Bob Leonard has a Bachelor of Science degree from Boston University and a Master of Science degree in Technology Marketing from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has a Futures Foresight Scenario Planning certification from the Futures School and a Climate Risk Management certification from the Global Association of Risk Professionals. He is currently completing the Applied Foresight Activator program at the Futures School.

For much of his career Mr. Leonard worked in B2B technology marketing for Digital Equipment, GTE (now Verizon), and EMC (now Dell/EMC). For ten years he ran a B2B technology marketing company called acSellerant. He moved from there to the climate nonprofit Spaceship Earth where he is the Chief Content Officer. He co-authored the book “Moving to a Finite Earth Economy” with the futurist David Houle. He is collaborating with David Ross on a new book entitled “From Chaos to Clarity: Thriving in a VUCA World”.

David Ross has a Bachelor of Science degree with First Class Honours in Environmental Biology from the University of Technology, Sydney, a Master of Environmental Engineering and Management, an Executive Master of Business Administration, a Graduate Certificate in Futures Studies and university certificates in VUCA Leadership and Advanced Conflict Transformation.  He has had a diverse career working in public and private sector management roles in climate change and sustainability, corporate strategy, leadership, and stakeholder engagement, often focused on dealing with wicked problems.

Eleven years ago, he set up Phoenix Strategic Management to help position large public and private sector organizations to not only successfully navigate an increasingly VUCA world, but also to make genuine contributions to their most complex social, economic and environmental challenges and opportunities. He is currently writing Confronting the Storm: Regenerative Leadership for the VUCA Century through Business Expert Press. It is a theoretical book that is targeting the higher learning market, predominantly. And he is writing “From Chaos to Clarity: Thriving in a VUCA World” with Bob Leonard.

1. Would you summarize the main point of “Moving to a Finite Earth Economy”?

“Moving to a Finite Earth Economy” addresses the root causes of our climate crisis and many other of our societal woes: late stage capitalism and our consumer societies. The problem is deregulated capitalism… “wasteful, unregulated, fossil fuel subsidized, media glorified and wealth concentrating capitalism.”

The solution is to change how we live… we must save ourselves from ourselves. We are inundated with advertising and constant exhortations to Buy! Buy more! Out of money? Here’s some credit! We have been taught that our role in life is to consume… and our self-worth is tied to how much stuff we accumulate. After 9/11, President George W. Bush famously told the country to “go shopping.”

Today, the whole world has become a consumer society. Madison Avenue and Hollywood exported the American Dream around the world… so the whole world wants to live in our American Dream. Our finite earth cannot support infinite growth.

Humankind is faced with a profound dilemma. To resist growth is to risk economic collapse.

To continue to pursue growth relentlessly ensures the collapse of our ecosystem which supports all life. A Finite Earth Economy is an attempt to solve this dilemma.

US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1960 was $542 billion. In 2019 it was $22 trillion. Clearly, GDP does not reflect the well-being of most people and it certainly doesn’t show how well nature is doing.

Our current economic system doesn’t value natural capital. A standing forest absorbs CO2, sequesters the carbon, and emits oxygen… which is valuable for our health. It also shelters a diversity of plant and animal life and prevents soil erosion. All of that is worth nothing in our current system. If the forest is cut down, and milled into two by fours, then it has value.

A Finite Earth Economy removes GDP as a measurement of the well-being of a society. How well a society is doing is focused on the well-being of its people and the natural environment.

So we replace GDP with a Gross National Happiness metric which measures things like mental and physical health, quality of education, public safety, across the board living standards, and the resilience level of the environment. This is not a new idea. The country of Bhutan instituted it in 2008. GNH is distinguishable from Gross Domestic Product by valuing collective happiness as the goal of governance, and by emphasizing harmony with nature. And in 2019, New Zealand launched a similar program named the Well-Being Budget. Other countries, including Scotland, are following suit.

Our climate crisis is what it is. It is the situation we are in, like it or not. It is an opportunity to step up and become something more. An opportunity to create a society that works for all life on Spaceship Earth.

2. You are working on a second book titled “From Chaos to Clarity: Thriving in a VUCA World”. What are its key points?

While there are many in society who believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is the only existential threat that we should be focused on now, we argue that our climate crisis will have a more significant and lengthier impact. It will guarantee an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world for decades to come.

Many leaders are lying awake at night, worried about the future viability of their organizations and their own careers. They understand that the education, skills and experiences that propelled them into their leadership positions won’t enable them to continue to be successful in a VUCA world. They understand that their leadership styles, organizational structures and business models must evolve significantly and quickly… but how?

By viewing the strategic management of organizational risks through a futures thinking lens, leaders move from the impossible task of predicting the future to developing a number of plausible futures that can be planned for. A preferred future can be developed along with the actions necessary to create it… and contingencies to maximize opportunities that arise.

From Chaos to Clarity is a practical guide that shows leaders how to successfully deal with the wicked dilemma of our climate crisis. In the book we use case studies, research and interviews with experts to illustrate how to unearth business opportunities embedded in the risks and threats of a VUCA world.

Through educating organizations on the use of futures thinking, leaders can anticipate and explore the plausible futures that lie ahead of them. It is important to note that futures thinking should not exist solely within the C-suite of the organization. Futures thinking involves a cultural shift in which all employees and suppliers adopt a futures mindset. Futures thinking becomes a part of the operating system of the organization. Patterns that emerge predicting the future often are visible first at the edges of the organization. The C-suite is insulated from them. Our book addresses cultural issues and how to consciously evolve a corporate culture to one that is risk-aware and future fit. With the insights gained, leaders can help to create a preferred future, ensuring that their business shifts from just surviving to positioning it instead to thrive.

3. VUCA stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. It is a term which is bandied about in many professions. Why do you think it is particularly relevant to the concern over climate change?

“If we continue down the present path there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow, but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last two thousand years.” – Professor Hans Joachim Schellenhuber, Director Emeritus of the Potsdam Institute

“A comparison of results from the latest generation of climate models suggest 1.5°C is only five to seven years away.” Tebaldi, C et al, 2020, ‘Climate model projections from the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP) of CMIP6’, Earth System Dynamics

“Reaching 1.5°C by 2030 would be a decade ahead of IPCC projections.” Xu, Y, Ramanathan V & Victor, DG 2018, ‘Global warming will happen faster than we think’, Nature, vol. 564

“Reducing emissions alone will have no significant impact on warming trends over the next two decades. A by-product of burning fossil fuels are sulfate aerosols, which have a strong cooling impact, but are short-lived in the atmosphere. Aerosols have been masking some of the warming so far.” Samset, BH et al, 2018, ‘Climate impacts from a removal of anthropogenic aerosol emissions’, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 45

“The climate emergency is evolving faster than predicted. We must accelerate our response, with ambition and urgency. This is the battle for our lives.” – António Guterres

UN Secretary General, 2020

“Climate models do not account well for increased warming due to loss of Arctic sea-ice: Losing the reflective power of Arctic sea ice will advance the 2ºC threshold by 25 years.”  Pistone, K, Eisenman, I & Ramanatham, V 2019, ‘Radiative heating of an ice‐free Arctic Ocean’, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 46

“Further tipping points could be triggered at low levels of global warming. A cluster of abrupt shifts could occur between 1.5°C and 2°C.” Lenton, TM et al, 2020, ‘Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against’, Nature, vol. 575

These include the Greenland Ice Sheet, which is close to a tipping point, previously estimated to be around 1.6°C; and the Amazon rainforest. Robinson, A, Calov, R & Ganopolski, A 2012, ‘Multistability and critical thresholds of the Greenland ice sheet’, Nature Climate Change.

Harvey, F 2020, ‘Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah – study’, The Guardian, 5 October.

Aside from our climate crisis, exponential advances in technologies, rapid societal shifts, and critical changes to economic models will exacerbate and amplify the challenges faced by organizations of all types resulting in a cycle of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

Let’s break VUCA and climate change down.

Volatility	The rate and pace of change imposed upon organisations and leaders by the pandemic has shocked many. It has left an array of businesses feeling brittle. This speed of change touches everything in organisations. It is easy for leaders to adopt a “firefighter” persona… feeling that their activities simply dealing with one urgent but unimportant issue or risk after another is sufficient (or, at least, the best they can do). Similarly, society and the corporate world are overwhelmed by the speed of change associated with climate change. As the climate crisis is, itself, a root cause of other wicked problems, we are seeing volatile change impacting organisations and risk management in multiple ways.
Uncertainty	We have seen the effects of uncertainty brought about by the pandemic on many facets of society ranging from the long-term learning outcomes obtained by school children through a complete (and yet to be determined) reinvention of the travel/hospitality/entertainment industry . Uncertainty is the enemy of organizational leaders. They value stability. Uncertainty creates an inability to plan effectively. Yet, just as we have been shocked by how quickly the world is now experiencing monumentally adverse impacts resulting from climate change – impacts that we all believed would happen “in the future” – so too it is now apparent how difficult it is to forecast reliably and successfully deliver a traditional 5 year plan. Our corporate strategies were typically based on the extrapolation of data from the past, believing that trends would remain on the same trajectory. The past is no longer a reliable predictor of the future.
Complexity	We can no longer deliver projects or manage risks as simply as we did in the past.  Decision making now needs to consider and integrate multiple, concurrent nested systems that do not play out in a linear fashion. Business leaders know how to handle a complicated problem or opportunity. They have successfully managed linear-style problems like an engineering project or delivering a new IT system. Today, for multiple reasons, our problems and opportunities are wicked. There are many root causes underpinning these. Simple solutions to complex problems cause unintended consequences. Climate is an extremely complex, highly interconnected system that touches everything. There is no way to test solutions in a lab (although technology is being developed to create simulations). An example of just one (out of thousands) of complex problems we face are the competing needs of preserving our marine stocks while also trying to protect our fishing industry. Leaders need to address our climate crisis via mitigation and adaptation efforts, but they cannot solve it. Instead, they should focus on taming the dilemma while charting an organizational course that enables survival.
Ambiguity	Just as we have seen with the debate about how to manage the pandemic, so too the data on hand with respect to our climate crisis can be contradictory. Its progress and impacts have been interpreted in different ways and different conclusions have been drawn. This is why futures thinking as the operating system of an organization is critical. A widely diverse set of experience, technical knowledge, viewpoints and more are necessary to discern the signals from the noise and to navigate in real time.

“The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.” – Edgar Schein, professor, MIT Sloan School of Management