25 October 2021. Climate | Managers
Reasons to be optimistic about climate change; Women managers do the nuturing work in organisations, but don’t get paid for it
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. (For the next few weeks this might be four days a week while I do a course: we’ll see how it goes). Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Reasons to be optimistic about climate change
There are some reasons to be optimistic about climate change. (There are also plenty of reasons to be pessimistic, but that’s for another day).
In an article at The Futurian on Medium, David Bengston lists them out.
Actually, he’s pretty clear to say that he’s a “possibilist” rather than an optimist:
A rosy long-term climate future isn’t the most likely scenario. But I firmly believe a positive climate future is a real possibility. I’ve arrived at this view by intentionally paying attention to positive signals of change.
At the same time he also argues that as humans we tend to skew to the negative—we’re better tuned to identify risks, probably because it has been an effective survival strategy at the level of individuals and groups. The futures tool of horizon scanning, he suggests, helps to balance this:
Horizon scanning is a structured process that involves searching diverse information sources to identify and explore the meaning of emerging developments, issues, and trends that could help shape the future. Futurists are always looking for “weak signals” of change — early and provocative glimpses into possible and very different futures.
He adds some detail to his list of less negative signals out there, but for my purposes here I’m just going to share his headlines.
Clean, renewable energy capacity is growing by leaps and bounds.
The cost of renewable energy has passed its economic tipping point.
Divestment from fossil fuels is growing.
A wide range of carbon capture and storage technologies are being developed.
Battery breakthroughs are burgeoning.
Global reforestation efforts are being launched.
Attitudes toward climate are changing.
The youth climate movement is inspiring.
(Mau Forest restoration by members of the Green-Print Project in Kenya. Image: Antony Odhiambo, Mau Forest Restoration/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Well, I’d agree on most of this, and have written about some of these on Just Two Things, although I’d quibble about carbon capture and storage. But this isn’t the end of Bengston’s list:
Technological innovations to decarbonize steel and concrete production, two major contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions; learning and applying traditional ecological knowledge from Indigenous peoples; restoring degraded soil to absorb greenhouse gases; genetic modification of plants to remove more carbon dioxide.
As he says in the piece, the future isn’t fixed. One of the significant changes I see in the futures literature over the last 20 years is a renewed focus, in theory and in practice, on the role of agency. This was there in some of the 1950s futures work, but somehow got effaced in the era when scenario planning was the dominant idea in futures work.
Bengston concludes his piece this way:
We have opportunities and freedom to influence the future in a positive direction. Our inaction in the face of accelerating climate change is often characterized as a failure of imagination, an inability to envision a transformed and sustainable world. Overcoming our natural inclination to focus on negative signals and see the seeds of a transformed world is a first step.
#2: Women managers do the nurturing work in organisations but don’t get paid for it
McKinsey has some research which is utterly predictable—and all the more depressing for that. Women managers are more likely to do the work involved in caring for teams and individuals; this work improves organisational performance; and no, they don’t get recognition for this.
These extracts are from from the web version of their email, which also has good links in it, but there’s also an article on the website.
Here’s the main points:
Entities that are more cohesive (and focus on emotional and physical well-being) can weather tough times better, research shows. In the workplace, who is focusing on connection and well-being? Women leaders, that’s who. … (But) The data show that women in corporate America are even more burned out than they were last year—and increasingly more so than men. Despite this disparity, women leaders are doing more than men at the same level to support employees.
There’s data on this as well.
In short, women leaders are more likely to ensure that people have manageable workloads and check in on their overall wellbeing. They spend more time than men on work related to diversity, equity, and inclusion outside of their formal job roles, and “senior-level women are twice as likely as senior-level men to dedicate time to these tasks.”
Of course, and perhaps astonishingly, given all the data we have, there are people out there who think this is all a bit of decoration when companies should be focussing on the bottom line.
McKinsey gives this notion short shrift:
McKinsey research has found that organizations that create strong, supportive cultures attract and retain the best people. Companies that fixate only on profits will lose ground to organizations that create a strong identity that meets employees’ needs for affiliation, social cohesion, purpose, and meaning.
But... and there’s always a but: this work generally goes unrecognised.
For this work to feel like a real priority, it should be tied to concrete outcomes, including performance ratings and compensation, for managers. Companies already tie comp to a variety of goalsWhy not consider adding this essential one to the list?
Update: It seems that Congress has noticed The Markup’s research—covered here last week—that suggests, fairly conclusively, that Amazon’s algorithms promote Amazons’s own-brand products. They’ve given the company ‘a final chance’ to, er, ‘clear up the record’.
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