All right. Well, hello everybody. Welcome back to another let's discuss with Parsons TKO I am your always fun and chipper and drink too much coffee hosts Tony Cappuccini and the CEO and co-founder of Parsons TKO and Today for our topic of let's discuss taxonomy. I'm joined by two of my colleagues Nate Parsons and Stefan Bergkrieger who you may have seen in another episode or two But I'll let them just introduce themselves the cases your first time joining us Maybe Nate you go first. All right. I'm with as Tony has mentioned I'm a Nate Parsons chief strategy officer of Parsons TKO and also co-founder And I'm Stefan Bergkrieger chief analytics officer at Parsons TKO and I lead the data strategy team Where we spend quite a lot of time talking about taxonomy actually It's become sort of a daily Daily conversation for us as taxonomy touches a lot of parts of how organizations understand their content and their performance So very much looking forward to this one So, you know our let's discuss conversations are Informal but informed Topics of things that we like to discuss as a company. We were having these types of conversations internally And literally today's was from a ginormous slack thread that started two days ago between Stefan and Nate That was on the topic of taxonomy It comes up a lot in conversations here So to kick it off. I mean, I think The word taxonomy. I mean, I've been in the game for 20 some years now I remember at a certain organization I was working at in 2007 or 2008. I had It was like a seven foot tall sheet of paper with all the possible words And we had all we actually had a library staff at the time so when they were getting in on it And I would take this to the executive all these different vice presidents offices But you need to decide on these words You know, that's but that's one basic probably understanding taxonomy and but it's just to note that I I think the word Potentially has lots of different meetings for different folks Which probably obscures or hinders what we really mean by it from the technical sense Of how I can help an organization. So I hope that's maybe a good leading question for For one of you to dive in with Yeah, that's is the word too big. I don't know. Can we define it? Yeah, it's interesting You know, I think You know the way that for a lot of folks that they got they first encounter taxonomy and where it's kind of Been historically a part of the digital landscape is that it's been something that happened on websites where You know content items would have these Tags these like words at the bottom of the post or the story or whatever that would be The summary of the three important or five important kind of things that the story was about and they were sort of these almost summarizations of longer form content and You know Because of that and because of the way that a lot of people thought about them They're often applied after the fact people would write a story and then they would think Ah, what is the story about and they would select the content items that they thought it was from This list and that would become the taxonomy that was applied and over the course of time People sort of waffled between two kinds of polls one where they wanted to be very exhaustive And they would have these really big taxonomies like those pages and pages of things where it was like Oh, well northern ireland is different from southern ireland, which is different from western ireland But this is also about wintertime in ireland and those would all get different tags on the story, you know And then there was the other school thought which was like no It's going to be highly managed and you can't make up any other tags And it's just going to be this thing So if you had a story about ireland and you didn't have an ireland tag you're like, well, it's about the uk That's close enough bam going to put the uk tag on this thing and then off you go right and like those are Kind of the ways that most taxonomy got applied and because of that, you know sort of Usage, you know the way that it often was used by users once it had been applied is they would click on those tags to see more stories About that particular topic and what they would see is then a big list of content that all shared that tag, right? And so that was kind of taxonomy is a system, right? And as you can imagine, it's all pretty unintentional It's pretty divorced from you know organizational strategy And it doesn't have a lot to do with helping the user understand what your opinions are, right? Because they don't discover the taxonomy in full they discovered in these little atomic pieces, right? They find one tag and that's all they know about your taxonomy. They don't really get to see your understanding of the You know descriptive world the way your taxonomy is organized Yeah, I mean I'll I'll jump in there. I'm getting climbing back on board. I have to say given my Irish family members some of the things you said about Tagging Ireland in different ways or hard to recover from but But I will say that I think that's exactly right And I think that heritage of taxonomy in the web world has been a really tough thing for people to overcome And this stems from a conversation I just had yesterday where That use of taxonomy as a way to browse your content Is actually not that engaging a user experience for users And so I think a lot of people have this heritage. This is the one way they've ever seen taxonomy used on a website That's the most forward-facing way that it's used on a website And then people who watch the analytics say oh well people don't even really use that So why should I care and so it gets really neglected in a lot of ways? But I think that misses out on this whole world of opportunity Of ways in which taxonomy can be leveraged both through taking those features those sort of traditional features of taxonomy on a website And making them better actually spending some time on user experience Figuring out how you can use it to You know syndicate content. Well, I think yeah, we could we could go on and list a whole bunch of ways In which which taxonomy can be used UX wise, but then I think beyond that There's taxonomy in its role for reporting and measurement being able to actually explore what People do with your content based on how you think of your content. There's taxonomy for You know strategic alignment. There's taxonomy for integrating your systems And so I think there's just so many different ways to to slice and dice your content And and reach into you know the the different use cases of those taxonomies I don't know Nate. I mean of all those things. I mean which ones which ones I guess Have you seen the most potential for organizations to do something new and revolutionary? Yeah, I think the the the first one is just switching around where in the strategic process taxonomy emerges or occurs, you know, which is to say like You know every organization I've ever encountered has an a theory of education or a theory of change about how the world is and how it could be better and how they can influence it and that's often represented in An ephemeral and kind of conversational way within those organizations and it's rarely captured in any kind of visual document or any kind of strategy document and You know Ironically there are millions of things that look just like taxonomies that people don't call taxonomies to help come up with their strategies Like two popular ones are mind maps which people do to kind of brainstorm and find all the things that are connected And concept maps which are how are these two concepts related? Which one is important in the hierarchy and how should you learn things like oh this one before this one before this one? That's sort of order of operation of things And you know those documents are really taxonomies, you know, they're just not considered as such And they're rarely formalized as such they're used as initial tools And then they are graduate to other things that don't even look like those and they're kind of left behind And then they sort of sometimes reemerge in some kind of, you know, frankenstein format eventually back through the taxonomy system to get supplied But the most revolutionary thing is just to start and continue using a visual taxonomy document, you know, and I think that That does a couple of amazing things in the organizations to do it one They have serious conversations about the kind of Content and the kind of outreach they're going to conduct because they, you know Need to be able to put content into each of the taxonomy buckets that they're creating, you know They also create consensus around what are the The correlations of topics like these three atomic things roll up to this bigger thing and that's important And we want to talk about the bigger thing And it's really easy for experts especially to miss the middle right They start with their mission and they get right down into the details But then that flow of like hey this major concept is supported by all these minor concepts We're working on and we chose these minor concepts because they help advance this major concept Is often sort of undersold or implied but not actually spoken to So it helps with that and you know, I think there's much, you know Sort of dramatically from a systems level when you start and use that taxonomy It doesn't just exist on the web it exists on You know content records in the crm and exists and how email and outreach is conducted It exists and how reports are quantified it reports how funding is allocated it reports in terms of strategy Oh, we're going to do this this year and you know in two more years We're going to stop working on this part of the tree We're going to add this part of the tree and it becomes a management function So I think you know ironically this the most amazing part of it is just starting with it and sticking with it But it's it's like, you know done by you know a hundredth of the organizations we run into So as you guys are talking i'm i'm sitting here and i'm thinking We drive really hard into digital transformation, right every organizations needing to do this now You like it or not it is here and you've got to start maneuvering And taxonomy today in that essence in my head it becomes this underpinning, right? Like it actually becomes an essential element Where when I think of it was funny because you're you're talking about tagging and all the different tags and All I could think of was web 2.0 now you can like Do the content yourself so it was web 2.0 to blame but you know there was this moment of oh I get taxonomy It's not this crazy thing that librarians talk about all the time. It's this other piece of information I could put out for findability Because when the web was still a little newer, right? Oh, I want to really make sure that because everyone believed at least I did I think in like 2002 that if I added these tags Somehow some search engine Maybe google call it would grab it and everybody would find my stuff So I guess two things, right? I mean does it really help with findability? Where where does the google machine play into things like this and then thinking about taxonomy? I think you've said it before and maybe step into taxonomy as a strategy, right? Because that that really underpins and strengthens The componentry of a digital transformation thoughts I mean, I'll I'll speak from the why is it? I mean, why is it useful in the in the technical side and the technical systems? I mean, I think one of the biggest things. I mean if you want the exciting answer Uh, personalization personalization and marketing automation. They all completely depend on consistent and comprehensive and well managed well curated taxonomies You know, Nate was talking about how taxonomy is Can be and should be Reflected across all of your systems all of your systems have to play a role in creating a cohesive user experience for your audiences and unless you can figure out here's The topics that I cover on the website here are the topics that people are interested in Here are the topics that we're emailing people about Unless you can connect the dots between those you can't create that cohesive experience every every Time you talk to a person it's from scratch and they're just a new person In the way you're writing for them. And so taxonomy can be the connective tissue between all these different systems And so I think you know, this is even setting SEO aside. How do you SEOs about how do you find Help people find you but once people have found you how do you build a relationship with them? And and that's where taxonomy is crucially important for you to be able to learn about your audiences and their interests In a structured way that Your systems can then also use to make decisions about outreach So I think I think that's you know that alone. I think it makes the case for for taxonomy Yeah, just to to plan that a little bit, you know, one of the the coming evolutions in technology is the movement from systems that filter content Dictionaries down to what you're looking for like google tries to filter the whole web down into like the 10 or 20 Things that things you might be interested in to a systems that try and understand your intent And then try and match things that fit your intent better And you know, everyone has sort of experienced this with either syria or lexa or google assistant or one of those systems where you're like Tell me the weather in denver, right? And it tries to figure out that you want to know the weather report in denver colorado Because you're in the united states and it's implying all these things and it's trying to figure out your intention And then give you data that fits your intention And you know taxonomies are an important stepping stone to that because do you think about it? From just a pure content perspective when you apply a taxonomy term to a piece of content You're declaring an active intent. You're saying I tried to make this content about this term You know for better or for worse for more accuracy or less accuracy That's what you're declaring and I think that there's also going to be an evolution What is in the taxonomy as well? You know taxonomies historically have been sort of almost You know library or research library focused in the sense of like, oh, we'll have a region's taxonomy And it'll have all the places and we'll have you know Concepts taxonomy will have all the concepts in it or something like that But you know, of course, those don't really include intent, right? Like are you trying to learn about this thing? Are you trying to keep up with this thing? Are you an expert in this? Are you a student in this? And I think that the next evolution in terms of how we're taxonomy is going to go is going to start to pull in some of those intent factors into taxonomy because I think it is it's part of the learning, right? Like if you have a model for how somebody Should learn about a concept, you know, you take them from first hearing about it to a journey Through it and then eventually, you know, some level of understanding or expertise in it And I think you know, that's similar to how You know a lot of nonprofits try and think about engaging their audiences, right? Like we want to take somebody from first hearing about the nonprofit Becoming a strong, you know booster of the nonprofit or having a lot of affinity for the mission, you know And I think all of that sort of speaks to their being intention sort of latent in these like sort of systems and in these content And you know taxonomy is I think will continue to evolve to include intent as part of the the strategy captured with them So I have several thoughts now from that Uh, and I don't I have us throw them all out and then you all decide how you want to to take them from there. I mean On the intent piece You know, interesting. So what if I was at my what if my organization had a great taxonomy? But now I want to evolve it or adapt it or tweak it Can I do that without losing All of the great connections, you know, it's definitely to your point for this data reporting I was able to do and the journeys I was able to how do I evolve it. What does that Do and you know, we also talked about mapping it between systems If it feels at least in my experience It always seems to stem from a communications website perspective And then there's always the debate with whoever the program or department is that might own some knowledge area It's rarely ever on my experience out from the crm experience That goes back into the other places. So that's a whole bunch of like where my head went And you know how my brain goes like an amoeba, so I'll let you all attack what I threw out there However, you'd like to if you've got thoughts on it Yeah, I'll dive in real quick just that um, one of the things that the we try and bring to You know, one of the perspectives we bring to our client engagements, which I do think is pretty unique to to ptko is this concept of Portfolio management and what I mean by that is that we try and describe both the effort it takes to do something The value business value produced by doing that thing and the time period in which you're going to both commit to doing something And reevaluate doing something and potentially, you know replace or modify or evolve something at the end of that And you know, I think content libraries. That's a key one, right? Like people are always like, oh, you know How do we revisit old content or how do we deal with still content? The same thing applies to taxonomies, right? Like where the taxonomy exists really in a period of time You know, we kind of see it as this like permanent like obelisk that's been planted into the sand But the reality is it's like a crop that we plant every year and sometimes we need to change the mix, right? We might need, you know, more soybeans this year or more corn this year And that's the same thing with like how we actually Create things that are measured by the taxonomy, right? Like we may have more content in one area We may have a new sort of strain or new evolution of things that we want to add to it We may want to like let some things like fallow for a little while And we may decide that something we're never going to do again And you know, I think that the key for evolution there is just that it's planned and intentional You know, I think that what really happens in a lot of organizations is that they say we want to start doing x And so why stops because there's not enough time or ability to do it Not because there's an intentional plan to sunset it And I think that's where most of the business value is lost and much of the user dissatisfaction occurs, you know Instead of saying, hey, we know you're trying to do x and we're focused on y now And here's where you can still find what we did on x and it's still relevant But it's sunset a lot of organizations kind of play the shell game of like, oh, where are we creating content? We won't tell you and you won't know you'll just have to discover it, you know And you won't find the places that are stale and we're not covering because we're not going to tell you that either And I think that's a real trouble, right? Like it makes them it makes them feel like they're covering more ground But really what they're doing is obscuring their best and newest work And I think that's part of the the evolution piece, right? Like it needs to be intentional and not just a matter of capacity And Tony, I want to go back to your question and build on Nate's word intentionality And I think that question of why people think of taxonomy in the web world and usually only in the website world And where that disconnects to all the other systems comes from I think a lot of it just has to do with the the history of websites and content management systems I mean you think about Drupal, you know, you know 10 years plus ago Taxonomy was one of the core native features when you're building a new Drupal site. It's right there. What's your taxonomy? And so I think structurally It was forced on people a little bit in the web world for for good And I think that was a you know one of the positive aspects of those early approaches to content management system building But you don't have that and it's not as obvious a piece In a lot of other systems when you think about how CRMs are designed when you think about how Social publishing platforms are designed when you think about email marketing systems I mean, you know when it comes down to a taxonomy The difference between taxonomy and and metadata and tags It's all semantic. You know, they're they're all similar concepts. It's all information about the thing that you have Whether the thing you have is a piece of content on your website a person in your crm a message that's going outbound It it's all metadata and I think one of the one of the key things that differentiates taxonomy as you know capital T taxonomy Is that intentionality it is planned metadata It's metadata with a strategy metadata with a purpose and metadata that you use to organize your thinking You know the way you structure Everything that you do with your audiences And so I think that piece is really important And and I do think there is you know to that You know, how do you move forward with it having that intentionality where you say this is how I'm going to manage my content And in all the different dimensions, whether it's topic whether it's category region Audience intent call to action all of these things could be a taxonomy It's just a question of how you want to represent your content strategy and your audience engagement strategy in the systems that execute those things And and having that parity is is really crucial So, you know, I would say it took a from where you started there, right where People seem surprised that it should be in these other systems I'll say I'm surprised that in our data strategy practice how often it kept coming up from you Because I wouldn't have thought about that right in my experience being in communications or marketing and coming Oh, sure. Why do I need this taxonomy to go to my data strategy and my reporting? so I Yeah, what do you want to say about that because that that was new-ish to me But I'm totally supportive of you. I'd like the rest of the world to know why Why you talk about it though and where it it creates limits for the work that you do Yeah, absolutely. And I mean we've I think we have a whole other Um episode about this and I'm sure we will have many more But in short when people Ask questions of their data it is to inform their strategy And so the kinds of questions they ask are How does our content about this topic perform or how does our content by this department to perform? Or how does our content designed to get people to sign up for the annual gala perform? All of these things are context about your content about your organization And in order for analytics to report on that analytics needs to be informed about that and and Fitting your taxonomy into your analytics is what makes that possible because google analytics when you set it up It knows nothing about the website that it's running on it knows nothing about your organization And so until you teach google analytics, this is This this is what the topic is on any particular page unless you give it that context It can't report out certainly not cleanly not without hours and hours of tedious lining up rows And doing it in ways that you're certainly going to do differently next time And so that lost efficiency lost consistency So so having that mapped together from your cms into your analytics and then from your analytics back into your crm Um and and being able to follow the thread Of engagement across topics across content types whatever question you might want to ask Is is really transformational for a lot of organizations Yeah, just just to tag on to that if I could real quick, um You know one of the reasons we have this this approach this engagement architecture approach that we talk a lot about is because it's really An organizational operating system, you know, it's a way for organizations to understand How to cohesively and strategically Configure all of their systems their business processes and even their staff time and allocations In a way that marries up and supports the strategy that they're trying to pursue You know, and I think that You know step in what you're saying, you know, just fits that to a t and really explains it well Which is that you know, the organization to work well has to have a unified operating system for what content means What concepts mean what the strategies are what we're pursuing How we report on them how we adjust and try to optimize, you know The tactics that are you know being used to Pursue a strategy and what a strategy may have reached a plateau that is sufficient You know, maybe it's time to work on the second strategic goal because the first goal is sufficiently met You know and none of those things can happen if you're fighting yourself and fighting your own You know data inequality problems and all sorts of other things to try and get to the those sort of business insights and You know, that's part of what taxonomy is really critical for is that it is one of the you know key You know structural beams in your you know your platform, you know And if you don't have that your you know operating system is going to perform Inefficiently and you know probably inexactly Yeah, and once you have this in place so many new things become possible I think a lot of organizations that integrate this for the first time Suddenly learn a lot about their content I think a lot of organizations make assumptions about even even something as basic as what they produce Uh, and and once you actually start being able to track it you can say Oh, well, you actually produce five times as much about syria as you do about jordan And and being able to actually see that difference in terms of staff effort in terms of editorial process Uh, you know, there's so many things you can learn from this I mean if you include things like publish date, uh, you can actually see timelines of when your organization Talked about certain issues Um, there there's just so many insights About your audience about engagement, but also about your organization that you can start to to collect The more and more you represent your your content strategy in your data All right, so i'm listening to y'all and i'm taking a day and i'm absorbing it and you're winning me over but My head goes to two places again. What why? Every website, you know, we know this we even say we don't build websites, right? But we still do website redesigns for organizations, but we refer to them as business systems, right because it is But every website redesign goes back into let's talk about our taxonomy Why does it always end up there? Why are we not settled and then my my secondary thought to that is okay I redesigned two years ago And we fought for three to four weeks about these terms and nailed it down and whittled it enough Now you're telling me I got to change it again or do I have a solid base to build from? I leave my anxieties Well, I think uh If taxonomy is something your organization focuses on and has a lot of sunlight on then those website redesigns can usually Leverage it and use that as a jumping off point to make good decisions about how to improve the website You know and I think in the very best cases The website's deficiencies or the the reason you're you're improving or changing the website are based off the taxonomy You like the taxonomy is trying to do x and the website is preventing it from achieving that goal You know, but the reality is for a lot of organizations, you know The the organizations that don't have much sunlight on their taxonomy or don't treat it as a strategic planning tool Is it those redesigns become a way to? Suddenly rethink how outreach is occurring and to rethink what organizational priorities are about communications and and concept mapping and concept, you know communication to the outside world And so they kind of naturally always reopen the taxonomy door because they're really pointing at the real underlying problem, which is that there's not a consensus of what the strategic plan of attack should be for Content creation and outreach based off of that and education and motivation based off of that And you know if that core piece were well settled then the taxonomy probably wouldn't change that much Website redesign and website redesign, you know if it did it would simply be optimizing not wholesale changing, you know, but the reality is it's you know, most Executives at nonprofits or even most organizations have never seen their taxonomy aren't aware of it And we're certainly never asked to get strategic guidance or input into its creation And so I think that that just kind of highlights the problem, right? It's like the back of the train when it needs to be the front of the train and because of that when executives are trying to Notionally move towards it. It creates a lot of cascade effects down into it But it's always addressed downstream instead of being brought back up to the front and said, okay Let's nail this down. Let's get this. This is our guiding document from then doing other kinds of like web designing things Like site maps and content types and structures and all that I think I think what I would say first to your question, Tony is That if you have put work into your taxonomy, I am not telling you that you need to change your taxonomy The first thing you need to do is to Integrate your taxonomy into more of your systems. I humbly would suggest analytics first and I think With analytics integrated with your taxonomy You are going to learn a lot about it And you are going to learn a lot about how your organization uses it And you're going to learn a lot about how your audience is respond to different parts of your taxonomy Once you have learned those things Um, I think you may want to change your taxonomy because you're just going to start to see these are The answers. Um, these are the things that are working well These are the things that aren't getting any sunlight that aren't delivering any value And I think that's going to drive changes to the organization Organically without needing to have a summit without needing to do a week's long process I think just day to day and Meetings that your staff have with one another about how to plan the website I think you could start to see that evolution and then I think it truly is evolutionary and not something Fast and hard and painful. So I think I think that's really got to be the first step for a lot of organizations And if you allow for that kind of data informed growth, that's made possible by integrating your taxonomy into your analytics Then I think you can actually put off a lot of the hard changes that that you know, you're talking about I think you know to Nate's point if uh, if you have your taxonomy up to date and you're managing it well And you're using what you learn about it to improve the way it's represented on your website You're probably pushing off your next website redesign And and I think you can actually get more from what you have Uh for a longer term And just to tie in that one last thing that did make me think of something else, which is that uh You know one of the things that the taxonomy Can do from both the data perspective and the content strategy perspective this helped you understand if you are Inadvertently as an organization creating, you know too much content in one area and too little in another And most importantly on that what the cadence of that creation is, you know There are certain sorts of content that are kind of like gateway content to your your You know deeper materials and those ones are often the things that that you need to make sure are happening on a regular basis And the content pool and that is increasing in the right amount, you know Like uh, it's really common for say for think tanks to write a lot of expert content But not a lot of on ramping content and maybe not enough, you know Summarization content for policy makers, right? And like that's a simple place where like having a taxonomy in place that is reported on well from data might really Change your Internal focus about just content creation and you know that might have far more It's very likely to have better impacts than redesigning the website, you know Because even if you redesign the website to have a really nice on ramping place if it's a ghost town That's not going to help any, you know, I think you really have to have a whole You know 360 view of these things you can't just change, you know the delivery and assume that, you know The things you're putting into the delivery are better, right? You have to go back to the factory and figure out What's happening for you get to delivery? So, you know transformation digital transformation is big tends to require But every because you both have said the word several times now, which is integration But the integrator within an organization that you know Even if you're still siloed Work still has to start cutting horizontally to really be what you need to be as an organization now But the tools that are out there Where where should ownership of taxonomy live? Who should be in charge of that? Like where does it start? Who owns it? Are there tools to manage it? How would I manage it? What do I do? help me Help me everyone I'll put my two cents in first here Which is uh the higher the better in the hierarchy is the first thing I'd say, you know the more, you know executive insight The better because it's a strategic focus, right? Like if you if you have someone down in the weeds doing it They might be keeping it up to date, but it might be drifting from the organizational strategy Where really it needs to be a reflection of organizational strategy Um, you know, I'd say as much as possible that person or that department underneath that person should have a facilitator and an organizer and a convener of discussions because a lot of the conflicts that need to be resolved in a taxonomy discussion Are valuable for more reasons than just fixing the terms in the taxonomy, right? Like they have to do with Misalignment or overlap or you know, you know potentially a focus of effort that needs to be either You know coordinated more tightly or more clearly bright line. We separate it, you know, so I think that's key There's tons of tools for managing these things. Um, you know, I'd say The medium to larger size organizations Need to be investing in tools that not just allow the management of this from an editorial perspective to work out Well, but the distribution of the changes to work out. Well, you know, like if you make an update to it How does it get, you know announced to everybody who needs to get with the program? And you know, that's why for a lot of our, you know Engagement architecture or technical infrastructure We often recommend that there's a thing called a taxonomy service or taxonomy API And really what it is is it's a broadcast beacon that all the other systems listen to that say Hey, when I make a change here, I'm going to reflect it here. You're in here And in the very best and most sophisticated ways that often also will tell you what happens to any terms that have been, you know Merged or moved or depreciated and it says, oh, you know redirect term a to term b or term a is now part of term b Or whatever it is, you know, and I think that kind of system is going to be like the You know, uh, this is one of the big separators between really successful and dynamic organizations and ones that are less so Because you know, when you get to voice and other kinds of search Technologies, you don't get, you know, three pages of google results to get it, right? You get one or two answers, right? No one's going to listen to a half hour of Alexa telling them possible results, right? Not going to happen So there's a huge focusing moment coming which is like you got to get closer to the top of the Intention to quality ratio, you know, like if you're down in the like, oh, you'll find it eventually You're not going to be a winner in the new economy And you know, that's part of why things like these taxonomy services that are abstract and technical and behind the scenes Actually are going to be big differentiators for organizations I I agree completely and and I think that You know it answers both of the questions It's who should own it and and where should it live in the hierarchy? I do think higher up because it needs to affect so many systems If it's just the web team that owns taxonomy Then only your website's going to know about your taxonomy and you're leaving a lot of value on the floor And so I think it does need to be high up and and I do think that there needs to be Strong governance around taxonomy, you know, when you think about the organizations who have done it well Um, it never happens by accident It happens because there's a tony running around the office with a six page printout of words You know forcing people to to you know pitch in And and there is that expectation that I can't just click one or two terms and call it a day That we actually have to be thoughtful about how we use it how we relate content to it And then how that relates to to our other systems as well So it does require a good bit of discipline And in clarity and a mandate to do so. So I do think that's important And when an organization does reach the point where it it can invest in something like that taxonomy service That I think is a real game changer because the the lack of consistency or lack of Comprehensiveness in how taxonomy is applied is most often the failing This is something that we run into time and time again Even organizations that have a taxonomy even organizations that have integrated with their data We then report on that data And it says oh well only one percent of your content is about your major topic And and they're like well that that just can't be you know this your data is wrong Well, it's because your taxonomy is wrong because you haven't actually applied it anywhere And that's all we have that's the only way we can know that this content is about your mission and so You know solving that problem the the that discipline question whether that's done through business process You know make it a required field in your systems as you publish things Or just you know you have to tag it because you're going to have to report on it later Having those motivations can help But if you can get to the taxonomy service perspective There you have machine level excellence and consistency Everything goes through the same rules everything goes through the same process and instead of one percent You know coverage of your taxonomy you're instantly at a hundred percent And so that's one of the things you know we've we've talked about a lot and we've you know been looking into Is how our clients can leverage things like machine learning to automatically recognize What tags and terms apply to A piece of content and and make sure that you have that that consistency Yeah, I'll give you one step further on that which is uh if you want to extend your organization's business intelligence out into the social world Having a strong taxonomy lets you do things like map hashtags back to your taxonomy terms And then track how much your strategy has traction or has You know conversation out in the social world based off of those organic tags that are emerging that other people are having conversations about And guess what that's super duper hard to do if you don't have a good taxonomy You know there's been a lot of time debating the mappings of all these things back to things So So it sounds to me I mean we're going for this I could probably we could probably keep this conversation going for a while But we probably should get to a closure at some point So i'm convinced you got me right, uh, but you know when I when I think about the conversations I'm having with our clients prospective clients or just people in the community This always reminds me when I was working more in global development and everybody wanted to fund the vaccine Nobody wanted to build the road Right because building roads that was just well I mean before he dig ditches who wants to do that and but you need roads to get the vaccines to the people who need the vaccines, right? Taxonomy feels that way to me a lot and I think what I'm hearing here, too is There's going to be winners and losers and It's this is all going to happen so much faster than I think Everybody's ready for You know as the conversation was in yesterday Um the executive kept talking about AI in the next five years I was like, I think you need to shrink that down to three And that might even be not enough, right? It might even be less than that So it sounds like this is the type of thing. We got to dive in so What's the starting point? What what do I do today? I'm more organization X you just came in now you've you've got me. I I believe it. I am nervous I don't want to be one of the losers I don't want to get left behind Do I do Well, I think the first thing You know in terms is to narrow the question a little bit even for those organizations, right? Like what are the things the three things that you want to really help people Understand or know or get educated on and then to sort of use that as a jumping off point to think about all the different ways That you need to you know talk and educate them about those things because that's kind of the real basis of starting a structure Taxonomy, right? It's not what do you have? It's where do you want to go? And I think that's the key thing that a lot of organizations need to start with is they need to start seeing this as a way to Document where they want to go and where they want to be successful and a lot less like what do I already have and you know If you see it as a way to inventory the junk in your storage that you're renting Then you're never going to get anywhere, right? Like this needs to be a blueprint for the engine you're building I think that's right and I think immediately after that you need to be able to report on it And I think I think having that integration with the analytics is I mean It's so central to making the rest of your data worthwhile And and more interesting and able to answer the kinds of questions your staff ask And and I think that's probably if you already have a data practice If you have a culture of data if you have staff who are bringing questions about performance I think that's actually really Useful and perhaps unusual place to look to inform your taxonomy is figuring out what you want to know And that might show you some of the gaps in your taxonomy because if you want to know how people respond to content written for the media But there's nothing in your site. There's nothing in your taxonomy. There's nothing in your content types that say this was written for the media it's really hard to report on that and so being able to think through What are the strategic changes you're trying to make that people are asking questions about and you can look at those questions for inspiration That might paint the paint the path or whatever you paint paint a picture For for what your future state taxonomy ought to look like You know, I'm wondering for any of our viewers and an audience that might be made it this far in with us And they're thinking through this I mean, how do you if you have thoughts on How to create the the groundswell or the champions internally to start talking about this like please stop talking about the next system How is that system going to connect to this? Is there a way to find those champions internally? Yeah, whoever the champions the natural champions really are the people who need to get results You know, just to say like the people who who are on the front lines trying to actually make your mission go from theoretical to You know actual and enable, you know, and you know in a lot of organizations, especially in the nonprofit world Those are the people doing development work the people who are getting people to financially fund and support the organization They're natural People to be promoters of this right because they need to create and demonstrate value for the people donating they need to explain why the organization's mission and approach is Successful and likely to work and you know something that should derby should be more of in the world So there there's you know, really what it comes down to are the people who need things done Are the people who are the most likely champions of this the problem is they're rarely In the back office so to speak, you know worrying about all this infrastructure that's getting in the way of them being successful You know, and I think that's one of the tricks here for the empowerment Those are the best allies those people know what needs to be done and what they need to have Reported on what they need to be able to demonstrate what the real motivating factors are You know and that goes also for people who deal with volunteers or anyone else who's really supporting an organization directly right but like We need to connect those folks or those people in organizations need to get connected with the folks at the highest level who are saying Let's make our strategy from here flow through the organization to here where you're actually trying to use it at the edge You know and that middle is where most of this stuff doesn't get You know created or a champion strongly enough And so that's why you kind of need it at the top and at the edge and then they can kind of work the middle So they get it to you know, actually occur in a productive way Any thoughts on that Stefan? I think that's exactly right. You know where my head goes there whenever you're talking about Taxonomy and all the things an organization does all the ways in which an organization does and has thought about their their content their audiences Long-tenured staff You know is where my head goes because I think the long-tenured staff often have A wealth of organizational context knowledge about what things exist Why they were done how they've been used how they could be used You know what the original intent was that perhaps got lost somewhere along the way Um, so I think I think just bringing together, you know anyone who's been around and uh and can talk about that history Is really really powerful and I also think there's there's another piece there Which is that those long-tenured staff can often be the biggest blockers to change Um, and so I think making sure that you engage them in a forward-looking conversation About what could our taxonomy or we should be saying taxonomies Become because there are often many that you have to consider Uh and and really finding the the good ideas that got Left in the sands of time because you know We're not even saying that your future state has to be completely novel and totally new Truth is there's probably a lot of good stuff in your history And so you have to be able to bring it all together You know sift through it find the gold and uh, and then make that a part of the future while also making a plan for the retirement of uh of ideas that have Lost their value Well, it sounds like you know from That desired future state that vision of this transformed organization That the road and the pathway really is built by digging in and getting the right taxonomies laid out um and set into place So with that, I don't know. I mean that sounded like a pretty good close to me But I don't know if you had any last thoughts you want to leave our viewers with Well, just that you know, it's probably a lot of people who work in communications are thinking this but you know Taxonomy and and ontology and taxonomies are all sort of tied to Content strategy and this idea of you know user engagement and what are the stages of user engagement? And what do we need to do to nurture that user engagement? And it's just kind of probably worth pointing out that these are all sort of part of a sort of engagement triangle Right where you need to have the right stages figured out for how you're going to engage users You need content in each of those stages And you need conceptually to be able to measure and manage Where people are in that those stages and taxonomy has kind of been a critical piece of that triangle of making that all happen and You know, if you're not thinking about it that way That's a useful way for communications people to think about it But it is also worth knowing that that's a limiting way of thinking about it because it's not just a tactic It's a strategy And I think for me it's it's finding all the different ways in which you can use your taxonomy As a strategy but also as a tactic And and really making sure that you Well first and foremost connect your taxonomy to your data. I'm a big proponent of that. It's like it's my job But I think beyond that making sure that you Identify the ways in which having your taxonomy in your CRM can help so that you understand individuals interests and preferences Understanding how having it integrated with your email marketing can help so that you can start automating content based on those ideas and interests And I think the more opportunities you find to make taxonomy a part of your reporting or your analyses your systems your Your business logic Your editorial planning process you're both going to get more value out of your taxonomy and you're also going to create more stakeholders who care and Having more people who care about your taxonomy is going to improve How well it's managed and it's going to improve that consistency get you from 1 coverage to maybe 10 or 50 or 70 while you're on your way to Automation and you know artificial intelligence and all that I think there's a lot you can do By making sure you involve the whole organization and your taxonomy both on the consumption side But then also on the production side. So I think there's a yeah a lot of a lot of opportunities to grow Well, thank you both for the wonderful conversation I know I sure enjoyed it dear listener our viewer. If you also did please like us Send us some comments share this with a friend Uh, we are trying to get the word out on lots of different topics and things that we're really passionate about and you know If you're feeling this was good and quality, please share it out there and let us know to it It's fun to see feedback come in Well, thank y'all until next week. I'm signing off. See y'all later. Thank you. Yeah, cheers


Good morning everybody and really pleased to be hosting this special workshop. I'm Paul Beckley. I work for the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. We are really pleased to be part of the Net Zero Festival and this is an interesting session to kick us off. So it's a sunny morning here in Cambridge and we're excited to be speaking with you today. And the purpose of this is to explore effective boards in a carbon constrained world. And with me we have three speakers who will share their experience. We're going to be talking about the capabilities and capacities of boards to lead organizations in a carbon constrained world. We're going to be looking at what will be required for businesses to grow and succeed whilst delivering net zeros. Is that actually possible? And we'll be looking at some of those tricky issues that often we are aware exist within large organizations but actually are sometimes just overlooked. And so this should be a challenging and engaging hour. We're hopeful that the IT will be smooth and things will run really incredibly well. But I know that we're all 20 months or so into a COVID pandemic and actually we're experienced in terms of Zoom. And we've all had that terrible situation whereby things have not gone quite well. But today let's cross our fingers and embark on our journey together. We are going to just share some slides and we are just hopeful that this all runs really smoothly. So I have been working with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability for a decade. And in that time I've worked with a whole host of boards representing different sorts of organizations, whether that's NGOs or whether that's development banks, whether that's the military, whether that's large corporates. And everyone has very similar but quite different issues. And it's a real privilege to engage with boards. And so we're trying to share with you some of those insights today. With the hope that we can come up with an understanding about what we need to have for effective boards in carbon constrained work. I work for a department at the University of Cambridge. Sadly this is not our office on the screen, but actually this is King's College. And for 800 years the university has been at the frontier of trying to drive change. The biggest change that we collectively have is the transition to net zero. What we're hoping is that we could just take a moment just to invite you to share some initial reflections with us by logging into menti.com and using this code which is on screen. And what we'll see is we'll see your views about to what extent boards are equipped to lead their organization in a carbon constrained world. So if you grab a phone and I'm sure most of you have a device or some sorts just to hand just log into menti. And you'll be invited just to complete two questions. And it should come up smoothly. And I'm really hopeful this is going to work perfectly. And our tests this morning have given us a nice scoring system. So hopefully that'll go quite well. And generally what we find when we talk to people is that they think that they as a board are able to lead the organization into a carbon constrained world, but they don't hold a lot of faith that other boards will be able to lead. And so it'll be interesting to see how this question answers and we'll just keep this open for a while. So the code is at the top the websites at the top I'm hopeful that that will run smoothly. But just to take a step back and just to remind ourselves about how organizations change. This is really important because actually the nature of the organization is often perceived to be quite hierarchical quite clear. The people at the top of the board have control. When we go to business schools, we're told that this is what leadership looks like. This is a slide that I took from a chief executive friend of mine, Darith Llewellyn. And actually, the reality is that this is not true. This is just not true, especially in a COVID world whereby we're all reflected on zoom with the same size box. And we can have informal conversations and actually we're living in networked organizations. A few years ago, IBM spoke about the globally integrated single person enterprise. And this is a conversation killer, but actually it's really important.  And that's quite interesting because it has a profound implication on leadership, but also on the nature of the board. The power dynamics of a globally integrated world mean that leadership doesn't look like what we have on the slide, but it looks a lot more like this. This is how it feels. This is chaotic. There is no one who has carefully worked out how to prepare for a pandemic. What would happen if suddenly people come into the office? Leadership feels like this. And that's really important because actually organizations operate like this and the transition to net zero will require coherence. It will require strategic thinking will require long termism. But at the same time, we have this leadership dilemma. So this is the nature of our conversation today. And actually in that conversation we have Carol who is delightful and we have been lucky enough to work with Carol for a long time. We will come and invite Carol just to introduce herself in a moment or two. We have Antoine and Antoine has been with us for a long time. He's worked with Earth on board. And before we come to Antoine, let us just go to Philippe. So Philippe corrected me recently when I said, gosh, Philippe, you are president of Alstom Power. And he said, no, I was president and CEO. And this is important. And what's really important is that we're honest with one another and that we're engaging with one another. And actually he held me to account and indeed he has been an expert in thinking about board dynamics, thinking about the transition to net zero. But also how we can create Earth competent boards. So let me just pause with my screen sharing and come to Philippe. Good morning, Philippe. It's super that you can join us from Paris. And I would just like to invite you just to say a little bit about what you think net zero means for a company. Okay. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. Perhaps before I jump into your question, I will spend a few minutes to to to give the same scene and to bring a little older in the chaos that you have very brightly described as usual. Why are we talking about that? Why are we together? First, because we are very pleased to have been invited for this kind of on table and discussion. But secondly, I think because suddenly we are becoming conscious of a few things. When you look at business, as long as far as I look in the past, we have always been doing business taking nature for granted and unlimited. This is how I have been doing business and most of the people have been doing business. And what is interesting is that science has already reached a conclusion that we are reaching the boundaries. But nature is sending signal very clear. And this summer, we have had all across the world and particularly in Europe, which was not that often received this kind of signals. When you look back in 2015, I think that Paris Agreement, I am not talking about that because I am in Paris today, but Paris was really a landmark in this in this new world. Paris Agreement normally is seen as a temperature agreement, talking about 1.5 to the degree etc. But if you really look at the agreement, for me at least, the important sentence is you have to reach a net zero world as soon as you can around 50s. After this, we had a flurry of government and country declaration. I think that today, more or less two thirds of the world GDP has declared at the country level, an initiative around net zero. So in 2015, the scene is this one. First, this is a fact. We have reached the planet boundaries where we are reaching. Paris Agreement said you have to go to net zero. And countries are going. And the best proof of this is that the next COP in Glasgow is all around net zero. And why is it meaningful for business? You could say countries are saying this, fine, let them go and continue to live the way we have been doing business. What is meaningful for business is because in Paris for the first time, business was seen as a solution. You can sometimes say business was not at the table in Paris but was under the tent. Nothing which is in the agreement has been done without business agreement or even business involvement. If you look at the definition of net zero, which is defined at the country level or territory level, you look at the definition and it means that you cannot emit more CO2 from your activity that nature is able to absorb. This simple sentence have put enormous pressure on the systems. And if you look at what the systems now is saying or is the way it's behaving, you have the pressure from science, you have seen the last report on 1.5 which is absolutely overwhelming by the consequence of this. The political statement, as I said before, is all over the world now and even taking some commitments. And after the commitment at the political level, you have the legal commitment also coming and this is changing the legal system and this is probably where the world is changing for business. Business has not yet taken that very clearly into consideration but law is helping now business to understand their responsibility and there are plenty of cases where business are responsible either because they have contributed to this inflow of CO2 but also make other surface consequences and they are being attacked legally. The financial market is coming now not because they are realistic but because they understood that as they are systemic, the system is in danger and their profit and their risk is too high. And the money is moving. So when the money is moving, obviously business sees that their funds, the way they are financing their operation is different and they are receiving the pressure from the investors. Frontrunners are putting pressure on their own supply chain and their own value chain because they are all understood that this is not a question only for the between the walls of a business. And more importantly, as you're going to see later with Antoine, a new generation of consumers of employees are behaving differently and so the resources also of the company are under pressure because the young talent doesn't want to behave the same way. So when you have a change in risk, a change in opportunity because this is opening a whole new flow of opportunity for business and changing the behavior of the resources, you are pretty sure that you are in front of what we call a constellation of disruption which is close to this chaos that you have designed where a lot of pressure are coming and nourishing each other. To create a perfect storm. So what the business is doing in this case, reaching the point of your question, very simply, we are making declaration and fabulous declaration, we are all net zero. And then this is what I will, I will now go into a small detail, some more details. I don't have the right number because this is increasing every day. So at the moment that we are saying between 15% or 20% of the GDP business representing 20% of the GDP have declared a kind of net zero, net zero commitment. But, and then I'm sure we'll come back during the conversation. They are with different time horizon. Some are 2050, some are saying, hey, leave me alone till 2049 come back and you will see I will be net zero in 2050. Some of them are a little more reasonable and giving you a pathway, but not all different scope, scope one, which is the mission scope to mission important for energy and scope three, or part of scope three, always with intensity, all the scopes are also very different. They are very different transformation pathway, inclusive, explosive, competitive, et cetera. And more importantly, as you obviously know, declaration is not action. So this is more or less where we are at the moment for business. And then you want to make the survey now, we want me to answer the second question also where you want. Let us just unpack a little bit of what you just said. So capital is on the move. This is a very dynamic space. I think this moving target of how many organizations have committed to net zero is really important. And it is changing almost on a daily basis as we run up to the convention of the parties in Glasgow. But I wondered if you could just say a little bit more explicitly about what net zero would mean for a company, does it? But the main question I think before we do that, because I think Carol and Antoine will have also an interesting point of view on this, but before we do that, we defend the idea that it could be difficult to use net zero at the level of the company. Because net zero was defined at the level of a country or territory, but can we really use net zero at the level of the company? We reached the conclusion after having studied all what the difficulty and also the declaration that we are seeing all around the world now, we reached a conclusion that net zero is at least minimum questionable and probably improper to be used at the business level. As I will explain, we can certainly continue to use net zero as a company contributing to a net zero world, but the company has a lot of difficulty to be net zero. And if you take only four points of question and doubts, first, because of the lack of clarity, as I have said, when you look at all declarations that have been done on net zero, they are always different scope. They don't allow to compare a company between themselves. Take the olengas, for example, most of them are net zero at the moment. Recently you are shell, total, and BP just to take the three Europeans that have declared net zero. They are all different scope. They are all partial scope. And none of them will really be net zero across their value chain. So they are all different and it's a really lack of clarity. The timing is not the same. The measurement is not there. And the pathway is not clear. So you see that this element of comparison is not there. It's misleading. Why do we say it's misleading? First, because most of them are including compensation or offset. And we all know that it's difficult, it's nearly impossible to compensate a mission certain today with an offset which is uncertain in a different time horizon. And it can give a false sense of achievement to the rest of the community, saying, okay, this company is net zero, we can sleep quietly, nothing will happen to us, the company are taking care of future. We know which is also totally insufficient because we know that a company anyway cannot be net zero and an offset is not a good answer for the diminution that is absolutely necessary, a decrease absolutely necessary in the emission. And it's not maximizing action, finally. First, because it's a very good tool for procrastination, saying, okay, let's continue to sleep well and we will do something tomorrow. And it's giving an unfair economic advantage to the economic power of certain sector. And it's probably too easy and too cheap to compensate a mission with offset that are widely available. So that's why we say that company cannot be net zero, but must contribute to a net zero world. This is provocative, very short. Yeah, you wanted to talk here. I think there are functionalities for the participants to begin to ask questions, and I think this is a really interesting statement and set of thoughts that we've heard from Philippe. And this builds on a whole host of expertise that you have had both working with Cambridge and also in your role at earth on board, as well as your previous experience of being a business leader. And this is incredibly important. And earlier we polled people in terms of how effective and how capable they thought that boards currently are at moving towards net zero. I understand that we've had a small technical challenge with some of the polling data, but most people have come back or the respondents all cluster around the issue of not really have indicating that boards are not very well equipped to lead their organizations in the carbon constrained world. And in many ways I'm not surprised at all. And partly that might be as Philippe says the issue of net zero is very hard at the board level, but also that perhaps this is a new way of thinking that we need within the board. And I wondered, as we move forward. Maybe we can just invite Carol to come and say some thoughts about the work that she was doing and the work that she is doing as a non executive director but also formally in her role that he throw. And we were lucky enough to engage with some of your team for a long time Carol, and I wondered if you could just share some reflections on how net zero played out in the boards that you're working with, and Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Paul. I'm really delighted to be here with you all. Before I talk about net zero just reflect on what Paul said earlier about leadership and how in a sort of chaotic diagram it showed that leadership doesn't actually just rest with the board as such but with everyone. I think at Heathrow we recognize that and we invested several years actually into a program called sustainability leadership, so that we try to get everyone to see that each individual is a sustainability leader, and to not just concentrate on the short but to have a long term outlook on things, and not only to focus on financial gains for the shareholders, because for years we were doing that, but actually to look at the wider aspect of the ESG goals, the environment, the social aspects. And it's good that the companies act in the UK have gone along with this so that obligations on boards and companies is much wider than purely financial, and you would all probably very familiar with section 172 of the companies act which actually requires people to take that wider view. So at Heathrow we were working on this and we actually also worked with or actually took lessons more likely from CISL to learn from other organizations as to how they do things well and so that we could copy them with some humility I guess. So at Heathrow, when Philippe was talking about can an organization actually be net zero, we ourselves have set around the task of trying to be carbon free or carbon neutral and net zero whatever the term is, as far as our own infrastructure is concerned we've been on that journey for decades actually, and we were able to do that even before COVID struck, but that is meaningless because as Philippe was saying, this is a much wider issue for an airport being net zero only means 5% really because all the emissions are really in the air, it's with the airline so that's 90 a cancel 95% of carbon emissions. So what is the role for Heathrow airport then, and we recognize that climate change is and carbon emissions are basically an existential issue for aviation. And so we try to occupy the role of at least a convening power to start off with, and, and nowadays airlines are very much at the forefront as well so we work with them to try and see if we could find solutions to this, either in the area of cleaner engines, or alternatives to fossil fuels. So for example, really looking into sustainable aviation fuels to try to advocate the government to create a mandate for the use of sustainable aviation fuels to a large extent by 2030 and beyond. Because actually the infrastructure is already there, you don't need to build new things as such you could put in the same tank biofuse in fossil fuel tanks so that's actually very convenient. So those are some of the things that we have been working on. And on the public policy side, we have been engaging with government, and it's really important to have that voice, and our CEO, john home and K has been a particularly strong advocate. He personally is very passionate about climate change so we're very lucky to have him as our spokesman. So that's actually just a thumbnail sketch of what we've been doing at Heathrow. That's really super. Thank you Carol. And I think that's really interesting in terms of calibrating our thinking to where we can really have a significant impact on the transition to a net zero future, because actually, often organizations are part of a value chain whereby carbon might be outside of their direct influence but actually, maybe you could just say a little bit Carol about how you're engaging with some of the industry associations and some of the other organizations in order to tackle the aviation challenge. I think, as I mentioned, sort of being a convening power is quite an important thing so it's working with the airline industry with other airports, also working with the public policymakers which are really important and influences, because I think all of this it's in everyone's interest to try and reduce carbon emissions from flying, because flying itself actually isn't an evil thing. I think aviation, just per se, has got a lot of benefits. It brings cultures together. It actually expands our knowledge. It gets aid to where overseas countries that there needs to be aid. For example, it actually increases trade and makes the world a smaller place. So flying actually isn't necessarily the evil as such. It's carbon that is the issue. And what we're trying to do is, or at Heathrow have been doing is to try and gather lots of agencies together. And I think the will is definitely there. It's about getting a few voices within government who could start sort of making those policy changes. I think the government currently recognizes that and have put together Jet Zero Council. And I think there is an aviation sector which we have a representative at Heathrow who sits as a leader on that council as well. So there are lots of different bodies, you know, very willing to participate. I think sometimes we just want to see more pace because everyone is talking about it. We just want to see action now more than anything. So hopefully that helps fall. Thank you Carol. I think it's really important because I think a lot of the boards that we work with are realizing that they're having to form those different types of collaboration and that they're needing to find peers and individuals who can work differently and change across the ecosystem. And this leads us to the second installment of our session this morning, which is looking at some of those characteristics that we think will be more and more popular within boards. And I understand that some people joining on certain devices may have seen this question already in our mentee, but what we're going to do is we're going to go back into the screen share. And hopefully we're going to see something which is new. But in a moment I'll just put my slide up. And here it is. And we're going to go and we're going to ask the question. What characteristics will be needed for a board to be successful? And we've just indicated from our first poll that most people think that boards are not equipped to lead to a carbon constrained future. So I just invite you to go to mentee.com and I hope you can see that clearly. mentee.com and use the code which is on the screen in order to share with us some of your views about the characteristics and the traits and the attributes that will be needed for a board to be successful. And then we'll come just to have a look at the word cloud of that in a moment or two. Whilst you're doing that and I would encourage you just to take a moment just to reflect on that. That is here from Antoine and Antoine. You're offering a different perspective. I just wondered, since you've been working with Philippe in particular since the Paris arrangement, you've been quite active as a young climate activist and you're working with a lot of networks in and around that space. And one of the issues that we see quite a lot with the work that we do with boards is people trying to work out the needs and expectations of a younger generation. What is the value of this and how do you see that issue of intergenerational responsibility playing out in the work that you're doing? Yeah, thanks Paul. I'm delighted to participate in this discussion. Maybe a thing to mention is that I'm involved in what we could call climate activist organizations, but I'm also working a lot and discussing a lot with the networks of alumni of various engineering and business school. And you see that the issue of climate environment is really mainstream within those networks. And so it's not only in the climate actually space that I speak a lot about how the younger generation engage within their companies and how they try to participate to exchange, but it's really within all the network of alumni of engineering, law and business schools that have contacts with in France. And I think you would find the same in UK or other countries from Europe that participants are from. To answer your question, I think there is a lot of value for boards today to engage with the younger generation, and I will focus more on how they can engage with the young professionals within the firm. The first value I think is really about on a strategic level understanding the context, what is changing and you showed that picture of the chaos of what we are facing today. I think the younger generation they just bring another view of that context and they can also have, I think when you start to engage with them and discuss with them, they really want to have the big picture. It's not only like defending decos of we are the young generation and as young people here are our desires and what we think and that's the true thing. They really are, as I've used them in a position of saying, we want to understand what the big context is to understand what are the expectations of the groups within society and not only like representing the young, the young generation but seeing what's the dynamic currently and how we view how the environmental and social issues we evolve what are the main trends. Once we compute in not only our view of the younger generation but all the view of stakeholders I think they're really in that aspect of society is complex there are a lot of interest and as young people we want things to change. So we need to understand what is the global context and I think they can bring that to the board as young people today. The second thing is when you engage with people within the firm young professional. Usually they have more, they're more used to collecting intelligence, I think processes, and they also are less maybe censored by the function they are from and and the specific work within the firm I think what I what I have seen with the various professional professional networks of young people I worked with is that they can really better overcome the internal values between the various function of the firm that they're older colleagues because there are maybe less attached to the current function they have and they're less entrenched in their career in one specific position and what will be the step afterwards. So they're yeah I think it's easier for them to bring a collective vision and a longer term vision of the company that reflecting on what would be the consequences in the following years for my function for my role. And the third obvious thing is that really engaging for both with younger professional today. It is really an extra motivation for the young people and there are a lot of, I was talking about networks of alumni and not really climate activists, the climate activists and with usually they're not within firms, the alumni they are working with big firms and a huge share of them are currently asking themselves whether they want to continue within that firm, whether it makes sense to work for such a firm when they see the issues, the environmental and social issues they are concerned with and offering them a way to engage with the board to engage with the higher executives and to show that their concerns environmental issues are accepted within the firm and that the higher executives are willing to reflect with them and to hear their voice. It's really a great motivation factor and a great way to attract talents. And in France, I have really seen that working with sometimes with younger graduates and they asked the just older counterparts of like five, six years older, is the company open to that kind of question. If I join such consulting firm or such such industrial company will I be able to raise my concern and to ask questions and to really have a commission it's really important for them to want to join a company. So I think those are at least three main values I see. And as for the the way to organize this I think there are lots of different perspective it's really a new thing so it's kind of iterative but just to give a few ideas. A few ideas. I think there is both the bottom of approach. The one I am grounded in is that really young professional within the firm that are concerned that want to start the conversation and that's organizing among themselves to conduct a reflection and to try to bring it to the higher executives and to the board. So the first way will be only to, as a board, ask, try to listen to who are already the young professional that are reflecting on those issues and that can bring me a vision and help them and show them like the respect and the consideration for what they're doing. And there might be also other ways to organize it in a more top down approach by organizing like how can I meet some people within my firm during my board meetings or how I can structure something like a youth board or as a formal structure when I give paid time to some young professionals to really reflect on the issues, spend time to organize among themselves. How can I give them a budget to have time to ask experts outside of the firm to spend time with also management and executives of the various functions of the firm to really understand why the issues. So I think it's quite an iterative process so far and there's not many experiences, but you really have those two bottom up approach and top down because there is already an extraordinary strength of young people within the firm that want to engage with boards and executives to really understand what the issues are and that all matters and climate changes always are most the first issue they want to address. Great. Thank you, Antoine. And I think going back to our earlier schematic, this flatter organization poses a whole host of opportunities for people to engage and to exchange, but actually it means that we need greater opportunities to listen, adapt and respond. And I think this is kind of an interesting piece in terms of how the boards will need to operate in the future. We have, it might be slightly tricky to share and I understand that we're having a couple of technical issues, so apologies, but in response to our poll at the moment we have a number of comments which are that boards will need to be much more inclusive, more resilient, much more open. There's a number of people that have suggested the word diversity and I think what we're hearing here is that that's just diversity in terms of gender and ethnicity, but also intergenerational. And I think this is really important and I know that earlier on, we were talking about this being a very global agenda. This morning I was chit chatting with some colleagues in Singapore and actually a lot of the themes that you're talking about in terms of changing the younger people Antoine are playing out in Singapore too and I think we see very similar approaches to these governance issues as we look around the world. The idea of being science based and much more aligned to rapid turnover is one that comes up quite a lot. And I have found my way into the chat function so now I can also see that there's a lively conversation emerging there so thank you for your questions. I do continue to share those pieces of information, but just before we come to turn to your questions. Carol, perhaps I can come back to you and then to Philippe and then back to Antoine, just to touch on some of the key reflections you have about the competencies and the capabilities and characteristics that will be needed at the board for them to be successful on this agenda. So Carol, can I invite you just to offer some reflections? Yeah, okay. Thank you Paul. I think just carrying on the theme of diversity and reflecting on some of the comments and feedback from the audience around the table on this. I think it's important to have diverse thinking in particular. Clearly, people from diverse traditional backgrounds, whether it's gender or ethnicity bring something to the table because of their different experiences and life experiences. But I think it's actually about the diversity of thinking which is important because that would help increase the quality of the debate. And to include different, you know, thinking from different generations is even better. So an example is that I sit on the board of Breeden Group PLC is the largest construction materials group in the UK. The construction is one of the hardest to abate sectors. And what the board did last week, for example, it's one of the most diverse boards I've sat on. But it's open to ideas from younger generations. So last week we went to Derbyshire to visit a quarry, a cement quarry. And it would be very traditional. We'll simply be looking at operators who would be with their diggers, etc. I was quite bold over when we went into a state of the art sort of laboratory, where there were lots of young postdoctorate chemical engineers and process engineers. And they were very fine. Why do you want to work for a company, which basically dealing with quarries and cement. And they said that they saw this as an opportunity to make change. And they were really involved in finding solutions to alternative construction materials, recycled concrete, and working with other organizations to try and help make the change. So they were the change agent within a sector that you would think, my goodness, you know, we might as well just forget about construction, but that's not really feasible. So they're trying to be practical and work with the grain rather than against it. And that's actually extraordinarily encouraging. And the good thing about the board was that we don't have the very young on the board itself, but we were very open to the ideas and actually had them round the board table to talk to us, etc. So that I think is one characteristic which is really important for boards to be open to different viewpoints. So I think that things would be sort of systemic thinking, having the, you know, looking at things in a holistic way, what I touched on earlier looking at the long term, not just the short term, and thinking around the stakeholder or the wheel to see who are the people that you impact most not purely the shareholders but the environment and so forth. And think about how honored we are to sit at a board to have that position is not, we shouldn't say at the apex of the organization and it is an organ within the company that can actually set a strategic direction for the organization. So it is a responsibility as well as a privilege for to be on the board. And I think it means that we each have to take that responsibility quite seriously to try and be the change and to make a difference, not just for the company and its place in the world, but to make a difference to the lives of other people as well and climate change is a really critical issue facing all of us at the moment. We have a question from the floor which have builds neatly into this approach. What will it take for boards to act with urgency on this agenda. We'll take both to sorry. Act with urgency. How can we accelerate. I think there is a first, first point that we have not touched yet in the conversation. It's very simply. As Carol said, we need an organization, we need awareness, et cetera, in the board to take that into consideration, can come back to this in more detail after. But the first thing that the board should understand that there are no choice because very simply when you look at the responsibility or we call that the duty of the board all across the world, you have always the same three main duties, which is loyalty to the company, which means you have to act in the interest of the company. Not in the interest of one stakeholder like shareholders or shareholder primacy, which was the previous century behavior. Now we have to act in the interest of the company. And then there is nothing more important than to take into consideration the deterioration of natural capital and, for example, climate change for a company. So if a board doesn't look at this is negligent is not doing his job. Sometimes I say you can be president of the United States and be climate or skeptical, because at a certain point in time you stand up. You said, hey, I don't believe in climate change. This is a Chinese hoax, but vote for me. And they voted for it and then it was elected. But for a board you have to take care of your company. And if you don't take this consideration, this fact into consideration, you put your company in very dangerous water because you take bad decision. You don't look at the risk. You don't look at the cost of what this will put into your balance sheet and you don't look at all the opportunities that you are wasting. So for me, the duty of the board anyway start there after that you have other duties like care and diligence. And you cannot say you don't know, which is very obvious now. The science is clear. The society is clear about that. So both cannot be in denial anymore. So and more importantly, perhaps we'll come back to that later. You are responsible of what the company is saying outside the world of the company as a board. You cannot be misleading and coming back to the center of conversation this morning. If your company say I am at zero and anybody comes even me and say this is not true because of this, this and this. All is responsible for this. Why I'm saying this because as we have said before, the financial market is starting to take this and consideration to orient the flow of finance. So if you are misleading on the declaration like this and attracting funds and wrongly attracting funds and investors, you are exposing yourself to a lot of consequence because sooner or later, somebody will challenge what you have said and board is personally responsible of this kind of communication. So if you look around the duties of the board, you find plenty of reason that the board has to take this issue into its own responsibility and make sure it's positively tackled. Thank you. Philippe, one of the questions that we have from the floor and maybe you are and one might respond is to what extent a kind of performance on net zero playing out in remuneration of people being paid for good performance on net zero. So is it playing out in the finance system earlier we spoke of capital being on the move and actually our people being incentivized to pay packets to actually try to support this transition. Maybe we'll invite you Philippe and then invite Antoine after. Oh, it's a trend, obviously, but behind this, first, it's not wide enough, but behind this question of remuneration, you have also the question of evaluation of real performance. Sometimes I say that we are publishing wrong numbers of results or profits on which we are basing the remuneration of the dividends are not true, because you don't take into consideration the cost of using nature for free. For example, and you are not using you are not in reality, delivering really a result. So yes, we need to put for individual performance criteria like respecting nature or going to net zero for part of your business or having climate targets in remuneration. But for me, the most important thing for all is to start to check if the result that we are publishing is a real result. And before we start to pay dividends, there is a conversation today in France, you know that we will be electing or president in a few months. And there was a consideration about companies that have received funds from the government to go through the COVID issue. And that are now, and they are now paying huge dividend to shareholders. So some parties, some candidates are asking questions about this. How come they can pay dividends? Is this a real result? And the result has been affected by fund that the government have been giving to them. So this question about remuneration, dividends, bonus, etc. is a very tricky one and a very holistic one. It's super important. And I know that to lots of the work that we're doing for the present and around the space of cap, what do we actually value as a society? I think there's a stark contrast to the mobilization funds in the post COVID recovery versus the climate action. I think this is a really interesting sort of conversation. And I think it's a big trade-off. And on this journey to net zero, we will encounter lots of debates and a lot of trade-offs. And Antoine, I just would like to come back to you if I may, just to hear some final reflections as we begin to come into our landing. Yeah, Antoine, landing is a risk. Oh, that's right. It's true. There's always a lot of aviation themes there. Yeah, maybe to make the link between my remarks on the generational aspects and those last questions around the relationship with the financial markets and whether they value or not an environmental transformation today. I think if we look at the net zero, what's interesting is that as I do it, the net zero aspect is currently being integrated by financial actors. But the way they value it is maybe the wrong way. They ask whether there is a commitment, maybe is a look at the time horizons, and they will give some good points to companies that have made a commitment to net zero and whether they are reporting about a partial or a large part of the scope or not. But they don't really look at whether the company is currently doing a thought to adapt itself to what's leading tomorrow into net zero society. So I think the way the financial market value today, companies contribution to net zero is not a good proxy for what companies are actively transforming pensems and will be adapted to tomorrow's world. So that's answering to your last question of if the board really wants to help this company to transform and to answer to the real world issues, it doesn't only have to see whether it's well rated or not by the financial ESG indices. And so it has to ask other people whether it's well contributing to the issues or not, and then see what are the investors that will value that and how if it's doing the right thing, it will be able to find the capital. But if it only looks at why financial markets are currently asking the environmental aspect, I think it will miss what's the right thing to do. And on that aspect, I think the younger generation that can really, really help because if you select when you are looking at your diversity, not only young people, but young people like willing to speak out and to look at the real issues, they can show you what are the current issue with the offsets, what are the current issue of changing activities that might be labeled as greenwashing and at missing what is the right thing to do. So if you build that relationship of openness and frankness in the exchange, I think those younger generation, they can help you to see the gap between what's best ESG investors are currently asking and what's for the real issues and the need for real change. Super. Thank you, Antoine. I think that's a really powerful message. And I think there is a contradiction in some organizations between the financial markets which are beginning to wake up and beginning to mobilize capital and the incumbents who might have a much longer time horizon. This is something which is very interesting about the time horizons and the ability of the finance system to move quickly. And I think boards are having to work differently with different traits and characteristics drawing on diversity, building stronger relationships with broader stakeholder groups in order to anticipate and adapt to this changing context. We're just on time. So thank you, everyone. This has been really good. I'm sorry that we've had a couple of technical problems, but I'd just like to thank Philippe and Antoine for sharing their excellent insights with us and for Carol to join and help us think not just about aviation, but also about some of those other industries, they're hard to abate because we collectively need to move forward. If we're to achieve our net zero goals, then actually we all need to be moving forward. So thank you very much. I hope this has been an enjoyable hour. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the festival. So thank you.


The Delta State Government has launched the state green project to promote environmental cleanliness and health. The initiative involves dignitaries in government functionaries, clearing debts along major roads and streets as part of a sensitization drive. The project also aims to make the state a business-friendly environment and encouraging local and foreign investment. Media or on the highway. These amounts are moving away from your home only for you to dump them along the road. This should not happen. Our surroundings should be kept neat at all times, devoid of refuse and overgrown weeds. All agencies of government should take the issue of clean environment period. There should be synergy between agencies of government and effective collaboration with all Delta for our environment to be kept clean and neat. The strategy of having a clean environment apart from what I've listed earlier is enormous. It makes our cities conducive for business and encourages investors to come to our cities. The state green strategy aimed at promoting a clean and healthy environment in Asaba and its surrounding areas. It was highlighted during a roadshow attended by the Director-General of the State Capital Territory Development Agency. At the end of this campaign, we are going to start enforcement and we don't want to enforce when we have not created an awareness. So we have been already, we are going to be on TV, we are going to set up our people physically to go to houses and offices. At the end, we will do enforcement. We are going to move with mobile calls, but I don't like using that type of force. That is why I want to move around with everybody as I'm going on the street and talking to people who are giving flyers. So if you can do all this, are you still violated? You don't need to blame us.  So if you don't do it and you want to make the Capital Territory dirty, I'm sorry to say I probably will offend you and definitely will offend them. We can see the collaboration we have with the local government but we have with the waste management board and the Ministry of Environment. It's a team and we are employing the environmental tax force law. We are not going to spare anybody. It's to make the people understand the goals and the campaign of the agency, the plans. And that is why we're here to make our people understand that even the Bible says that cleanliness is next to godliness. That is to say, we need our environment to be very clean. We need our state to be very clean. And that is why we have leaders ambassadors today to be able to talk to you. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.