Ambassador from the Future: John Elkington

Join us as we sit down with the amazing John Elkington and talk about the triple bottom line, futurist Alvin Toffler and how the visionary Buckminster Fuller influenced John's revolutionary thinking on sustainability. 

Together, we explore whether humanity stands at a decisive crossroads in terms of sustainability and embark on an enlightening conversation that spans humour (light, situational and absolutely not scripted!), economics, and philosophy. 

We discuss the intriguing potential of regenerative capitalism and talk - importantly - about the fundamental power of optimism. 

Don't miss this episode filled with deep thinking, engaging discourse, and a shared pursuit of happiness and sustainability.

Follow GoodGeist for more episodes on sustainability, communications and how creativity can help make the world a better place.

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Global Sustainability Discussion With John Elkington

Intro 0:02

Good Geist , a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor , brought to you by the DNS Network .

Damla 0:24

Hello , hello everyone , you are listening to Good Guys , the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the DNS Network , the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place . This is Damla from Mira Agency , istanbul , and .

Steve 0:40

This is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester . This podcast series explores global sustainability issues , how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen .

Damla 0:51

So in this episode we're going to talk to John Elkington , a global thought leader on sustainability who has played a pivotal role in shaping thinking on corporate responsibility and sustainable capitalism , to which we will come . John is the founder of the consultancy Volants , where he is chief pollinator , and has played a key role in major programs like the Dow Jones Sustainability Index , the Global Reporting Initiative and B-Lab UK .

Steve 1:24

I know , I know , I know Damla - John has spoken at thousands of conferences and is the author or co-author of 21 books although you may have put another one out while we weren't looking , john and one of the earliest being the Green Consumer Guide , which helped kickstart my environmental journey , and the latest being his memoir and manifesto Tickling Sharks . So , john , thank , and the latest being his memoir and manifesto , tickling sharks . So , john , thank you .

John 1:47

So much for taking the time to talk to damra and myself . Steven damla . Thank you very much indeed for the interest and I'm looking forward to the exchange so we always like to go back to come forward on the podcast .

Damla 1:56

John , if we look back 25 years to your book cannibals with fox , the idea of the triple bottom line is fully embedded in the canonical thinking of ESG . How did that idea and that phrase come out ?

John 2:11

Well , in a way it's a simple story , but it was complicated at the time in the sense that I came up with the triple bottom line in 1994 and with the people , planet , profit or prosperity formulations the following year , in 1995 . And I'd been worrying for a little while , before all of that , that what I was seeing in business was useful . So people were talking about what they called eco-efficiency how can you save energy , cut down on waste , cut down on pollution , all of these good things and they were saying , basically that was sustainability and my sense was that was a necessary condition of a stepping stone towards . But there was something more about the corporate agenda in terms of that sustainability . The corporate agenda in terms of that sustainability Sorry , I was in Turkey two months ago and I contracted COVID , so every time I get excited and passionate it sort of comes back . But so it took me 18 months to get to that three-word formulation . And once I came up I thought , oh God , I've heard this somewhere before . Somebody else has come up with the same story . And people at different parts of the world who I called or got in touch with said , no , it's novel .

John 3:37

But 20 years later I was reading a book by Alvin Toffler . He wrote a book called Future Shock and then he wrote another one in 1980 called the Third Wave . And I very rarely read books , but I went back to the Third Wave and I was skimming it through and on about page 267 , I came across this subtitle and it was multiple bottom lines . And so this was 14 years before I came up with the triple bottom line . I thought that's where the seed uh was planted . So that's the . That's the story of how it uh started . It's got a life of its own . I mean , as these things do , it's like children . They go off and have um wonderful at times on their own account , but um anyway , there we are wow , I think I've got that somewhere , john .

Steve 4:25

I'm gonna have to go and find it . Did you say it's future shock or third wave ? It's the third wave . I'm not sure I've got that one , but that's amazing . I love this . I love it . I mean early . It's an early doors meme , isn't it ? It's just got its own momentum and gets shared . And what toffler was ?

John 4:40

talking about , I mean , the future shock was about . There are these moments where disruption is so intense it blows away all of our assumptions , all of our sense of who we are , and so on . And in the third wave he talked about an agricultural economy being replaced by an industrial economy , and then an information-based economy coming after that economy coming after that , and each of these being a paradigm in its own right , having all sorts of implications for how people thought or think and how they live their lives or the work that they do . And I think he was significantly ahead of his time in thinking of all that .

Steve 5:20

So , john , the perfect link to a question I had for you , which is named a lovely bit in Tickling Sharks , where you mentioned having breakfast with Buckminster Fuller I know amazing person and you said he spoke of how humankind was headed towards . A period of massive change was the word you used , and this picks up on what you've just been talking about with Albin Toffler . So , with so many kind of megatrends that you follow and I've heard you talk about converging and with politics being so disruptive , with technological change , do you think we're now at some sort of critical juncture for humankind ?

John 6:02

It's interesting because I think we're probably always at a critical juncture for humankind . It's interesting because I think we're probably always at a critical juncture . It's very tempting for any generation or any group of people to think you know , and now it's going to be different . You know , I've worked in the space now for 50 years . I met Bakya Fuller Bakya , mr Fuller in the late 1970s in Reykjavik in Iceland , the late 1970s in Reykjavik in Iceland , and he'd already had a really big impact on me and many other people in the field . And exactly as you said , he said that technology but civilizational trends are taking us towards a period of somewhat convulsive change and dematerialization , doing more with less or ephemeralization . He was a very good one for complicated language , but his thinking , I think , was spectacularly well-informed and insightful and really provoked a lot of my early thinking . So I think it's very easy to say here we go , it's the fourth industrial revolution , or whatever we brand it as . But I do think the next 10 to 15 years we'll see radically more change than the last 50 of my working life , and the reason is we've left so much of the change that needs to happen for too long . We've sort of avoided doing very much to address these sort of systemic challenges like loss of biodiversity , like the climate emergency and so on . So we're going to have to do it , if we do it at all , in relatively short order .

John 7:35

Luckily , the technology is increasingly at hand to do some of this stuff , but a lot of this still sits with people and what goes on in their hearts and minds and , as we see in the United States and we see in France , we see in different parts of the world , people are agitated .

John 7:52

They know that change is coming . They don't think that the leaders political leaders , business leaders and so on properly understand what's going on in the world and therefore they don't particularly have very much confidence in their ability to handle these sort of interlocking crises , this sort of what people call the poly crisis . This always happens at this point in one of these systemic change periods , so they happen every 70 to 80 years . You're lucky if you live life without having one . But here we are and actually , oddly , just in conclusion , on this I've been saying recently , I feel more optimistic now than I have done for about 10 to 15 years , and the reason is because the old order is coming apart . People increasingly don't really know what they should be doing , and that's a better environment in which to suggest what they might be doing than if they think they know exactly how to do things and just get out of my way . My pay packet depends on my doing what I'm instructed to do .

Damla 8:56

It's interesting because when we always talk about when and how , we talk about climate crisis and how to behave , we always say that we have this pendulum to fear and then to this optimistic place where everything is nice , green and children are smiling . So we always have this pendulum going on in the narrative of climate crisis . And when I was listening to you at the moment , I just felt it because you said that every generation is keen to say that this is it , this is a turning point . So I just felt that the next thing would be but we will manage this and so on , and that was the whole part of the pendulum . And then you switched to but this is really it , and so we have this pendulum and the crisis is big and it's hard to cope with it .

Damla 9:57

But also , in your own story , you made enormous change . So my question is we also talked to Jonathan Poirot , too , about hope and optimism . He was on the hope part part , but I feel , when I listen to you , with the words also used , I mean pollinator nest , like children . These are all more on the optimistic side .

John 10:27

So you are more optimistic , is that right to say ? Well , I mean , I love Jonathan Parrott and he and I've sort of had intertwining careers or working lives . I do think he goes through periods of dark despair , and no , I think we all do . If you really pay attention to what's going on in the biosphere and so on , it's a pretty gloomy story . I happen to believe that our species tends to leave things as long as it possibly can until it's forced itself into a corner and only then does it start to act at the speed and the scale which is necessary . That's not guaranteed to happen . Very often , you know , civilizations in general collapse . Very often they take down a large part of the local environment with them as they do so . But jonathan says he's not an optimist but he does have hope .

John 11:22

I would say I was born an optimist . I mean I so in the sense that you there's not very much you can do uh with that if that's intrinsically uh in your uh wiring . But also , my favorite subject at school was always history , not births and dates and who cut whose head off or whatever . It was more the broad pattern of history , particularly sort of military and economic history and social history and so on and what that gave me . I then did economics and fascinated again by economic history and the work of people like Nikolai Kondratyev and Joseph Schumpeter , economists who looked at long wave cycles , waves of technological change and so on , and I've always felt that that's the reality in which we operate . So the biosphere goes through great cycles of change . Our economies do the same thing , and if you're born into a period where things are humming along quite well and everyone's driving a motor car and having a television and all the rest of it , you think that's reality , that's going to go on forever . But if you're a bit older , you get that sense . Well , just you wait , because this is going to shift , and it's going to shift in some good ways and it's going to shift in some less good ways , and I think that's exactly where we are now . And about five , no six , seven years ago now , I started to talk about a U-bend , so a period in our collective history where an old order unravels , you know , the post-Second World War order geopolitical , macroeconomic , all the rest of it , and all assumptions that went with that are going to start to sort of come apart at the same time . These things do not happen overnight . This is not going to be done by next Tuesday or even by 2025 . These things take , as a minimum , 10 to 15 years . We're not even halfway into that cycle .

John 13:18

I don't think deadly dangerous , because wars often spiral out of control during these sorts of periods and people lose their jobs in very large numbers , but there is an excitement in addressing some of these challenges and opportunities in a way that really does develop solutions that are fit for the future . And just a tiny sidebar both my parents were involved in the Second World War . My father was a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain and so on . My mother drove trucks for the army and I once asked them when were you happiest ? And I expected them to say well , of course , darling , when you were born or whatever , but they didn't say that . They said no during the war . And I thought , well , how strange . Because they were losing family members . They were losing friends left , right and centre , but they felt engaged because everyone was in this common endeavour to make something happen .

John 14:37

And I think the next sort of five to 10 years could be like that , if leaders pop up and unfortunately , with the greatest respect , most of the leaders that we currently have political , corporate and all the rest of it , the investment community . They're not really fit for purpose . And what you see every time you have a world war or something like that for the first two years the people who were trained before that war just absolutely failed to do anything significant . And then a new breed of people come through who know , who've learned how to do some of this stuff , and part of what we're trying to do is to work with some of that group of people . So they're younger , they're different , they don't look I was about to say they don't look normal , but I mean that's too strong , but they don't fit into the frames that people use in recruitment or whatever . They're social entrepreneurs , they're innovators , they're people like God , help us Elon Musk , and you know .

Steve 15:39

There's another story , but I'll stop there oh and well , I'm going to jump in , john . I mean , I'm so glad you mentioned contractive waves . By the way , I've got um , I won't get distracted , but I've got this chart I use when I'm talking to people about the so-called fourth industrial revolution and say , actually , these are the true waves of innovation you need to watch , um . But I wanted to talk about your style , if that's all right , um , because one of the things I think you do really well , um and you do it when you're talking and you do it in your writing , um is that you engage on these huge , exist , literally existential topics for humankind and the planet , but you do it with a lightness of touch and and you you always have a sort of rhythm where there's some humor drops in just at the right moment to to sort of shine a light down the dark corridor or up the mountain that seems unclimbable , um . So your style , how do you do that ? How do you do that ?

John 16:42

I don't know , is the answer okay ? Well , genuinely , I mean and with the humor I mean mean in the book Tickling Sharks

The Potential of Regenerative Capitalism

John 16:49

. I talk about some of the examples of large , powerful companies that I and my colleagues have worked with ending a day with board members of that extraordinary , innovative company which came up with Post-it notes and all sorts of other things . But at the end of that meeting , as I describe in the book , a very well-dressed , well-coiffured woman came up to me . She's a member of the board and she said why do you use humor when you're dealing with people at this sort of level in a boardroom ? And I literally had never thought about it . But I began to think and I thought , oh my God , I'm in real trouble here . She said well , actually there were two reasons why I cannot remember jokes , so I don't tell them . It's all situational , it's all playing off in a sort of ongoing conversation what people are saying at the time .

John 17:53

And she said two things with me which have always stuck in my memory . She said firstly , you're giving people a certain comfort because they expected a missionary , they expected you to come in and tell them exactly what they should be doing and so on . But you're actually playful and tell them exactly what they should be doing and so on . But you're actually playful , and you're playful with your own agenda , and that's not typical missionary behavior . So that relaxes them . But then she said you start to play with them , and people don't normally do that in that sort of space .

John 18:25

And so she I mean this is slightly over dramatizing for effect . But she said it's . It's almost as though um what ? What starts to happen in their brains , these powerful people's brains , is they think if he can do that with us , his army outside our city walls must be enormous . So it's a power play , it's a reptilian response to it all . And so that was the first time I'd even begun to think about it . But people are human beings , I mean , whether they're CEOs of major companies or chief financial officers , or even God help us , elon Musk and you have to find a way of getting into that human-to-human conversation . And whether we like it or not , humor done right is a lubricant , a social lubricant . So that's sort of why I've done it . But I started doing it without actually giving any thought at all , never trained to deal with powerful people , never trained to use humor in the process . It's just something that evolved in the doing .

Damla 19:35

Well , that's very nice , because the play , Power Play or other play . We have this very well-recognized philosopher in Turkey , and one of his books was Homo Ludens .

John 19:50

I know .

Damla 19:52

Yeah , I love that , because he just turns everything upside down with it and with that and what you said . Now I'm just collecting those pieces together so we don't have to be each other's wolf .

Damla 20:06

So we don't have to be each other's wolf Maybe we can also be our play dates and change , something which brings me to my question . In your recent book , the last but one , we can say that maybe you bring up the topic of regenerative capitalism . Is this genuinely possible ? Is this a play , or can we really play with that concept and make real change ?

John 20:39

It's impossible . I mean , let's just get that out on the table . With capitalism as it currently is , would it ever get to the point of being a genuine regenerator of the biosphere of social systems , of our economies , of our political systems ? The answer is capitalism as it's currently practiced is deeply corrosive . It is extremely damaging for all of those different sort of systems . So in a clinical sense , it's totally impossible .

John 21:09

But what if and this is what the book was trying to get at what if we started to change economics , the master discipline of capitalism ? What if different generations of leaders came up in our economies , in corporate structures , in the financial markets and so on , who were trained to value nature , who were trained to value a stable climate , who were trained to understand science enough to understand if you acidify the oceans , you're going to collapse your civilization . There is just simply no way around that . And so it's posing an impossible challenge , but saying I always love . I mean , I'm sorry to go back to wars , but in the Second World War and the Pacific campaign there was a US Army Corps which was called the Seabees and they would go into captured islands and build airfields and dock facilities and so on , and they had a most wonderful saying which was the possible .

John 22:16

We do , as you know , quickly I'm paraphrasing the impossible takes a little longer , and for me , that's what drives a lot of my thinking this sense that what looks impossible for our generation will seem self evidently possible to future generations . And so how do we jump that curve ? How do we make some of these solutions that most people would rule out as completely impractical ? So all I'm saying is that capitalism is sort of the best and most innovative system we have , but it's a ghastly mess , not least because it involves human beings , and we always make a mess of whatever economic system or political system that we evolve . But done in the right way , way with the right sort of governance and the right sort of political structures wrapped around it , the right sort of legal and regulatory systems , I think we could make more progress than we're currently making , and faster . So a complex answer to your question , damla , but that's how I think .

Steve 23:23

Oh , thank you , John , that was perfect , I should say

Exploring Capitalism and Sustainability

Steve 23:26

. Anybody that listens regularly will know that Damla usually tries to deconstruct capitalism about two thirds of the way through the podcast . It's a very regular leitmotif that we have , but I waited this time .

John 23:41

But no , I think all isms should be suspect , and that includes environmentalism and so on . So socialism , communism , capitalism , all of these different things , because they're mind viruses . You know , richard Dawkins gets exercised about religions . We should get exercised about mind viruses in every part of our lives . But capitalism , when properly operated , as has been said , dies with its failures . Communism just props those . I was in Romania recently , a few weeks back , and when you look at the devastation that was caused by communist regimes , they could not admit failure and so they just propped up these old , devastating infrastructures and the rest of it .

John 24:31

I think capitalism can evolve . It tends often to evolve through depressions , major periods of conflict , sometimes even sort of pandemics , like the Black Death in Europe that liberated people to get higher wages and so on , because there were fewer people around and started to corrode the foundations of feudalism . So I think , if you think about this in a big enough context , it is possible to be optimistic . It is possible to think things could be a great deal better . But at no point in all of this am I assuming that things will be better , because you know , I've studied enough of the evolution of civilizations to know that they all crash . So at some point ours will go down too . The question is how long can we push back that evil day , and to what extent can we mitigate the damage we cause in the meantime ?

Steve 25:24

so , john , unfortunately we can't break our rule , even though I know damler and I would like to suddenly , 50 episodes in , change the format of the podcast and make it an hour long so we are going to have to call it , pull it to an end , but I've got one last question for you , um , which is our network .

Steve 25:43

Uh , the , the full name of our network is called do not smile , um , because we passionately believe we need to make sustainability a subject that brings happiness into the world . So my question is what object , place or person always makes you smile ? Always , that's .

John 26:01

That's a very big question , because , yeah , no , that really is a big question , and I sort of think that the image that had a radical impact on my generation was that picture of the earth from outside and I won't say that every time I see it I smile but something happened in the human psyche at that point . I'd far , rather than sitting in a screen , watching that image on the screen , be out in the wetland . Or when we were in Romania , my wife and I went out of the danube delta and spent three days there . I loved being immersed in , in , in that form of , uh , nature . Ask me again in two weeks . I'll give you a different answer , steve . Then it's best that I can do on the spot no , that's absolutely fine .

Steve 26:56

You know to be to be really fair , john , that was probably the most elevated response we've had to that question . It's usually my kids or my dog , so I don't have a dog that simplifies matters exactly , um , john , it's been an absolutely wonderful talking to you .

Steve 27:11

Thank you so so much . Uh , your , your books , have meant a lot to me over the years , and so , um , it's been a real treat to to have you on the podcast and you'd share your thoughts . I think , damla , like you , were born optimists and we can't shake that . So it's been a lovely conversation . Damla , do you want to wrap us up ?

Damla 27:28

So thanks to everyone who has listened to our Good Guys podcast , brought to you by the Do Not Smile network of agencies .

Steve 27:35

And make sure you listen to future episodes , where we'll be talking to more amazing people about how we can work together to create a more sustainable future . So , john Damla , see you soon . Thank you both .