Hello everyone. Welcome to our third session of the Fundamentals of Donut Economics with Kate Rayworth. We want to just give you a brief update that we're now well beyond 350 students enrolled in over 50 countries around the world and we were just noting as you've been saying hello in the chat, just how extraordinary it is that we can all be sitting in our living rooms or in a cafe and be live with people all over the world simultaneously and it actually works. We all have our experiences with Zoom but I mean it's just it's an amazing thing so I just want to welcome everyone in the spirit of the miracle of technology today and to say that you know we're really considering and I'll be talking more next week but just so people can start putting it on their calendars one week after Kate's final session. We're going to have an open house so we'll be sending everybody a special email but if you want to put this time, 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, the Wednesday two weeks time, we want to have an open house where we really want to go into detail about the Masters in Regenerative Action, other courses that we want to be scheduling to make you aware of because the whole purpose of Kate's course is not only to inform you about the fundamentals of donut economics which is taking the world by storm due to its brilliant simplicity and deep and profound message around aligning human affairs with planetary ecosystems but we also are launching a whole new kind of MBA program and we want to have as many students as possible come together in pods to study together as we progress with other faculty and possibly other courses by Kate and the folks associated with the Donut Experimental Action Lab. So welcome everyone to our third session with Kate and Kate I turn the program now over to you. Thanks Jim and welcome back everybody. I'm really glad to be here today it's funny I feel like we've become a group we're hitting our stride and then it's that feeling of oh but this is the third or fourth so it's that it's actually very fitting because of course it's just been the summer solstice or the winter solstice depending on where you are and it's that moment of the the fullest most breath of the earth or the breathing out again depending on where you are so just reflecting on those passing points so lovely to be here today and lots to address lots to cover so I'm going to share my screen as I always do and take us straight to business in every sense of the word so can business get into the donut let's just bring ourselves here because I know that everyone's just turned up from all sorts of different places and activities rushing in the morning in the evening coming from meetings conversations so let's just arrive here again and start back with the donut as a possibility of a compass for human prosperity in the 21st century where we aim to meet the need of all people within the means of the living planet and we know that we are very far from that right now just from this one little snapshot so let's remind ourselves that last century's economic theories and governmental policies and business models were not designed to solve for this they were not designed with this understanding or indeed with this purpose so we should just not expect them to take us there that would be insane we have to come up with new economic theories new governmental policies and new business models and I should add finance models too if we're going to give ourselves a chance of actually turning the dynamics of this story around so what then happens when business meets the donut I've had conversations with so many companies ever since the donut first was published in 2012 and I'm going to share with you some of that and some of the tools that we've created at Donut Economics Action Lab today I'm also going to invite people to share from your experience I mean you're going to have a lot of time in the breakout groups but I'm going to invite people to share so please think of your own experience from within enterprises within businesses that you know well if you would like to share some of those insights what we're going to cover today when business meets the donut we're going to start with what I call the corporate to-do list what's business going to do when it encounters this challenge and context of the world we're going to talk about what it means to move towards regenerative and distributive design in the field of business we'll then look into the deep design of business itself we're not talking about the product design we're talking about the enterprise design then you're going to go into breakout discussion groups and we're going to have 30 minutes today because I think there's just so much going to come up and that people can share from their own experience that I want you to have a real chance to do that and we'll share back from some of those ideas that come out and then we're going to talk about deals business policy because this is really important for us it's it's a really important part of me sharing this today and I'm doing this very consciously sharing these ideas and yet also sharing the importance of handling our intention to be open with our commitment to the integrity of the ideas so I will be talking about deals business policy and what can and can't be done with these tools right now and how we're planning on opening that up at the time so that's the journey we're going to go on let's go so here we are this is this is business as usual this is what we've inherited we have inherited a world an industrial system where degenerative design of enterprise is normal where we take again and again and again from the sources of the living world and we throw our waste again and again and again into earth sinks into earth's spaces where we think we can put waste whether it's plastics in lakes and rivers or electronic waste in the neighborhoods of the world's poorest people and I look at these images mining deforestation dumping and I think our children's children will call these images from the archive and tap us on the shoulder and say did you know about this did you ever see anything like this because they will find it absolutely extraordinary that we thought this was normal because we do they'll find it extraordinary that this is what it meant to do business and thank goodness they will find it extraordinary because it must be transformed by the time that they are experiencing business and enterprise in the world so we've run down earth's life support systems with the way we do business we also run down people we exploit and we've inherited industrial structures of which one of the major stories is that story of exploitation whether it's women workers who find that they are sacked if they are pregnant and are forced to prove every month that they are not pregnant whether it's workers in incredibly exploitative condition along with children in cobalt mines and lithium mines whether it's people who are working for some of the world's largest companies and find that they are made redundant or the company might be taking furlough money but not passing it on to them and doing massive payouts to its owners or shareholders or indeed just avoiding paying tax altogether the indignation of people about the relationships between businesses and their employees their customers their communities the societies on which they depend deeply divisive enterprise is fills the newspapers every day this is what we've inherited so this is what has to be transformed and that is either utterly overwhelming and it can make us incredibly angry or it can be utterly exciting because we know its work that must be done so what happens when we invite business to the donut table as I mentioned ever since the donut diagram came out in 2012 I've been having conversations with companies I was invited at the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership first to present there to some of the world's biggest companies I found myself in the room with senior managers from around the world of multinational corporations and it was just fascinating listening to their responses when I showed this image showed the overshoot and how does business respond what does business think it needs to do in response to this vision of our context tells us a lot so over the years I listened to how different enterprises were responding and I'm talking about moving from a three people social enterprise startup to a major multinational fortune 500 company across that spectrum what's business going to do and I drew up what I call the corporate to-do list the first response on the corporate to-do list is the oldest it's do nothing and it goes like this well that's a sorry story oh that's a really shocking picture but the business of business is business as Milton Friedman nearly told us in the 1970s and everything we're doing is nearly legal so we're just going to carry on until the cost of the find exceeds the benefits of this business model and there's still plenty of businesses around to operate just like that today and of course that has to be shut down the first step on where many companies I think are is to say well oh that's a challenge we will do what pays now so if it pays to cut our carbon emissions because actually it turns out you get massive savings in your supply chains why have empty lorries driving up and down be smarter with your supply chain logistics you can actually save money as you cut carbon so if we'll save money when we cut carbon we'll do that because that pays now if we will get a new access to market share because we take on a green certification we'll do that because that pays now so we'll do what pays now it begins to move in the right direction it's more ecological it's more socially minded but it's nothing like the speed and scale of transformation that we already know is required it's still caught up in the short term financial returns the short term business case show me the business case they'll say so we need to move on from this now the next step up is a little more interesting and it was quite dominant in the last decade we'll do our fair share for about 10 years especially when climate change awareness began to rise you heard quite a number of companies and it was clearly a movement companies seeing or others are doing this we'll do this too they'd say our national government has committed to cutting its carbon emissions nationally by 20% over the next 20 years so we'll do our fair share we'll cut 20% over the next 20 years and this fair shareism it's a step forward but it very rarely adds up as anybody knows who has been to a restaurant with friends and everyone's chipping in what they think is their fair share of the bill it's pretty dangerous to be the person left holding that platter to give to the waiter at the end of the evening because it often just doesn't add up and that not adding up is what we've seen going on in climate change negotiations by the world's governments say for many decades we'll do our fair share when you do your fair share but you're not doing your fair share and I think companies also watch each other about what's normal what's expected what's required what's okay to get away with and our fair share seems to be just a reflection of the our national government's inadequate commitment to what's got more interesting in recent years though is that the science has come along and said oh you want to do your fair share I've got news for you because we need to get to net zero carbon so it's going to turn out that your fair share actually kicks you up to the next level of ambition you need to do net zero by the way when it comes to climate change and of course this is what we hear many companies talking about now we're committed to an emission zero zero carbon emissions in our global supply chains net the question is by when is it 2050 2040 2030 2025 but zero polluting wastewater leaving our factories zero dirty air going out into the city zero child labor in our supply chains zero accidents in our factories now this is transformative because business was never done like this before so this is to be recognized this is transformative but in the words of the regenerative designer bill mcdonough why stop there why aim to be a hundred percent less bad we're going to do absolutely no bad why would you do that he says why not break through the ceiling of your imagination and actually aim to do good to be generous to be generative to be positive some people call it net positive and this i'm going to call do the doughnut because if we're going to get at the doughnut we have to be bring positive contribution we are already so far out of it it's no good just to do no harm we need to actually move back into it so you could say be generous be generative be positive be contributive but some enterprises have been really struck over the years showing them the doughnut they literally rush up and say but that could be our logo i mean that just encapsulates why we exist we're just using business as a vehicle because we think it's an effective vehicle for achieving that purpose we have in the world but that's why we exist and yet there's companies all the way up and down this corporate to do list which itself itself is fascinating how can it be that there's such a wide range of enterprises on this corporate to do list now let me add some specificity of well what would it mean to do the doughnut like what are we talking about here and so i'm going to just go in one level of detail and of course yeah i couldn't spoiler alert i'm not going to tell you here's a company that's doing the doughnut i don't know of one i haven't gone through the process of fully assessing one yet but there's no company i'm going to show you here today that's doing the doughnut what i'm going to show is companies that through their intention and through the action are clearly aiming to move towards doing this and i think that's the point we're on this journey of redesigning business and we're moving towards in that direction so how can business actually aim to do the doughnut if we are so far out so much red of humanity falling short so much ecological overshoot business that aims to do the doughnut is business that's going to actually act to bring us back within it's going to be a return journey into some place and it needs to be regenerative and distributive by design and of course these concepts are familiar from last week when we talk about cities but i believe these are the two dynamics that run through all of the transformations that we need to make in cities and governmental policies and in business and in communities become regenerative and distributive by design so let me dive in and give some examples of what this means let's start with degenerative enterprise we've looked at some already it runs down earth slide support systems we mine and mine and log and log and we use things often only once and then throw them away into lakes and rivers into the atmosphere this is how we run down the life support systems of planet earth this is how we systematically push ourselves over planetary boundaries and run down the local ecosystems in which communities and societies live and we need to transform that bend those linear degenerative arrows into circular regenerative ones so that these resources are not used up they used again and again so that we begin to do business running on earth's solar and current energy we begin to do business while recognizing that the waste from one process becomes food for the next we separate the biological and the technical materials so nature's materials nature of course breaks things down and restores them that's how she works that's why life on this planet continually regenerates and we need to learn to mimic that with human made materials from plastics to ceramics to synthetics keep them separate so that we can mimic that and create business models that mimic that loop and not throwing anything away that is how we can begin to restore and work within the cycles of the living world so going one step deeper it's not just about being sustainable and I find this frame from the carpet company interface a really nice heuristic for thinking about this so we've inherited degenerative designs where factories are smokestacks polluting the sky where the logical norm is to take make and waste and where we produce carbon intensive products to move to sustainable you could say is to say well we need factories to go to zero there's your mission zero zero emissions we need to close the loop so any materials that a company uses they say bring them back to us let's close that loop and bring them back and then let's create low carbon products or even zero carbon products but to move the next stage they propose means to have factories as forests and I'll say a little bit more about this that actually rather than polluting or doing zero harm what if factories actually are generative as the forest next door returning products from dispersed materials so recognizing again that we're already in overshoot there are plastics in the oceans there is carbon excessive carbon in the atmosphere there are all sorts of materials that have been dispersed carelessly into the world and business needs to be part of actually gathering them and reintegrating them into the cycles to which they belong and then creating products that don't release carbon or none but actually sequester carbon just as nature does say in coral reefs so this is a beginnings again but I wouldn't say this is the ultimate definition of regenerative it's the really nice useful beginnings of ah from degenerative to sustainable to regenerative here's a few examples from enterprises that I believe are intentionally moving towards regenerative design so sanitary toilets recognize that in many parts of the world there are no toilets in communities and it's a huge lack of privacy of dignity of hygiene huge vulnerability of the population so they set up these micro enterprises throughout communities surrounding Nairobi and the idea is that for the first time people can have access to a toilet it gives dignity cleanliness and sanity which of course improves health in the community immediately but also that waste is collected every day and it's turned back into compost which is then reapplied to the fields so at the technical level they are closing the nutrient loop but at the social level you can see it's creating enterprise funding health and reconnecting the urban with the rural another very different model is fairphone company that set up a phone company to say if we are going to create and reduce our impact in the living world so massively reduced by use of earth's materials we need to create products that enable the resources embedded in those phones to be used again and again and again and the way we're going to do that is go for open modular design so if you have a fair phone it can be unscrewed by you the customer and owner there's a video on youtube telling you how to replace the battery how to operate the camera how to fix broken parts so the intention is to make open modular phones so that it can be part of an ecosystem of modular design far it's ending the the inbuilt obsolescence and actually intending for reuse another example is the swedish sportswear company koudini so all of the clothing that they make is made either from wool and tensil both of which are organic fibers or recycled nylon and recycled polyester they don't blend them they don't mix them they don't make complex interwoven fibers because you can't separate them out again so they keep them apart and with the nylons and polyesters they again they'll reuse them and re-embed them in their products with the wool and tensil as a way of demonstrating to customers the recyclability and the regenerative nature of these products they literally said bring them back to us they started composting them some of them in in a big horticultural garden in stock home turning that clothing literally into compost growing vegetables on top and then serving it as a meal to some of their customers and saying look you're literally eating your old skiwear now of course this is a brilliant piece of performance art and performance messaging about regenerative design that the materials of your clothing are organic and returned to earth systems and then the last one i'll show here is interface itself so their concept of saying what would it mean for our factory to be as generative as the wildland next door and this is their work with the biomimicry designer jenine benes whose organization biomimicry 3.8 as in nature has been innovating for 3.8 billion years there's probably quite a lot to learn from there so if jenine were working with a company like interface she'd say right take me to the wildland next door let's go to hectares of this land in which this forest is situated and you can probably hear now echoes of the city portrait let's go to the wildland next door let's actually take the metrics of this wildland it's ecological generosity how much carbon does this land store in a hectare how much groundwater does it store after a storm how much biodiversity in many species are housed here how much does this land cool the air on a hot day from the tree tops to the forest floor how much does it build soil and these metrics that we measure on the wildland next door become the ecological performance standards this is what nature can do here this is nature's genius in this place let's take those ecological performance standards and make them the aspirational standards for our factory so what would it mean for this factory as it's making carpets to be as generous as the wildland next door how could it store carbon how could it hold groundwater and welcome by diversity and cool the air what would it look like to actually belong as a factory so that it comes functionally indistinct in terms of ecological generosity to the wildland next door now that's ongoing work and if you're interested i recommend having a look on some of the interviews that have been shared about this and videos on the internet because it's really interesting ambitious work again very much moving towards what what is that going to look like and how close can you get towards actually matching or exceeding the generosity of the wildland next door so there's some for examples of companies that are on the move towards regenerative design but we also have to think about other dynamic because we know that we've inherited enterprises that are often totally intentionally divisive by design that aim to capture as much value as possible for the owners of the enterprise indeed they say but that's the that's the purpose that's our culture that's our norm that success that's the law is that the law and there's a big debate in some places is that the law that you must maximize shareholder returns that is your fiduciary duty or is that the common corporate norm and this may vary of course across jurisdictions but this has become a norm and the bookshops are full of the biographies of CEOs who have done this in an exemplary way and who've delivered massive share value for their shareholders and their owners but we need a different kind of enterprise we need enterprises that actually aim to share the value that's created with all who co-created it and that's a far far greater number of people than the owners in fact many people would argue if you really want to look for people who created value you don't go to the owners they are they may be shareholders or indeed share traders but the ones who created that value are the works in the factory the works in the fields and the supply chains so what would it look like to create an enterprise that aims to create distributive value and think widely about opportunity and value because it can show up in many forms here's a few examples so John Lewis which is a major store and supermarket in the UK has a employee profit share scheme because it doesn't have employees actually everybody who works there is called a partner all of it's in all of the people who work for the company whether it's the CEO or the person who delivers the box on your doorstep and at the end of the year they have a profit share that this person is holding up this the 17% saying this year it's 17% of your salary profit share so the money made is returned to those who are employed within the company of course that's a very powerful way of distributing value created amongst those who are employed in the company but of course the people who created the value that is sold in John Lewis stores goes far far beyond the immediate employees the people who picked the food who made the clothing who made the homewares on the other side of the world one model that aims to go even further than that is El Puente which is a an association of craft producers and craft shops around the world they have not only profit share amongst the producers but in governance share so they share the value of making decisions amongst all of their organizations so it's very owned in a very very grounded way so distributive ownership amongst all of those who create value in those supply chains another example going back to Houdini so Houdini say you know we want to see the world become regenerative by design and there's no way that one company at a time is going to do it in fact we're never going to get there if we carry on doing business in siloed industrial systems each company with its own loop its own products its own secrets so Houdini say this is one of our top products it's our hoodie here's the pattern here's exactly how we cut it out and here's the details of every single piece of material and accessory that goes into making that we bought this one here it's called that we bought that here that so that you too can use it and when Houdini innovate new fabrics and they produce very high-end clothing so they're often innovating very soft stretchy new fabrics they open source those fabrics whereas many companies would say no no no this is our USP this is exactly where we apply a pattern and this is our corporate secret Houdini say no the opposite we're never going to create a circular economy and in an ecosystem of textile use and reuse if we do that so here it is this is the technology please other people start using it and we can begin to create an ecosystem the last example I'll share here is Lush the cosmetics company that make all sorts of kinds of smelly soaps and many more things Lush is one of the few companies I know of in the UK that signed up to the fair tax mark what does that mean it means they just signed up to make a commitment to say we commit to paying the right amount of tax in the right place at the right time that sounds simple but we know that many companies spend an awful lot of money with accountants and lawyers to ensure that they pay the least amount of tax in the fewest number of company countries as rarely as possible so this is a recognition from companies that we depend upon a healthy society for our business to thrive we are a member of society and we must give contribution back and it's the opposite of saying you know corporate tax avoidance innovation we are going to sign up to pay fair tax where we do business again these are just examples from specific companies and I'm sure people can think of many many more towards with distributive design they are just illustrations so business that's regenerated by design and distributive bird design to me this is what it means that business is moving towards saying we're aiming to do the doughnut so let's come back for the corporate to-do list and what's a company going to do and I've sat around the table with many companies and put this on the table and said well where are you and it's just a fantastic conversation and I recommend anybody who's involved inside a business to put this on the table say where are we because actually what you'll obviously find is that we're not in one place at all that we're in many places all at once so for example some people might say well the CEO speaks as if we're aiming to do the doughnut grand speeches but actually middle managers are incentive-centivised only to do what pays now so there's a massive gap internally between what we say and what's actually going on inside the company or people might say well when it comes to climate change we are absolutely publicly committed to mission zero but ask me about child labor and I don't think we're doing anything on that so picking off issues and acting only in certain areas so I'm just going to invite now people on this call if you have experience from within a company of any kind whether it's social enterprise or a multinational company I'm not asking that you say the name you can if you want and if you think that's okay you can but I'm just going to invite people who have experience with companies who'd like to and find this a use for reflection if you want to just pop a comment in the chat box and say yeah actually I could say something about a company that I work in or have worked in and I could just unmute for a moment and I'll invite you to and just say something in relation to this list so can I ask that we stay with this because we could obviously go off the sideways in so many directions but to stay here anybody who thinks yeah I could say something interesting about the company that in a split position on this list so does anybody want to offer a comment here I'm going to watch the chat box and see if anybody does oh Caroline is offering a fossil fuel company Caroline if you're offering to talk about a fossil fuel company or you're you're hoping a fossil fuel company you're going to pop up but if you're it's Caroline missing Richard Caroline if you'd like to just unmute and tell us something about a fossil fuel company from this point of view yeah hi everyone and can I ask you to keep it like one to two minutes that will be wonderful go ahead yeah no problem can you hear me yes okay hi um I'm having recently left a company that I was with for some time um I guess I tried to play a role as a bit of an internal change agent and and what I increasingly found is that the although the company was sort of I guess doing best efforts to sign up to net zero and adopt a lot of sustainable principles increasingly the messaging coming from the CEO and the executive was a world apart from actually what was happening with younger staff more purpose driven employees and at the end of the day the rationale has always been um well we need to look after our shareholders in despite the fact that there's the growing number of activists shareholders still um the financial returns tend to um you know outweigh other considerations and and I sense for me that is what it is sort of the crux of the problem at the moment that's holding back many companies where you've got a huge number of employees that want to change but actually the um the shareholder return mindset um that is is really you know the biggest problem we've got in society I think at the moment I've just started working for a public benefit corporation that's dealing with nature-based solutions all the employees have ownership of the company and it is just a completely different scenario so it just shows you that there's ways that it can be done um but you know I really think we've got to break the um the um the the public listed company structure that we've got at the moment that's fantastic and I'm just so happy for you that you you you can feel it in your voice and like I'm in a different space and actually everything you just said is so relevant to what we're going to come and talk about the design of enterprise itself can I ask you to say one more thing because it's so interesting you're saying the the the leadership or the the senior management of the company were increasingly uh just so different in voice to the younger employees and it that's such an interesting tension or opportunity can you just say something about what you felt among the younger employees and whether or not they had their interests and concerns had any traction with that senior leadership or not well it definitely had traction because growing um challenges around more concerns about employee retention and actually what was a company that used to be able to in the UK get the best graduates from the Russell group universities and around the world um more so in um I guess the the global north and the global south was starting to really struggle to attract talent so I think that was one of the the warning signs the company's always been challenged by NGOs um but I think what I did see though was that a lot of the senior leaders started to have you know children of their own and and being challenged by them and and in a way often talked about what they wanted to do but how they felt hamstrung and I think it was own it's only sort of a few remarkable individuals where it felt like something resonated a bit to the point you made earlier about having some sort of personal epiphany it took something like that for individuals to think I will try and um perhaps work harder to really change things but um otherwise I think you know unfortunately a lot of people get tied up in their own you know sort of you know feeling of personal entitlement and the financial framework they're in with their own salary that they also don't see another way out and I think without sort of looking at gender stereotypes what I also started to see was a lot of females start to look at a certain stage of their career looking for more purpose and we're very aligned with actually a lot of the younger staff joining and making decisions to sort of leave the organization there is so much in what you're saying incredibly rich that's why I'm on a don't out economic pause okay but it's so just you just shared so many different angles it's it's fantastically rich thank you um I'm just going to ask uh if you'd like to uh estaban echevaria to to talk about the consumer products company paper tissue if you'd like to and just share something about it in respect again to this uh framework first of all sorry for my English I speak very bad English anyway I used to work in that company for about 30 years as country manager selling diapers and tissue paper and pepper products then I moved to sustainability and I started measuring the impact of the post consumer waste and was one day per year of the total waste of the war so it was huge so we were trying to convince the company to start doing something for post consumer waste in a disposable product like uh tissue paper or like uh used a baby diaper product it is possible there are some small companies doing that in New Zealand for example but they they are not really interested in that that's the real uh reality yeah yes yes thank you and I'm going to ask one more person um because I'm going to keep an answer Michael Lennon he says he's got an anecdote contrasting export forms of US corporates versus German local work this sounds great come on Michael give us your Michael Lennon give us your anecdote it sounds like a wonderful comparison hello everyone I was uh I live here in Washington DC and um I was basically um advising some uh local policymakers around how to be investing uh as as China was becoming a competitive performance benchmark uh whether whether or not the German approach or the American approach the American approach being that you globalize the supply chain as far as possible out uh the German approach being that strong worker centric model of putting um concentrating in every local region the highest value add in each town and um and that so in Germany they might do the most advanced work and everything else got uh outsourced on the food chain in America the whole food chain got outsourced and Germany continues to be a net exporter to China the US does not and that's been a hard reality for for the US to face it's like oh maybe we're we need to actually retain the capacity to do these things or we we don't yeah yeah and so all of these examples bring us back actually profoundly to ownership and finance and expectations and and what Caroline was saying about even individuals saying I want to do differently but I feel hamstrung I feel trapped by the shareholders by those demands great okay thank you all of you for sharing all those and I'm going to ask people to share more things later if that's okay um I'm going to return you can still see my screen can't you um I'm going to come back to here so can business move we're not seeing your you're not seeing my screen okay luckily you told me that that could have been bad okay okay here we go thanks for telling me right so can business move into the doughnut we just heard three examples of companies uh different tensions and more people were placing great examples in the chat can business do this when I found myself first starting working um and having conversations with companies in things like sustainability leadership for uh they'd often want to to bring their products and and the idea was going to put your products on the table let's talk about design your products so I don't know what have I got around me pair of sunglasses you know what kind of plastic is this made from that is this recyclable plastic or not and what could happen this plastic and and the workers ethics and the wages and the terms of condition of where this was made and what kind of packaging so very um they must focus on product design and gradually gradually it became clear to me and to the team at donut economic section lab is like we can talk all we like about product design but actually what we really want to talk about is about business design we want to talk about how you as a company are designed because that is actually what's going to tell us the most about whether or not you can transform about whether or not you can become regenerative and move that way or become distributive and so I began what I started calling very playfully the corporate psychotherapy sessions in the sense that you know if you if you you sometimes hear people saying you know I I I have all these difficult relationships in my life and I need to go and see a therapist to help me and if you go to therapy over time the therapist will make you realize oh it's not all about them it's also about me and I need to look in myself and think about how I am and reflect internally and I worked at Oxfam for decades and worked on labor rights and global supply chains and when we talked to some of the major companies they say well it's very difficult for us because you see as a retailer as a brand we're sourcing from factories all over the world and these factory managers I mean let me tell you they don't do this they don't let all blame blame blame out and we work with them and said hang on you need to look at your own practices and your own relationships so this is that same activity let's look at inside let's look internally to the company and ask how is the way that you are designed and purposed in the world shaping the relationships that you create and shaping the effects and dynamics that you generate in the world so I began by saying let's look at the deep design enterprise and again let's listen to what enterprises are saying and and make it very very stylized and simplified on the one hand there are companies that say well here's the overriding question of our business how much value can we extract from this enterprise 20th century was dominated by a lot of this and we can all think of companies and we've just heard some stories of some of them we can all think of companies that operate like this and boardroom meetings run like this and reporting goes like this this is what it's about and this is what we celebrate but there are other enterprises other businesses that exist in the world and indeed have existed for a long time some of them that ask a completely different question how many benefits can we generate through the way we run this enterprise and it goes back to that point I said when some companies see the doughnut they say oh we we exist to bring sanitation to the slums of Nairobi we exist to create community here we exist to clean the air we we the reason we set up a business is to sequester carbon by creating timber build housing or we we're just using business as a model sure we make profits we have to that's what makes us a business otherwise you can't open your doors next week and next month and next year but we're not here in order to make profits that becomes a condition for the purpose that we have we're just using business as a vehicle for what we want to do because we think it's a really good vehicle for the change we want to make happening in the world so we can all think of enterprises on both sides of this and I actually felt I heard Caroline just going I used to be there and now I'm here and just that that personal sense that she just radiated and like oh I've shifted now what is it what is it that has some companies on one side and others dancing on the other and can they move to me this is actually the really fascinating question can a company move or do people have to move from companies so what is it that defines the difference it is I believe something we can explore through these five design traits and they will look familiar because they are the five design traits we also brought in the conversation with cities now I first learned to think in this way from the brilliant thinker Marjorie Kelly who wrote a fantastic book called owning the future and owning our future about business design and I really recommend that book if anyone's interested so I'm going to run through these core characteristics of the design of an enterprise its purpose networks governance ownership and finance and then I just invite everybody to have in mind a company that you know one that you love or hate your CEO you're the newest employee you've just left but have in mind a company and think it through does this make sense does this make sense to me of that company and I also say to all the students I teach in or you know whether they're doing MBAs or studying any subject that's relates them to business keep these five design traits in your mind and as you go in the world as you think about going into employment assess that future employee of yours you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you assess them against these five design traits because if you're going to give your energy to a company be be sure and be confident that that company can be part of transformation and this will tell you whether or not they can so let's dive in purpose you hear a lot of people talking these days about oh it's all about purpose like companies purpose and we hear as purpose and soldiers okay purpose fine by the way it has to be backed up by everything else it is not enough just to talk about purpose but of course the purpose of the company is crucial why are we here why does this enterprise even exist what is it in service to in the world and I think some companies are having some very very existential questions and discussions around their purpose and how they can repurpose and is it just a rebranding or a deep repurposing and one company I think must have had some really interesting boardroom questions is Danish oil and natural gas Dong energy which was a classic fossil fuel company and they decided at one point that they were going to move out of being about 85 fossil fuel and 15 renewable energy they wanted to gradually shift in the other direction but what I think they really did was look up a level and say well maybe we're not an oil and gas company we are a look up we're an energy company and actually to be fit and belong in a regenerative 21st century economy the kind of energy we want to be generating is not oil and gas because they moved far faster than they ever imagined themselves and very rapidly became 100 renewable energy they got completely out of oil and gas got totally into renewables wind turbines and so renamed themselves or instead that is a company that's transforming its purpose by actually looking up a level and realizing that if we still want to be an energy company we need to completely change what it means to be providing energy but there are so many companies that are deeply thinking their purpose and how can we repurpose ourselves so that's often an entry point and again I hear a lot of leadership consultants talking about purpose but it's not enough on its own because it has to be underpinned by all the other design traits of an enterprise so let's go to the next one networks and this question asks what networks are you part of who are your suppliers who are your customers who are your industry ecosystem some that you might think are competitors they might turn out to be your allies they might turn out to be your future collaborators in a circular economy crucial to think this through what networks you part of that are actually pulling you back into that degenerative and divisive form of enterprise and what networks you part of that already enable you to pivot forward and that will hold you to your stated purpose and your values when the going gets a bit tough and some networks I hear people again in the in the world of business lobbying and allies and colleagues of mine over the years have said you know organizations like business Europe and CEPHIC which is the European Chemical Manufacturers Association spend millions every year on lobbying in the European Union lobbying to stop the commission from introducing this or that legislation the American fuel and petrochemical manufacturers in fact I think Shell left even Shell left saying we no longer want to be associated with that because actually we want to be seen as a more progressive company than what this network stands for so there's always a first question of which networks are you going to move out of which customers are you no longer going to try to serve which suppliers will you no longer use which company will you no longer keep because it's holding you back from the purpose you aim to have and what company will you choose will you be part of the renewable energy 100 will you join the fair tax mark will you become part of a circular economy 100 what other networks can you be in one company that now bring it down to the level of ticker company one company in the UK that I know of that really uses that power of networking well is good energy which is 100% renewable energy company and they intentionally build very strong relationships between their customers householders whose electricity they supply between their suppliers which might be communities and local farms people setting up renewable energy supply between their industry ecosystem like the recharging points across the nation that together they will make up an ecosystem and their owners they are 60% owned by their customers and they are actually one of the first companies I think in the UK first energy companies be crowdfunded so they launch themselves through crowdfunding knowing that our customers so deeply share our values that they are going to want to own a tiny share of our company and that means that we're owned by the very people who profoundly share our values and that holds us to those values so purpose and networks now to governance now governance of course covers a massive range of things but let's just simplify and say we could be talking about the principles the rules and the practices by which the business is managed we could be talking about the metrics of success and incentives given to staff and we could be talking about the culture and norms of what it's like to be part of this enterprise and how decisions made how things get done who has voice in the room I think we've already heard from Caroline examples of companies that feel that they're almost governed by shareholders governed by that quarterly report that's put out every three months on how the company's statistics are doing and if you talk to a chief financial officer of a major multinational company and I've had the fortune to have really good conversations with some of the years to say look we love to transform just like Caroline was saying we'd love to become regenerative and build ethical supply chains but every quarter I've got to show that we've got growing sales growing profits and growing market share so where's the room for that we are held to such short financial time frames where is the room for transforming we're in such short loops we can't think long on the other side of the spectrum there are initiatives and designs that people set up that aim to precisely overturn this short trap so if you're shareholder around how do you get out of that and of course one of them is to be a big corporation so you can write into your articles of association a declaration that we are here not only to generate profits for shareholders but also for social and environmental value so it's a way of saying we will not be beholden to this idea fiduciary duty that we must maximize for the shareholders there are other values and other stakeholders whose opportunity and value we care about so it's one form of distributive design another is the economy for the common good which was founded in Austria by the regenerative economic thinker Christian Felber it's become a big movement particularly strong in parts of Austria and Germany and in Spain and the idea is to say that individual companies can say right we're going to actually sign up to the economy to come and good we're going to do this the balance sheet and the scorecard and rate ourselves and have somebody come and audit us and rate us in terms of our social performance our ecological performance across a wide spectrum of things and we get a rating and it's not going to be perfect it's definitely not going to be perfect but we've now decided to be transparent about this and we'll publish it and we then can show that we have set ourselves a benchmark that is above any nation's laws but that we're going for this higher benchmark and we commit to that another example would be a community interest company in which is legislation brought into the UK which means you can set up a company but that it's got an asset lock on the money that goes into the company so in fact don't let economic section lab that my co-founder and I set up is a community interest company so it means that the money can never be taken out and paid out to individuals or to shareholders it's locked into the enterprise and if the enterprise is dissolved that money must be passed on to similar intentions and purposes so just some examples and I know I'm brushing over governance I'm sure many many people can bring more things and I'll invite you to hold that and take it into the breakout sessions where you can just bring so much of your own experience into so many different ways that this governance challenge can be addressed let's go one level deeper to ownership and for me now we're getting again like like the psychotherapy that the most profound things lie deepest so we need to talk about ownership how a company is owned because whether it's owned by its founder by its employees by the state by venture capital or shareholders have huge implications for how it's operated one example of company ownership shell this is just a recent something I've recently found online is the quarterly transactions of its large institutional owners so the green arrows are some of those large institutions buying and increasing shares and red ones are them selling so the ownership is constantly shifting and of course it's shifting in response to expected market returns and some people say that we shouldn't think of companies as having shareholders because they don't often hold them for very long we know that over the years the duration of shareholding has actually got shorter and shorter and shorter and some people say no call them share traders because they're not shareholders they're actually sometimes trading them within nanoseconds so that's one form of ownership I'm putting on one side is an extreme and another side a pointy that I showed earlier that had that shared governance it's got 800 shops 800 action groups 40 producer organizations all around the world and its owned 20% share of each of its different stakeholder groups own its 20% share so it's fully owned by those who are fully invested and involved within the enterprise completely different ownership model completely different financing model and financing opportunities as well of course but utterly different design reduce it produces utterly different outcomes because how an enterprise is owned and I've just put the scatter of possibilities here and you can see that some things state owned private equity family owned these could show up on both sides I'm definitely not intending to say that this is good and this is bad they can show up on both sides of the line but how an enterprise is owned of course crucially shapes what sits at the bottom of this signboard and is the most powerful it's how it's financed and what that finance is expecting and demanding and whether that finance in simple terms is saying I'm here for the short term and high financial returns and if you don't deliver them I'm out and that's the share trader or I'm here and investing in you because like you I'm committed for the long term to the social environmental value that you're generating that's why I'm here and yes I want a fair financial return and what's fair is a very existential 21st century question but I'm here with you for the long term so these five design traits have amazing possibilities between them and again it's an excellent exercise to sit down as a company as an organization and indeed whether you're a for-profit or not for-profit I'd say any organization can sit down and actually go through these design traits and you'll learn a lot about your own organization and what's holding you back and what's enabling you to pivot forward and I want to just give two examples of enterprises that I've been really interested in watching over the last few years because there's the big question of can large multinational shareholder owned enterprises become regenerative distributed by design can big business do the doughnut you could we could say the jury's out we could say that personally I'm finding it very hard because I've never seen an example of this so if anyone has one later bring it up in the breakout groups but I'm going to tell these examples so unally but under the leadership of Paul Pullman who I have respect for in many ways Paul Pullman gave Unilever a regenerative purpose the sustainable living plan it's about health it's about communities it's about using soap and products to improve people's health and their self self their self-perception so very very purpose-led intentions around what the enterprise is doing he took it into regenerative and let's say progressive networks of we mean business of a renewable energy 100 so moving in alliances and being part of putting forward progressive business propositions whether it be G7 or the World Economic Forum being part of a public visible movement of enterprise and governing it differently using metrics saying well actually I'm not just going to talk about our share price actually we're going to reduce our use use of water we're going to reduce our carbon emissions we're going to commit publicly to these metrics that we set out they had about 60 of them and of course on his first day of his job he said I'm going to ditch the quarterly reports as he later said you know I did this on my first day in the job because I thought they can't sack me on the first day so first day I'm just like we are not issuing quarterly reports it means you then go to half-yearly reports he said if you're if you're invested in Unilever and you want quarterly results you're invested in the wrong company this is not why we're here we only want longer-term investors so some really clear signs on purpose and networks and governments moving into that direction of regenerative and distributive design moving towards being an enterprise that actually helps to generate social and ecological value but Unilever is owned by shareholders in the market and two of the enterprise organizations that own shares Kraft, Heinz and 3G Capital decided you could say as people sometimes say inside the business they they were leaving too much value on the table that there was just far more value that was being given to all these purposes that could actually be translated into shareholder returns and that's why in February 2017 these two companies launched a hostile takeover bid to try and take over Unilever you might remember it and it was a big battle of whether Unilever would be bought out or not and in the end they managed to ward them off and it didn't get taken over but many more people say inside Unilever the managers were actually told no we now actually need to show a stronger profit return we need to pull back from this generative focus and messaging and we need to show more mainstream returns from within the company so that's a really interesting example then much more recently along comes another one. So under the CEO Emmanuel Faber it was given a really clear purpose the French government introduced legislation saying you could be an entreprise à mission so with that clear statement of purpose and again a bit like Unilever having very clear purpose of all the brands and the intention of being a good force for good in the world moving in again in progressive networks renewable energy 100 being part of a biodiversity movement interesting governance more and more brands were being made B corp brands it was on the A list of so triple rated by the carbon disclosure product project and the the CEO began to list the carbon adjusted earnings per share so reflecting in market prices the actual real carbon cost of share price returns so some very innovative things but again shareholder owned and a long come to so-called activist shareholders Bluebell and Artsen and in March this year again the CEO was ousted from being chairman and of the board and the CEO now of course there's many many complex things going on behind these stories but I found them both really interesting because both Unilever and unknown were examples people will very often give of progressive big shareholder owned business that look business can be for good and that it does pay and it is possible and this is happening from within and yet why is it in both of these very well known cases we see the reversal we see that pullback by mainstream finance mainstream business interests away again I really invite you to take this into your breakout group discussions so let's pull back and I offer you this signboard as a canvas to think and play and put here any enterprise you like whether it's Unilever or Denone or one that you know really well or one that you don't yet know well and you want to research you could put an enterprise here and ask which design traits of this enterprise compel it to be extractive or encourage or entice it to continue to be extracted because there are going to be some is it the way its purpose networks governed owned finance what is it that's actually holding us back and which of these design traits already enable this enterprise to become transformative and to actually transform itself what's already on our side what we already got going for us that we can actually live leverage and do a lot more with what would be the easy change that could be brought about now we could dive in here and spend a long time exploring this and actually about seven years ago I was at a workshop with Unilever staff and did this on the table it was fascinating and I said it out and just said go play and it was amazing the conversation that this released and again you're never in one place we actually started putting multiple objects on each of those arrows saying well the CEO speaks here but middle management for it incentivize here so again I encourage explore but it's never just the enterprise is it I mean enterprises don't operate in a vacuum they operate in a regulatory environment they operate in an industry environment so I'm just going to add another layer onto this which to say let's just recognize even just for now let's bring in the regulatory environment of enterprise so an enterprise is situated in locality it could be a city or a region or a province it's within a nation and it's within an international context and so we can also ask which contextual factors whether it's the city or province or nation or the international regulatory environment are compelling it to be extracted what's pulling it back and again what in that wider context is giving an opportunity to pivot forward so here is a couple of examples I could place on here so that European chemical manufacturers union council I could say from people I know who do lobby work in or do corporate analysis in Europe would say this is this is the organization that's actually paid the biggest amount I think they pay something like 12 million euros in lobbying the European Commission in 2017 so people against corporate lobby would say I'm going to put them there at the international level the network that they hold is pulling mainstream European business back into degenerative design in terms of governance in the UK we have under corporate law section 172 it's very well known because it's it much more than many other European countries it's very seems to be strongly worded in favor of shareholders and it doesn't do nearly enough to say companies have a duty to go far beyond just returning value to shareholders but actually a much wider social environmental value other countries have much much clearer legislation on this so the UK national governance is pulling companies into that old extractive direction and finance many people would say just the power of these international stock markets and shares trading the narratives the norms and the culture around it is just utterly preventing companies that are owned in this way from transforming so there's a three things you could place on on the degenerative side I'm going to do three on the other side entreprise a mission in France the creation of this possibility like the creation of a community interest company in the UK means that there becomes now a new form that we can organize around and and associate with and transform our purpose in Stuttgart the city of Stuttgart has said we are going to actually recognize that endorsement and they're auditing by the economy for the common good and businesses in our city that have done that audit and have got a good enough score actually get subsidies actually get beneficial treatment by the city so the city have embraced that very high standard and then we've got the global alerts on banking on values which is an association of hundreds of banks that actually have purpose and value placed at the heart of their bank saying we want to be the beginnings of a new kind of finance so again if enterprises are looking for a different kind of finance that's a network that's beginning to offer it so you can place lots and lots of things on this frame let me pull back before we go into breakout groups we invite business to the donut table yes you can put your products in the middle of the table but actually we really want to put the design of business itself there we can ask where are you on the corporate to-do list from doing nothing to do your first do what pays do your first share do mission zero it turns out maybe we could be doing the donut what would that mean it would mean aiming to be regenerative by design and aiming to be distributed by design and the world of business is only just really beginning to explore what that could be we're only just moving towards those possibilities and then we have to recognize that it's about the design of business itself its purpose networks governance ownership and finance much of which can be shaped within the enterprise but every enterprise exists within a big context and therefore it's also either pulled back in the old direction or enabled to pivot forward depending on the regulatory and cultural possibilities of that context so we're going to go into breakout groups because I hope that this has just generated so many thoughts and ideas that people want to express and there's hundreds of us on this call at once and we can't all talk about it together so we're going to put you into breakout groups so that you can have plenty of space and time to explore this so here's how we're going to do the breakout groups each break since this is our third week together I'm upping the ante a little bit and upping what we can do here so each breakout room this week has two slides to play with you might only want to fill in one or the other depending on where the energy in your group goes the first slide is around bringing examples of individual businesses and enterprise so if you want to work on this slide which is just almost plain then you would say I want to talk about this company or that company and you could put examples on the slide of how that company is designed either degeneratively or regeneratively and share with the others in your group and you could of course put many companies on this it's not just about one you could also and I'll come back to that in a moment you could also use this slide and say no we want to talk about the company but we want to talk about the local national and international regulatory environment because actually that's what really matters too the context in which business happens business cannot alone transform itself it needs to be transformed by the much wider context so each group will have two slides and that means you you have to follow not just the number of the slides one two three four that you can see down the side screen but the big yellow number in the corner of each slide look for your group number so we're going to give 30 minutes because there's so much to talk about here there were two slides per group as I just explained now here's the here's the trick that we all need to do together to get this right this week so that we don't have the breakdown of the google slides that we had in the first week this week there are four links okay so if you find yourself going to a breakout room one to ten you're going to click the first link and it says link one to ten or 11 to 20 or 21 to 30 or 31 to 40 so make sure you get the right link and Richard is very going to kindly put those links now in the chat box so you can all see them find your breakout room click on the right link and then go to the numbered slide fingers crossed this is going to work again one person in your group share your screen so that everybody is seeing that one screen you don't all need to log into these slides and then one or two people within your group might say hey I'm happy to type down everything that everybody else says so that not everyone in the group needs to open them I think we'll be fine so do I open the rooms in a moment so you're going to bring back insights to share in the chat I know there's going to be a lot and I hope we've got plenty of time just to listen back examples that people have wanted to bring we won't be able to go into long long corporate stories but what we want you to bring is the insight that arise out of that about design and about the transformations that are needed in the world so with that you've got your full breakouts you know what you're doing with your slides you've got two to play with oh last thing I haven't pre-made um text boxes to to write in this week what you need to do is go up here in the top left hand corner that little t is a text box if you click on that and you can click on the screen you can write so the idea is you can write in lots of little boxes around the screen so you can put your comment in exactly the right place on the slide you can also if you want bring in images or whatever you want to do but fill those slides in a way that really makes sense to your group and we really really look forward to hearing what you bring back so I'm going to unshare and Richard is now going to put everybody into breakout groups here comes everybody fantastic okay welcome back everybody I hope you've had really good discussions and explorations of those boards this is one of those moments where we could of course dive into an hour of discussion of what came out and because of the numbers we are and because of the time we have we can't do that but what I would love to do is just invite people now in the chat box to write an insight that you learned first let's take an individual let's take the the topic of a company itself rather than the wider environment think about the company itself an insight a really interesting case study or perspective that you just learned that they've come away with enriched by because of the group that you were in so write something in the chat if you want to about I just now really seen that that's really important or always to ask about that or this kind of solution is possible so let's hear some things coming up in the chat box a line shareholder benefits with planetary benefits by social pressure voting with their wallets metrics for middle managers and staff must match the governance model right over interesting point yeah metrics for middle management can seem an incredibly tedious and technical and bureaucratic thing but of course it massively shapes what the company actually does so David says we did a compositional it's gone off we did a compositional study oh i've lost it i'm flying off the screen we did a compositional assembly of companies that exemplified principles left and right and there was not always agreement interesting networks that use social media to carrot mob or shame and name of friending companies like not my style so there's so many different things that are coming here you don't have to have technical expertise to deliver your purpose you can draw that in from networks you join that's a great point Fabio and that's actually a really great reason why companies should leave old networks that are holding them back and join new ones because of course that's the place of learning that's the place of inspiration so many other companies to learn uplifting indigenous communities that already operate in the donor Eden thank you and that would be so interesting to hear examples of indigenous owned and run enterprises that that operate within the donor and what is it about the way that they are purposed networks governed owned and financed that makes that so the importance of long-term financing are very patient capital that allows purpose-driven enterprise mandates to thrive yeah so Naomi bringing up this importance of financing and of course we could actually go a whole layer deeper and have an entire session around finance and what would it mean to create finance that is in service to business that is in service to life crucial crucial question the corporate business model is promoted in Minneapolis so that's a nice example then of a state actually and a place actually promoting the cooperative model and rewarding that and of course there's so much that localities can do highlight actions of people like engine one that brings in long-termism for better profit sustainability interesting so some some example interesting examples and then emmy says can't cover all the traits at once so step by step and that's a really important point of course you can sit down with an enterprise and say okay what can we already do you know you can make a plan what's the five-year plan of transformation what's the one-year plan what can we just do today can we leave this room agreeing that we're going to do this one thing now that we can already pivot on so so many different ways that this can be responded to okay last one i'm going to mention here seeing post-consumer waste not as a problem but as potential could be a great idea for new companies really nice point estapan um yes wait if waste is food who's going to who are they going to be the entrepreneurs who say i'm going to enter the world of business just spotting so-called waste look at it it's everywhere it's carbon in the atmosphere it's plastic in the oceans it's in the rubbish bins it's in the landfills and actually that's a phenomenal resource and if i start with that as my starting point what kind of enterprise could be set up that turns that into something ingenious and of course companies like uh biobene or companies that have got collecting back um coffee grounds from restaurants on an industrial scale angela is nodding very vigorously uh that say coffee grounds they're just everywhere people drink your coffee all the time and if you go to you might not be able to collect it from households but you can collect it from cafes and restaurants and hotels that every day are dumping it bring it back you can use it to grow mushrooms you can use it to do so many things so capturing the value as it cascades through different levels okay and now i'm going to ask people you may have started doing this already but start sharing again in the chat box some of those more systemic things so uh not just what the enterprise itself can do but what what insights did you get from the conversation around what the city can do what the region can do what the nation can do and what's international and what's holding us back and what's already enabling place to put forward so let's hear both bring bring some come on this is this is the place to vent what makes you vent what is holding the world back from transformation there's an Norwegian company leading the way on reusing waste that's interesting so then that would be you know you say oh there's a Norwegian company and then i would always say hmm let's have a look at how that company is designed what is it that's telling us about what's enabling that company to do it business as usual thinking says yourself so yeah the old mindset the idea that this is how business is done this is the old ways it's incredible how we can focus on regulations but it's the deep culture of what we do and don't do ego says Miguel yes ego can definitely get in the way of having a higher purpose and go through the mindset change that's required for transformation lobbying should be made illegal certainly needs to be tackled it's too easy to buy the cheaper version of things that do not take into account real costs that says Randy yes how do we transform that and then remove this onus well it's up to the consumer the consumer can choose and if people want to choose this then we're going to sell it and all the ways that their onus is put on the consumer to make those choices and Jane Fiona says move from no but to why not yeah so move and say no but we come but to why not do this right so that's about changing that mindset laws reflect values and global goals for the environment and society yes right CEOs who have a Friedman Hayek view of the world says Charlie Hicks yes Friedman Milton Friedman had a profound influence didn't he in the 1970s when he wrote this essay saying you know the social responsibility of businesses to maximize its profits and you just hear that's what I said at the beginning the business of business is business and it's so widely repeated and it's incredible how deep that mindset's gone as a justification and it's a very convenient justification but how do we then transform that and make it clear that that is not fit for the 21st century somebody mentioned greenwashing Natasha yeah with a sad face yes greenwashing and I'm going to talk about that in the moment when I come to talk about how we are working with donors economics and bring it connecting with the realm of business so thank you so much everybody for this brilliant sharing and I really hope you had good conversations in those breakout groups and have filled in those boards I can't wait to go and have a look at what you filled in there okay I'm going to start moving us towards the home run because we've only got 15 more minutes here today golly time flies so I'm going to share my screen here we are this is where we left off some of the core ideas that I've shared today put your product on the table but more crucially put the design of your enterprise on the table where are you on that corporate to-do list can we be regenerative and distributed by design it's about the design of the enterprise and the context in which it operates and this is all needing to be transformed and I was challenging what kinds of businesses can do it and can they transform or will they get left behind that is I think the existential drama of the world of business that is today so these are the topics we've covered and I'm going to come now to the last one which is deals business policy and our balancing of openness and integrity and I'm really pleased to be able to share this day because it's so important for us at Donut Economics Action Lab to share this with everybody here because I know that we're getting excited and talking about doing business but I really it's important to put that in context so I'm going to use the framework of Three Horizons to talk about how we think about the donor and our relationship to business and what is and isn't a permitted to happen at the moment so this is our fear and it's a really really real fear you know ever since the donut was first published I've been called by companies big banks you've all heard of fossil fuel companies big chemical companies please can you do a talk about the donut record something for our website we'll give you five thousand pounds come and give a talk come and stand on our stage can we use it we're just going to use it anyway and if that happens then the concept is just like this cool thing to play with in it gets greenwashed because it and by the way it's just sitting on a random section of companies I'm not taking out anything particular against this particular selection of brands but the idea that major brands say oh yeah that's a cool thing to play with let's put that on a website let's talk about that a couple of times it then gets greenwashed like so many other ideas get greenwashed there's a very very real risk and the the downside of that obviously is one it therefore doesn't fulfill any transformative purpose but two if it gets greenwashed in the space of business then everybody else is using it whether it's in cities or community action um or in teaching say oh yeah that was the thing it once was but you know it got so greenwashed so I'm not touching that anymore so it completely degrades and undermines the value of this concept and tool for everybody. So Donate Economics Action Lab we've thought really really hard about how we enable people to use the doughnut in cities and places in education and it's open and use it but in the world of business it's different at the moment I'm going to use Three Horizons to tell you why so here's the framework of Three Horizons and we use this a lot when we think about transformation and strategy I find it a very very useful device created by Bill Sharp and Graham Lester and others at the International Futures Forum. So there's time on one horizon and on the y-axis is what's prevalent what's dominant and there are always three horizons to the future that we can see visible the first one is what we call business as usual it's the mainstream it's the predominant way that things are done now so it's horizon one each one and I'm for the sake of this I'm going to call that that's the degenerative device of economy we've inherited it's business as usual it's very those very first slides I showed it's how stuff is down that's normal and there's something about business as usual that we believe is totally inadequate for our times and so we want it to see it let go and leave this float down is not a prediction it's a desire it's an intention it's a transformation we want to bring about it's definitely not a prediction of what's going to happen so horizon one we believe it's no longer fit for the future and so we want to see it let go and leave thank you very much you serve your purpose it's time to exit the stage then there's horizon three which I'm calling the space of transformative enterprise and it's small at the moment the seeds a bit of present we can all point as people were doing in the chat box we can point to examples of it existing in the world but we want the intention is to see that rise up and become the new normal so that we have an economy that is based upon distributive and regenerative enterprise and then the third horizon is my favorite one it's the horizon of disruptive innovation or you could call it the horizon of disruption because not all disruptions are innovation some disruptive innovation like creating a platform on a cell phone right so everybody's suddenly connected to the internet on their cell phone that is an incredible disruptive innovation that all sorts of enterprises can respond to covid is not an innovation in that sense but it's a massive disruption and it shapes a volcano going off as a disruption an election is a disruption it disrupts things as normal and it creates opportunities either for business as usual to reinstate and reinforce itself or for transformative enterprise to come through so we can ask about business as usual what is business as usual how can we let it sorry what is what is that emerging future and how can we help it arrive and arrive well and bring it forward faster and what about what is dying business as usual how can we help it let go and leave but crucially how can disruptive innovation be harnessed to bring forward that transformative future rather than get captured by business as usual and one of the things in that space of disruption we could say is the concept of the doughnut it's it's a conceptual disruption and it's there in the space along with many many other conceptual disruptions how does it get played with how does it get interactive with by business as usual and by transformative enterprise and what's going to happen to it and a doughnut economics action lab we always say when business as usual meets a disruptive idea something is going to get transformed and it's our job to ensure it's not the doughnut it's our job to ensure that when doughnut meets business as usual business as usual is the one that gets transformed because here's the risk the risk is that business usual captures the doughnuts it's all thank you very much we'll pick you up we'll we'll sponsor you we'll give you a bit of funding we'll bring you on to our stage and we'll we'll knock some of the more challenging edges off you make your bit more business compatible and and we'll eat you for breakfast and actually because what it's trying to do is continue its life and it'll pick up any resources and assets and possibilities and disruptions that it can then turn into ways of continuing its dominance so in this scenario the doughnut just gets captured by business as usual turned into corporate greenwash and as you can see transformative enterprise doesn't come through because the doughnut in this case doesn't do anything to serve it because it's been greenwashed so we're not going to associate with that that's called h2 minus don't want to see that happen what we want to see happen is that the doughnut connects together with transformative enterprise and actually brings through that transformation much faster we see a faster let go of business as usual we see a faster rise of transformative enterprise and that's h2 plus so how do we make that happen so this is the background to our thinking and basically it comes down to saying when you realize that you're part of something that's a disruption you might be an organization you might be a campaign a movement there might be an event that you're part of but you realize that you are one of the disruptive forces or engage in a disruptive force you need to think really really critically and carefully how do then we interact how do we engage with horizon one on what criteria under what conditions and how do we engage with horizon three so that we find that we are being harnessed for that future not captured by the old so here's deals policy in space of business first of all we have put into the public domain a tool that's on our website called when business meets the doughnut and i've presented a lot of the core of that today in fact i've gone into some more detail and added some more things there and any enterprise is absolutely welcome to take that tool and take it into your company and explore what's in there as an internal conversation but because of the risk of corporate greenwash to us we have really clear conditions around this i would really invite everybody on this call to go to our website and read this for quality don't even try and read it right now that right i'm going to give you a quick summary of the main points but please do go and read it especially if you are interested in this particular business angle with the doughnut so here are the main points first of all businesses can currently only use the doughnut for internal reflection that tool everything i've shared here you can take it into an enterprise you can sit at the table and you can have these conversations and there's plenty to talk about but it cannot be used in public facing communications by companies on a website in speeches in presentations it's not there for companies to talk about publicly this is from internal work first secondly consultants currently cannot say we are doing don't economics consultancy we are consulting on the doughnut because that hasn't even been set up yet or what that would be so that is not permitted at the moment only not for profit organizations can host public facing events and initiatives related to the doughnut so and it says in the university or a city an NGO but not for profit organization and we ask that no individuals or organizations hold public facing initiatives or events around the business and the doughnut until we change our policy so i know that must feel like a lot of things stopping and i'm just going to ask at this point that you anybody being oh that's frustrating we really want this concept to be valuable for transformation which takes time and so we need to put in place the team and the tools and the practices that can really make this transformative work happen so if you believe in this concept please stand with us and recognize the importance of doing this well and opening up when we are ready to open up so we plan to open up this very important area work soon in fact we just finished yesterday um receiving applications for deals business and enterprise lead we are shortlisting right now and we are going to be bringing somebody into our team in september and when we open that up all of this will then be a space where we can say this is how and when because we know this can be an important tool with business and we ask if you want to stay in the loop and when's that happening and how can consultants get involved what could businesses do and how please sign up to our newsletter and you will be the first to know and of course join deals community and you will then be inside of it and be the first to know okay let me pull right back and thank you for hearing that and i hope understanding that last week we looked at when the doughnut meets the city and this week we asked can we do business in the doughnut and there's so much going on in there i'm really really excited about next week because i've done a lot of presenting here concepts and a few examples but next week i'm so looking forward to bringing along three people who in their own places at very different places and very different scales have been putting the doughnut into practice in their place so the first one is imiko who is a phenomenal change maker based in birmingham in the uk and she has taken the concept with her team of civic square they're taking the concept of the doughnut saying what would it actually mean to do this in the fullest sense at the level of a neighborhood in one of the neighborhoods in the city of birmingham and she's going to come and tell about the work that they're doing they're just building this but with such incredible intention it's the most local scale of putting the doughnut into practice that i know of laura melcher has been one of the core people in the team in brussels when the secretary of state for economic transition contacted us and said we want to put the doughnut into practice in the brussels she brought on board an organization called confluence who do a lot of participatory change making in the city in the capital region of brussels and laura is going to come and talk about the way and the different ways that they've really interestingly downscaled the doughnut to place across the region from particular buildings even down to the idea of particular object and then juan carles gollum i know him because he is a data guru in the city of amsterdam but he also happens to be a resident of the island of coracao in the caribbean and we met through doing the dutch at the amsterdam doughnut and he just took the idea right back home to coracao and has worked with the government there to create the first island nation doughnut in coracao so he's going to join us too and talk about what they're doing there and how they're using it so we're going from a neighborhood to a capital region to a nation three amazing changemakers they're going to join us next week it's going to be them sharing their stories and i'm going to be inviting you just to put lots of questions for them in the chat box my job is a great one i'm just going to be pulling out your fantastic questions and you'll get to just hear from them what it's like to be in the challenges and the innovations of how this works in practice so i'm going to stop there and pass back to jim but just to say it's just been great for my point of view another great week of really interesting sharing so much richness going on in the chat boxes can't wait to dive into all those google sheets you've been working on i am of course again going to share the slides they will be put together they'll be shared on the website so you have them and i invite everybody to have this mental map of five design traits of business in your head for any organization you encounter can it be transformative by design thanks so much over to you jim thank you kate uh one thing to underscore about what kate has just said particularly in anticipation of next week everyone is that at the heart of our masters in regenerative action are not your traditional master's theses where you write something up but impact projects that will empower you to change the world and become as ed moeller puts it of regeneration first responders and so that's just a very important aspect of our mra and that's one of the reasons why we have some additional core courses beyond kates one of which will be offered by joe carbone and the green project management because we want all the students to actually go through the process of you how do you um be regenerative by design what does that actually mean uh practically concretely in real projects and so that's something just to bear in mind because if we're going to make the kind of difference we not only have to understand uh donut economics but as we'll see next week we need to learn from uh people that are actually making a real difference in the world and in that sense at the heart of of the mra is the process of transforming conversations that matter into actions that make a difference so that'll be the the final the grand finale for our course next week but then again as i said at the beginning of the of the program everyone mark your calendars for the following wednesday same time uh on wednesday uh july 7th where we want to have an open house where we can answer questions talk about the impact projects uh and the various aspects of what we're now beginning to build we're in discussion around building an incubator accelerator uh program uh we're talking about internships uh we want to build us community for everyone in the mra on our social platform uh the u b verse there's all kinds of aspects to the mra uh that we want to bring to your attention so thank you kate thank you everyone we'll see you next wednesday same time uh same station for the fourth and final lecture bye for now bye see you then