How can organisations adapt and contribute to the transition to net zero?
Dec 05, 2024
While there are many helpful guidelines and incentives to help organisations move towards net zero, (such as the mandatory climate reporting coming in Australia from January 2025), it is proving challenging for many organisations to make meaningful progress.
How do we build sufficient organisational momentum in very busy business agendas with multiple competing priorities? And what capabilities and mindsets do organisations need when facing into existential crises like climate change?
How did we get here?
Our individual and organisational worldviews, mindsets and beliefs have played a significant role in creating and maintaining our current climate crises. Some of the factors that continue to contribute to lower levels of commitment to action that will be necessary to evolve if we are to progress, include:
- Economic and cultural narratives that have endorsed extractive and exploitative behaviours
- The rise of individualism and fragmentation of collective identity (including fragmentation of our identification with the planet we reside on)
- Metrics and rewards that reinforce individualism and economic extraction
- Unconscious biases. We are susceptible to influence (for example, green washing), and we are more likely to believe and therefore privilege the short term and specific over the longer term and ambiguous
- Human beings are traditionally loss averse and cling to our hard-won wealth, convenience and privilege – for ourselves, and in an organisational context, for our shareholders
How can we progress?
In our experience, organisations and industries have also demonstrated that they are capable of transforming and maturing their views, qualities and capacities beyond these factors that hold us back. We have adapted and can continue to adapt to the world around us.
We have found that when organisations introduce adaptive practices such as the following, it can enable them to continue to progress and sustain momentum for evolution in a complex world:
- Participate in collective sense making and sharing of perspectives by exploring the worldviews and beliefs implied within organizational, social and economic systems, and what these mean for responding to climate change
- Deepen self-discovery and continually work on our own inner worlds (mindsets, worldviews, beliefs). For example, how do we move from climate anxiety to climate agency?
- Introduce foresight practices such as scenario planning in a Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible (BANI) world. This can help us to pay much closer attention to the unintended consequences of our choices today (considering our impact on future generations), and focus on building organisational resilience in the face of existential crises such as climate change
- Develop narratives based on emerging evidence and stories of what is possible (examples of impactful progress). This can help us collectively commit to action and provide hope
- Apply risk practices to take the appropriate risks to progress while mitigating or eradicating the risks that hold us back, including introducing metrics and evaluations that encourage and reward learning, prioritisation and collective impact
When we partner with clients in building adaptive cultures, we have found that change is not only possible, but the actual journey and experience for people can be deeply meaningful and create a sense of collective purpose across organisations.
As one of our clients shared,
“In these unpredictable times characterised by ambiguity and uncertainty, there is no question that we as individuals and organisations must increase our adaptability in order to survive. The adaptive cultures approach is the best one I know to help us get there.”
Dr. Nandani Lynton
If you would like to learn more about Adaptive Cultures’ approach contact us at [email protected]
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