The Sheconomy Summit gathered more than 30 female executives from Scandinavia to gain insights and discuss sustainability and green tech in Mountain View, California earlier this month. The summit, which was held at Google, featured a line-up of speakers who shared important knowledge on different areas of the green transition. The coverage of different areas ranging from AI, organisational change, green investing, and entrepreneurship, made the summit extremely captivating. What all areas had in common was the goal of a more sustainable future. The sectors are inevitably intertwined, as they all have the common goal of a more sustainable future, and therefore each have their individual responsibility to make a difference. This article will focus on three speakers of the Sheconomy Summit that gave their take on what is decelerating the green transition, as well as what we can do to implement change in order to overcome these challenges.

What are the some of the good things about hierarchies? They are good for defining responsibilities, making decisions and disciplinary environments. But on the opposite side, hierarchies prolong processes, slow decisions down, and make it harder to implement change.

Aurora Winslade

Director of the Office of Sustainability, Stanford University 

Hierarchy vs. Creativity

Aurora Winslade is the director of the Office of Sustainability at Stanford University. It is her job to facilitate the change process in order to help Stanford become a leader in sustainability. Winslade is an expert in change management and is constantly exploring new solutions for the campus to be as green and efficient as possible. She can come up with abundant green solutions and innovative ideas, but naturally, they will only become a reality once actually being implemented. This is where the real challenge begins. She stressed how inconvenient it can be to get projects approved on a higher level, which often is a problem at many companies and organisations. This led to Winslade breaking down the pros and cons of hierarchy.

“What are the some of the good things about hierarchies? They are good for defining responsibilities, making decisions and disciplinary environments. But on the opposite side, hierarchies prolong processes, slow decisions down, and make it harder to implement change,” she said.

Winslade emphasized the need to find the ideal balance in the workplace, where it’s possible to foster a creative and unconfined environment, while maintaining a strong leadership. The question is, how do we partner businesses and institutions to implement these solutions and innovations? According to Winslade, a dual operating system is the key to that balance, as we need the power, efficiency and accountability of the decision makers, but also the freedom to think outside the box and to lower the barrier for implementing change. If a company solely focuses on managing the hierarchy and reducing risk, they will never achieve revolutionary innovation. It is necessary that there is an alignment between staff throughout the institution to establish an environment that fosters creativity as well as a leadership that allows creativity and has an open mindset and willingness to implement change.

We cannot solve the green transition only with tech innovation. It is unquestionably a substantial part of it - but what is the point if we don’t implement these solutions where it matters? Many tech solutions already exist, but the challenges we face with the green transition is the fact that the solutions are not being implemented at the scale and speed required. According to Winslade, organizational models must transform to scale innovation and apply both existing and new technology. The organisational change management must support people to experience their way into new ways of thinking and approaching problems. However, change is not easy. As it happens, 70 percent of organisations change efforts fail. But the 30 percent that succeed make it worth the shot.

The problem is that we don’t have enough insight to do proper management and research to protect the ocean.

Kira Smiley

Business Development Manager, Project Tidal, Google X's Moonshot Factory

Failure as a step to success

While discussing the importance of organisational change, Winslade used Google X as a distinguished example of what a workspace that fosters creativity can do.

“X is giving a platform for trial and error,” she says. The staff aligns around shared purpose and navigates the aforementioned dual operating system.

Rachel Payne, Portfolio Manager at Google X’s Moonshot factory, introduced the team as a group of inventors and entrepreneurs, who build and launch technologies that aim to improve lives of millions, even billions, of people. Through an innovative environment, they work on creating radical new technologies to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. Payne underlined that their goal is “10x impact on the world’s most intractable problems” – so it is safe to say that their ambitions are high. The X Moonshot Factory recognises that with high ambitions there comes a high risk. Still, they approach projects that have the aspiration and riskiness of research with the speed and ambition of a start-up.

Often, we see management reject proposals because of uncertainty and high risks, which is why X’s organisational process is so rare. They embrace the uncertainty that comes with developing revolutionary and impactful solutions, and their mantra is to “fall in love with the problem - not the solution.” At X, they foster creativity and have the mandate to do things that have never been done before, which makes failure an inevitable part of the process. This mindset is supported by understanding the weight and nature of the problem that’s trying to be solved.
This high-risk organisational model naturally has its downsides. Payne explained that this approach easily leads to projects that will never fully succeed and make it to the market. However, the odds of positive and impactful outcome outweigh the odds of failure by far. Let us take one of X’s Moonshot projects as an example.

Finding solutions for the world’s hardest problems

X’s Moonshot factory facilitates several projects simultaneously, all aiming to solve different relevant and serious problems – one of them is the project “Tidal.” During the Sheconomy Summit, the delegates got the opportunity to hear from Kira Smiley, who is the Business Development Manager on “Tidal.”

Tidal, as the name suggests, is focused on marine technology. The ocean is critical to life on Earth. It covers over 70 percent of our planet and provides oxygen, food and livelihoods for billions of people. Humanity has pushed the ocean past its breaking point with acidification, pollution and unsustainable fishing. We are rapidly destroying ocean life and destabilizing oceanic ecosystems, which in the end will threaten not only aquatic, but also human life. Tidal aims to protect the ocean with technology systems while feeding humanity sustainability.

“The problem is that we don’t have enough insight to do proper management and research to protect the ocean,” says Smiley.

At Tidal, they wish to provide a platform to power sustainable ocean economy and to lower the barrier of innovation, so the solutions can be used by others. Currently, Tidal is working with incredible solutions, one being an underwater camera system that is bringing visibility to our ocean ecosystems, so we can understand and protect them better. The Tidal system is able to continuously monitor fish in all kinds of oceanic environments to interpret fish behaviours (such as feeding) and model fish behaviours over time, which will result in more environmental friendly decisions from fish farmers regarding fish feeding, welfare and health. Giving the Tidal team the resources and encouraging out-of-box thinking has shown to be extremely effective and has resulted in fascinating solutions.

Revolution comes with Risk

There is no doubt, that the combination of the three inspirational speakers promoted reflections for the delegates to consider, whether they can act and implement similar processes in their area of work.

Despite the growing concern for climate change and urgent need for a green transition, many companies and organizations have been slow to implement technological solutions that can facilitate the transition, as changes often are filled with uncertainty. However, global warming is damaging the planet faster than ever, and in desperate times, there is no way around rapid and high-risked green implementation.

It is crucial that we take advantage and prioritize the existing technology solutions to facilitate a sustainable future. Furthermore, there should be a larger focus on to scaling innovation and implement both existing and new technology that could potentially solve some of the world’s many urgent problems. This substantial transformation requires a balance between creativity and strong leadership that is willing to take risks. The fact is, that the world’s biggest problems can not be solved with conventional, incremental ways of thinking and behaving.

At innovation Centre Denmark Silicon Valley we help Danish research institutions, start-ups and corporates with scaling, innovating and knowledge sharing within the green transition. If you want to know more about our work and how we can collaborate on a more sustainable future for all, please feel free to reach out and read more about our work below.