This is, transformation program approach. Where are they at? Therefore, what's the right next thing to help those key suppliers or your mid tier suppliers or your small suppliers to move forward? Because the reality is every business leader wants to stay in business, but they'd like some clarity on what the other party needs so they can work out how to go get there. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, the number one podcast focusing on sustainability and supply chains, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi everyone, welcome to episode 41 of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast. Today's episode is a special episode because it is very generously sponsored by Component Sense. Component Sense are a company empowering sustainability in electronic manufacturing. In today's episode of the podcast, I'll be talking to Joanne Flinn, chair of the ESG Institute. Joanne, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? well, firstly, Tom, thank you for having me here. It's always delightful to have a conversation with you and I'm looking forward to ours today. So for everybody else, my name is Joanne Flinn. I'm the Chairwoman of the ESG Institute. We were founded to help businesses accelerate the transition to 1.5 or under as the science speak, but as human beings and as business people, it's really, how can we create a cooler, greener, fairer future? Or as I say to my nephews and nieces, one that we would all like to live in, in a couple of years. There's all sorts of other stories we could add to it, but hey, let's see where the conversation takes us. Sure. And how did you get there? I mean, what's your journey from wherever you were 10, 15 years ago to now Chair of the ESG Institute? I suspect a bit like yours, you know, enough twists and turns to keep life interesting. So, actually the, how the ESG Institute came about and this role came about actually goes back way, way back to when I was like a little, little tiny munchkin. My father finished his PhD in agricultural economics, specializing in irrigation and then did what any smart PhD does, and I suspect some of you listening have been through the PhD process. You've got a wife, two kids, you go where the money is, and that was a job in Canada. So we left Australia, which is where I'm from, we went to Canada, and then we went to the US, then back to Canada, and then we went to Nigeria, and so I spent 7 til 12 in Nigeria. Lots of stories there, but talk about if you really want to see what this was just after the Biafran war. So if you want to see what countries look like and societies look like when it's really gone pear shaped, yeah, not recommended. And in one way, part of what motivates me is having seen it. Anything that can be done to reduce that is seriously worthwhile. Went to boarding school in England. So those of you who've got good accents for years will be going, okay, now we work out why her accent's so nutty. And then we moved to the Philippines and my father was the head of the Agricultural Economics Division at the International Rice Research Institute. So all the topics we talk about today is sustainability. This was in a conversation. I'd be sitting there as a kid. He'd have his postdocs and other global scientists over talking about, you know, farm production, impact on the environment, climate change. I mean, climate change has been around my entire lifetime. What it would mean to the livelihoods of different people, what it would do for the quality of food. Like all these things that today are so hot topics. That was dinner in a conversation. And then I did what any, you know, smart young thing does when they graduate from high school. I went to university and my dad said to me, you guys remember comparative advantage. Now he was an economist So my comparative advantage meant that I ended up doing a business degree economics and law, and then I ended up working for a big IT consulting company, Accenture. They didn't want to hear anything about sustainability. What are you talking about, Joanne? And, you know, business is business. Now I'd run my first 10 million business while I was at university and had to raise over a million dollars of unfunded debt. So, you know, I was pretty familiar with business, but it was also in an institution that was nearly a hundred years old. So that whole sense of what decisions do I make and what consequences will they have over quite a long time period was really apparent. Because, anything I did in my duration there was going to have a legacy that other people would be living with positive or negative. So I left that particular place, ended up at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Thailand, running the financial services consulting practice. So, you know, if you're picking up some of the data points, like very heavy business and business transformation background in that. That whole days of, you know, I was involved in the first banking SAP project. Way back in the day, which was a lot of fun, actually. And then about five years ago, I left that corporate life being as an independent and five years ago, four depending on when this drops around then I did a strategy help the Alliance To End Plastic Waste update their strategy and about halfway through that particular project the CEO Jacob Dewar said to me goes Joanne You understand sustainability an awful lot better than I'm you know, most of our consultants, which I took as a compliment, particularly as I was reading up on things, you know, in the evening scope, you know, like, okay, you know, where's it at? Where's it at now? Because it hadn't been something front and center of my life, for a really long time and finding that the data sets had changed, but the science hadn't. Yeah. And so I was in these conversations channeling my dad, literally, and the things that I'd heard him and these other scientists talk about, and just going, it's my data, where's my data? And just going like, we're just further down a trajectory that was predicted, you know, way back when I was a teenager, which at one level is terrifying because that trajectory is not the greatest trajectory. But it made me realize that I really did have this unusual combination of business with all my years in business and, working and transforming businesses and the business transformation element that's so key to sustainability. And I actually really thoroughly understood sustainability because I've been, into the bone of it. That led to writing Green Site, The Sustainability Guide For Company Directors, and I'm an appalling author. We don't have a copy sitting here to flash, but Hey, there you go. And soon after that, I was approached by a number of people and asked whether I'd set up the ESG Institute, which we founded in February 2022 with the support of the Singapore government and the Australian government, Singapore Institute of Directors, the Asia Stewardship Centre, the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply, AusCham, AmCham, and a number of others, to literally say one of the problems of many right now is that there's so much science, there's so much data, but even the IPCC says, well, we didn't actually have any social science who knew how to communicate outside of science world. And the one thing we were set up to do is to really help business leaders lead this transition because that's in everybody's interest. And in the ESG Institute, who are typical clients and what kind of problems are you solving for them? So we've got three major groups of clients at the moment. Some of them are business leaders who are just going, okay, we need to accelerate transition. And what they find is that there's awareness and understanding of sustainability and green skills in the business world is low because it's not a skill set we've needed. What does this mean to your business model? What does it mean to your risk? What does it mean to your stakeholder? So we literally, we, we, we helped them map themselves and going, okay, what are the business model impacts of the next three, five, 10, potentially 25 years, because some changes take a while to build up and then what's the stakeholder impact that's likely to be happening. You know, and therefore what's the intelligent strategic choice to make as a business, given what we now can see happening. So that one is, you know, we usually work with the top 50 leaders. Combination of, you know, coaching training workshops to just get that embedded and then, you know, progress around over 18 month program to help go okay, this, this is the next level. Let's level up. That's level up again. You know, so that people can't, you know, like we're doing a transfer, it's a transformation program, but really focused on business and sustainability. You know, that's, that's the one big problem going. How can I accelerate? Because I know I need to take action. The second one is when businesses start getting into it. And I can usually tell they're more advanced players because they go, Oh, wait a sec. There's this thing called a value chain I'm working on the basis that with this group, but your podcast, I don't have to define all the terminology I use. Cause with some groups I would, I can talk value chains and supply chains. I know everyone knows it. You'd be amazed at how many conversations I'm in when I use the term value chain. I'll do it when I'm doing a keynote, I'll have a quiz up there. And one of the early questions is, you know, talking about a few things and I'll go, okay. So next question, Joanne goes one, two, three. Is she, what's the next number? You know, what's next? Four, she's playing a game with us. Two, priorities. Three, scope of responsibilities. It's amazing how many people still don't immediately go, okay, we're talking sustainability, it's gonna be, scope three, it's gonna be the extended responsibility through, from cradle to grave at bare minimum. So that's supply, supply chain and customer value chain of this like bang. And as soon as we get into this space, it's not just what action are we taking within our own organizations? It's the other guys that we're in business with taking. And so we work with businesses to help them understand the profile. of the all there, their customers and their suppliers, depending on which. Part of the chain they feel they've got the greatest need to make great impact in to be able to see where they're at and therefore, again, this is, you know, transformation program approach, where are they at? Therefore, what's the right next thing to help those key suppliers or your mid tier suppliers or your small suppliers to move forward? Because the reality is every business leader wants to stay in business, but they'd like some clarity on what the other party needs so they can work out how to go get there. So, you know, that's sort of a fairly significant problem space that we're work with quite a number of big companies with, because they're the ones who kind of got the memo in that, which, which is good. But then the challenge is to others move and not push them out of the market because that will have other issues that you know, the whole direction on, you know, what's socially fair, what will create a just transition now, you know, wrestling through these questions becomes important. And then the third area that we work with, and again, it comes from going like the other problem is so many of us as leaders know that there's not other many other people that we can talk to who understand this. Sure. And if you don't have, it's, you know, I remember way back is literally getting common vocabulary and getting common mental constructs was the first step to be able to have a constructive solution and conversation. And so one part of the institute does programs you know, we run an ESG leaders program every six months to basically go, here we go three months, 90 minutes once a week. Get in peer discussions because we learn so much from other people, right? So that it's like, Oh, okay. Oh, that's what, how your industry is thinking of it. Oh, okay. Well, okay. Are you guys in a value chain? You might want to understand each other. So it's a lot of that, that's a lot of fun. And it's also just seemed to generate some quite powerful conversations as people go like, ah, cause I found in business, we can't take action on things we don't understand. Yep. And there's so much in this space. It's not optimizing for profit alone in the traditional MBA philosophy at all. No. It is multi-stakeholder optimisation, which is, you know much more sophisticated approach to business. So, you know, that's sort of, you know, the game that we want, we're playing is to help businesses lift from that, you know, monoparameter into that bigger systems parameter and going, you know, cause when are we, sorry, I feel like I'm just got me on excitement mode. What I noticed is that when you get the right groups of people having a conversation, that's amazing how rapidly they can solve for a problem when they're given a context that gives them the permission to think a lot more broadly about it and much more deeply about what it means as a human being, what are the ethics of the decisions we're making that, you know, the changes in a whole variety of things mean that we actually now have, in my view, permission to actually show up fully as a human being and not pretend that our sense of consequences is out the door because we're in corporate environments. Like, Oh, great. Come on in the room. Let's work it out. Fair enough. ESG often gets simplified to just being about carbon reduction, but obviously it's much broader than that. Can you explain what sustainability beyond carbon entails and why it's essential for companies to adopt this broader perspective? Well, one of the things I've noticed is that there's so much noise or valid noise around carbon, but I'm going to say noise because it's like somebody playing a trumpet, you know, it's super loud, it dominates the orchestra is that we run a State of Sustainability Survey once a year to calibrate where businesses are. One of the questions we have is, you know, are you taking attention on carbon and are you paying attention to methane and other gases? There's a 30 percentage point differential at the moment on people who go carbon and then methane's an awful lot lower. And yet greenhouse gases include methane and several others. And methane is one of the most environmentally damaging ones and therefore wants to have way on the list. So, you know, even just a little bit of that, just want to like beyond carbon, you know, step beyond the entire greenhouse gases. But then it's like the physical world systems are. You know, the planet in the nine planetary boundaries, you know, there's water, there's fresh water, there's sea water, there's, you know, water life, land life, you know, biodiversity always sounds so intellectual to me. It's sort of like, no, no, no, it's, it's plants, it's, it's trees, it's birds, it's fish, it's lions and tigers. You know, like real living things that we can relate to, hummingbirds and things like that. You know, that richness. Because. So here we go. Silly fact. At the moment, 63 percent of the global economy is dependent on nature. And I read this stat and I thought, I love it. That's really, that's a very useful stat. I'll total it out for all my business conversations. And then I'll make the point of like, so if we don't have nature, how long is humanity going to last? 100 percent of global economy dependent on nature, sorry, is the reality. So there, you know, this bigger picture of what does it actually, you know, what's the, what's the environmental, the physical environment of the weather use like daily language. What's the weather that actually makes for comfortable human life. I mean, like where I am physically in Singapore, it's got hotter. I've lived in Singapore now, 25 years. It's got hotter, like immeasurably hotter. Like it has in many other parts of the world. You know, hot days just simply mean I need more air con if I want to mentally function and all the consequences that that entails. So, when we talk about environment and when we simplify it down to carbon, it's just like me and it's just missing the bigger picture. And the other piece is like, who are we as human beings? What, what world are we creating, you know, for ourselves? Do you plan on being around in 26 years? I know I do. Okay. Hands up here. Just checking. 26. Yeah, it would be nice. But, well, I don't know, because in my case, there's a history of Alzheimer's in my family. And in 26 years, I'll be close to 80. So maybe is the answer. So, this is the thing my, my father passed away at 52. So, you know, gene pool on one side on that. And my, my mum was going strong playing tennis and doing yoga and plays a mean game of bridge and everything else as well. You know, she's, you know, well into, she's well into her 80s and, you know, she's 26 years older than me. So I use 26 because it's easy. It's just like, if I get to mom's age in that health, you know, good. I'm lucky because that's not, so not necessarily. 26 years is quite viable for most of us, Yeah. to be living. And so in 26 years, if it's another three degrees warmer, which is what it is, feels like compared to where Singapore was, you know, 25 years ago, I mean, that's not going to be a very pleasant world at all socially. True. I just go like part of the reason why we do the work at the institute is just, you know, selfishly, I want to live in a world that's as comfortable as the one my mom has. And hey, bonus also for future generations, but this is not about kicking the ball down for somebody else. It's just going like, yeah, me too. I'm going to live. And anyone who's got the longevity, bug in there that goes, I'm going to do a hundred. It's like, well, you know, 20, 26 years feels like a long time. That's 2050. And if you're wanting to do the hundred, you're going to be up in the 20 sixties and seventies. So all these long term climates. You know scenarios are like not somebody else's problem. They're like you're going to be lived experience So it's like over 26 years and then six years is not so far away, you know, that's the time it takes to go and get a undergraduate and a master's degree or you know to get your way through a PhD and breathe again I mean, it's not that long in a human life Mm. In that so the social element of what kind of society and what kind of business environment are we actually creating for ourselves becomes really meaningful because we're going to be living. We're going to be living in it, so why not create one that we prefer? Rather than one we're going to suffer in. And then the last section, you know, is governance. It's about what decisions are we making in business? How are we prioritizing? What's important? You know, that all gets defined by really classic things like economics. Can you pay your debts as a, when they fold you, Mm. Which of course gets influenced by your costs of goods, your ability to create relationships with other business partners, your organization, culture, your ability to attract employees, you know, all these things all hold together to say, You know, will we sustain either as humans, as individuals, as businesses, as a society? No. The one piece I am completely sure about is Gaia, planet Earth. She's going to be around. She's on four billion years. Just counting. True. You know what I mean? We'll be able to still be around is the important question, yeah. No, the planet is fine. Yeah, exactly. life on the planet might be What would your top wish for life on the planet be, Tom? That it has a healthy, sustainable biosphere to live in. You know, it's at the moment it's going the wrong direction. So we want to rein that back and give all of us human and every other species on the planet. A nice working biosphere to live in, where we can thrive and survive. Yeah. What I find amazing, given the number of people you talk to as well, is that actually when I start looking around how many solutions there actually are already, Oh yeah. how many scalable solutions exist today? Yeah. We just need, I think, a lot of businesses to be moving in the right direction. Some of them will need a push. Some of them will do it for the right reasons. I think regulations are going to have to come into place for a lot of businesses to actually prioritize this. The EU's regulatory structure means at least one major market in the world is providing an example of what's possible Mm and be big enough to be meaningful, to solve the problem for, which means that then that technology is in those solutions. You know, have market and then can extend elsewhere. I look at what the EU is doing as, you know, from the point of view of our long term 26 years of well being. Really, really key. And then other markets push, pushing forward and saying, okay, like in Australia, where I come from, which I have to admit does not have the world's best reputation for excellent reasons. But the current government is doing a lot more in that one and it's collaboration with the specific island nations and increasing its the pressure to act. I just go hallelujah because if there's one country who ought to be able to We've got a lot of desert. Yeah, same as here in Spain. There's a lot of desert here in Spain as well. You know, it's where famously Sergio Leone did a lot of his spaghetti westerns in the southeast of Spain. Why that area isn't blanketed in solar panels, I've no idea, but that's a whole nother topic. I think there's this adjustment as a society to say, okay, I might not adore the look of a solar panel or a wind farm. I'd prefer that to the other consequences. And then progressively what I'm noticing is there this awareness that there's solutions that say like, so, you know, when, when farms and those super long blades there's science and work being done to create other products that can replace the blades with things that will be able to be recycled in a much better way than the existing ones. Each one's a different problem that's getting solved this is where I, stay in the space of opportunity and hope because I do progressively see these things happening. I've been involved with a fundraise where they raised over a quarter of a million funds, which has now been co funded to go and put it up like a fully scaled plastic recycling plant in Indonesia, they're doing it so low key. Like there's just no press releases on it and things like that. They just go, no, it's getting stuff done. This is not about fanfare. This is about doing, and there's quite a lot of this actually happening. So, you know, I see these ones and I know that when you get one good one like that, then the next one becomes infinitely easier. Are the kind of stories that I try and highlight on the other podcast I have. The Climate Confident podcast, but let's come back to ESG. And in the ESG Institute, you've developed the Sustainability Readiness Profiles. Can you walk us through what the profiles are and how companies can use them to assess their ESG strategies? So we do the profiles at two level. There's a very accessible level that can be done. It takes, frankly, six minutes enough to give lead indicators of where an organization is. And if you remember earlier in the conversation talked about, you know, where's the impact on your business model as one dimension. If you start thinking, you've got to have a two by two at some stage, don't you? So think of it as one dimension, vertical dimension, the horizontal vertical dimension being the what's the stakeholder demand for change? And that's a cumulative thing. So if you've got a 5 percent chance from a regulator, a 3 percent from customers, 5 percent from employees, that adds up to 12% demand, people often look at this as if it's a single thing. And it's like, no, no, no, add it all up. You get another 2 percent saving on your cost of funds. You know, this all adds into there's pressure and there's value of creation that's possible here. So you end up with a good four by four. The appropriate profile for that's an observer. Okay. And we're watching, you know, we don't see the demand. Now I'd have to say from the point of view of businesses and people trading into Europe, I think that that would be a strategically very dangerous position to be at. Because with the EU regulations saying to any company, 10 percent of your global revenues at risk, if you're not doing stuff, you're not going to stay on a supplier list. So you'd actually want to reevaluate your risk profile and possibly put it higher up, but Hey, you know, you make your own personal judgment when you do that profile, because it's your personal, it's your, your opinion. And that one so that the second, the second one is don't see business model changes, but okay. We're, you know, we're doing stuff. We're doing stuff. What you and I might call it. Well, I call them a pledger. That's the official term we call it. That's the pledger profile. This is the kind of companies are going, we're doing CSR and I'm going great and how much pollution. Just because you cleaned up one beach, you know, so these are the ones that, you know, run higher risks of greenwashing. And again, possibly underestimating their business model risk. But again, that is, you know, an initial, the initial profile. And then there's the lower right quadrant, which is companies that are going, okay, we're going to do, and they actually are, because the question, how we focus is like, what are you actually doing? Doing the right things to be compliant with changing expectations of customers and other stakeholders. So we call them compliers. Now, the thing I've noticed over the years is that compliers don't tend to make value out of something they do enough to maintain license to operate. Right But they're not, they're not value creators out of that one. So then the fourth profile, this profile is beyond sustainability. It's a business strategy profile, you know, in deep truth, but sustainability is our driver. And then there's the ones where people are going, okay, we see this cumulative change from all these different stakeholders. We appreciate this business model ramifications. Okay. We're transforming. We're working at how do we create value from this? And how do we need to transform to be able to create value and prosper? And in that group, then there's a subset that we call definers and they're companies that are already strategically oriented around circularity and regenerative economies, because that's a different business model structure. So the profile gives, it's a fast, easy way just to say, this is, I invite people, they do it, do it of this is where we actually are at, because then you can start making the other decisions that we sort of talk through. So we do that one at a, you know, make it, you know, accessible and available for people to help that initial calibration and then some organizations go, okay, great, you know. Got that. Now let's actually go and do a deeper, you know, deeper run through. And that goes to over about 250 different items using a maturity model type structure. So it's really clear of, well, you're doing these things here. You're doing this there. So therefore, this is really where you're at. But it also makes it super clear to go, Oh, now that's what I do next. And we call that process doing the ESG road one, two, three roadmap. Because you know, in coming through that, you go, okay, like I now know what I need to do next. And the business leaders who we've done this with, we've had some that started up that come in and say like, okay, yeah, we're an observer, but we want to know what this is all about. And it doesn't, it, You know, within that process, they come out of it and they're going, okay, we can make the business transformations we need to at least get to complier in about two, two to three years, because once they've got that clarity, the action taking is infinitely faster. So we've got, we do that because one of the problems that we found, you know, into your earlier question on problems is people find ESG and sustainability so complicated. They don't know where to start and they don't know how it all links. Mm. Yeah. And so we went, okay, let's work out the links. We had 10 companies volunteer themselves into co creating this so that it, had, commercial strength, commercial experts, sustainability experts saying, okay, because our actual opening question was, if we can't solve this, we have a different problem, Mm. but if we can solve it, we have roadmaps that make it simple and accessible and acceleratable. So. We saw, fortunately we solved it when we stood back and went, Oh my God, we've done it. Hey, breathe deeply. But you know, what's been great is when people who have not been involved in the original design, picked it up and gone, Oh my God, clarity, action. And you mentioned earlier that you wrote the book Greensight and you've spoken about the importance of mindset in sustainability. What mindset shifts do you think are necessary at the leadership level to really accelerate ESG initiatives? There's there's two major mindset shifts. We've touched on one of them. It's this shift from thinking that we're optimising for one parameter to going like actually no it's its the health of the system is actually what it's about across these different factors of ESG. We focus in on 25 as at the starting point, which is why we simplify it down to ESG, because then we can say it's three for psychological manageability, because this is, you know, partly you do want to keep it mentally manageable. So, one of the mindsets, just the shifting from being mono into systems, and that's in itself quite a big mindset shift. It's a doable one, but it is a different way of thinking. And the other one is shifting from this view about the only thing I need to care about is my immediate time horizon, into what are the multiple layers of my time horizons. Mark Carney put it beautifully when he said the tragedy of the horizons. Because so much in business is focused on the next 60 days, the next 90 days, maybe even a year. And the term long run means three years. Well, you know, the term long run means how long am I actually in this job before I rotate off this role and somebody else gets carrying the can. Anyone else heard this story? And so those two mindset shifts are really different because the decisions that I would make today, thinking about my future self would be quite different to the decisions I'd be making today if I was only thinking about me right now. So, you know, those for us are the two, the two biggest pieces. And as we get, as we find teams get more comfortable with this and have language and structures to be able to go, wait a second, we're prioritizing that element and that time frame over this. Is that the right combination for what we need? It becomes something that's discussed and it's something that you can solution data for and in some cases you can get much more honest and go, you know what? We actually won't have historical data because the world's not been in this place. So looking for data. What is the sensible forecast? What are the scenarios this could lead to do we like this scenario? Or do we like another scenario and then what actions would help improve the probability of this other scenario to happen. As an Irish guy, you teased me a bit when you hinted at a relationship between ESG and rugby. So, gotta put me out of my misery there. What's the connection there? Oh, you'll love it. I love this when other people have loved it. Actually I think it's one, so, okay. Irishman. I remember watching my dad play rugby. In fact, as a little kid. He represented the state playing rugby. So, you know, he was a keen sportsman. That and swimming. But dad was a very keen sportsman. And so as a little kid, I learned about rugby by the best, as far as I was concerned, the world's authority, my dad to the very excellent thing called, you know, you cuddle up under one arm while he was watching TV and commenting on it, Hey, what are dads for? And then I remember when we're in Nigeria watching it and, and you know, I remember him being on a team with, with another, you know, big, strong Irish guy Father McCormick. Oh my God, Father McCormick. He was my hero. He was my first date. He took me to a movie when I was, when I was eight. He was such a wonderful human being. And you know, Father McCormick, big Irish guy, my dad, big Australian guy, thundering down the rugby field after things. But one of the things I remember my dad teaching me at the time, when I was a little kid, was that how in rugby, when you used to be able to play rugby, you could do neck tackles. For anyone, anyone who's not played rugby, that's called throwing your full, big full grown men, throwing their arms around someone's neck to drag them to the ground. For anyone who's not had the privilege of seeing this in real life. The problem is it tends to create quadriplegics and paraplegics. Hmm. Anyhow, so the game of rugby decided that this was not the game that they wanted to be playing anymore, that this was not the outcome they wanted for their players. So they lifted the rules of the game. They literally said, okay, lifting the standards of the game, you can't do neck tackles anymore. You can do shoulders and below. It really was a change of play about lifting the standard and the quality of the game to a higher standard to create less damage. Hmm. You know, in business is what's happening with ESG and sustainability is we're lifting the standards of the game. We're going to create less damage, create less knock on effect. I mean, I was speaking to Bloomberg the other day and I was sharing the rugby thing. And he's going, cause like, I'm like, this is what's happening. We're lifting our game. And he said, oh my God, I used to play when I was, you know, a kid would get, you know, would get up, you know, on all concussed ago, some of those guys really did that, you know, 30 years on, you can see the damage that's being caused. Yeah. And that's tragic. You know, you're having, we're having great fun there and then, but 30 years on, we're feeling the pain of it. And what's happening in business is we're going like, we're lifting the game, just like rugby managed to lift the quality of the game. It's still a brilliant game. We're lifting the game of business just like rugby. And rugby is looking at the game now at the moment too, and going, wait a second, we're still seeing too much player damage. What do we need to do to lift the game? And I just look at it and I go, business, we're lifting the game. Come on, let's go play. Let's go play better. Want to be an all black? Play rugby. Sorry, I'm Australian, not even New Zealand, but they are pretty cool. Not as good as the Irish rugby players, but, you know, we'll give them a pass. Oh, that's kind of you. Okay, left field question. If you could have any celebrity or fictional character alive or dead as a spokesperson for ESG, who would it be and why? Ooh, gosh, I don't think I've ever been asked that question. That's fabulous. And I'm actually really having to think about what would the qualities be that I would really, really feel would be the ones that would have power. Let me tell the qualities in that, like, have a, have a name come, Okay. Because I've got an inkling of a name, but I can't get, I can't, the name's not landing. And it actually is, it's actually somebody from the historic Arabic world, which was very wise, very deep, very systemic and very, how do we keep society and people, and the environment around us in peaceful coexistence with the greater goodness of the world. When the name comes, I will, Gabriel, I'm useless with names. I get my tongues tied. When it comes, I will email you and tell you the name. But there's just that sense of wisdom and that wholeness in there that I think has got some beauty in it. Because I think that part of this is same with sustainability. Because, you know, you spoke about the whole place of hope. is that for me at least when there's a sense of creating something more beautiful and more meaningful it gives me hope that the next piece is possible and yeah so the coming in from because there's so many voices out there doom and gloom and And everything else that it's, it's so easy to lose sight of how much progress we've made. Like one of the pieces I find comes out at different stages in the conversation is, you know, I know we're still on a trajectory of three, three degrees and potentially more given some of the recent, recent releases. But when I was a kid and I was hearing about it, we're on a trajectory to nine, between, seven and nine. Yeah, You know, in the last 35, 40 years, the needle really has moved. It's not moved far enough, but it really has moved, We've also managed at the same time to raise a huge number of people's standard of living, raise them out of poverty, get them into middle classes in the developing world and countries like India and China. Like, isn't that just an amazing thing? I mean, when we sort of step back and look at that, this is Hans Rosling who's Factfulness I just loved, you know, in part because I grew up in countries where we, this is what was happening that could just see people's lives so often lifting and improving. I mean, it's stunning as you say. How many more people live better quality of life, not to say there's aren't a lot and therefore that this next challenge of how do we as business create services and products in ways that has can create the value for the human being, the benefits for people in a way that has much lower footprints on the planet, much lower footprints on, the future and therefore means that it's entirely possible to say no, everyone wants a fridge, why not? Not coming from that space of fear that says, well, you know, I've already got a great quality of life. So you're not allowed to have one, which to me just morally and ethically doesn't feel right in that one. Yeah. So what's one of your other pieces of hope? what's one of my other pieces of hope? I hope we can get the CO2 levels of the atmosphere back down to around 280. It's highly unlikely it'll happen in my lifetime, but I hope we somehow manage to do it. Hmm and it is the kind of thing that while, it's not likely in our lifetimes. It is. It is. Should be doable. It's where the planet was stable for millennia and millennia, so we should get back to there. And hopefully we haven't done irreversible damage. But let's keep it hopeful. I mean, it's interesting because one of the pieces I find in this whole discussion space, it's this ability to be really aware of what the negative downside is, i. e. there are tipping points, there are these things, and this is what they look like, and the consequences that would happen. And therefore, this is the reason why we're taking the actions we're doing. Otherwise, the cumulative pieces could just become so overwhelming and depressing. And I, you know, depressed human beings. Don't make decisions and can't act. Yeah, The possibility keeps that space of action. The hope keeps that space of action. And that's what even if we, you know, even if we're talking 2030 is going to be a much more powerful place to operate from. Sure. For people listening, Joanne. What actions should or can they take? The most powerful action you can take is to make the choice to do, invest and do things now. From the very, you know, really practical point of view is that it's so easy to keep putting things off And then there's only a cumulative compounding bigger problem. But consistent small actions now really add up, you know, anyone has done math knows the power of compounding and finance, you know, that one as well. But it is so true here is that. We've worked with some organizations who have literally said, like, once a quarter, we're going to pick a particular challenge and across the company, work that one. And each one is just a dial moving a bit and moving a bit and moving a bit, you know, and those, they add up and they add up for results without it being stressful. And I think that's sort of the other part of it is just going like, what's stressful is watching it and it's terror, watching it and I'm doing this action line, I'm doing that action. And then the, that overwhelm and noise disappears. Or at least drops down enough to be manageable and keep going. Yeah. Yeah. Great. We are coming towards the end of the podcast now, Joanne. Is there any question I didn't ask that you wish I did or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about? Let's see, now you asked some fabulous questions, including one that I need to continue to reflect on. I'm going to find that lovely name. I think the question that would, could have been, because it's a beautiful conversation, And I chatted lots is this something that we as human beings can actually do? And my answer is absolutely yes. When I was seven when we went to Nigeria just after the Biafran War, we were looking at a world where wars were being fought for famine, and lack of food. And it was a global issue. And when they set up the institutes that I grew up in, I remember speaking to one of the senior scientists, so I know the story from one of the older scientists telling us over dinner, saying that when they started the institute, they thought it was going to take three generations to solve world hunger, to solve food, took one, took one generation. That's 26 years, took one generation. Now, what they'd solve was the ability to produce enough food to feed the world. They may still be political issues that have issues in terms of distribution and other sorts of things. But the point was, it wasn't about capacity to do it. It was done and it took one generation. And if we could do that with food. With lower technologies and different ways of interacting, you know. Back then, I'm completely and utterly convinced we as, we as human beings, as people, can do this for what we face ahead of us, and we can do it in a generation. Lovely. Great. Joanne, that's been really interesting. If people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? I would have them direct to two places. Firstly, LinkedIn's super easy to find Joanne Flinn. Just two hints though, I am a J O A N N E. And my Flinn, I know, is not quite spelt the traditional Irish way, it's spelt F L I N N. I just say this because sometimes people use the Irish spelling. And the second place would be the ESG Institute, which is www. the dash esg dash institute. com. And you can reach us both ways and we would be absolutely delighted to support you or to continue conversations. Fantastic. Great. Joanne, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the show today. Okay. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.