Regenerative economist Tim Frenneaux argues for putting wellbeing before money
UN Sustainable Development Goal Number 8 - Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
Episode 2 of 'The 17' focuses on Goal 8 and a subject that dominates the thinking of governments globally - the economy. The nature of this goal means it affects all the other Sustainable Development Goals. According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the current state of affairs looks like this:
Goal 8 is also one of the most hotly debated of all the UN’s goals. Will economic growth pull more people out of poverty and kickstart the tech innovation needed to address climate change? Or is a focus on making more money - by definition - unsustainable. This episode triggers a fascinating debate.
An influential expert with a different vision
Tim Frenneaux has worked on both sides of the economic argument. Earlier in his career he worked for institutions that did prioritise growth, but now he is independent and has chosen to follow a different path. He’s moved from shaping economic development policy in the public and private sector, to focusing on designing regenerative economic models.
Tim believes that aiming for economic growth should not be part of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, because he thinks that chasing more money pulls in the opposite direction to caring for the planet:
“There's a great phrase that the environment is starting to send invoices back to the economy. We've always had this narrow view of economic growth as the prime thing that would deliver all the other benefits that we wanted from society. It's starting to be shown as the fallacy that it always was.” - Tim Frenneaux
Each episode of 'The 17' ends with our influential expert guest giving us all their Stop/Start - one thing we can all stop doing and one thing we can all start doing right now to help move the planet toward meeting the UN Sustainable Development goal that is the theme of that episode.
Tim’s 'Stop' relates to our attitude to money. We need to stop chasing it and instead focus on wellbeing - our own, our community’s and the planet’s. His 'Start' is about searching out an emotional connection with the people around us. If we can feel the impact of the issues facing our unequal world, we can be motivated to be part of improving the situation.
Yorkshire's ambition to lead on Sustainability
Both guest Tim Frenneaux and host Kate Hutchinson live in Yorkshire and they sense that the county is keen to be a leading regional voice on sustainability. Tim recognises the increasing passion for sustainability in the region and thinks Yorkshire can be a test bed for best practice that can be shared more widely.
The first ever Yorkshire Sustainability Week takes place this coming July and will have an in-person conference as its centrepiece featuring keynote speakers such as Greenpeace's Areeba Hamid. Go to www.yorkshiresustainabilityweek.com to find out more and get your tickets.
Be informed, take action and spread the word
'The 17' is a podcast dedicated to sustainability. It is structured around the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development goals. They represent, in essence, a plan to save the planet. We all need to know what they are, take reasonable positive actions in our own lives to help... and spread the word.
This new sustainability podcast has made quite an impact. Episode 1 was a hit - hitting Number 2 in the UK Apple Podcasts ‘Earth Sciences’ chart - an amazing result for a brand new podcast.. A new episode of ‘The 17’ is released on the 17th of each month and each episode is themed around a different one of the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Follow 'The 17' to make sure you are informed and hear from influential experts about what actions to take to play your part in building a sustainable future. Listen every month, subscribe, leave reviews and tell your friends.
Resources
Find out more about Tim Frenneaux’s work in regenerative business design: https://timfrenneaux.co/
Discover the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals: https://sdgs.un.org/goals
Explore the plans for Yorkshire Sustainability week here: https://www.yorkshiresustainabilityweek.com/
Welcome to the 17. This is a podcast dedicated to sustainability. It's structured around the UN's 17 sustainable development goals. They represent, in essence, a plan to save the planet. I'm Kate Hutchinson and I'm the founder of Yorkshire Sustainability Week. My goal is to help the UK's regions to play their part in delivering the sustainable future.
Each episode of the 17 is themed around a different, one of the UN's 17 sustainable development goals. A new episode drops on the 17th of each month, and each time I'll be joined by a new guest who has a real expertise and influence related to one of those goals. We will talk about why the goal is important, what the current situation is, and what actions we can take at an individual, regional, and even global level to make progress.
It's episode two and we're tackling Goal eight, which is decent work and economic growth. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all. We're an independent podcast, which means that we can critique these UN goals as well as describe and discuss them.
And I know that today's guest has some strong opinions on this goal, which is exactly why we've asked for him to come on. Our guest this episode is a regenerative business designer who spent the first part of his career working on public and private sector economic development. Instrumental in the UK's first ever carbon negative local industrial strategy and is a circular economy pioneer right here in Yorkshire.
It's Tim Frenneaux. Hello. Thank you, Tim. Welcome to the 17. Oh, it's great
to be here. Thank you you, you've asked me to come and talk about my favorite topics, so thank you, Kate. Good.
So Tim, tell me a little bit more about how economy and sustainability have play such an important role in your
life. Well, I'm a geographer by training, so I've, I guess I've always tried to bring together lots of different fields and lots of different perspectives, and for most of my, when I was working in a career in the, in the, mainly in the public sector, I was working on economic development.
Mm-hmm. But, It was always done in a spirit of trying to be more sustainable. And towards the end of my career and when I was head of economic strategy at the York and North Yorkshire Enterprise Partnership, we started to do an awful lot of work on bioeconomy circular economy, climate change, and incorporating things like donor economics.
So it's always been part of my career, but it's something I. Passionately believe about as well. Mm-hmm. And since leaving my career, I've had the, the ability to pursue it even further. Mm-hmm. And I guess being freed from some of the institutional constraints that came with that I've been able to, to really start to do what I feel is important and what the world needs.
Yeah. About. Changing the way things work and changing the way the system works. So yeah, it's always been part of stuff that I do, but now is the absolute heart of, of everything I do in the regenerative design stuff, in the stuff that I do, running my own business and in collaboration with the with the Leads Donut Coalition.
So let's dive into the UN sustainable goal. Number eight, decent work and economic growth. The aim here is to promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all. Here are some of the facts about the current situation. According to the un, department of Economic and Social Affairs, global Economic Recovery post Covid is hampered amongst other things by rising inflation and labor market challenges.
Global unemployment is over 6%. One in 10 children are engaged in child labor and global annual G D P growth is 2.5%. It was 4.4 before the Ukraine war. So Tim, how big is the challenge here?
I mean the, the challenge is massive and, and what we're seeing in those figures is that growth is starting to stall, but it was always gonna start to stall because we've been driving the system based on we must make more growth, we must make raw growth.
And since the 1950s, everything has been growing everywhere. All the time. It's, it's called the great acceleration. Mm-hmm. And we seem to be working on this presumption that we could just continue with growth forever. And very few economists actually look. Past the hockey stick that they predicted of growth, growth, growth to say, well, what comes after that?
Mm-hmm. And now we're starting to see what comes after that. Well, now we're at the transition point of going, well actually this growth isn't getting us to the place where we wanted it to be. And in fact, it's starting to slow and we're starting to see the system. Show the cracks. Mm-hmm. So it, so we're starting to see the breakdown.
There's a great phrase that the environment is starting to send invoices back to the economy. And it's because we've always had this narrow view of economic growth as the, as the prime thing that would deliver all the other benefits that we wanted from society. Mm-hmm. And it's starting to be shown as the fallacy that it always was.
Even the guy who came up with measures of. Economic activity at country level. Simon cousin, it's a, uh, an economist in the 1930s in the States even. He said that measuring the national product is no way to measure the wellbeing of a country. Yeah. But we did and we adopted this thing of growth and it's become central to everything.
And we've built our whole edifice around growth. But it's starting to crumble the stats that the UN are reporting about growth starting to slow. It's absolutely right, but the challenge isn't how do we refresh growth? How do we pump more energy back into this? It's how do we find a model that moves as past growth?
Yes, to deliver wellbeing. Because ultimately what? Our jobs and businesses and the economy for, it's not to create money. Money is just a social construct. Sorry I'm stealing your words there, but it is, money is a social construct. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself. And the end is wellbeing and, and quality of life.
But we've lost sight of that because the thing that we've been told to measure that economists have, have, have obsessed about that then translates into business and banking and investment and everything else. Is just the money bit of it. Yeah. But actually, Economic wealth. The prosperity is built on a much broader series of capitals than just money.
There's environmental capital, there's social capital. There's so much more that goes into it, but we just measure one, one small bit of it. So that's why. Growth is starting to fail, and I have to be honest, it mystifies me a little why economic growth is part of the sustainable development goals because it's pushing in the opposite direction to all the other goals.
All the other goals are trying to deliver. Wellbeing and quality of life. Yeah. And yet by focusing on saying, well, we need to continue with economic growth though, because everything that's related to everything else, it actually undermines everything else. And that's why we are not making the progress that we expected on the sustainable development goals because they're actually in conflict with each other.
It's particularly sustainable development. Goal eight. That's the, that's the one that's in conflict with it all.
This. So that's really interesting, that whole conflict piece, isn't it? Because you're absolutely right. We've been operating in this world for a very long time. That is ultimately, economy seems to come first before everything else, and then everything else seems to have to fit around the economic model that we're operating in, rather than it being, this is how we should live and the economic model should then fit to us.
It feels the other way around. So how do we, where do we go from here? What, what happens? What do we need to do? So,
A lot of my work is based on donor economics. The book Donor Economics was released in 2017 by an amazing economist called Kate Raworth, and she sums it up beautifully. She says, we've got an economy that needs to grow.
Mm-hmm. Whether we thrive or not, we need an economy that helps us thrive, whether it grows or not, and that's the difference. We need to turn it on its head. So I'm not anti-growth. I am absolutely not anti-business. Business is the most powerful agent of transformation. That we've ever had. Businesses have reshaped the planet.
Businesses have ushered in the anthrop scene, so we, we have remolded the planet, so that shows how powerful businesses can be. We need to turn that phenomenal power onto creating a better world rather than extracting as much value and degrading as much of the environment in the process as we can whilst pressing huge amounts of people because.
That's what the system is doing at the moment. So it, we really need to turn it on its head and say, how do we do things differently? And that is a massive, massive process. It's a massive problem, but it's one that we need to embrace. This is the most important time to be alive ever. We are the one civilization.
That's got an opportunity to look at what the future holds for us. Mm. And do something about it. Yeah. So for all the, the, the problems in the system are gonna be very difficult and changing that is gonna be very difficult. It's the greatest challenge that civilizations have ever faced, that humanity's ever faced.
And it's our generation that are gonna do something about that. And tapping into that as to the, the opportunity to, to be the generation that future generations sing songs about. Sorry, I'm
No, do you know what, when you were saying that, I was literally just thinking. This is incredible. Like what an opportunity we have, what an opportunity we have, and I a hundred percent agree with you.
And ultimately this is why we're doing what we do. Right? You know, businesses are gonna be the change makers. It's gonna be business that drives this change to a sustainable future. But what an opportunity to build a better world. And this is the thing that gets me, and I'll get on my high house a little bit now.
We seem to have been in this sort of battle with, you know, sort of all these different sides. We absolutely know we need change, but I think the longer we keep with this message of like the world is burning it, the longer it will take. For us to actually implement that change. And if we start to talk about it in the same way that you're talking about it now, with passion and enthusiasm and looking at it as an opportunity, we are gonna be the generation that creates change and that makes a difference.
Oh my God, I wanna be part of that generation like Abso. Absolutely.
Don't we all? Absolutely. That's what you know, the meaning of life is. Life, yeah. Is living, it's sustaining life. And actually by embracing that, it enables so many more people to feel that they're living meaningful, fulfilled lives. Yes.
Rather than just that they're cogs in a machine, which is just extracting it, what as much as it can get out of them. Mm-hmm. And giving them enough just, just, just to keep them happy. It's they all bread and circuses thing. If you keep the population happy, you can do what you want with them. And actually that is not working anymore.
Hmm. People need to be empowered to make change in whatever way they can, and we can all do stuff. We've all got agency, particularly within our businesses. If we turn our businesses around and start to say, well, what is our area of influence? How can we do what we do best as this amazing business to make things better?
Not just to make money. And that making things better, healing the situation that we face is the greatest opportunity we've ever faced. I think that's one of the things that coming at. The environmental movement from this perspective, from strategic perspective that looks at, at the big picture. Yeah. And from an understanding of business, which often you don't see within the environment sector, businesses aren't just the problem, they are the solution.
Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. And, and we need to paint that upside. We need to paint a better picture and not keep telling people what they're doing wrong. Yeah. Everyone knows that things aren't working. They want to do the right thing. We need to give them the tools and the ambition and the motivation to do that.
And that's what we're gonna see in the, in this generation. And that's why, that's why things are gonna change and, and there's all that good stuff. But we're also gonna drive that because there will be more problems, there will be more crises, there will be more things that we've got to get to grips with.
None of this is ever gonna be perfect, and we're never gonna get to a point anywhere in this journey where we're gonna. Be perfect because perfection isn't possible for humanity and we should stop aiming for that. But we should aim for rapid progress and great things in a great future. So with that in mind, then, let's just sort of dig into, cause we like to look at it from an international, national, regional, individual perspective.
Talk to me about internationally what you think. We need to do to the economic structure, what that new structure would look like and how we could operate internationally. So
globally, we, we need to move from being an industrial society to an ecological society. And that means a society that is imbalanced, that recognizes that we are part of a bigger system.
Yeah. And that we can't control it. And that is a massive mind shift. Isn't that
funny? Control. Why the hell did we ever think we could control nature be, be
because of the enlightenment? There was a separation of science and spirituality in nature. And ever since then we've pursued this approach that drives the sort of solutionism you are talking about.
We almost think we've got to have a solution. Mm-hmm. Well, we don't. We can't have solutions. We can make things better. We can move in the right direction, but setting ourselves up to solve something is too big an issue. That's what we need to do. Globally, particularly in the developed world and the western world, we need to recognize that we were promised that progress would come from keeping growing, keeping growing, keeping growing, and eventually with there would be enough surplus that we could go around and sort out all the problems.
It comes back to that guy I was talking about before, Simon Kunitz. He had this curve. Of pollution on one side and e environmentally impact and income. And he said, well, actually, as income grows, pollution is gonna get worse. But eventually when we've got enough money, we'll be able to solve that. But that second half of the cousin's curve, it's never enough money.
There's never happened, there's never been enough. It's never enough money. That's why. It's because people want to hoover it up. And that's the problem with our extractive economy. We've become too focused on money and not the outcome of it. So yeah, so globally we need to shift to that ecological civilization, and we do that.
By painting a picture of what it means to thrive, what life is all about. And we're starting to see that, and it will happen quite rapidly cuz change is, is non-linear. Mm-hmm. And I think as. As more and more people start to realize, one, that there's a problem and two, that there's something else that we can do about it.
Yeah. Then we will start to see
that we're already seeing it. We, exactly. Since the change is coming, we're on the precipice of a green revolution, you can feel it. Mm-hmm. You can. You can feel it. There is so much happening nationally, internationally, regionally, we can absolutely see that the change is coming.
Change
isn't linear, but it's, it's hard for people to see that because we think that this reality, this, this world that we're living in at this moment, at the start of the 21st century is the way that things always have been. Yeah. And always will be because we're short term thinkers. Humans are terrible at thinking long term.
So I think the other thing that we need to do on a global level is find the sources and the re reservoirs of, of different sorts of wisdom. Cause we are not gonna get out of this way by using our old approaches. And that's why I hear so much talk about indigenous wisdom because these are reservoirs of different sources of knowledge.
These are different communities who don't just think short term. You know, you've got First Nations people in in America who think seven generations. You've got the Mai people who have this great theory of waapa, which means that they see themselves as this long line of humanity of life stretching all the way back.
And all the way into the future possibly. And so there are other cultures that retain this source of knowledge that we need to thrive in future. And that's why there's globally, there's so much attention at indigenous communities. It's not just because of the, the remaining bits of undisturbed land that they protect.
Mm-hmm. Which is very important, but it's because of the knowledge that they've handed down from generation to generation, the knowledge that needs to be repopulated throughout the rest of the world. And that's how we are gonna grow that, that. Ecological civilization.
Yeah, absolutely. That's God, honestly, I could talk to you about this all day.
That's so interesting. So then let's take that into a national perspective then, Mike. What's happening in the uk? We've just had the council elections. The Tories got absolutely slammed. Labor did well, the greens did well. The Lib Dems did well. They look like they're having a bit of a resurgence. So talk to me about what we think is gonna happen nationally from a, um, an economic perspective.
Well, I think it's fairly clear that there is gonna be a change of government. You used the word the UK there, and I think England has got less of a strategic vision for what the future might look like. Than Scotland and Wales. Mm-hmm. And Scotland and Wales are part of a wellbeing, government partnership with other countries like Iceland and Finland and lots of other countries that are starting to say, hang on, this economic growth model placing all our eggs in this growth basket.
Mm. Isn't working. It isn't delivering the prosperity that we want for people. It isn't delivering wellbeing. So what does something else look like? So actually I think there are other nations who are starting to embrace this a lot more, and you can already see that that coming through in some of the decisions that the Welsh government are making, you know, they're stopping doing things because it's gonna be bad for future generations.
Mm-hmm. So this idea of having longer term thinking, And thinking about the impact of our actions in future is starting to come through in some nations. I don't quite see that in England. You know, if you look at what labor is saying about, about what they would do, they're still wedded to economic growth.
And actually it's not gonna get us where we need to. And I think that, I think
labor have got the ability to. To change
that? Yeah, I think labor probably have got the ability to change that.
I sort of feel a little bit like what labor seemed to do at the moment is go for one line under what the Tories are saying, basically is how I sit in my head.
So the Tories will say one thing and then labor will say, oh, well we don't agree with that, but then we'll do something that's slightly less bad and it, that seems to be the approach and. I feel they could be more radical.
It's hard for, it's hard for politicians. I think that's the thing is that we are trying to get a, a political system, a democratic system, which is based on short-termism to think long-term, and it's very hard for those politicians to think long-term.
That's why. There's calls for things like citizens assemblies, other ways of bringing long-term thinking into this. Cuz I think it is super hard for the political parties. You know, it's hard for most businesses to talk about being long-term and being generous and healing stuff. It's even harder for politicians who've got to take people with them.
Yeah. And I think what we need to do is start to change ourselves. Our businesses, our societies and politics will change as a result of that. Politics isn't gonna lead us outta this. It's the next generation. Is she young people standing there with, with placards? Yeah. Who were, who were gonna change it.
That's where change comes from. It doesn't come from political parties anymore. They're more following and waiting for the signals that people are ready for something else. And yet, We know that people are ready for something. Yeah. And you talk to anyone and they know that the system isn't working and they're desperate for a way to, to do something about it.
We have more than enough to, to do everything we need to do to live good quality lives, to have health and wellbeing. But the system doesn't enable that because the system is geared around, around a few, a few people benefiting whilst everyone else does, kind of all right, but not
really bothered. But that's interesting, isn't it?
Because in the last few years, those of us who are not the very wealthy, Have been struggling to even just do all right. And I think that's a very interesting thing because it's not just your working class people who are now suffering under this economic model and they've been suffering for a very, very long time.
But it's actually the middle classes, particularly the young middle class who were told to go to university, told to get an education, and if they came out of university, D with an education, they would secure a 30 grand a year job immediately and blah, blah, blah. And it just hasn't happened. And that's been going on since my generation went to uni.
And back to that idea of long-term thinking and, and, and a new generation who were born at the start of a new millennium. Yeah. In generations to come. We'll look back at this time, at the start of the 21st century, it was a great turning point when things changed. Yeah. When we started to wake up and when we started to go right, what do we need to do?
How do we make a difference? How do we heal things? How do we re regenerate the planet and the systems which support life on it? We just can't see that now because we are such short-term thinkers. We can't really think, I can't think we are next week because it's humans. As a species, we are terrible at long-term thinking, but, but just take that momentary step back.
And look at the big picture of where we are in future. We will look back at this and, and see it was a massive turning point. And we are right in the middle of it. Now. We're right at the start of it. Yeah. Yeah. So few people realize that, and, and as that awareness starts to dawn as more people, as more organizations, and that is start to get with it, this conversation is part of it happening?
Yeah, it is. It's, you know, it's all connected. This is the system. The system is the movement of lots of things happening. It influences itself. It doesn't matter whether it's a conversation that we are having here. Yeah. Conversation around the board table, conversation around the dinner table at home, conversation at school.
Every conversation that says, what are we here for and how do we make the most of these short and precious times that we've got on earth? Mm. Are conversations that that change things. This is gonna be our life's work, isn't it? It is our life's work, but hey. What a, what an amazing time to be alive. What an amazing, absolutely amazing.
What an opportunity when we can do something about this. Yeah. We've talked a lot about the economic growth side of it. Yes. The other bit of it is good quality jobs and Yes. And, and that's still really important and by businesses starting to recognize that they're not part of the problem, they're part of the solution and empowering their staff to do something about it.
Yeah. You help bring wellbeing and meaning and fulfillment to people who've never experienced that in their, in their daily lives. If you can say to people, actually, we are gonna make a difference. We are gonna make the world better. And you are gonna do that in the bits of your business that you've got influence over.
Because every business can contribute to a better world, and every person within every business can contribute to a better world. Wow. Yay. How amazing is that? So that we can draw all of these people in, so, So that they get wellbeing from doing their, the stuff that they do every day. And this goes back to this is part of how businesses.
Can start to understand what it means for them. So instead of just looking at your quarterly returns and how you, how your sales are doing, we need to start to measure other parts of the business. And we need to start to measure the wellbeing of our staff and how they feel and how they feel that they're making a difference and balance that.
Against the economic growth side. Mm-hmm. Because there's a whole load of other metrics that we need to be looking at in business to know whether our businesses are delivering that wellbeing and the prosperity that that, that we want them to do. And we've just not, we've just not done that before. It's that old thing about what gets measured, gets managed.
Yes. We're measuring the wrong things. We need to measure more things in business. And that's why you can see things like the four day week have really taken up today. Yeah. Because. Actually, it's not about the hours that you spend at your desk, it's about the output. You output deliver. Absolutely. And, and actually if you change the context in which people are working, they can deliver more for your business in less time, and that can free them up to do the things that they want to do.
Outside of that
and oh, the basic things like being able to put your washing on and take your kitchen to school. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, do the big shop and all the other things. Because this is the other thing about the, you know, the shift economically over the last 70 years really is this move into bringing women into the work.
Place, which, you know, obviously I'm very pleased that that's happened. But the dynamic shift has not become that then women have come into the workplace and then we've had more flexibility, uh, time at home, et cetera. And we're now in an economic model where both partners need to work and still need to raise the children as if they're not working and still need to run a household as if they're not working.
And there's nothing to support that, which is why it's unsustainable and why it's. You know, ultimately not gonna
work. It's the old thing about diversity being a driver of innovation. The more diverse the team, the more diverse the perspective you bring to a problem. The more innovative your solution and, and the less likely you are to be blindsided by something.
And the role of women in the workforce is so fundamental and yet so badly understood by most male business leaders. To find that new way forward, we have to do an awful lot of letting go. Yeah. And for me, That has been the most powerful thing since going freelance and starting my own businesses, is that I've been able to let more things go, to let things come.
And so this gets us into the way we build a better future isn't the way that we built the old future. And again, I, I guess to relate it back to the sustainable development goals. The sustainable development goals are very symptom based. So they're going, we've got a problem there. So we will solve that problem.
Yeah. We will solve that symptom, but we never go back to the system and say, the system is causing, so we're playing whack-a-mole. We're constantly running around knocking down problems and another one pops up. Yeah. Because we don't work on a systems' level, and the way you get back to working on a systems level is think about ourselves as individuals and our role within the system.
Mm-hmm. And the role of our organizations. Within the system, we have to do an awful lot of letting go. So there's a, there's an alternative to the sustainable development goals, or I guess an addition has been proposed called the inner development Goals. Mm-hmm. And they talk much more about the importance of change being created by people and, and, and the internal conditions of people rather than really the sustainable development goals.
We're a bit of a top down, we must do this. You go off and sort that. It's the old command and control hierarchy top down. We've got some problems. Off you go, go and solve them. The, the inner development goals are much more about, about developing our own capacity. To engage with the problem. You'll have noticed that there's, there's times during this conversation when I've been quite emotional, like I am now, because I allow myself to feel the problems that we've got and it, it upsets and frustrates me, but most people, Aren't able to connect with stuff on, on that level because it's, it's hard.
And the system doesn't allow us, allow us to do that. We've got to open
up. It's ending. Yeah. Isn't it? I think that's one of the biggest challenges, isn't it? And I know that, you know, we've got, um, an amazing speaker called Clover Hogan coming to speak at Yorkshire Sustainability Week, and she's an activist 24 year old activist.
She's absolutely phenomenal. She's incredibly emotional when she speaks because she, you can see that she feels. This, she feels the connection to the problems and is genuinely distressed by the fact that there isn't, you know, there isn't a pace of change that she wants to see, you know, which I think is really interesting.
But then at the same time, she's able to, to hold that emotion. And then, you know, what she's gonna come and do at at Y S W is she's actually gonna come and do a big visioning session with us. On, what does that future look like and how exciting is this future? We have options here. We have options to change this if we just dream big enough.
And that's my thing that winds me up. Chronic, is that we as a nation, as a region, as you know, the town I was brought up in, which is Barnsley, you know, we were never. Ambitious enough. And that doesn't necessarily, to me, ambition and economic growth aren't necessarily the same thing. It's being ambitious enough for a brighter future.
And what does that look like? And that sort of brings me into, so from a regional perspective, tell me what you are hearing regionally. Tell me what you are, you know, what you're seeing regionally happening. I,
I mean, I think there's some great stuff happening regionally. Yorkshire is a really interesting region because you've got big cities.
Mm-hmm. And you've got. Big rural areas and, and most of the regions are either one or the other. And we've got 'em both. So, so we've got this great synergy here in Yorkshire of kind of human constructs of cities and lots of people and environment and landscape. So we've got huge opportunities. Mm-hmm. And that's driven great things like, so York's got real specialisms in.
Bio economy in replacing oil-based products and materials with bio-based materials, and that is driving a huge amount of prosperity within rural areas. It, it's, it's reviving rural areas and giving you sources for that. We've got some great work happening on the circular economy. You know, we've got Circular Yorkshire, we've got the, we've got the Circular Innovation Lab at Leads Uni.
So there are great institutional approaches which are starting to knit this together. It's still very early days, but I think, you know, you were doing great work at at bringing all this together and putting it on a stage and you are absolutely right. You know, we are not ambitious enough. We should be put in this front and center of, of our bid, both locally and nationally and saying to to, to the rest of the country.
Actually we're doing great stuff here in Newshire. We can help show you the way and we can be a test bed cuz so much of this is about, you can't do this and you can't do that, and you can't do the other. It just doesn't inspire everyone. Yeah. Yeah. And so we need that ambition and, and hats off your gate.
Oh, thank you for building a platform and holding space to create that ambition cuz it's
what we need. I honestly can't keep up with everything that's happening in Yorkshire every single day. I find something else that is phenomenal that is happening, that we should be shining a light on. This
is what we need is a wholesale.
How can we, with the things that we do with within our business, within our organization, how can we start making things better? Yeah. Tomorrow. And it doesn't, it doesn't require fun, huge, fundamental changes. It just requires us to think about what do we do? How can we make a difference and how do we start
with that?
And that innovation for innovation's sake is very interesting, isn't it? Because we've actually, I saw a stat, um, very recently, which blew my mind. So the cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the entire airline industry. Entire airline industry. That blew my tiny mind. And one of the things when I was sort of reading up on it, you know, every single time you take three pictures of the same thing and then you fail to delete those three pictures of the same thing.
You think about from an individual level, what can we do? Right. Well actually. That goes somewhere that sits in a cloud. The cloud isn't in the sky, guys. It's actually a, a whole data hub, which is in the ground. It's very hot and it's very bad. And all the rest of it, you know, there's loads of things is from an individual point of view that we can do to solve that.
Exactly. But also tech
for good. Exactly. And that's it. And there's, there are societal level problems that technology. Can solve. You know, that's a, so that's a very solvable problem, but we just need to wake up to it. And I think this goes back to that idea of, well, we can move into knowledge economy and service economy, and that'll separate, that'll decouple economic growth from environmental degradation.
Mm-hmm. And it's just not true. It's another one of those fallacies that we had at the, in the early days of, of, of coming up with something. Well, we'll sort it out in future. And that's what we've always been doing. We've always been kicking the can down there and well, it still be all right in future. And we are in that future now.
Yeah. And things aren't all right. Yeah. And then, and, and they aren't solving themselves, so we need to be more proactive about that and more purposeful mm-hmm. In saying, What influence have we got on the world as a person or a business or an organization, and how can we use that influence to make things better?
And that's all we need to do. And that liberates so many ideas, innovations that move is in the right direction. Mm-hmm. And again, it's about just moving in the right direction. So all we need to do is start going in the right direction.
I think the fundamental thing that you've sort of said continuously throughout this is that how it all comes back to we have to stop thinking short-term.
We have to stop thinking short-term. We have to start looking at what is the impact on us long-term? What is the impact on generations? And I love the idea of thinking seven generations in front. I always like to think I'm gonna, I'm gonna make sure before I die that my great-grandchildren are gonna be okay.
So that's my sort of, in my head, I'm like, I'm gonna, whatever that looks like, I'm gonna leave a world. That is gonna ultimately mean that my great-grandchildren are gonna be okay. And then I'm gonna put the onus on my children and my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren from there to do the same.
And if they do all, you know, if they continue in that line, then we'll be all right. And
again, we can learn this from, from looking at the natural world. So the natural world nature is, is the longest running r and d project. Trees need to perpetuate their species and they can do that over 10,000 years.
They're not cognitive beings in the same way that we are. They, they don't think about the future. But what they do is they ensure the survival of their species. Mm-hmm. We're back to what is life about? It's, it's ensuring the survival of life and trees and plants in the natural world do that by protecting the place in which they live.
They can survive over 10,000 years as in a species, not an individual organism. By protecting the place that they live and that, and that's how nature has evolved and we are this, this new being that's got to learn, that we've got to pick up on the cues from nature and learn about actually protecting the place that we live to sustain future generations.
So from
from there then, what do you think needs to change within their sustainable development goals? What do you think they should look like and how should they operate For
success? We need to drop the growth goal. It's, it is incompatible with all of the other goals. So we need to drop that idea of, of, of growth as being a driver of sustainability because it isn't.
So that's quite a terrifying concept to most people because we're so used to
abs being growth and it's a terrifying cons concept to, to institutions. Yeah, absolutely. That are built on growth. Yeah.
So what's the other thing that we, so,
so, so the other thing, well, we need to learn about that. That that's the thing.
Okay. Constraints drive creativity. We need to put in place some constraints that say, actually we can't keep growing forever, so what else are we gonna do? And people will, because we're in, we're in inventive species, you know, that is what, this is what we are greater is innovating and coming up with ideas.
We need to recognize that and, and, and say, well, actually, If we are not gonna grow forever, well, what does it look like? What, what are the other policies? How does investment work? How does property work? How do taxes work? What does employment mean? What does pensions mean? We need to start to investigate all of those bits of the system.
Yeah. And that's really brave. Mm-hmm. But we've got to do that. We've got to, we can't just keep going around in our blinkered little bubble saying Everything's gonna be all right. There isn't gonna be a problem. And if there is, we'll solve it when we get to it. We need to start to put some constraints on ourselves and say, Everything isn't gonna be all right unless we do something about it.
So let's stop thinking that growth can be the engine or everything. It's not that growth is, is itself a bad thing. If we've got tech companies who are able to solve some of our societal problems, then their growth is a very good thing. Yeah, I'm not. Anti-growth, but it's got to be, make things better first.
And if you grow as a result of that, then that's a good thing. But it's always the other way around. So you'll, you know, we'll hear, talk about green, so a length green growth and inclusive growth and it's always growth with a little bit of something else tacked on. It needs to be the other way around. It needs to be greening the economy.
And if we can make growth out of that, then that's a good thing. Being more inclusive, that is a good thing. If we can make more growth out of it, then that's okay, but the growth bit needs to be secondary to the beneficial part of it.
So what solution does donor economics present in that then? Does donor economics present a roadmap or how
does that work?
So donor economics does two things magically. On the one hand, it's a lens to hold up to society, economy, and the planet, and it shows us what's gone wrong. And so you can map onto the donut, the functioning of the planet, or you can map onto it, the functioning of a, of a business and say, well, how are we doing in terms of environmental and social issues?
Where are we doing well and where, where are we overshooting or undershooting? So, On the one hand, it can help you see what's going wrong and on the other it can help you do stuff better. And doing stuff better is basically a two things. You need to start to think about being more regenerative. More redistributive.
Regenerative means things like circular economies. Mm. And biomimicry. Cuz we are the one species on earth that creates waste. Yeah. Nothing else in nature creates waste. We're the one species that does that. We either need to follow nature and design waste out of the system using biological products or design waste out of the system by being more circular when we've got manufactured materials.
Yeah. Yes. And all of that regenerative activity needs to be powered by renewable energy, not fossil fuels. So, so one part of the, the donor economic solution is being more regenerative. Yes. And the other is being more redistributive. Yes, because it's, it's inequality, which is driving problems in wellbeing.
The more equal a society is, the higher the levels of wellbeing. Again, it goes back to that I, that cousin's curve and Simon Csnet saying, well actually in future, we'll we'll be able to solve all the problems when we've got enough money. The United States is twice as, as rich as Portugal in terms of income per capita.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And yet their wellbeing standards are worse Yeah. Than Portugal. So we can see that money isn't driving wellbeing. We need to find other ways of getting past that. So, so we need to redistribute, not just regenerate. And the redistribution bit is really important and lots of people get hung up on the, on the environmental side of things and talk about regeneration.
We can't forget the need. Of of people. We need to, we need to redistribute knowledge, power, and resources throughout the system so that it's not extractive and divisive so that, so that we don't have a few people doing very well and most people not doing quite so well. Everyone needs to thrive. And there you see things like salary caps within companies.
Mm-hmm. You know, no one ends more than 10 times someone else. There's lots of. Other ways that you can be redistributive within your business that spreads wellbeing and prosperity amongst people, as well as environmental improvements through through regeneration. So those are the two bits of donor economic.
Those are the, those are the two core
elements. Really interesting. You just sparked a thought in, um, one of the things that you just said then, which is about, um, you know, employee ownership. I was at an event recently that was all about investing in, um, in businesses and how you get investment basically with the crack.
So they've got three businesses that had had investment and three investment management businesses, sort of on a panel discussion all talking about it. And one of the things that they were talking about was how in America it is actually, um, a fundamental part of your operating model that you must give shares to employees in order to get.
Funding. Like if you've not done that, they basically won't look at you because their argument is when it, when times get tough and you need somebody to really, really, really work hard on this business model, then they need to have a slice of the pie to be motivated to do that, you know? And that's really interesting, isn't it?
Because you know, we haven't quite done that in the UK yet. It's something I'm definitely looking out for my company and my team, but how do we sort of start to see that? Trickling into all the UK businesses. Cause I think there'd be a huge benefit.
Absolutely. And and I think one of the other big problems that we've got in enterprise design is the requirement that businesses put shareholder needs first.
This is why businesses is focused around money, because the purpose of a business is to provide dividends to shareholders. So we've got a movement in the UK called a Better Business Act where they're. Uh, lobbying parliament to change the legislation so that equal weight is given to shareholders and to stakeholders to wider society, and this is what moving to an ecological civilization looks like.
Mm-hmm. It's about being in balance and, and, and recognizing that this is a dynamic system and that it needs to be more balanced and there are means that we can do to do that. And if, and in effect, what that would do. If it was passed would turn every company in the UK into a B Corp. Yeah. Because every company would then have to do what B CORs do, which is balance the needs of share of shareholders with all of the other stakeholders in the system.
We're back to the changes happening. Yeah. We can see it coming. There are movements to do this. We know what the solutions are, we just have to have the will to do it. And that will to do it is what is, is where I always go back to, we can't create this change by operating from the head. We need to operate from the heart, and that's the most important, and that's a journey that I've been on personally in the previous, particularly in my career.
I was operating from the head. I was a strategy manager. I was producing strategy and policy, and it said all the right things. But the moment I started to engage with it on an emotional level, It was much more powerful. Spreading that emotional engagement with the need for change and the implications of not changing is so powerful, and that's why Antonio Gut's the the Secretary General of the un, he's recently written a letter to his great-granddaughter where he apologizes for not taking or actually inflammatory, sorry, I can't even talk about it because, He has an emotional connection to the need for change and he's, he cultivated that through thinking about future generations and when he tr when and when he portrays that.
That's what it looked like. It looks like a letter that he writes to his great-granddaughter, apologizing for not doing more now, and and so that gives me hope for the sustainable development goals is that you've got someone like that at the top of the organization, at the top of the UN who does understand this, who does understand that, that there is more than just a reductive, mechanistic approach to go, well, we'll solve that problem, we'll solve that problem, we'll solve that problem, and everything will be all right.
Actually, we need to change the system. Um, and, and I think that longer term thinking, that emotional connection to the need for change is the way that we really drive that change. So this
leads me beautifully onto, we always like to leave the podcast with a sort of statement at the end that says, what can an individual do?
So if you could ask any individual watching, listening to this to stop doing one thing and to start doing one thing, what would those two things
be? I think the stop. Is stop making it all about money. Money is not the be all and end all. I currently earn a third of what I used to earn, and I've never been healthier or happier.
Money is not the be all and end all, so we need, we need to stop putting money first. Wellbeing is what's important for ourselves and for future generations. Both those born and those the had to come. The thing we need to start is making that emotional connection to the needs of future generations, to the needs of more people on the, on the planet at the moment.
Because for all that, in the Western world, we are doing okay. There is an awful, awful lot of suffering in the world and it is caused by our, the quality of our lives in, in, in the Western will. And we need to open ourselves up to that and it's very difficult. So the thing we need to start doing is making an emotional connection with other people.
Because we're all humans. We're all trying to find a way to live together on this planet. So opening ourselves up to that is hard. You can see time and time again. It hits me, but that's important. Yeah. We need to let it hit us.
Tim, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure having you on the podcast. I really, really appreciate your time and I feel like we've dug into so many different elements here, but I'm hoping that people have walked away with some value and some perspective on what new economic future looks like.
Well, it's been a joy.
Thank you.
Thank you and thank you for listening to the 17. We really appreciate your support. We're a new podcast looking to grow, so please do hit the subscribe button on your podcast provider and do leave us a review. Tell your friends about us as well. It massively helps. Remember, if you want to find out more about Yorkshire Sustainability Week, go to the website, which is yorkshire sustainability week.com.
It's happening from the third to the 7th of July. You'll be able to get your tickets to the conference there. We're gonna have keynotes from John l Kington and Dr. Wayne Visser, who will be digging into the topic that we talked about today. And Tim will be hosting a fringe event on Thursday at 10:00 AM And Tim, what's the name of the Fringe event?
Future Business Now. Future Business Now. Thank you so much, and I hope you're here for episode three of the 17th. The 17
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