All the latest news and updates from Thinking the Unthinkable.
“Prisoner of hope and stubborn optimist” Halla Tomasdottir talks unthinkables with TTU’s Nik Gowing. The CEO of The B Team reveals that leaders know they need a new playbook because the current one is “not fit for purpose”. So there must be a new definition of leadership. But can leaders achieve what is needed so urgently?
For most people, until late February, Ukraine was a nation of which they knew little. Now its desperate plight is disturbingly close for all of us. The terror could be against you next. Yes really!
No business can survive in a world beset by crises. If the Russian invasion of Ukraine distracts leaders from taking decisive action on climate then ‘Putin wins’. Strong warning from Aron Cramer, President and CEO of BSF.
It is unthinkable. We are even closer to war in Europe. The inevitability of what Putin is forcing upon us continues to be real. The date and numbers 22022022 are the new 9/11. History will remember February 222022 as the day the post World War Two security of Europe was shaken. I write this as the founder of the Thinking the Unthinkable (TTU) project in 2014.
Many leaders are not yet convinced by the scale of change needed, plus the urgency. Anna Borg, President and CEO of Vattenfall, the energy giant which is “determined to enable fossil-free living within one generation”, explains why taking risk is so important to achieve the urgent transition needed.
TTU’s Nik Gowing talks unthinkables with Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalisation and Development at Oxford University.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2022 highlights the grim prospects for what lies ahead, especially because of the Climate Emergency. This is a lightly edited version of Peter Giger’s sobering assessment at the report launch.
Huge change in thinking and leadership is needed for our planet to get anywhere close to achieving Net Zero as rapidly as required. Are leaders getting the message and taking action at last?
Yes. Here Paul Polman describes how at last the mountain of scepticism, caution and resistance is shifting noticeably in the direction needed.
The rapidly encroaching Climate Emergency threatens our survival on this planet. Together we face “nothing less than the collapse of the living world”.
Johan Rockström has been speaking with Nik Gowing in Nature’s Newsroom at COP-26 in Glasgow on 6th November, the halfway point of COP-26. He says that “the direction of travel is not debated anymore” at COP 26. “It’s rather the pace of change” that is the question being discussed. He hopes that urgent message from science are at the forefront of leaders’ thinking at COP as a “constructive stress factor”.
On the Climate crisis, “the fear is there. But I think there’s also a resolve to turn not to panic, but to turn that to very concrete actions this decade.” Nigel Topping, UN High level Champion for #Cop26 was speaking to TTU’s Nik Gowing in Nature’s Newsroom at COP-26 on 2 November 2021. This followed the announcement of a significant agreement on funding an end to deforestation globally starting in 2030.
This ground breaking research must revolutionise leadership. It is already doing so after four years study by the Future of the Corporation project for the British Academy. The outcome “exceeded anything we expected”. That is why we at TTU are publishing it. The work involved “hundreds of academics, leading thinkers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, lawyers, policymakers, regulators, and people from every walk of life around the world”.