The Boundless Podcast

💬 “The IPCC has said that it's too late to avert climate change through the supply side alone, therefore as individuals, we need to shift our consumption behaviour. But the producer is also responsible for our consumption, so they're going to need to help us shift our consumption choices to more sustainable options.” @Janet Salem

This is a conversation with Janet Salem

🎙️ Janet has worked for the United Nations for over 13 years in Paris, Vienna and now in Bangkok where she leads the Asia and the Pacific work on sustainable lifestyles and innovation. Her current role with the UN is as Economic Affairs Officer for Circular Economy.

🎧 In this episode, Janet talks about how the ecosystem of startup companies working on environmental sustainability has changed and developed over the last few years. In her role at the UN they track not only the successful companies but those that do not succeed in scaling up. The reason is that often the failure of a company can be down to legislation or regulation, so this data can help to promote the relevant changes in policy that will create a better platform of success for the next company. Janet talks about the global surge in startups including in Asia.

With over 50% of India now having access to the internet, more and more business ideas are being created, getting noticed and getting funded in that region. She explains that the transition to sustainable business and a circular economy is driving these business leaders, but unfortunately, capital is still mostly going to safe projects and proven technologies.

One way to change the way the capital is invested is to look to the leadership of Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand. The NZ Treasury has been instructed that, when planning policies or modelling future economic scenarios for New Zealand, it can no longer only consider the impact on GDP growth. Instead, it must include social, human, and natural considerations into its thinking.
Janet talks about responsibility. Who is accountable for what, and remarks on the disposable coffee cup as an example of failure in sustainable practice, failure in policymaking and failure in economics. But she says, whilst consumers need to change, there also must be viable alternatives.

Finally, Janet talks about the power of visualisation. A theme throughout this series and she explains what she’s been working on recently with Sony and new immersive technologies.

This is the Infinite Leaders series on the Boundless Podcast, we are exploring how Digital Transformation, Data and Artificial Intelligence can promote, provide engagement and deliver environmental sustainability.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-boundless-podcast--4077400/support.

💬 “Some people benefit from home working, but the research shows that face-to-face meetings are much better for developing ideas. The University of Stanford has published research that says in 2021 we could lose out on innovation because we haven't got that face-to-face connectivity.” Dr. Naeema Pasha

🎙️ My Friday Co-Host is Naeema Pasha. She works for Henley Business School focussing on future strategy, vision and operations of business education. Everything from people engagement to tech adoption.

🎧 In this episode Naeema and I discussed our insights and observations prompted by this week’s episodes with:

Diane Mulcahy, Institutional Investor: “The future of work is here, it's not just evenly distributed”

Murray Grubb Jnr, Director of CX & Strategic Accounts at Oracle: “AI use in marketing still needs humans”

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-boundless-podcast--4077400/support.

💬 “In most cases customer loyalty simply doesn’t exist anymore and that’s why AI in marketing still needs that human touch; validation points and constant checkpoints throughout the process. One mistake and your customer is gone for good.” @Murray Grubb Jnr

This is a conversation with Murray Grubb Jnr

🎙️ Murray heads up the Aviation Sector and strategic accounts in Oracle to drive Digital Transformation, User Adoption and Acceptance of modern digital services. He is a former Elected Politician, Speaker, Panellist, Judge and Industry Expert on all forms of Digital Engagement.

🎧 In this episode, Murray talks about brand ‘authenticity’ as being critical, and gives some great examples of this, but explains that, as we have learned from the pandemic, the world can change swiftly and companies cannot rely on their AI to support consumer personalisation when new buyer data takes time to build. Murray talks about the importance of keeping the human in the loop especially at times like this and why consumer loyalty to a brand is wafer-thin and that one mistake, whether from a human or from your AI can turn a customer away for life.

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💬 “One impact of COVID-19 is that some workers now care less about the external signs of success and care more about things like freedom, flexibility and autonomy. That is difficult for some companies to shift towards, because it means they have less control over what success looks like. @Diane Mulcahy

This is a conversation with Diane Mulcahy

🎙️ Diane is the author of the bestselling book ‘The Gig Economy’. Diane is a consultant, speaker and lecturer and currently an Advisor to the Kauffman Foundation, where she manages the venture capital portfolio. She is the author of ‘We Have Met the Enemy … and He Is Us’, a widely read report on the VC industry.

🎧 In this episode, I asked Diane if COVID-19 has changed, revealed or accelerated the future of work. She perceives that predominately it has accelerated the future of work towards more permanent remote working, and it’s established new types of employee motivations. Diane discusses how leaders and leadership models are adjusting to reflect changes in employees desires for increase autonomy and flexibility.

But not all employees want to be based from home and although a number of high profile technology companies announced permanent work from home strategies, that may not be the end of that story. We haven’t yet discovered the longer-term impacts of distributed teams on creativity and innovation. Whilst the future may be uncertain for remote working, Diane has hopes that the change in mindset created by COVID-19 could encourage employers to increase flexibly in areas like holiday and working hours and to recruit from a far wider geographic pool of candidates. Diane is an expert on gig working, and she talks about trust within the workplace, particularly around the collection and use of data. She also explained how a lack of trust can drive employees towards freelance work or gig work where they have more control over their work, including their hours and location. Finally, I asked Diane for some advice to people entering the workforce for the first time during the global pandemic.

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💬 “Sometimes you just need someone to step up and say, ‘we can do this’. When we look back at how we addressed climate change this decade, we will see that this person was not the one that had the best ideas, or even made the biggest impact on the cause. It was the person who made the biggest impact on the people.” Jon Thor Sigurleifsson

🎙️ My Friday Co-Host for the Infinite Leaders series is Jon Thor Sigurleifsson

🎧 In this conversation, Jon Thor and I discussed our insights and observations prompted by this week’s episodes with:

1) Gavin Starks, Founder at IcebreakerOne.org: The power of Open Data

2) Andrew Zolli, VP Global Impact Initiatives at Planet: Leveraging the big pause for climate action

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-boundless-podcast--4077400/support.

💬 “Rather than thinking that we need to ‘fix’ capitalism, we can think about encouraging a flourishing of diversity and different ways of living on earth. All to move us to something that is sustainable in terms of human capacity and civilization.” @Andrew Zolli

This is a conversation with Andrew Zolli

🎙️ Andrew oversees Global Impact initiatives at Planet, a breakthrough space and AI organization that has deployed the largest constellation of Earth-observing satellites in history. These satellites image our whole planet every day in high resolution, and his team makes sure this data is ethically used to its highest and best purposes to monitor the world’s ecosystems, improve humanitarian action and disaster response, protect human rights, transform sustainable development and advance scientific discovery. Planet is exploring how their tools can inform the next iteration of capitalism, where social and environmental externalities are more effectively measured and valued.

🎧 In this episode, Andrew reflects on how 2020 has been a remarkable year for change: he mentioned Black Lives Matter calling it the culmination of social conscience of a whole generation which expressed a broad and deep desire for change. And we saw, albeit in the most painful way possible a glimpse of what a lower carbon future might look like through COVID-19 lockdowns.

Andrews refers to this as a glimpse that a better world might be possible. He spoke about resilience a subject that he’s written extensively about. He provides an in-depth commentary on resilience, referencing it as amongst other things, as the ability to persist, recover, or even thrive amid disruption. And in every system, most societal responses to disruptions are, what adhocratic. We use our knowledge, wisdom, and our rehearsal of disasters and disruptions and combine them with our own imaginative capacity so that we can engage in improvisational kinds of behaviours.

He describes our response to climate change to be more like jazz than classical music. Living systems always orbit a healthy range of different States, a dynamic disequilibrium. And in that disequilibrium is where we find new innovations. We try new experiments, things change, and we adapt and adjust and learn and grow. This experimentation, Andrew says, is also a form of resilience.

Coming back to practical points, Andrew points out that the company Amazon is measured millions of times a day to assess its value. But the Amazon rainforest is not measured nearly as frequently. As we don't value what we don't measure. It's not valued nearly as much. With our current economic systems we only value the trees when they are cut, or land when it’s cleared, we are missing the incredibly important role that the trees are playing while they're standing up, which is that they're enabling humanity to breathe.

So capitalism has produced enormous wealth, but it treats the value of nature as optional. The global capitalist system, Andrew, says cannot continue. We have to align climate and capital. And we must acknowledge that there are many pathways. Rather than fixing capitalism, we want to encourage a flourish of diversity, of civilization, different ways of living on the earth, all in an effort to move us to something that is both sustainable and flourishing in terms of human capacity and civilization.

We have to make the invisible visible for people so that we can reinforce these messages and visualize the interconnected relationships between our planet and our economy. We need to create new norms. Doing away with this idea of dominance over the earth, and encouraging thinking for the long-term.

Andrew works for Planet, helping organizations all over the world to access and act on earth data. There is a huge role for data, analysis and AI since the scale and size and speed of the challenges we're confronting are bigger than our cognition.

We're living through the sixth extinction, but we're also living through the second Renaissance. Through a period when our tools, have never been more powerful. More powerful than many of us are aware of he says. Tools that can combat the weaponization of misinformation and provide evidence when things happen. Planet helps its clients to use the satellite imagery to prove when environmental catastrophes happen, which can be used as evidence at times when governments try to cover up disasters.

Finally, Andrew talks about how the observations have shown how quickly some natural systems recover from intense human impacts. He has seen rewilding initiated on the scale of weeks to months, proof that the earth can and will survive. Andrew is confident that life will flourish on the earth again. This is the moment to think and act in ways that will get humanity into a position where it can flourish along with the rest of the life on the planet.

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💬 “As a benchmark, we spent two to three times our GDP creating the railways, effectively creating the industrial revolution. The idea that we're going to somehow re-engineer and de-carbonise everything for some small percentage of our GDP, I think is magical thinking.” Gavin Starks

This is a conversation with Gavin Starks

🎙️ Gavin helps solve complex challenges. He has co-created over a dozen organisations, building multi-disciplinary teams fit for a digital age. He explores the impact of data on business, society and culture which has led to roles such as co-chair of the Open Banking Standard and founding CEO of the Open Data Institute.

🎧 In this episode, Gavin talks about the mindset and actions needed to create a working blueprint for the freer sharing and licensing of data at scale. He explains why this approach is critical for making a green and sustainable recovery possible. He uses the example of creating an effective, decentralized and distributed energy grid that incorporates shared data, describing this as a federated decentralized approach to data sharing. But he warns that this isn’t possible without a culture shift.

Gavin defines open data and shared data and explains the differences between these two concepts. He explains open data by comparing it to Open Banking where there's a common standard for all parties that are working in the banking sector and hundreds of different FinTech companies to share information across the whole network, but maintaining privacy and consent. Gavin talks about how this approach has democratised access to the marketplace for financial information and could be a useful mechanism for other industries.

I asked him if the movement of money particularly investment has responded to the changes in risk, particularly risk related to climate change. He sees positive change here but warms about the speed of progress. Physics, he says, doesn't really care about how quickly we are able to change our systems. We need to be moving faster to decarbonise all of our activities.

To drive home the gulf in our actions to what is needed, he points out that the UK spent two to three times its GDP creating the railways and so the idea that we're going to somehow re-engineer everything for some small percentage of our GDP is magical thinking. But Gavin says, if are able to adopt the principles of a war economy, then we can achieve remarkable things, at scale and at speed. And even between our first conversation and this recording, something remarkable happened when China announced its goal to be carbon neutral by 2060. This is the Infinite Leaders series on the Boundless Podcast, we are exploring how Digital Transformation, Data and Artificial Intelligence can promote, provide engagement and deliver environmental sustainability.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-boundless-podcast--4077400/support.

💬 “Every day our devices serve up business stats to us; number of downloads, sales, signups, etc. Can we add air quality, % of renewable energy, water pollution levels to those? I think to act on climate information, we need to see climate information… the stuff that matters to us.” Richard Foster-Fletcher

🎙️ My Friday Co-Host for the Infinite Leaders series is @Jon Thor Sigurleifsson. Growing up in Iceland, Jon Thor had a lot of questions about the world and always knew that he wanted to explore it but the more he learned, the more he realised he didn't just want to explore it, he wanted to change it.

🎧 In this episode Jon Thor and I discussed our insights and observations prompted by this week’s episodes with:

Kristin Gutekunst, CEO at Overview Collective: Leveraging XR for Climate Impact

Steven Ramage, Head of External Relations at Group on Earth Observations (GEO): How businesses are harnessing earth observation data

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-boundless-podcast--4077400/support.

💬 “There's a lot of people who are making decisions that affect our day to day lives, that don't understand the data, nor the technology that is influencing those decisions” Steven Ramage

This is a conversation with Steven Ramage

🎙️ Steven leads global stakeholder engagement and external relations for the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), an intergovernmental partnership promoting the value and usefulness of Earth observations (EO) for research, policy, decisions and action. He has worked in the private sector and consulted for the World Bank and the United Nations.

🎧 In this episode, Steven talks about the important work that the Group on Earth Observations known as GEO is doing. GEO is an intergovernmental partnership working to improve the availability, access and use of open Earth observations, including satellite imagery, remote sensing and in situ data, to impact policy and decision making in a wide range of sectors. Earth observations play a major role in achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
For example, GEO makes available Earth observations in support of effective policy responses for climate change adaptation, mitigation and other specific provisions, working with partners to enhance global observation systems for climate action. Also, Earth observations contribute to disaster preparedness and better mitigation and response.

When it comes to getting stakeholder buy-in for your idea, project or partnership Steven shared two important factors with us that will create action from your data – the first is use the power of storytelling and the second, is to use the language of the decision-maker. We all have our own acronyms and vernacular, but if we can’t transcend these to speak someone else’s language then we will miss out on important opportunities. And when it comes to climate change, we can’t avoid to miss these.

This is the Infinite Leaders series on the Boundless Podcast, we are exploring how Digital Transformation, Data and Artificial Intelligence can promote, provide engagement and deliver environmental sustainability.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-boundless-podcast--4077400/support.

💬 “The human spirit is so resilient and if we can provide some of the vulnerable people around the world with the tools they need, they will often be able to use them to great advantage.” Kristin Gutekunst

This is a conversation with Kristin Gutekunst

🎙️ Kristin is an expert in new media, brand, and partnerships with over 10 years of progressive experience working at the United Nations in campaigning for development, particularly through the combination of high-level advocacy strategies, grassroots mobilization, youth engagement, and innovative communications such as immersive media and experiential marketing. Many of the projects she has developed and launched have been streamlined, becoming standard for new media and communications at the UN as it has embraced the opportunity of the Sustainable Development Goals.

🎧 In this episode, Kristin talks about how Virtual Reality technologies are allowing stories to be told in new and novel ways, and are part of the new narrative in charitable giving to focus on the resilience, hope and ingenuity of individuals around the world. Individuals that when given better tools, can use these to better themselves and those around them.

Kristin charts a brief history of how we got to this new narrative, one that focuses on the quality and impact of the giving. Impact is a keyword for Kristin, she works with brilliant storytellers and technologists so that she can focus on how to amplify the message and use it to create lasting and significant change. Examples she gives, are by linking the impacts of climate change to the changes in your local community, things that people can see and have bearing on their day to day lives. There’s sometimes a feeling of disconnect, insignificance or overwhelm that causes inaction at the individual level and Kristin is working on successful strategies to overcome all of these with technologies, data and the power of storytelling.

Finally, she talks about the importance of being able to visualise data, something that until now has only been possible in 2D, is now both immersive and in 3D. She says this difference makes a big difference.

This is the Infinite Leaders series on the Boundless Podcast, we are exploring how Digital Transformation, Data and Artificial Intelligence can promote, provide engagement and deliver environmental sustainability.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-boundless-podcast--4077400/support.