Business and climate change - Seeding Our Future

a process for exploration

Deep adaptation offers radical ways to face and respond to the climate crisis. This is a tough call for businesses, as individuals need to work through their own feelings, and the organisation must see how to transform and survive. Seeding our Future offers processes and support to help business leaders and consultants to face both these issues.

The impacts of climate change are alarming and uncertain, for all of us. It’s clear that business will need new approaches, new information, and inputs from people who understand both the corporate world and process of Deep Adaptation. It’s this rare combination which Seeding our Future offers.

What is Deep Adaptation?

Jem Bendell is a Professor at University of Cumbria. In 2018 he reviewed the latest climate science, and like others, recognised that the current situation and future outlook is much more serious than generally reported. His original 30-page paper is a key document, and has now been downloaded 450,000 times. The key points Jem makes include:

It is probably too late to ‘stop’ catastrophic climate change, so alongside movements like Extinction Rebellion, it’s vital that we look at deep adaptation.
The likeliest major impacts are likely to arise from food shortages due to large-scale crop failures arising from severe weather events.
Jem believes that societal collapse is likely in developed countries within ten years.
He highlights the deep emotional impacts of a truly alarming outlook as an essential part of what we have to engage with.

Business response to deep adaptation

In order to begin to explore and create pathways for the future, we must first move through our defences to enable us to face the truth of the situation – however that is for us as individuals and as a collective. Beyond the stark realities of climate change itself, each person will connect with this and face it in their own way, with different feelings and sense making. Working with the deep adaptation framework of Resilience, Relinquishment, Restoration, Reconciliation, we will create a space which will allow you to feel the threat, share your experience and make meaning through this collective exploration. Resistance is a natural process in any change – to acknowledge this and get curious about your resistance will support your own adaptation.

As leaders you will not be able to lead through this change until you have felt and worked through your own resistance issues. Facing the threat also allows the opportunities to reveal themselves and enables a shift to a future focus, creativity, and ability to think transformationally. An essential part of Seeding our Future’s approach is to provide supportive processes to enable all this. We have found that a really different setting can be a catalyst, and we advocate using a wild outdoor venue for some gatherings, such as Hazel Hill Wood (see more below).

What can Seeding our Future offer?

These challenges are unprecedented, and there are no easy answers. SOF work with clients to co-create a tailored approach. The elements of this process could include:

Framing: An informal, small-scale first meeting with the leader of the organisation, for an honest discussion of issues, hopes, fears, aiming to agree the aims and shape of first stages of an intervention.
Engagement: A half-day session, probably at corporate HQ, for the designated client team, and the facilitation team who will work with them. This session will aim for mutual trust and understanding, and agreed aims from immersion workshops.
Immersion Workshops: To address effectively these issues needs significant time, in a catalytic residential setting. Three-day, two-night programmes are desirable, two day one-night is a minimum to enable a personal and organisational journey. The process would be tailored to agreed aims and the context of each client.

Some examples of potential content:

Facing facts about the climate crisis and the outlook for the next 5-10 years, including both personal and organisational impacts.
Processes drawing on the supportive natural setting of the wood to help participants face and function with strong emotional responses, such as fear, despair and overwhelm.
Exploring how to support all staff in handling these kinds of emotions.
A future visioning process, using the woodland ecosystem as catalyst, to create a deep sense of future possibilities, seen from a range of viewpoints (e.g. the business, consumer activists, the environment, investors, regulators, etc).
Constructing a few potential scenarios for the overall future strategy of the business, and assessing these on a range of criteria, including shareholder needs, personal values of workshop participants, future legacy, customer impact.
Drawing together priorities to take this further, e.g. areas needing more fact-finding, scope for project teams, how to engage with stakeholders.
Looking at personal support to enable participants and others to keep engaging with the full realities of the situation.
Follow-up: The target outcome from the immersion workshops is to design a process, which can then be led by the client, potentially with help from consultants, coaches, etc., who they already use.

Who are Seeding our Future?

We are a small team, working to support a range of clients with future resilience. Our lead partners for the business sector are Alan Heeks and Jake Farr, see profiles below. The team includes several others with extensive relevant experience, and we have access to inputs from Jem Bendell. We also work in partnership with consultancies specialising in leadership and change management.

Alan Heeks: a Harvard MBA with many years corporate experience as a manager and consultant; including co- founding Caradon plc, a major management buy-in. His work has focussed on future resilience since 2012, and he is working closely with Jem Bendell. Alan directs Seeding our Future, which is also assisting community groups and NHS doctors.

Jake Farr: Organisational psychologist, executive coach and Gestalt psychotherapist with over 20 years experience working with senior leaders of their organisations. She brings a deep awareness of the psychological and emotional process of change, and offers clients a creative, holding and holistic space from which to face the future and explore potential responses to the climate crisis. See www.apodltd.com

Hazel Hill Wood: this is a 70-acre woodland retreat centre near Salisbury with off-grid residential facilities. Alan and Jake are both trustees of the charity which runs the project, and have led many programmes there. See more at www.hazelhill.org.uk

Eco accommodation at Hazel Hill Wood

To explore further:

Please contact Alan on or 07976602787 or Jake on

BLOGS

Business and Climate Change: finding constructive responses

An introduction to Deep Adaptation and Jim Bendell

Report from Findhorn Climate Change Conference, April 2019: Mainstream Miracles

Review of Charles Eisenstein book: Climate, a new story

Featured Blog

How can we raise community resilience?

The Facing the 2020s report As the pressures on all of us keep rising, we can see mounting discord about best priorities and solutions. One of the few topics on which almost everyone agrees is that increasing the resilience of local communities is getting ever more vital. This has been a focus of my work since 2012, so I’m offering an overview of some of my insights. As part of a project called Facing the 2020s, in 2012 I commissioned a substantial piece of action research on UK community resilience by Reos Partners, which included over thirty diagnostic interviews, extensive desk research, and exploratory workshops in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff with potential stakeholders, including national and local government, NGOs and community organisations. This blog is a summary of the insights I gained from this research. The terms community and resilience are so heavily used that a short explanation of what I mean by community resilience may be wise: the collective capacity of a group of people to handle and grow through crises and challenges. I’ve set out below some of the main aspects of resilience in this context: part of this capacity could come from organisations, including local authority, public services and non-profit groups. Material: some capacity to respond locally to interruptions in food, energy supplies, especially for elderly and vulnerable people. Environmental: response to ecosystem damage, eg habitat loss, pollution and to extreme weather, eg floods, droughts.Wellbeing: for everyone’s emotional needs, especially those who have mental health or isolation issues.Inspirational: maintaining and renewing a sense of vision, cohesion and purpose in the community in the face of a crisis.Connective: good communication within the group, including the skills of hearing, voicing, reconciling strong differences in opinions and values. The main insights from the Facing the 2020s research are these: Reproducibility: On most aspects of community resilience, there are successful exemplar projects somewhere in the UK. For a concise, inspiring range of examples, see the book The New Road, by Alf and Ewan Young. Why have these not been widely reproduced? One reason is that many good community resilience initiatives have depended on a few superhuman people, who just kept going against impossible difficulties. How can such interventions be systematised so that regular humans could implement them in a bigger number of communities? Recording what was done in an accessible toolkit form would help a lot. Sustainable funding: Many good initiatives have also depended on funding that was not reproducible, e.g. a slab of one-off grant funding as part of a pilot programme by an NGO. Sustainable funding sources could include raising capital from local communities themselves, (eg crowdfunding), or a social enterprise model, or a couple of larger foundations offering a grant scheme plus support to use it. Professional services: Many community initiatives struggle to find professional support geared to their particular needs, in finance, legal, property, HR and other areas. The emergence of specialists for this sector would greatly assist reproductivity. Systemic catalysts: In my dream of raising UK community resilience, a focal role would be played by trained advocate-facilitators, who would go into a community to understand its needs and dynamics, help gather support and a project team and could provide access to reproducible role models, sustainable funding, professional services and more. Working with minority groups and communities of identity: Some communities will be more vulnerable to shocks than others, and history tells us that unresolved social tensions bubble up at times of stress. Resilient societies and communities rely heavily on social cohesion. The benefits of working on community resilience now include the opportunity to pre-empt more severe ruptures to social cohesion which are likely to arise from the major stresses ahead. It is important to involve minority communities in the resilience journey, and communities of identity such as LGBT, instead of focussing solely on geographic communities. Wider participation: Many places don’t have a strong sense of community, and in most of those that do, only a tiny percentage of people participate actively in community matters. How could larger numbers of communities, and larger numbers of people, have a motivation to participate in community resilience, including ethnic and low-income communities? This is a crucial issue, which will become more acute amid the pressures ahead: it would be great to see a couple of enlightened large NGOs fund pilot projects and gathering of best practice to move this forward. Engaging local authorities: As funding for services has moved from central government to local authorities, many local authorities have worked to further devolve decision-making and budgetary decisions to local communities. This means that in some parts of the country, local communities are strongly engaged with the local authority, and structures exist to support these partnerships. This move towards greater local control highlights the exciting potential to tackle many priorities (environmental, public service reform, etc.) by adopting a resilience approach and involving local people in community action and resilience building. In recent years, some local authorities have become real innovators in new forms of service delivery, partnership working and more. The replication issue applies here too. Is there currently an easy way to access best practice and role models in this area? Building national resilience: Most approaches towards community resilience take place at a geographic community level. However, examples from UK history and from other countries indicate real benefits in national-level approaches towards resilience. Some of the countries that are considered the most resilient, such as Japan, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, have a strong national resilience policy. If the UK had this too, it would make local initiatives more effective. Online resilience services: A massive opportunity for innovation! If I continue to dream, I imagine social entrepreneurs and progressive NGOs helping to create new apps and web services, alongside businesses.