Making Governance Count - Code Red for Humanity
Code Red for Humanity Report
Are you involved in Governance? Perhaps your on a Board, or your role is to support strategic thinking? Maybe you are a leader.
This article is specifically for those who carry the legal duty to govern, be they trustees, Directors, founders, Public Appointees or Ministers of government.
Make your Governance Count - adopt a Code Red for Humanity approach.
Do you care about your grandchildren, and their children too?
Our call to action is simple. That the response to the climate crisis should be a standing item on every boards agenda. You could call the agenda item ‘Code Red for Humanity - our response’, so that you can take behavioural change one meeting at a time.
Making Your Governance Count is about values in action. Here is why…
Behavioural change is notoriously difficult. We can look at the pandemic and consider how many messages it took at each stage in each of our cultures (globally there are fascinating differences) to enable us to change our behaviours.
Some of us middle class lot did great things about simplifying our lives, cleaning our homes, walking each day, learning languages, discovering our own local authority boundaries, converting phoning into zooming family members. Whatever we did, we did it one step at a time.
We may have enjoyed the birdsong and the quiet as humanity slowed down.
We may have even been hopeful about #buildbackbetter
Our responses to this worldwide CRISIS were multiple and diverse. It was an ‘Emergency’. It required western governments to find money trees to fund people’s furlough and emergency laws came in to place.
Good Governance Counts as it shapes the culture of strategy for humanity.
CRISIS = Hidden Opportunity?
In Chinese the word for Crisis is made up of two characters, ‘Hidden’ and ‘Opportunity’
My experience is that often when we work on the bigger things in life, it can then help sort out our PURPOSE, our calling. And if there is one fundamental thing about the duty of all trustees and all Directors it is to interpret the fundamental purpose and calling of an organisation. In charity law we call that ‘guarding the purpose’. In the public organisations we often call this following ‘ministerial ambitions’ (which are what politicians say and make announcements about). My experience is when you get this sorted, the true priorities, a process of ‘right ordering’ happens and the smaller things get more aligned and sorted too.
The bigger picture emergency - Code Red for Humanity.
'Code Red for Humanity’ is the phrase that has been pressed by a 196 nations who agreed in their inter-governmental process on the wording that went into the IPCC’s report on Climate change in autumn 2021.
For me ‘Code Red for Humanity’ is like a label on a Big Red Button, similar to what we fear Putin or Trump/Biden have on their desk.
I think sometimes we are a bit naïve about what created these IPCC documents. It is the Inter-Parliamentary Committee on Climate Change, which has parliamentary process of 196 nations agreeing on every single word written in these documents.
That is a hell of a lot of agreement about the phrase ‘Code Red for Humanity’.
In fact the BBC Panorama documentary at the time showed how the IPCC spent more hours disagreeing and negotiating about the words ‘should’, ‘must’, and ‘could’ than anything to do with the phrase Code Red for Humanity.
So lets have a think about what this means to us to make our governance count.
What use is ‘Code Red’?
Code Red for me generally means STOP! It doesn’t just mean ‘slow down’ – it means stop.
We still see the planes in our air, the transportation of stuff we don’t need over large distances, and i feel it. Yet, this doesn’t get much clearer. Code Red for Humanity.
This is where governments intervene. Its an emergency. It is a game changer of seismic proportions.
Now know we don't all tend to trust the government. Particularly when we have such poor examples in leadership.
However through the pandemic, in general we have agreed with drastic action being needed. We have got used to masks, we have understood that vaccinations seem useful, stopping work for a while seemed sensible. It made sense, so that we were safe. We generally agree that we have to act because of the pandemic.
Code Red to Humanity is a really simple idea
Bridges transition theory then helps us understand that transition begins with Endings. This is the end time. We have to STOP and through that, we will have new beginnings.
That is the hope, it is really simple. It is in virtually every religious tradition that I've studied when doing my Religious Studies degree. The models of major transition caused by crisis, and leading to new life are in the traditions of the Bible, in the Bhargava gita, and almost every other tradition teaching us about metamorphosis.
I'm appalled at our lack of literacy at the moment, because from a governance perspective this is about reading the context, interpreting the duty and understanding the opportunity to respond to the needs for change.
I don't understand how governance are not asking the fundamental questions of Code Red for Humanity. Simply asking what do we need to do next month? What do we need to stop doing?
I have three working hypothesis. 1 = people don't understand the IPCC’s message (which astonishes me as its in fairly plain English). 2 = people are in denial (which I'm used to - I'm a psychodynamic systemic coach, and this is certainly easy to be overwhelmed by). 3 = people are in wilful blindness, (which I'm also used to when working with Immunity for Change).
5 Actions you could take to make your Governance Count
1) Insist that Climate Change adaption is a standing item on every board meeting agenda.
There are 17 Goal areas in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. You can use that framework on a month by month basis to look at each area and what your business is and can do about each one.
Click on the image to link to the goals.
2) Become a member of Friends of the Earth Scotland.
Being a member is still about doing what it says on the tin… Being a friend of the Earth. I’m on the Board, Mark Ballard and Laura Curtis-Moss are our co-Chairs. (other democratic campaigning organisations are available, it just doesn’t make sense for me not to mention the one that i’m involved in governance with.
3) Join us as part of Sustainability Leadership Network
This is a new network set up by my colleague Osbert Lancaster. It is a worldwide network of non-sustainability experts who know they want to be leading more to be happening. Book a call with Osbert to find out more directly, or check it out via my membership widget in the image.
4) Subscribe to my regular Insight articles.
My Insight articles cover all of these dynamics. As I regularly work with organisations, governance and leaders in order to help them change their culture.
5) Write your own blog/ letter/ response as a parent or grand-parent / business leaders to the whole Code Red situation we find ourselves in.
others will be influenced by you, not me, the size of peoples actual circles that they trust is shrinking with all the false narratives and polarisations caused in this information overload age.
Yet what I really want to call for is that it could be very, very simple – if we each, especially those with the duty of Governance, discuss on each board meeting the standing agenda item of Code Red for Humanity - what are we doing as an organisation strategically?
I don't think it could be simpler, but maybe I've missed something, maybe I haven't understood.
If you are disagreeing with what I am saying here about Making Your Governance Count…
Can anybody help me understand dimensions of this that i’m not understanding?
Please feel free to contact me, put up your own response on responsible social media, like the various Linkedin groups I am part of, together within the membership of Institute of Directors or within the Public Appointment spheres of communication that i’m part of. Lets have this conversation with others.