Over the last decade and a half, our society has found itself resting upon an increasingly complex web of trust. Born from the ashes of the Great Recession, this technologically amplified economic recovery held much promise; investors incorporating environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations into their decision-making processes, governments embracing demands for more equitable policies, and citizens leveraging social media to increase the pressure for transparency and justice. But is the backbone of this brave new world really that perdurable?
Once heralded as the great democratizer of information, the corridors of the internet are now polluted with cascades of misinformation, both hyper-accelerated and monetized to once unimaginable dimensions by the Attention Barons of the Web’s second chapter. Market systems long overdue for change remain locked into archaic monopolies still operating on opaque proprietary systems. Trust has become a vehicle to boost shareholder value, with the incontrovertible truth often falling to the wayside as both an inconvenient and unaccounted for expense. This unintelligible game of tug of war has not only created the most profitable industry in the world but has also facilitated the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.
All hope is not lost, however, as a new chapter is being written and a circular economy engineered in the board rooms, financial exchanges, and digital wireframes of a rapidly emerging body politic. After all, the economy we leave to the next generation will be built by those who decide a more sustainable world is not only more profitable – but inherently possible.
One of those great builders is none other than senior vice president of sustainability at Wood plc, member of the World Economic Forum’s Advisory Committee on Climate Change, and host of the first chapter of Everything’s Gone Green™: Ann Rosenberg. After 20 years at SAP, Ann joined Wood plc to serve as senior vice president for sustainability solutions. In 2020, Ann co-founded and launched SDG Ambition, which challenges and supports companies to be more strategic and transformative in how they run their businesses to deliver on the 2030 Agenda.
SDG Ambition challenges companies to employ enterprise-wide integration that hardwires the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) laid out by the United Nations (UN) into business management, business processes, and information technology landscapes. The first Business Benchmark challenge launched was Business Ambition for 1.5 C, daring companies to take bolder action to redefine business models to limit the global temperature and mitigate climate change.
Ann will be hosting the inaugural chapter of ‘Everything’s Gone Green™’ – a digital roundtable produced in association with IT World Canada that will examine the role of science fiction thinking in solving climate change and advancing a more sustainable future.
The 60-minute panel discussion will first air on Tuesday, March 22, and features four global leaders from the converging worlds of ESG and digital innovation, including: Perry Hewitt, chief marketing officer at Data.org; Theresa Kushner, chief data evangelist at NTT Data; Chris Wolf, chief research and innovation officer at VMware; and Brian Solis, global innovation evangelist at Salesforce. I sat down with Ann in advance of the roundtable to find out more about how science fiction thinking can help address the greatest challenges of our time.
The best formula for innovating with purpose within the energy and climate space is to create a big impact, through big solutions to big problems. By impact, I mean the cultural, social, and political effect of change. Science fiction thinking is a way of accessing that big impact kind of thinking; by eliminating traditional parameters of possibility, we can expand our solution making to the kind of scale needed for this mammoth issue.
Science fiction thinking takes place in those fertile grey areas between faintly possible and totally crazy, between the pursuit of utopia and the avoidance of dystopia, and between fiction and fantasy. Science fiction thinking is a powerful way to envision purposeful solutions for a sustainable future. Looking at the digitalization of the energy sector, where there is a dire need for the implementation of new cleaner energy sources, there is still a huge technology gap between where we are and how we implement the needed clean energy transition.
You could also interpret Science Fiction thinking as a more creative kind of scenario planning. It’s the same concept but with a more open mind.
Science fiction can certainly result in some scary solutions, but the guiding principles applied with the science is what determines its character. As examined in my book, Science Fiction Thinking: A Starship for Enterprise Innovation, we are applying science fiction with the UN Global Goals and exponential technologies. This is Innovation 4.0.
In this manner, science fiction thinking builds the bridge between the UN 17 Global Goals and the solutions which will ultimately achieve them. Linking innovation to purpose and the 17 SDGs can accelerate positive change in the world and improve company’s bottom line. Those efforts can inspire employees, customers, partners, and entire communities to unite around a higher purpose – completely unlike the dystopian future thinking we so often see.
Science Fiction thinking and scenario planning inspired by fiction is not a new phenomenon. Martin Cooper, a fan of Star Trek, invented the mobile phone while director of research and development at Motorola. In 1997 the film “The Fifth Element” featured flying cars & taxis as urban transportation. Today, Chinese drone maker Ehang has produced the Ehnang 184 Autonomous Aerial Vehicle capable of aerial transportation of a single passenger for 23 minutes of flight at sea level.
Today we see a strong adaption of ESG commitments across CEO agendas, strategy, and governance. We are seeing more and more companies take on board UN Global Compact’s SDG Ambition Framework which I co-created in 2019 with the UN. SDG Ambition is a pathway that helps companies integrate goals across their operations and within stakeholder engagements.
The UN is the global convener of SDGs across governments, the private and public sectors, academia, etc. It is collectively leading the way for the world to collectively fulfil the global goal agenda. We as human beings should be supporting that mission in any capacity possible.
Last year, COP26 really lit a fire within stakeholders across the public and private sectors. I’ve never seen such a united front in wanting to work towards these goals in a truly collaborative way. This overwhelming unity of purpose dwarfs whatever noise there might be surrounding the conversation.
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Our emerging generations, the vast majority of whom will build their lives in increasingly crowded, chaotic and competitive cities, are hungering for a clear and common sense of purpose, but can we offer them one?
From ecological exigency, to ongoing and intolerable community inequality, to a sense of rapidly eroding trust in an ever-connected world, we have reached a critical point in human history; a state of emergency that requires a profound shift towards more meaningful dialogue in order to overcome.