POSITIVE IMPACT ISSUE 0.8

SPECIAL REPORT
The first diagram in the book [shown on page 23]
is one I had been using for a couple of years before
Covid-19 hit arguing that the global economy’s bull
run was masking a much deeper set of discontinuities.
The bar at the bottom is where ordinary people
experience the greatest confusion, fear and anger.
If this analysis is anywhere near accurate, the era of
populism is far from over.
Readers will not be surprised to learn that the Green
Swan concept was informed by the “Black Swan”, one
of the most successful memes of the past decade.
Introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007
book, The Black Swan, the concept spotlights events
that take us totally by surprise, that have an off-thescale
impact, and that we fail to understand afterwards
– setting ourselves up to fail again. Interestingly, Taleb
says Covid-19 is not a Black Swan – because we saw
it coming but too many leaders failed to act.
By contrast, if most Black Swans take us exponentially
to places we really do not want to go, my definition of a
Green Swan embraces a profound market shift, generally
catalysed by some combination of Black or Gray Swan
(foreseen) challenges and changing paradigms, values,
mindsets, politics, policies, technologies, business models,
and other key factors. The link back to the TBL agenda is
that a Green Swan delivers exponential progress in the form
of economic, social, and environmental wealth creation.
The Sustainable Development Goals
are an exponential change agenda
rather than about incremental
change, as too many people
currently perceive them.
In the book, I also talk about “Ugly Ducklings”, drawing
on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. These are
early-stage concepts, mindsets, technologies, or ventures
with the potential to drive either Black Swan (driven
by bad exponentials) or Green Swan (driven by good
exponentials) market trends. For me, a potential Green
Swan is the European Commission’s growing linking of
its recovery plan with its Green Deal objectives.
The potential future evolution of an Ugly Duckling
can be hard to detect early on, unless you know
what you are looking for. Tomorrow’s breakthrough
solutions often look seriously weird today. The net
result is that we give them significantly less attention
and resources than they need – or than the future of
the 2030s and beyond would want us to, in hindsight.
Tell us about the shift in approach from responsibility
to resilience and regeneration. How does that look
in society today? How would you like to see this shift
happen and what can we do better?
JE: The ‘3Ps’ of the Triple Bottom Line became central
to the sustainable business debate from their launch
in 1995. When we did the product recall of the TBL
in 2018, we began the Tomorrow’s Capitalism Inquiry.
One emergent framing was the ‘3Rs’, which emerged
from the production of our new book, Green Swans:
The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism.
When the urgency is clear enough,
people do act – though the continuing
unwillingness of populist leaders to
act on the climate emergency
is a severe test for anyone who
believes in human rationality.
The 3Rs are: Responsibility, Resilience and
Regeneration. As we dug deeper, it became clear that
almost all business effort in pursuit of sustainability
had focused to date on the Responsibility agenda.
• Responsibility: Typical platforms in this area
have included the EcoVadis, GRI, IIRC, SASB and
WBCSD. Key activities have focused on voluntary
standards encouraging greater transparency and
accountability, stakeholder engagement, supply
chain management and investor engagement.
• Resilience: Unfortunately, all this effort has
failed to head off a growing number of “wicked
problems”, at the outer edge of which we see the
Black Swans spotlighted by Nassim Nicholas
Taleb. The Covid-19 outbreak is one such Black
Swan. Resilience activities include China’s growing
number of “sponge cities”. Wuhan, which led in
this field, has now signalled the need for very
different forms of resilience.
• Regeneration: The change agenda for Green
Swans requires a massive shift in thinking and
investment, towards the regeneration of our
economies, societies and environment. Among
the new networks emerging in this space are those
based on The Capital Institute (whose CEO, John
Fullerton, did the first Tomorrow’s Capitalism
lecture at our Tomorrow’s Capitalism Forum on 10
January 2020), Eden Project International (whose
founder, Sir Tim Smit, won one of the first pair
of Green Swan Awards), the Alan Savory Institute
and The Regenerators.
How have behaviours and attitudes changed during
Covid-19? How do you think Covid-19 will mould
the way forward?
JE: I chaired a conference session this autumn with
several panellists who are CEOs of major financial
institutions. One of them noted that things – and
behavioural changes – that would have been unthinkable
even last year have become possible, even inevitable,
in 2020. When the urgency is clear enough, people do
act – though the continuing unwillingness of populist
leaders to act on the climate emergency in places like
Australia, Brazil and the USA is a severe test for anyone
who believes in human rationality.
What is the key takeaway you would like people to
gain from your keynote presentation?
JE: I was originally trained as a city planner – and
continue to find cities, urban regions and the built
environment fascinating. And they are also where most
of our species now lives, so putting our cities onto a
very much more sustainable path is make-or-break
for the future of our species – and all other species.
DESIGN WITH LOVE:
ARCHITECTURE FOR JUSTICE
AND HUMAN DIGNITY
KATIE SWENSON
Senior Principal, MASS Design Group, United States
What are your thoughts on developing a sustainable
roadmap from a built environment as well as an
urban and cities’ perspective?
KS: The last six months of the global pandemic
have revealed how interconnected we are, and how
difficult it is currently for people to thrive, and for
our planet to support human life. We cannot breathe
freely, literally. In this pandemic, we are united by our
global interconnectedness, and this conference brings
out the best of that – we get to share in inspiration
and commitments, to share in ideas and to craft a
plan together. That said, a critical part of our plan
must involve an emphasis on the local sourcing and
production of buildings, using local labour, artisanship
and creativity.
Architecture is never sustainable: it is either climate
negative or climate positive. At MASS Design Group, in
order to move our buildings toward climate positivity,
we try to adopt a “Lo-Fab” building approach. Local
Fabrication (Lo-Fab) is the practice of creating value
through the construction process as much as the finished
building itself. Lo-Fab is a commitment to supporting
the local economy using local contractors and locallysourced
materials – highlighting local innovation and
ideas, bolstering and developing local craftsmanship,
hiring local labour, and investing in local capacity
building and job training. Through this focus on locallysourced
material and labour, we can leverage the entire
supply chain, minimising the environmental impact,
and assuring that the majority of capital invested in
construction flows to the community we are serving.
A good example of our Lo-Fab process in practice
is the design and construction of The Rwandan
Institute of Conservation Agriculture (RICA) in
Bugesera, Rwanda. RICA’s mission is to train the next
generation of leaders in conservation agriculture to
attain healthy and sustainable food independence in
Rwanda. The campus features innovative methods of
power generation, water use, and green infrastructure,
and is estimated to be carbon-positive by the 2040s. It
has begun to achieve this by reducing the embodied
carbon of the buildings, sourcing 96% of materials by
weight from Rwanda, installing a 100% off-grid solar
farm, sourcing and treating all water on-site, and offsetting
the remainder carbon by restoring parts of the
savannah woodland and reforesting key areas within
the campus.
Harry Connolly
Design
with Love:
At Home
in America
Cover
What are the founding principles that you believe
each design should aspire to? Please use examples
of your work to illustrate this.
KS: MASS Design Group is a design collective
dedicated to delivering architecture that promotes
justice and human dignity. We were founded on the
idea that architecture is never neutral; it either hurts
or it heals.
Twelve years ago, MASS Design Group designed and
built the Butaro District Hospital in northern Rwanda,
an area where 400 000 people were not served by any
medica; facility, and in an environment where many
healthcare facilities lacked the necessary precautions
to prevent the transmission of disease. Hospitals often
had small, poorly ventilated waiting rooms in which a
patient with an injury, such as a broken leg, would be
waiting in proximity to a patient with Tuberculosis.
Here, architecture and spatial care protocols were
directly putting people at risk.
Butaro is a beautiful, medically-sound facility, with
natural light, wide hallways, courtyards, and spaces
for families to gather, oriented to take advantage of
the beauty of this mountainous region. Thanks to
projects like these and other investments in health
infrastructure in Rwanda, average life expectancy has
gone from less than 30 years to almost 70 over the last
three decades.
SPECIAL REPORT
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POSITIVE IMPACT ISSUE 0.8
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