The United Nations considers climate change as “the defining issue of our time”. Raz Godelnik, Assistant Professor of Strategic Design and Management hosts a webinar that will focus on the challenges and opportunities for strategic designers working in a business environment shaped and defined by the climate crisis.
1. Raz Godelnik
Assistant Prof. of Strategic
Design & Management
Parsons School of Design
Web: sandboxzero.co
Twitter: @godelnik
2. Today’s agenda:
45 minutes:
The climate crisis
Changes in business
Opportunities & challenges for
strategic designers
15 minutes: Q&A
WELCOME!
3.
4.
5.
6. “Many perceive global warming as a sort of moral and
economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution and now come due after several
centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled
into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has
been emitted in just the past three decades.
The majority of the burning has come since the premiere
of Seinfeld. Since the end of World War II, the figure is
about 85 percent. The story of the industrial world’s
kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime”
- The Uninhabitable Earth - David Wallace-Wells
17. The context in which
companies operate is
redefined and
reshaped by the
climate crisis.
It is becoming the
biggest challenge as
well as the biggest
opportunity for
business.
18. “Climate change has become a defining factor in
companies’ long-term prospects.” (January 2020)
Resource: EY Survey, December 2019
24. Do what you can, not what you
need
Voluntary-based
No clear sense of urgency
Vague (no clear benchmarks)
Too many frameworks
Incremental
Business as usual
Sustainability as usual
Sustainability-as-usual mindset
28. So, what does it mean for [strategic] designers?
Is the climate crisis on their radar?
How they respond to the climate crisis?
How might they respond?
29.
30. “Design mode means the outcome of combining
three human gifts: critical sense (the ability to look at
the state of things and recognize what cannot, or
should not be, acceptable), creativity (the ability to
imagine something that does not yet exist), and
practical sense (the ability to recognize feasible ways
of getting things to happen). Integrating the three
makes it possible to imagine something that is not
there, but which could be if appropriate actions were
taken.”
Ezio Manzini. Design, When Everybody Designs
(Design Thinking, Design Theory)
31.
32. “Essentially, strategic design...is focused on the systemic
redesign of cultures of decision-making at the individual
and institutional levels, and particularly as applied to
what we can think of as the primary problems of the 21st
century — healthcare, education, social services, the
broader notion of the welfare state, climate change,
sustainability and resilience, steady state economic
development, fiscal policy, income equality and poverty,
social mobility and equality, immigration and diversity,
democratic representation and so on.”
Dan Hill. Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary.
34. Greater resilience;
Industry-level
transition; Systemic
changes
Designing new
business playbooks
Transforming the
climate challenges
into business
opportunities
Translating & injecting
scientific knowledge
into the business
vocabulary
Why How what Impact
Raz Godelnik - Parsons School of Design - The New School
35.
36.
37. 1. This is serious
“Climate change has become a defining factor in
companies’ long-term prospects.” (January 2020)
38. Climate change creates a strategic inflection point:
“a change, typically in the environment, that could be caused
by technology, social norms or many other different things. The
key insight is that an inflection point causes the -taken for
granted- assumptions on which your business is based on, to
no longer be true.
What I mean by that is as you run a business, you have a set of
assumptions about what’s possible, what the limitations are,
what the key metrics are, how you’re going to drive things – all
those things that are rooted in historical context. When an
inflection point occurs suddenly, those constraints are relaxed
or changed, and that historical context no longer has relevance
to where you are right now. An inflection point basically
makes what you believe no longer true.”
44. “The science makes clear that we need a
fundamental reshaping of business and
finance. Every board and every company
must show a credible strategy to align with
1.5°C. This Playbook is an excellent guide
for the necessary journey to net zero
emissions, to prepare business for the
fastest economic transition in history and
help them drive it. It’s a guide for
preserving a more liveable planet for
future generations”
Christiana Figueres, Former Head of the
United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change, Convenor of Mission
2020.
Resource: https://exponentialroadmap.org/1-5c-business-playbook/
45.
46. Design your own business playbook
#1: Strategic
motivation
#2 Strategic
(re)orientation
#3 Ecosystem analysis +
identifying areas of
opportunity
#4 Exploring dimensions
of innovation
#5 Prototyping the
business (re)design
#6 Organizational change
and paths to integration
Articulate/Know the organization’s
“Why” (focus on purpose+culture)
strategy + your role as a
business in society.
McKinsey’s
Five Frames of
Performance
& Health
product process business model
Lens: Design
Approach: Systems thinking
Context: Climate change
Tools: Business
mapping
key factors
shaping
your system
organizational
53. resource: Thinking like a system: The benefits of looking through a systems lens - RSA report
54. resource: Thinking like a system: The benefits of looking through a systems lens - RSA report
55. resource: Thinking like a system: The benefits of looking through a systems lens - RSA report
56. Psychologist Kurt Lewin’s applied inversion framework:
1) Identify the problem
2) Define your objective
3) Identify the forces that support change towards your objective
4) Identify the forces that impede change towards the objective
5) Strategize a solution! This may involve both augmenting or
adding to the forces in step 3, and reducing or eliminating the
forces in step 4.
“Think about not only what you could do to solve a problem, but
what you could do to make it worse—and then avoid doing that, or
eliminate the conditions that perpetuate it.”
The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts - Shane Parrish
57. Key avenues to make change happen:
Policymaking/
regulation
Leadership Innovation
Activism
Climate
Crisis
59. 2. Leadership
-Empower others to create
change within the organization
-Embrace Corporate Activism
-Be a role model / Walk the talk
-Cultivate a supportive culture
"Even if Patagonia becomes a smaller company as a result of
the pandemic, it will keep working “to protect wild places, to
vote climate deniers out of office.”
“We were one of the first to shut down, we might be closer to
the last to reopen fully — I don’t really care. We are doing
everything we can to ensure that our employees are taken care
of in the best way possible and we’ll make those decisions as
we come to them.” - Rose Marcario, CEO Patagonia
“Be bold or die” - Emmanuel Faber
60. Building an effective culture
Can you
influence formal
and/or informal
institutions?
65. So, what about [strategic] designers?
Is the climate crisis on their radar?
How they respond to the climate crisis?
How might they respond?
66. For the most part designers still generally seem to be operating in
“business-as-usual” mode, in which they focus mainly on increasing
economic value, with little to no attention to climate impacts.
This runs somewhat counter to the premise of design thinking to solve
systemic problems, not just to improve innovation outcomes in
organizations. As IDEO’s Tim Brown admitted recently, the challenge
still remains to redesign design in order to address urgent societal
problems.
67. Problem: Design knowledge doesn’t take the
climate context into consideration
Design knowledge =
“comprising theories,
practices, principles, cases,
guidelines, patterns, and
cognitive strategies.”
