New Ways of Deciding - Victoria Whitaker Knows That How We Choose Matters

I’m very pleased to bringing you a chat with Victoria Whitaker. I was really excited to chat with Vic - she’s another of the originals of the Sydney and Australian sustainability crew like Lee Stewart and Nicolette Boele I’ve had the chance to chat with on this show. I did some work with Vic the best part of a decade ago when she was at The Ethics Centre, and it was immediately evident how thoughtful, well regarded and insightful she was.

Vic has held a number of different roles in various organisations over time. From being involved in the earlier days of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Leadership and running Al Gore’s Climate Project in the UK, to joining Choice, working on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in the initial Kevin Rudd prime ministerial years, she brought the Global Reporting Initiative and UN Global Compact to Australia, spent time at the Ethics Centre and was recently a partner at Deloitte doing all sorts of sustainability, human rights and social licence work.

Vic represents the required breadth of knowledge, skills and capabilities of the sustainability professional. under that though is a person driven to make a difference. She has Always been looking to find a way to alter the trajectory of a problem or an organisation’s contribution to it. It was a pleasure having Vic on the show to chat about the history of this work, her own stories and then the fundamental role of ethics, values and principles in decision making that is often the missing factor in a corporate sustainability machine that is now fixated on mandatory disclosures, mandatory ESG assessment and mandatory e-learnings. Change doesn’t happen when you try to force it on people, and as we hear from Vic here, the reprisal and spreading of the original ontology of sustainability needs work, stretching back to what Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring from 1962 helped reveal.

Chatting to Vic was illuminating. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the pursuit of more sustainable futures without different ways by which decisions are made which value and prioritise ethics, values and principles. 

The April newsletter is on the theme of unity, and in crisis it’s easy to feel isolated and alone. Together though, we are far stronger, our unity is where our power lies. With Vic in mind, and the theme of unity, here’s this quote from Thomas Paine which to me represents the situation of the sustainability professional “It is not in numbers but in our unity that our great strength lies.”

Til next time, thanks for listening. 

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