Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen, Ph.D.

The Climate Change Leadership Imperative with Dr. Doug MacKie

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 282

Share episode

Send us a text

Dr. Doug MacKie has over 30 years of experience as an organisational and business psychologist and executive coach working in the UK, Europe, and Australasia. He specialises in sustainability leadership, high-performance teams, and developing leadership within purposeful organisations. Through his consulting work, he has helped identify and accelerate the development of ethical leadership and team capability in CEO’s, C-Suite executives, and MDs within many of the top 100 companies in the UK and Australia. He is the author of the definitive guide to Strength-Based Leadership Coaching in Organisations (2016) and is a co-editor of The Practitioners Handbook of Team Coaching (2019). He has recently established the Centre for Climate Change Leadership in Organisations and is the editor of the Handbook on this topic, published in 2023.

A Few Quotes From This Episode

  • “There is a significant gap between the scale and impact of anthropogenic climate change and the capacity of contemporary leadership to address those issues.”
  • “We need to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation.”
  • “We’re not good at long-term thinking as a species.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode 

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

About  Scott J. Allen

My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.


♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!
⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.
➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.
📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.
🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.



Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00 

Okay, everybody, welcome to Practical Wisdom for Leaders. Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world. And, today, I have Dr. Doug MacKie. He is a business psychologist, and he is the author of  ‘The Handbook of Climate Change Leadership in Organisations.’ And I'm really, really excited for this conversation today. This is a topic that maybe we've had two or three episodes on the podcast that have kind of danced around this space, but Doug, I know that you are an expert. You are immersed in this thought. And so, maybe provide a little bit more background about you, and then let's jump into this conversation. 

 

Doug MacKie  0:36 

Well, thank you, Scott. Thanks for the introduction. Thanks for the opportunity. We actually connected at the conference in Birmingham last year, and I followed up on something you said in your presentation about intentions. So, I think my intentions today are; be engaged, but be really clear, I think, about what the core issues with climate change, leadership, and perhaps, give a little bit of context as to why I think this is so important. So, my background, I'm from the UK originally. I've done all my training in the UK, but I've lived in Australia now for 21 years in Brisbane. I have my own practice in Brisbane. I'm an organizational psychologist, that's my kind of professional identity. And there are three areas that I really focus on in my practice. So, I focus on strength-based leadership. I've done a doctorate in that, I've written a book on that. So, that's the kind of core of my practice. A lot of that done at individual and team level. I focus on high-performing teams. I was lucky enough to work with some of the great team developers and team researchers like David Clutterberg on the ‘Handbook of Team Coaching.’ So, that was in 2019. And then my latest project is, as you say, Climate Change Leadership. I edited the handbook of that in 2023, got about 30 different authors contributing to that. So, those are the three pillars of my practice, but I do other things as well. And I think my background in clinical psychology is important. I don't talk much about that, and you won't see that on my bio, but I was a clinical psych for 10 years before I turned into Organizational Psychology, and that's all I've done organizational for the last 25. But the 10 years in clinical was important because it taught me a couple of things. One was that, in clinical, you could only go so far before people were discharged, so you only looked at the negative. And that really got my interest in positive psychology and strength-based coaching. And the other one was you get to sit in front of people who are very stuck in their world and finding it very difficult to change. So, you're used to intransigence and difficult stages of change. And when I thought about the transition to organizational psychology, a lot of people said, “You can't do it. It's too difficult,” etc. But I did, and I'm glad I did. And I think I've created a good career for myself out of organizational psychology for the last 25, but the transition from clinical to organization, I think, was important because my initial assumption, based on working in the public sector, and based on working in clinical psychology, was that business wasn't really a place where you went if you wanted to do good in the world. And moving into organizational psychology has fundamentally changed my perspective on that. I think that was a really important shift, that as soon as I started working in organizations, I was bumping into people who were profoundly ethical, profoundly committed to a better world, even in banks. So, one of my first clients was a large bank in the UK, and they had a GM there whose sole job was social inclusion. So, this is getting people who are homeless into the banking system because, if you don't get them into the banking system, then they get ripped off when they go and cash their welfare checks. So, that kind of insight made me realize that, actually, business was a force for good in the world, and I thought that's something I want to be part of. 

 

Scott Allen  3:24 

Oh, that's wonderful. That's wonderful. Well, I love the fact that you're bringing this multidisciplinary kind of lens, whether it's the clinical individual perspective, the clinical organizational perspective, the strength-based, but again, you're embedded in how do we change. So, that can be at the individual level, that can be at a team or a group level, organizational, or cultural. And let's go there. You've tapped into a topic that there's some major shifts that need to occur. Before we jump into some of that, I want to know how you're defining climate change leadership. I think that's important that we just level set that with listeners. And I know you might have some other content that you want to layer in a little bit of a foundation before we get to that question, but let's see where you start.

 

Doug MacKie  4:13 

All right. Big question. Okay.

 

Scott Allen  4:15  

Exactly.

 

Doug MacKie  4:15

When I started thinking about this topic of Climate Change Leadership, this isn't about… Well, I've been thinking about it for a long time. My first degree was biological science, so I've been tapped into the environment and into ecology for a long time. But I didn't really find a professional direction for this until probably after I'd done my doctorate in 2013 and was looking around for another project, thinking, “What can I do now? What's going to be the purpose of my career and my focus?” And one of the things that attracted me was the concept that it was an incredibly overwhelming topic, but it was the complexity about it, I think, that drew me in. So, here's a topic with purpose, with real meaning in the world, and also high levels of complexity. So, if you can get a handle on this, I think you can solve almost any problem. I'm not saying I have, but I think I have thought a lot about this, and the structure I came up with is the structure I put into the handbook. And this was based on, I don't know, probably four or five years of research and thinking about climate change and thinking about the role of psychology, in particular, and leadership in particular, in dealing with this. So, there's a fundamental proposition in climate change leadership that, perhaps, gets us started, which is the contention is there is a significant gap between the scale and impact of anthropogenic climate change and the capacity of contemporary leadership to address those issues. That's the headline. So, if you think about that, think about the fact that it's incontestable that there is climate change. It's incontestable that it's anthropogenic, largely, with some minor deviations. And it's incontestable that organizations and businesses, in particular, have not been effective in dealing with this. And this is perceived wisdom there. It's generally accepted that the changes that we've made are completely inadequate in terms of keeping us to what should be 1.5 degrees temperature increase. So, one and a half degrees is the temperature increase at the Paris Agreement, I think, in 2015, said, “That's the limit we need to keep global warming to have a safe and prosperous environment for us to live in.” Last year, we were at 1.5. So, we're already there, and it looks like, if you add up all the commitments that people gave, all the countries gave at the Paris Agreement in 2015, we're on track for an increase of about 2.7 degrees if all those agreements are kept, which is a big if, because it's easy to make an intention, as we know, it's much harder to actually commit to it and actually deliver on it. So, 2.7 is catastrophic. I can talk more about that in a minute, what the basic science tells us about that. But we're nowhere near where we need to be, is the message. So, climate change leadership says there's a huge role for leadership here in turning your organization's attention to this problem because the goal here is to orientate business towards this problem. At the moment, it's business as usual with a little bit of greenwashing that's nowhere near good enough on the sustainability continuum. We need to be right up at the other end of strong sustainability to have a hope of dealing with this. 

 

Scott Allen  7:03 

Okay. So, paint a little bit of a picture, and I'm less familiar with the levels here. So, anthropogenic is that it's human-caused, that we are having an impact. And so, take us through a little bit of a storyline. You said catastrophic, that's not a good word, but where we are now, and then what are the timelines associated with some of this conversation? 

 

Doug MacKie  7:25 

Okay. There’s an excellent book by Ray Andre, which I really recommend, that she talks about climate change leadership, and she talks about the five practices necessary to confront climate change. And the first practice is scientific understanding. So, there's a lot of information out there about global warming and the impact that's going to have, and there's a lot of consensus about what that looks like. And one of the places I would go to would be the Sustainable Development Goals. So, you can look those up. They're published by the UN. There are 17 of them, and they give you a very broad sense of what we need to do to keep on track for a flourishing world, and where we might be on track and where we might be well off track. And the reason I like them is because of the breadth that they give you. So, only one of those sustainable development goals is talking about climate change, the rest are talking about poverty, inequality, the built environment, sustainability, etc. So, there's a real breadth to them, which makes them, I think, very attractive. But if we just zoom in on one, which is number 13, which is climate action, and think about that. So, as I said, the Paris Agreement said we need to stick to 1.5 degrees warming from pre-industrial levels to have some hope of having a habitable world. And currently, with last year, we were at 1.5. So we're right there in that, but there's also the amount of emissions we're putting into the atmosphere. So, that's another statistic we need to keep an eye on. And the statistic that we pay attention to is it's about 57 gigatons per year that we put in. So, a gigaton is a billion metric tons. That's an enormous amount. And, in order to keep to 1.5 we need to get from 57 to about half of that. So, say about what, 28, something like that, by 2030, so in five years time. So, you think, okay, is that possible? We're experts in goal setting; that’s what we do every day with our clients. So, is that possible to have a kind of five-year plan? Well, the reality is that, last year, emissions went up 1.3%. So, instead of going down, and we beat significant reduction to get to 50% by 2030, we're still going up in terms of emission. So we're nowhere near on track. And the Sustainable Development Goal report of last year, 2024, said exactly that; we are nowhere near on track to limit global warming to 1.5. That's just one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. And, Scott, that's not the worst one. So, this is how bad it's getting. That's not the worst one, but that's the one we pay attention to because that's the one that the media really focuses on. But the least progress is on inequality and what's called life on land, which includes biodiversity. So, that's where the least progress is happening. Now, biodiversity is an important topic, particularly in Australia, because, unfortunately, we lead the world in mammal extinction, and it's inextricably linked to climate change. If you think about deforestation, for example, if there's prominent deforestation going on, not only are you increasing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, you are reducing a habitat for all wildlife that lived in that area. So, the two, biodiversity and climate change, are inextricably linked, and we don't talk enough about the impact on biodiversity. For some reason, the focus is on climate change, and I think that's our anthropogenic, our human-caused bias, again, operating that we focus on what's important to us, rather than the broader biosphere. A couple of other things to really rattle the cage with listeners, Scott, so one is that inequality and resource depletion are the two most common things linked to societal collapse. So, these are the two that we're doing worse on. So, pay attention to that, that's really important. And there are other ways of looking at collapse, but that's certainly a very accepted model, that if we get those two wrong, if you think about it, inequality drives dissatisfaction, drives political polarization, etc., resource depletion, there are planetary boundaries that we're just crossing. I think there are nine if you look at the Stockholm resilience research report, there are about nine, and about six of them are already being crossed. So, unsustainable impact on the environment that we need to be paying attention to, that's absolutely critical in terms of… So, the third thing that's really worrying is that, at the moment, we're thinking about linear increases. So, by and large, an increase in gas emission has a linear relationship with temperature. So, that's, at least, comforting, that you know you can predict, if you emit this amount of emission, you can have this much temperature increase. However, we are getting into the range of tipping points. Now, I wasn't paying much attention to tipping points until this year when I thought, “I better have a look at this because I'm reading a fair bit about it, and there's quite a lot of publications about it.” So, between 1.5 and two degrees centigrade increase, there are about five tipping points that we're likely to trigger. So, some of those, for example, the Greenland ice sheet melts, the West Antarctic ice sheet collapse, they trigger 5 to 7 meter increases in sea level alone, let alone talk about the Arctic permafrost and the coral reef dial. So, what does 5 to 7 meters of sea level increase look like? Well, for every one meter, you're about 100 meter retreat from the existing coastline. So, that's half a kilometer. So, that's major cities in the world gone. Now that won't happen overnight, so I don't want to terrorize people. Absolutely not. That won't happen overnight, that could take decades or even a century to happen. But that's the impact that we're looking at between 1.5 and 2 degrees, Scott, so we're there now. It really interests me that this is not resulting in the kind of moral panic that I think it should be, and, to me, that's a result of the cognitive biases we all have. We look outside, as I said earlier, it's a blue, sunny day, why would we be concerned about climate change? We're not that well-designed in terms of picking up on the cues, but the data, if you can read the data, it's absolutely clear. There's no doubt about where we're heading with this.

 

Scott Allen  12:55 

How I was thinking about this as you were just communicating, I was going back to your role as a psychologist. And I think, even at the individual level, I had a guest on named Robert Livingston. In his book, he said, “When it comes to mental gymnastics, most of us are Olympians.” Even the whole conversation around cognitive bias, I think there's an image online that has this beautiful circle image of 180 cognitive biases that we suffer from as individuals. And you have enough of a challenge at the individual level, and, of course, we can get into organizations, and we have things like groupthink, and we have, I think, collective level cognitive biases at times, what we choose not to pay attention to, not to have conversations about. But this is almost like a mass, global level bias where, I don't know the framing for it or the word for it, but there seems to be this just collective, “Nothing's happening over there. Let's keep moving forward, and we don't want to address that.” I think, at the individual level, that happens with people's health. They continue to smoke, or they continue to drink, or they continue all these habits that they know are not leading somewhere good, but they continue to engage in them. Again, that happens then in families, that happens in communities where you have higher incidence of certain behaviors that aren't going to get us anywhere good. So, it's just such an interesting human condition. Does that make sense when I say that? 

 

Doug MacKie  14:27 

It does, and I think it's a good analogy because, if you think about each cigarette, you don't see an immediate impact on health. 

 

Scott Allen  14:34 

100%.

 

Doug MacKie  14:34 

We're not good at long-term thinking as a species. You can say, “Okay, well, there's no impact on the short term. I'm a little bit breathless, but that's okay. I can get by with that.” So, the idea of long-term impact is not something that's front of mind. And this is the classic long-term impact that we're looking at here. This is unfolding over decades and centuries, not minutes and hours, and that's the problem. We're not good at prospective thinking, putting ourselves into the future. Having said that, Scott, there are elements that are good at that. There are some societies who think in terms of generations, particularly indigenous societies, who think much more long-term about certain things. So, there's a capacity there, we just haven't activated it. And that's the interesting thing to me, is, what is it about contemporary society that's not activating these capacities that we have to deal with it? And I think some of it is education. There's no doubt about it that business development and business education has a role to play here, and there are people who are very active in this sphere about responsible management education. But how can it be possible to come out of an MBA and be more materialistic in your values than when you went in? How can that be possible? How can it be possible to come out of an MBA and not have a worldview that says, “Hold on, we're embedded in nature, and we need to pay attention to it.” And models of neoclassical economics that say we can be independent of it are just ridiculous and are damaging the planet, and we need to get rid of them and get another one in. How can that be possible that's not been taught in business schools? Business Schools clearly have a role here because they're educating the future CEOs of tomorrow, the companies that we're all trying to work in and make more effective. And if they're coming out thinking it's okay to adopt the Friedman doctrine and to just look at shareholder primacy and not worry about any other stakeholders in society, including future generations and the biosphere, then we've got a problem because we're not doing a service to the future education of these people if we're not giving them that content to come out and reflect on. So, there's a big movement about principles of responsible management education, trying to get that into. That's a long-term solution, though, that won't solve in the short term, but that will gradually change over time the insights and the values that people come out with. I think values is critical here, and we probably don't talk enough about that and character. I know you had Mary Crossan on the podcast recently. Character is another fundamental. So, these are the foundations. When I go back to my model that I put together for the handbook, the first element was foundations. What are the foundations of climate change leadership? And there are things like values, like character, like mindsets. These are the foundations, as well as the scientific understanding that I've just talked about. 

 

Scott Allen  17:00 

Well, I love the fact that, now, let's translate this into organizations. So, let's talk about how organizations can be a part of the solution. We have principles for responsible management education. We have the role that business schools can play. But talk about how organizations can be a force for good, because, at least, my mind goes to, well, capitalism. “The dollar,” quote-unquote, whatever currency you want to name here, is king, and that drives everything in some mindsets that exist. And so, capitalism, left unbridled, can just pursue that objective. But I think you're thinking about this in an interesting way where organizations can have a broader perspective of what it means to be successful. It's not just that myopic viewpoint. So, talk about organizations and their role in this. I'm excited to hear about that. 

 

Doug MacKie  17:56 

Again, one of the reasons I came into organizational psychology was the belief that I think business could be a force for good in the world, and I don't think it has been historically. So, there's some really good research by Rich Heede. He looked at cumulative emissions, I think, from the 17th century up to about 2010, who was responsible, what companies in particular were responsible for the majority of emissions. And he came up with a statistic that about two-thirds were emitted by about 90 companies. So, that's an amazing statistic. So, if you want to look at attribution for emissions, you need to look at these 90 companies. And some of them are publicly listed companies, like the big all majors, for example, some of them are government organizations. But you can limit it to about 90 companies of where these emissions have come from. So, business has a huge role in that. And if we look at companies like BP and Shell winding back their commitment to renewables, or something, you can see there's a real tension and tussle going on in organizations at the moment. Should we take this on board, this broader social role, or should we just focus on our shareholders? There's a real tension there. There's no doubt about it that there are pressures on organizations by active investors to just focus on shareholders, and there are pressures by active investors to focus on society and the broader impact. My view, Scott, is if you don't focus on the broader impact, you won't be in business in 10 years time because nobody will want to work for you. Why would you want to come out and knowingly work for a company that is using the environment as an externality, and that's the technical term, an externality, where they can dump their pollution and have no accountability for that? Who would want to work for a company like that? And having done a fair bit of assessment of middle and senior managers coming through, I know that the values are shifting as the generations get younger, and certainly, there's a much more ecocentric mindset in younger generations who are very clear about the sort of values of the organization that they want to work for. So, I think one of the big pressures that we can hope for here and actually cultivate is the fact that organizations will be changed by the new generation of people coming in who have very different values and who recognize that, actually, the economic models, particularly neoclassical economics, are fundamentally the problem here, and there are better models, for example, green growth and even degrowth in some situations that we need to be paying attention to that still give us sustainable prosperity, but don't damage the environment in the process. So, that process is called decoupling. You have to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation. If you don't do that, we don't have a hope, and, in 100 years time, there would be no business. It basically will be unsustainable. There'll be no possibility of doing business on a planet that's that damaged. So, we can make the choice now knowingly, that's the direction we're heading in, or we can just wait for business as usual to do the damage it's going to do, and then have to deal with the consequences of what really would look like a slow collapse of civilization. I think that's likely to happen if it's business as usual in the relatively short term.

 

Scott Allen  20:44 

Say a little bit more. How else can organizations be a force for good in this conversation? What do you think? 

 

Doug MacKie  20:51 

Well, I think we as leadership development practitioners have a role there, Scott, so I think we can go in, there are, again, go back to the handbook and to the structure I had in handbook, after foundations it was transitions. So, transitions is taking existing leadership models and transferring them onto the work of climate change. So, there's a chapter in the handbook by Jennifer Robertson on environmentally specific transformational leadership. So if you’re like me and you use transformational leadership a lot in your day-to-day consultancy, then look at that chapter. Read up on green leadership and understand that, with a minor tweak, transformational leadership becomes environmentally specific, and then starts predicting really interesting things about organizations, including pro-environmental behavior. So, a minor change that any listener to this podcast can make. I've now added that into the routine assessments that I do when I do a 360, and some of them include transformational leadership. I include the environmentally specific transformational leadership scale. So, now we're always having a conversation about your impact as an environmental leader in the organization. Doesn't matter what organization, and we're still going to have a conversation about that because that's a responsible thing to do. There's another model in that section in the handbook by Robert McManus, who talks about responsible and ethical leadership. And he's got a fantastic model, which is a nested model of leadership, which has leader, follower, goal at the center, then context, then culture. But at the outer rim of the nested model is the natural world. Now, again, when you start putting that up to your clients, “So, this is the model of leadership we'll be working with,” you can't escape the fact that everything we do is in the context of the natural world. We are embedded in it. And again, it's that ecocentric mindset that we're trying to move people towards, I think, in climate change leadership. So, there are simple things that practitioners at leadership can do that will just shift the focus of the conversation to a more environmentally and sustainable approach to leadership development. 

 

Scott Allen  22:39 

Well, intellectual stimulation or inspirational motivation during transformational leadership take on a little bit of a different flavor. So cool. What else do people need to know? We have probably about 15 more minutes to chat. What else would you like people to know as they're thinking about and making sense of this topic? I love that introduction of, okay, we can look at this topic through the lens of some of these classical theories of leadership, it's important. They can be embedded in this conversation. I think that's just a wonderful perspective.

 

Doug MacKie  23:09 

Again, to go to the next stage of the handbook, Scott, so the next stage is progression. So, these are new models of leadership that are emerging that I think are specifically going to be orientated towards wicked problems like climate change, and they include things like systems leadership or systemic leadership. And I know you've had this in the podcast before, these maturity-based models. Look at adult development. There's definitely a link there between adult development and understanding long-term, complex problems. So, again, are we developing enough leaders with that type of capability? Clearly not, or we'd be having CEOs all over the place making significant inroads into this. And then, the fourth element to the model is actions. So, what are the actions that we can take? And these include things like goal setting, and coaching and development in a climate change context. So, our last chapter in the handbook that I wrote was about climate change leadership development. How do you develop climate change leaders? This is a nascent area. So, you can't be dogmatic about it, but there's definite things we can do, which I've shown going through the list of foundations, transitions, and progressions, et cetera, that we can do to be more orientated as leadership development practitioners around that. But also understanding what effective goal setting looks like in this. So, again, great chapter in the handbook by Fred Dahlman on substantive versus symbolic carbon goal setting. So, again, you can use your current techniques in goal setting from organizational psychology or leadership development, but apply them to a climate change context, and very effectively done. There's another chapter in there by Joel DiGirolamo who looks specifically at what coaching looks like in the Anthropocene. And one of the big insights there, Scott is, I think, coaching is normally client-led. That's its history. You sit down and you listen to the client and their ambitions, et cetera. And Joel is saying, basically, we have to shift that dynamic. We can't be client-led if the client doesn't understand the context in which they're developing to the degree that they need to, and by the context, environmental degradation that many businesses are causing upon the world. So, we have to be more directive in a coaching context to say, “We need to introduce this concept. We need to have more stakeholders in the room.” There's a great line by Peter Hawkins, who wrote a fantastic book on ecologically conscious coaching, which goes something like, if all the stakeholders are in the room, what would the conversation they would want us to have be? Just think about that. Think about instead of just two people in the room, all the stakeholders. And by stakeholders, he means environment. He means future generations. He means communities. If they're all in the room, it's a completely different conversation that you’re going to have about how to develop this person and what ethical and responsible leadership looks like. So, I think there are real actions we can take as individual practitioners that, I think, give us hope, give us an opportunity to make a contribution, give us an opportunity to make a difference. But the other thing, Scott, I think it's worth talking about is there are tensions in the profession. This is one of them, I'm writing a paper about this at the moment so this is kind of front of mind for me. Why haven't we made more progress on this? Given that this is blinking red on every dashboard you look at, why are we not making more progress? Why is every conference not filled with papers about this? Why is all the research not happening that needs to happen to make climate change leadership the default program that you would run in any organization? And there's lots of reasons for that. We've talked about cognitive biases. There's a great paper by Gifford, I think, in 2011 that talked about the dragons of inaction, and these are cognitive biases. There's another chapter in the handbook about that as well by Mazutis and Eckardt, again, a great chapter. So, cognitive bias is one part of it, but there are other things going on as well. And I think one of the issues is these tensions and polarities, and we don't yet know how to manage them. So, we have an interest in polarity management, and I think that's a capability we should be developing because, clearly, the tensions are not being resolved. 

 

Scott Allen  26:46 

Yeah. That has emerged in recent times as just such an important, but again, I wonder if that goes back to some of the maturity. Do I need to have a complexity of mind to start seeing those tensions as being something to be managed and navigated? Does that require a certain complexity of mind? I don't know the answer to that, but that definitely has just emerged more and more as how do we hold these tensions and manage these tensions, and not let ourselves get so out of balance? Henry Mintzberg talks a lot about rebalancing society, but, yes, we can get out of balance and very easily default into ‘either or’ thinking that, “Well, we can't hit that metric, so let's not even try.” It's fascinating how our minds work at the individual level, at the collective level. It's amazing. But polarities, for sure, have elevated, at least, in my almost 280 conversations of the podcast, have elevated as a core activity that leaders need to manage. 

 

Doug MacKie  27:47 

So, the classic polarity in an organization, and it's a ‘both and,’ how do I have a successfully, financially orientated organization, and be environmentally responsible, be a good steward of the environment? And there's a tension there because one doesn't necessarily support the other. So, it might be in your financial advantage to not pay attention to the environment. In fact, it usually is because there's a cost to being a responsible steward of the environment and paying attention to it. So, that's the sort of tension that I see in my work every day that people are working with. There's an intention there. Yeah, we'd like to be good stewards of the environment, but what about the financial cost? What about the fact that shareholders are going to get irritated with us when the dividend drops? What about the fact, when we report the fact that we spent all this money on environmental stewardship, that actually some activist investors come after us and try and get a seat on the board and try and remove that? And that's exactly what's happened to BP, by the way, remove the CEO and put someone in there who's less concerned. So, those tensions are real, and they're happening every day. And again, building capacity, both in leadership practitioners and in, I think, business leaders to manage those tensions, I think that's essential work. But also mapping the tensions, Scott, I think that's really important. I've been thinking about some of the ones that I think are important. There's a classic one out there about the desired future. So, often when you hear people talk about climate change, what they're trying to do is terrorize you into behavior change. They're trying to paint a picture. And I've done a little bit of that today, so I acknowledge that because it's very easy to look at the data and say, “Look, the future is looking pretty alarming unless we make some substantial changes, and it doesn't look like we're quite ready to do that.” But what the psychology literature says is that we need to be painting a desired future. What is the upside of making these changes? What does sustainable prosperity look like? And you hear very few organizations make that case. In fact, almost the opposite. So, if you think about Extinction Rebellion, other process organizations, what they're using is fear and terror to try and drive people into change but there's no desired future built within that. So, what would the future look like under that model? It's not clear to me, other than potentially quite authoritarian because there's just certain things you'll be forbidden to do, like fly, for example. So, we need to get much better at that, and we need to get much better at using positive emotion, not fear and terror, to promote behavioral change, particularly pro-environmental behavioral change. And again, very good evidence for that, that that is an effective method, but it's just not one that's being used sufficiently because people, I think, are not managing their own anxiety sufficiently well. So that's where self-awareness comes in to think, well, actually, there's a better way of communicating to the public about how to be more sustainable and how to focus on pro-environmental behavior. And the risk, I think, is, if you use fear and terror is people just think about loss. So, everything you're telling me to do is going to be a cost. So, if I move to net zero, there’s going to be a cost to that. I have to buy more expensive heat pumps, etc. So, there's a physical and financial cost to that, but what's the benefit? Why isn't that being emphasized more? So, I think that's a real tension. I think there's another tension in where responsibility lies. So, individual versus corporate responsibility is a real tension there. And you can see some corporates pushing it onto the individual and saying, “No, it's your responsibility. You need to pay attention to that.” But, actually, as I mentioned before, Ric Heede’s work is very clear where the carbon majors are. That's where most of the CO2 is coming from. And I think there's a tension around the role of business in society. Some people just focus, and again, there was some recent legislation, I think, in the US about this where organizations were forbidden from using ESG, so environmental, social and, governance criteria to make financial decisions in terms of pensions I think it was because the purpose of business was seen to be making money, shareholder primacy. Again, so there's a real tension in society about what the role of business is. Is it a vehicle for change and for sustainable prosperity, or is it just for shareholder benefit and forget anybody else? So, some real tensions. And it's not just a ‘both and’ in every case, obviously it's more sophisticated than that, but understanding those tensions and being able to see them and manage them effectively. I think there's a huge role for climate change leadership in that. And thinking about the capacities required for that, these are very sophisticated models. There's a lot of training required to get people to the level where they can spot tensions in the business and say, “Yes, I know how to manage that. There's a degree of ‘both and’ there we need to work that out. We need to manage that polarity.’ That's a sophisticated process that takes time to develop. 

 

Scott Allen  31:58 

So, talk to me a little bit about how the strengths-based literature could be of service here. 

 

Doug MacKie  32:05 

That's a nice segue, Scott. I actually wrote a chapter on this, and I think it was about 2019. I can give you the reference for that. And it was one of the most interesting chapters I wrote because, for me, it went back to purpose. So, there's a line somewhere that (?Tina. L?) Evans wrote, which is “Leadership is only as good as the purpose it serves.” And I think strength-based coaching has exactly that focus as well. So, it's only as good as the focus that you put in it and the focus it serves. That was the core of the chapter that I wrote, that we need to be really clear about what the purpose of strengths is. Without an overwhelming purpose and direction, you could be developing anything. You can be developing the dark triad, for example. You could be developing more psychopathy in organizations. So, you need to be really clear about what you're developing, what the purpose is, but you also need to have the sustainability mindset around that. Why are we doing this? What's the broader view in society? What's the positive impact that we're trying to have? And going back to organizations, there are a number of models, and Katrin Muff has got one of them in the handbook, which looks at what positive impact organizations look like and what the key element of a positive impact organization is. And one of them is having great governance, but one of them is having a sustainability culture internally where people are always talking about progress, and all of that is mediated by strengths, Scott. If you think about the relationship between strengths and performance, it’s always that inverted U shape, what's called a non-monotonic effect. It's always that. So, you're trying to get people at the top of that curve when you're developing your leadership capacity so that they're fully maximizing and utilizing that strength. But it's in the service of what, is the key question there, why am I maximizing this strength, and which strengths are particularly orientated towards sustainability and responsible leadership? And I think it's the character strengths you have to go to. So, go back to Mary Crossan's work. If you're really clear about what the character strengths are that you have and how they can be fully utilized, then you're orientating them in the right way. 

 

Scott Allen  33:57 

Yeah. That's another foundational conversation that just, after all of these conversations on the podcast, if we aren't setting a strong foundation, and that kind of comes back to some of those classic ways of thinking about character virtues and what do I value, and is there a shared understanding, then anything goes. We can be oriented in any direction, and we're just kind of floating in the wind as to whatever it is that we choose to pay attention to. And so, maybe one more kind of bright spot that you see. Is there a path forward? Is there some indicator? Sometimes I hear folks say, “Well, we are ingenious, and technology can help address some of these challenges.” And so, how do you think about that statement, “We will invent a huge vacuum that will suck the emissions.” (lLaughs) How do you think about that? There's a gentleman named Peter Diamandis who says the world's greatest problems are the greatest opportunities. So, how do you think about some of that when you hear those types of statements? 

 

Doug MacKie  35:01 

I'd love to believe them, Scott, but I think they're delusional. And the reason I say that is because there's been some very good research done on… So, for example, carbon capture and storage is what you're talking about here. Is it possible to capture the CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it somewhere safely over time? That's partly what net zero is about. So, the big element of that in the hard-to-abate sectors, you have to have some carbon capture and storage. The evidence for that is that it cannot be scaled to the level that we require. So, it's removing a minute proportion, an insignificant proportion of CO2 currently, and it doesn't look like it's going to be scalable to anything like the level required. So, that's the kind of consensus. The second argument against that, Scott, is it’s a moral hazard. So the very fact that mindset is around allows business as usual to continue, and that's a problem. So, if you think, “All we need to do…” And we get this a lot in Australia because we have a very right wing party and opposition here who's basically pushing the moral hazard arguments, “We can just build something that will suck.” So, “We can go and drill and explore all they are and all we like now because, some point in the future, we will invent some technology that will remove it.” No evidence for that, Scott, unfortunately. And it is a moral hazard because it encourages irresponsible behavior now, so absolutely not in favor of that. In fact, if you look at what net zero, it should be doing, they should be doing the front loading of emissions now. So, most of the heavy lifting should be done now because the easy-to-abate stuff is happening now. The harder to abate, the cement, and the steel, etc., is going to come later, but the easy stuff that will transition to renewables is happening now. So, we should be front-loading emissions, not waiting for magical solutions. I think nature called it magical thinking, and that's exactly what it is. It's just not facing up the reality of the situation we're in. But a positive perspective, Scott, because I do think there's hope in this, I think there's a number of things that leadership practices can be thinking about. And again, I think about it in terms of the structure of the handbook. So, do things like take the sustainability mindset indicator. I took it last year, it is a chapter about it in the handbook. You can go online and find it. It's by Isabel Rimanoczy and Beate Klingenberg, and you will get a report that will give you some feedback on what your sustainability mindset is like and what you might do to develop it even more effectively. Invaluable. So, it's an easy thing to do, but it just raises your consciousness about that. Think about your own impact as a citizen. Mike Berners Lee, who was the brother of Tim Berners Lee, who invented the internet, talks about the five ton lifestyle. So, we should be admitting about five tons per annum per person for a sustainable future. Currently in Australia, we admit about 16 tons. So, think about that, and think about offsetting so that you, at least… The reason I put solar panels on my house and bought an electric car is because I wanted to be net positive in terms of emissions. How can I possibly do this work if I'm individually not committed to making the changes necessary to reduce my emissions? And that was my son, actually, that pushed me on that and said, “Dad, you can't possibly not have solar panels if you're going to get into climate change leadership.” “You're right. Let's do it. So, you go research it and tell me what we need to do.” So, we can do that. We can think about the transition models. As I said, the environmentally specific transmission leadership is a very easy add into an already existing model that we can do, same with responsible leadership, that just changes the conversations that you have. I think in terms of progressions, we all need to get better about managing polarities and understanding how to deal with those and be more systemic in our thinking. And again, I'm about to do some training in that myself. I just think it's something we all need to get better at. And then, some of the actions, just being really clear about what effective goal setting looks like in a sustainability world, and using the Sustainable Development Goals. So, very simple addition. I use a development plan all the time when I'm working with people individually, I now just integrate the Sustainable Development Goals into that. So, it's another conversation we can be having about that. And the final thought, Scott, is governance. And last year I did the training on the company directors course here with the view to becoming a director. So, I want to be sitting on boards of companies where I can have a view about climate change leadership and share that view with others. So, that was a deliberate choice to say, “I need to do that.” You have a different system in the US for that, but I think that's an opportunity for people who are getting to a certain stage in their career to say, “Yeah, I can make a contribution by getting on boards and being the positive voice of the environment in those contexts.” And the positive voice for business, rather than just looking at spreadsheets and numbers and return on investment, etc. So, expanding the conversation at the governance level, I think, is another opportunity as well. Final thought for me, Scott, there's some great work that everyone should be aware of by Ryan Lambert on the mental health benefits of nature. So, being in nature has unequivocally great mental health benefits, and we have a bit of a mental health crisis in the world. I keep paying attention to that because of my background in clinical. If we destroy the environment, we're setting us up for some drastic mental health issues. And being out in the environment, being out in the natural world is a great antidote to stress. So, we've got to preserve these environments for our own well-being, as well as for the biodiversity that sits within them. So, that's something to think about is there's a lot of self-interest here as well in preserving the biosphere and having somewhere where we can go and decompress. I go for a walk every day locally here in Mount Coot-Tha, and it's just a chance to be in nature and decompress and ground yourself in the broader scheme of things. That's the purpose of it, and that's an opportunity for everybody. So, adopt materialistic values at your peril. They're environmentally damaging and they're bad for your mental health. Sustainability values are the opposite. They get you out there in the environment, they get you preserving and thinking in a more self-transcendent way. And, to me, that's the future. So, we can all make those individual changes, what's called the inner development goals are succinct from the sustainable development ones that make a difference, both for our own mental health and for the environment that we're sitting in.

 

Scott Allen  40:36 

Well said. Sir, thank you so much. I've learned so much in the time that we've been together right now. I really, really appreciate your expertise and your wisdom. And I always close out the podcast by just asking a simple question, what you've been listening to or reading. What's caught your attention in recent times? It may have to do with what we've just discussed, it may be something totally a left turn that is very different. But what have you been streaming, listening to? What's caught your attention that listeners might be interested in?

 

Doug MacKie  41:05 

So, streaming ‘Severance.’ So, then if you come across ‘Severance,’ but it's [Inaudible 41:10] The idea you can manage work-life balance by severing your brain in some way, I just think that's hysterical. So, that has got my attention. I love that show, I think it's very interesting. And the other thing I've been watching is the Six Nations rugby in Europe. Just coming from Europe, I love rugby and it's just a great tournament. And you learn a lot about teams in that context as well. So, I watch it with that lens on, but just for the sheer enjoyment as well. The other thing I haven't mentioned is I'm a wildlife carer, so that gets my attention. I do that with my daughter. We look after orphaned and injured animals, particularly possums. And again, that contact with the biodiversity, it's transformational. I can't recommend that highly enough that being around animals and engaging with animals, I think, for your mental health, is fantastic, particularly when you're dealing with these issues on a professional basis. Just to ground you in, you're making a difference to this animal in this moment. Fantastic. Can't recommend it highly enough.

 

Scott Allen  42:01 

Thank you, sir. I will put those resources in the show notes. I, too, have been intrigued by ‘Severance.’ It's also just from an organizational behavior, cultural kind of… 

 

Doug MacKie  42:12 

I know. It's mind-blowing.

 

(Laughter)

 

Scott Allen  42:16 

I really appreciate your time. 

 

Doug MacKie  42:19 

Pleasure. Good to be with you. 

 

 

[End Of Recording]