ethics at the University of Auckland primarily at the executive level, including the MBA and the Masters of Management and his research interests include concepts of leadership, perceptions of leadership and the relationship between leadership and management. His work has been published in Organization, Leadership, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, International Journal of Learning and Change and The University of Auckland Business Review.

Lester’s not feeling well, so he’s answering questions by phone.

What role does leadership play in the context of the green new deal?

It plays a critical role. We live in a world that is highly managerial, and the paradigm that dominates is the managerial paradigm, which is incredibly unhelpful in the context of society and business. But in the context we’re talking about, leadership is critical. In complex systems like this, by definition people don’t know in advance where we’re headed. We need greater collaboration, not just teams but tapping into the power of people working together.

The way most people look at leadership is the individual perspective — the one-dimensional, great person, heroic leader — but really leadership is about social capital, the power of connectedness. Leadership model is one of influence, engagement, communication that creates meaning.

Authentic leadership — leadership that has a moral and ethical perspective — is very important, and we also know that in a large-scale study we did here in NZ, 2/3 of people see the workforce as inauthentic, filled with people who diminish the hope and optimism of the people around them, and leave people unmotivated and unwilling to speak up. We need a great sense of aspiration, and if we’re dominated by a managerial downward spiral, we don’t have a hope of getting there. One of our last great freedoms is our choice of attitude. If we want to make a difference around the things we’re talking about today, leadership is essential.

Does the current global economic crisis change the role of leadership?

Yes, it’s a good and a bad thing. Leadership matters most when the course is no longer clear. The first thing that happens in a crisis is that there’s some kind of systems failure in part or whole, but what really happens is that the plans that we have are found to be inadequate or no longer useful. Time is compressed, we have a distorted picture, and we see the limits of authority — who actually runs the supra-national financial system? Who runs the supra-national environmental system?

In times of crisis, individual leadership is insufficient. It is imperative that key people in positions of authority or people with influence (and it doesn’t matter if they’re elected or thought leaders or what), it’s critical that they step up, and there also has to be a collective leadership response, and if we’ve created an environment where people are largely disengaged that’s going to be difficult.

Improvisation is critical — if we don’t have people who can work beyond the plan, we have some serious problems. Plans are good, but they’re less useful than most of us realise. There’s a lot of planning and then a lot of slavish adherence to the plan, but leadership is more organic than people realise.

In the acute phase of a crisis, it’s important not to make decisions rapidly; a lot of those decisions can have major ramifications. He sees leaders more as explorers now. All of you are now Vasco de Gama and Magellan and Columbus, and that requires courage. Moving forward, we need people with courage, people who are truly committed. It’s not the absence of fear; it’s the capacity to create environments that are constructive, of hope, of possibility, where people can move beyond the rhetoric and get things done.

What do you see as the key barriers to constructive outcomes?

The first key barrier is complacency. None of us likes to think we’re complacent. It’s more destructive than people realise. It’s invisible to insiders: either we don’t notice it or we deny it. Although no one ever stands up and introduces herself as saying, ‘Hey, guess what, I’m content with the status quo!’, but nobody presents himself as a micromanager either. There’s a huge anxiety about the unknown.

Complacency creates an environment where people pay little or insufficient attention to opportunity. We look around and we see what looks like energetic activity, but really much of it is frantic activity — it’s unhealthy and unhelpful. We need to move more towards some positive force, and it’s interesting in the context of The Hillary Institute. He was fortunate enough to know Sir Ed, and about a year or so before Sir Ed died, Lester discussed leadership with him. Around 40% of the words Sir Ed used in the interview were ‘determination’ or a synonym therof.

Another barrier — apartheid, which is separateness. None of us would vote for this or support it, but it happens routinely in our organisations.

Indifference.

A lot of people have very little intrinsic motivation around solving these issues.

Lack of appreciation of the key values. An ugly, rich vein of complacency.

What are the key issues facing New Zealand and how do you see we can overcome them?

He believes that there’s a real inertia to make significant change, and that’s tied to our limited energy to create momentum.

We’ve got a narcotic effect of quick-fix solutions to complex problems.

We have a resistance to new ideas, caused in part by our struggle with identity.

We have a problem with being truly innovative — we’re timid.

We have a horrible overemphasis on compliance and risk aversion. We worry hugely about the wrong thing.

You can have a fiduciary response or a generative response. Even if you have a fiduciary response, focused on control, we can shift those people from an oversight question — ‘Can we afford it?’ — to an enquiry question — ‘What’s the opportunity cost?’ An oversight question — ‘Does the budget balance?’ — to an enquiry question — ‘Is it in alignment with our values?’

We need to be much more thoughtful, much more generative, much less worreied about the downside. We really need to step up with courage and aspiration and truly make a difference.

From the programme: Melissa Clark-Reynolds is a mom, an environmental advocate, and an entrepreneur with 20 years of experience. Melissa founded GMV Associates Ltd, which was sold to Southern Cross Healthcare and became part of Fusion Insurance Services (NZ’s largest private Workers’ Compensation Insurer). She was the turnaround CEO of PayGlobal Ltd and INTAZ Ltd (two NZ software companies in trouble), and is a member of the GAV Trust (NZ Games, Animation and Video Effects Industry). Creative HQ, which has just selected her as an Executive in Residence, considers her one of Wellington‘s leading business minds due to her string of entrepreneurial successes. Melissa started her current venture, a kids’ virtual world called minimonos, in 2007, out of a desire to create games that have a positive impact on children. Grass-roots support for minimonos (via its Twitter account and its Facebook group) is growing, showing that the concept taps into an unmet need for parents. The virtual world asks some key questions: “How can we convey important concepts about sustainability without being preachy? What would a virtual world for kids look like if good values were already in the DNA and we could just concentrate on making it fun?”.

Her passion for our planet is profound, and reflects in how she is raising her daughter, how she gives back to her community, and how she is growing her business. One of only two New Zealanders trained up as an Ambassador for Al Gore‘s Climate Project, Melissa has presented The Inconvenient Truth over 20 times to more than 2000 New Zealanders to raise awareness and motivate people to take action. minimonos is an opportunity for her to combine her dedication to sustainability with her entrepreneurial skills.

Melissa starts by telling a story about her daughter kayaking on Lake Muller. Her father-in-law, who’s a keen mountaineer, pulled out a map and showed her that Lake Muller wasn’t on the map. She’s got a picture of this: at the end of the lake is what looks like a dirty cliff, which is in fact the terminal face of the Muller glacier. This is a 5,000 year old piece of ice that’s melting at such a great rate that it’s creating a lake just down the road that isn’t on her father-in-law’s map.

She is of this land — this is where she belongs; this is where she comes from. She’s always been an entrepreneur — started at 15 years old, hiring university students at $30/day and hiring them out to the asphalt works at $50/day. And since she started this journey of entrepreneurship, she’s been through a fair few crises — she started her first company with interest rates at 20%. Started a company in Vietnam and had to deal with the flu crisis. One of her proudest moments was when she was a student in the US: one day, she opened the NY Times to a full-page ad from David Lange explaining why New Zealand had gone nuclear-free — and burst into tears. She and all the other expat Kiwis took out another ad to show Lange their support.

She’s here today to tell a story. It’s got a cast of characters: individuals, businesses, governments, and the prize: Mother Earth herself.

Act I: The Infinite Resource Paradigm

The story starts with this infinite resource paradigm: we’ve got this abundance of air, this abundance of water. Even last week in Geraldine, she had a farmer say to her, “If the water gets to the sea, it’s a waste.” We’ve had this mentality that there’s so much air and so much water and so much earth that it just doesn’t matter. We’ve got so many bison that we can just keep killing them. We’ve got so many fish that we can just keep fishing. Or we’ve got so many trees that we can just deforest and there will always be more.

So maybe we need a new paradigm, one that isn’t infinite. If a depleted ecosystem is growing by 5% per year, and we’re depleting it at 10% per year, we’re going to hit a wall.

Act II: The ‘Either/Or’ Paradigm

The next paradigm, and the one that she grew up with, is the ‘Either/Or’ paradigm. Business vs. government. Government vs. individuals. Earth vs. business. So we’ve ended up in our new crisis: we can either make a whole lot of money OR we can save the planet.

She did this whole cradle-to-grave thing at the University, where they started to think even then about what kind of economic instruments can be used around carbon management. 19 years ago they were running seminars for the Ministry for the Environment, and they were around a carbon-trading kind of approach. She came back to NZ and opened an environmental consultancy — but nobody cared.

We see now that we all go down together: individuals, business, government, the planet. Economics and ecology both come from the Greek ‘oikos’, meaning ‘home’. It’s all about how we manage our home.

Act III: The Sustainable Paradigm

Act III seems to be the sustainable paradigm.’Sustainable’ means ‘you can keep doing it’. The way we’ve been thinking about sustainable business so far is an old paradigm as well. Sustainability is smart — Henry Ford figured out that if he didn’t start paying his staff well enough to buy his product, he wasn’t going to have any customers. He wanted to think about how he could build his industry so it could last forever.

Sustainability isn’t a luxury. When we think about that cradle-to-grave thing, it’s about downcycling — we take something that was a good resource and turn it into something crappier later. What she wants to know is what happens when that thing breaks? What does it become next? Anything that only takes out of a system will ultimately fail. How do we grow the communities we live in? How do we enhance our customers’ lives so that their entire experience of being part of the ecosystem is better?

This is big business, and the rest of the world is doing it — and we’re so far behind here in NZ. There are sustainable skyscrapers being built. We don’t have to be some sort of Luddite living in the countryside — we can have positive contributions and still do big business. Buckminster Fuller: “Wealth consists of physical energy (as matter or radiation) combined with metaphysical know-what and know-how.”

How do we use our know-what and know-how to grow wealth for us all, and particularly how are we going to feed 6 billion people? We need to move beyond reduce, reuse, recycle to this positive, contributing, not-ONLY-for-profit model.

We need new questions, and the answers aren’t just environmental. They’re going to be social, economic, military, lifestyle. The first time she gave the Inconvenient Truth presentation, someone asked her, ‘What are we going to do about it?’ and she said ‘Changing your lightbulbs isn’t going to do it — but educating women, which leads to the choice of lower fertility rates, will make a big impact.’

This is happening with major players — John Doerr, David Suzuki, Al Gore, Paul Hawken — and we need to get real or go home. Individuals are moving and businesses are moving, and we don’t even have a grey deal here in NZ. In ther latest budget we did pest control and weed control, and that’s great, but we really need to get our government to catch up on environmental issues.

There is no finish line on this. Kyoto was a starting point, and Copenhagen will be another starting point, and we all win or we all lose. This is not something business needs to be convinced on. What’s the next paradigm? She doesn’t know, but she wants people here today to think about what the role of business is in the coming revolution. What’s beyond cradle-to-cradle?

From the programme: Rod Oram has more than 30 years’ experience as an international financial journalist. He has worked for various publications in Europe and North America, including the Financial Times of London. Rod and his family emigrated from the UK to New Zealand in 1997.

He is currently a columnist for the Sunday Star-Times and Good Magazine; a regular broadcaster on radio and television; and a frequent public speaker. Rod is an adjunct professor in the Business School at Unitec. And Penguin published in 2007 his book on the New Zealand economy, Reinventing Paradise.

Rod is going to discuss the two large sectors that have to be carbon positive if the region wants to become carbon positive.

He’s not going to attempt to summarise Jeremy’s provocation, but he wants to lead on from what Jeremy said. Rod’s going to add a further crisis: the question of agriculture.

Agriculture

What have we achieved in the agricultural supercentury? Over the last century, the world’s population increased by 259%, and we also managed to increse the per-capita harvest, but it came at an extraordinary cost — the energy subsidy. That’s the fertiliser, and most of that came from fossil fuels. So if they’re running out, how are we going to meet the food needs of the future? If we lose our fundamental driver of agricultural productivity, how will we double food production, which is what’s estimated we need over the next 40 years?

This is a crapshoot for New Zealand — we rank 2nd in greenhouse-gas-per-food-produced. We say we don’t have big industry in NZ, but we’ve got cows: they account for half our greenhouse emissions. We’ve got the best ruminant scientists in the world, and we’ve got this nascent team looking for a breakthrough. What’s amazing is that if we get the cows to eat healthier, and then to better convert that food into energy (milk), that would be amazing for both industry and for the planet.

For each litre of milk, we generate 980 grams of carbon dioxide of emissions. This season just passed we produced roughly 16 billion litres of milk, but at the moment we still treat those 15 tonnes of CO2 per year as a waste product, as a liability we’re trying to run away from. If in fact we found a way to get cows to eat better and digest better, we could turn the industry into a carbon positive industry, and this is an utterly brilliant business opportunity.

Tourism

The other sector he wants to touch on is tourism. We are the seventh most flying nation in the world, if you consider our tourists. Tourism is of course very important to us. What the World Economic Forum tells us is that even though we had the best tourism destinations in the world, we were not the best place for tourism as a business. We were in fact 19th last year, down from 15th in 2007. We have this astonishing disjoint between being one of the best tourism destinations in the world and not being sustainable at it.

The key issue for competitiveness in tourism is sustainability. What’s our opportunity with tourism? If we take one person on a return flight from London to Christchurch, that’s more than 5 tonnes of CO2. 2.4m tourists = 13.2m tonnes of CO2. He sees all this CO2 as NOT a waste product or liability — it is a BRILLIANT BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY if we can make travel healthier.

If we use biofuels in aviation, we would be drawing CO2 out of the air. It’s not inconceivable that tourism could be carbon positive.

How do we think about how we might move ideas and companies through this reconception of what business looks like? Experiment, build new business models, build an ecosystem or critical mass, and finally, the tipping point: the economic structure flips, driving transformation.

He cites a company turning flue gases from a steel mill into biofuels. On the Airbus 380, the fabric for the seats is edible and perfectly recyclable; it ultimately becomes compost. Formway is releasing a new range of furniture with a large component of bioplastic — it’s grown by recapturing CO2 in the air. This isn’t recycling; it’s upcycling. He has no doubt about our capacity to achieve carbon positivity.

He also refers to the point that ants have a greater biomass than humans, but unlike us have a positive impact on their ecosystem. It’s not that there are too many of us; it’s that we don’t manage ourselves well. We can look to nature for ideas. Biomimicry — ships in the shape of a nautilus shell, spidersilk stronger and lighter than steel but catalysed simply and efficiently at room temperature. Biomimicry in NZ: synthetic chorophyll can be used to generate electricity.

Provocations: do we believe that the upside is so great and the downside is so dire? How can we build grassroots support? What new business models do we need? What technologies can we poineer in New Zealand? And lastly, what is our unique contribution to the world?

April 26 was both Shakespeare’s birthday and World IP Day. Rod spoke on that day and quoted Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

If we lose our faith in human kind we’re doomed, but if we believe in the infinite ingenuity of humankind we can start a revolution. We now have a smaller proportion of world trade than we did 15 years ago, a smaller proportion of investment thatn 15 years ago. Our next revolution has to be around sustainability. It’s easy to fix up a collapsed banking system, but if the ecosystem collapses, there’s no reserve bank to bail you out.

We need radical changes in the way we do everything. Of all the OECD countries, we are the most dependent on our natural environment. Quite simply, our next revolution will be harder, deeper, and longer than the previous one, but hopefully not so traumatic, and ultimately more beneficial and more rewarding as we reinvent paradise.

From the programme: Social entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett is founder and Executive Chairman of Solarcentury, a leading European solar energy company, and founder and Chairman of SolarAid, a charity set up with 5% of Solarcentury profits. SolarAid (2006-present) teaches young Africans to make, sell, and use solar lanterns. It has raised several million pounds from individuals and organizations, and its Patrons are Cate Blanchett and Ian McEwan.

Leggett is also a founding director of the world’s first private equity investment fund for renewables, run by Bank Sarasin (New Energies Invest AG, 2000-present) and is an Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Unit (1998-present). He was also a member of the UK Government’s Renewables Advisory Board from 2002-6. He has written several books, including The Carbon War (1999) and Half Gone (2005). In a first career as a geologist, he researched the history of oceans, explored for oil, and worked on oil source rocks funded by BP and Shell among others (1978-89, while on the faculty at Imperial College). Increasingly worried by global warming, he left to become an environmental campaigner (1989-1996, with Greenpeace International), during which time he won the US Climate Institute’s Award
for Advancing Understanding.

Coming to the view that successful green businesses were badly needed in the global struggle to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, he set up Solarcentury, which has expanded into the fastest-growing UK private energy company of any sort, according to the 2008 Sunday Times Tech Track 100. The company has won multiple awards for innovation and sustainability, and become a magnet for talent. Entrepreneur of the Year at the 2009 New Energy awards, Leggett has been appointed a CNN “Principal Voice” (2007) and been described in the Observer as “Britain’s most respected green energy boss.” He is convenor of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES), members of which include Virgin, Scottish and Southern, Arup, and Yahoo.

Leggett’s new book ‘The Solar Century’ will be published mid-2009.

Jeremy Leggett is deeply honoured to be the first Hillary Laureate and is presenting virtually on the subject of the ‘Triple Crunch’.

We are living through a triple crunch: the financial, carbon, and oil crises. He’s not going to talk much about climate change itself, but more about our responses to it.

Finance

He shows a cover from Fortune magazine with an executive in handcuffs and the headline, ‘Sending wall street to jail’. This really captures in one image the context in which we’re having to deal with the other problems.

We look back on utterances by chief executives like ‘As long as the music is playing, we’ll still dance,’ (accompanied by a slide of a deposed chief executive) — we have to learn from this.

Branding — the importance of brands to corporations — shows a satirical car ad that says ‘You wouldn’t buy our shitty cars, so we’ll be taking your money anyway’. Shows the entrance to an AGM in Luxembourg, with guards in riot gear (gas masks, guns, etc). How have large brands become so poorly regarded?

Carbon

But green is hot. He shows a cover of Vanity Fair: Julia Roberts, Al Gore, George Clooney — they’re all dressed in green, and the whole issue is devoted to green. Then he shows an ad from The Economist: a child asking, ‘What did you do in the war against global warming, daddy?’

The average age in finance companies is in the 50s — nearing retirement — but the average age in clean tech companies is late 20s to early 30s. This is the future.

From a climate perspective, we can only afford to burn another couple of hundred tons of carbon — and there’s far more fuel than that available.

Peak Oil

There’s been a common view that there’s so much oil that we’ll have oil forever. Newsweek just a couple of weeks ago had ‘Cheap Oil Forever’ on its cover. October 2008 marked the first multi-company attempt to sound an alarm bell on premature peak oil — 8 companies with a collective worth in the billions. If you’re interested in this issue, it’s worth taking the time to read their report, ‘The Oil Crunch’.

Shows a few charts to demonstrate Peak Oil, and the likelihood that oil availability will plummet sharply, and soon. If the energy industry has miscalculated its asset base the same way the financial industry did, we’ve got a big problem — and he believes they have.

Shows a chart of global production of oil and gas — looks like production should strt to drop sharply in 2010. Shows another chart analysing 800 oil fields field by field, and the drop should begin next year. The gap between what we can produce and what we need based on current consumption is massive. We’d have to seamlessly discover and develop massive fields without any mistakes — and there’s nothing to indicate that will be possible.

We would need the equivalent of six all-new Saudi Arabias within 22 years.

There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell. If the analysis is correct, we’re looking at the third great global energy crisis, but for many companies it would be experienced as something worse — this time, the producers have to realise that they got their asset assessment fundamentally wrong.

Shows an image of Dubai in 1990 and Dubai in 2007 — this is going to be a big issue.

The Hirsch report, done for the US Dept of Energy, makes pretty similar arguments. Hirsch used to run nuclear fusion programme in the US. Here are the main conclusions from the report:

• Oil supplies and GDP are coupled
• World production has been on a plateau since 2004
• Recession is meaning cutbacks in exploration and development
• This means global GDP will drop
• The lag time for mititation is large
• This means double recession.

Recommendations from Jeremy’s task force:

• Appraise the risk
• Draw up a national energy plan
• There’s no time to wait

The timing of all this is interesting — peak oil means you have to accelerate what you’d be doing for climate reasons. International recommendations:

• There needs to be greater transparency
• Combine multi-lateral efforts
• Accelerate ‘green new deals’

We need a green new deal. We escaped the Great Depression with a New Deal, this is another opportunity to escape a depression with a new deal, but given the confluence of problems it has to be green. Non-green solutions (more motorways, etc) will ultimately deepen the climate crisis.

There is massive economic potential for energy efficiency and renewables: it seems with an investment of GBP1 billion, you can create 20,000-40,000 clean jobs, and in the first year and every year thereafter you’re saving hundreds of millions of pounds.

The negotiations for Copenhagen have been deeply frustrating. Multi-lateral agreements with well over 100 countries is profoundly difficult — especially since one of the major players is dragging its feet and the other is saying they won’t do anything until the first player moves. China and the US have to get their acts together and realise that any new economic wellbeing created through traditional methods will be literally washed away by climate change.

Many countries seem to have emerged from this crisis with nothing more than a desire to get back to the way things were in 2007. It’s a desperate adherence to the old thinking.

His two upside themes of cleantech revolution (shows China’s Solar King). In 2007 more than 10% of all energy investment went into renewables, so you can see where many investors think the future lies, and that’s a trend to work with.

Shows a picture of a solar installation. Although solar is not a magic bullet, it’s his day job. This is the first solar-powered street in cloudy Britain, and will generate all the energy and 1/2 to 2/3 of the hot water required. If you maxed out the energy efficiency in the houses, the solar could provide all of the power needs.

It’s not about payback, it’s about ROI — solar actually gives a better return than a building society or a bank.

Survival trajectory — second positive point — there are oases in the business community where there is real leadership taking place. He’s seen the impact of Walmart’s decision to go zero carbon worldwide on their entire supply chain, and that’s working. That’s effective — we need to see more and more of that.

BP and Shell are re-carbonising — that’s a very depressing story. They’re going after solid-state tar, which requires a lot of greenhouse gas emission to turn it into liquid fuel. But Solar Century are predicting grid parity with this technology in 5 years. At least the oil companies are honest, but it’s depressing.

Lots of people are recognising that we can’t go back to 2007, and that’s encouraging: self-help, peer-to-peer lending, that’s great. But look at other aspects of society — let’s entertain ourselves to death, etc. Put these themes together and we’ve got a battle for hearts and minds, and it’s kind of polarising. It means no matter how effective we are, no one of us can influence this — all we can do is light candles for hope, and it’s the sum of those candles that will make the difference.

On the down side, it’s really depressing that these big companies are able to sit back and say, ‘Sorry, guys, we’ve got to mine the tar.’ He debated live with a guy from Shell (I didn’t catch the name) on BBC World, and the Shell guy said, ‘Look, Shell is not responsible for the way the world uses energy.’ How are they going to look their children, their children’s children in the face and say they did this?

On the upside a small company like Solar Century, they’re working with schools (Solar 4 Schools), and it’s just fantastic work to be doing.

As we go towards Copenhagen, we know what we’re capable of collectively, if we manage to get to a tipping point — that’s what we have to angle towards.

We need a tipping point in renewables.

Welcome. June 5th, World Environment Day, marks the second annual Hillary Symposium in Christchurch. We’re delighted you could join us. Here in Christchurch, the symposium will be attended by people from a cross-section of industries, including the financial; science; education; cultural; legal; not for profit; local and central government sectors. Some of our leading environmental thinkers will be offering thought-provoking presentations, followed by a pragmatic ‘trading floor’, focused on the opportunities inherent in the global financial challenges we all face, and the strategies necessary for climate change solutions. You can see the complete programme here. But this day will be exponentially more powerful with your involvement. That’s why we’ll be live-blogging both the presentations and the trading floor outcomes — and inviting your contributions. The discussions are to be based on a four-faceted model of livable cities: Livable cities are highly visitable Livable cities are highly workable Livable cities are highly investable Livable cities are carbon positive The Symposium will be facilitated by Peter Townsend, and will include a presentation from the Hillary Institute’s 2009 Hillary Laureate, Jeremy Leggett, an award-winning social entrepreneur, an author, the Executive Chairman of leading European solar energy company Solarcentury and a founding director of the world’s first private equity fund for renewables, run by Bank Sarasin (Switzerland). The Symposium is focused on the city-state of Christchurch, but Jeremy will further enhance the theme later this year in our equivalent international event in his home city of London. And outcomes will be provided to the global climate round in Copenhagen in December. In the spirit of the extraordinary leadership Sir Ed demonstrated and inspired throughout his life, and with warm greetings from our Hillary Summit governors across the globe, we thank you for being an essential part of serious cross-sectoral dialogue on this vital leadership challenge of our times. “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” Sir Edmund Hillary