Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Rewiring capitalism: we need a narrative we can believe in

From the Archbishop of Westminster's better business blueprint to Al Gore's sustainable capitalism, the many new initiatives are in need of a believable narrative

IMAGE 2006, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH ... Al Gore in the film, An Inconvenient Truth. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount/Sportsphoto Ltd.

'The Sustainability movement will fail unless it creates a compelling future vision,' Jo Confino argued in a recent piece. Collectively, he said, we have failed 'to articulate a vision of a future that is both prosperous while remaining within planetary boundaries. Until it is able to showcase a plausible paradigm shift, then no one is going to feel safe letting go of the current system that is driving us towards the edge of an environmental and social abyss.'

This is a point of view I am hearing more and more frequently. The UNGC-Accenture CEOs Sustainability Survey adds weight to this argument. The survey suggests that while a small number of pioneers are regularly finding business opportunities from embedding sustainability, many more of even the companies committed to sustainability are struggling to find the business case. The inference is that if these companies are finding it hard, what hope is there for companies at lower stages of corporate responsibility maturity?

Yet it would be dangerous to make this pessimism a self-defeating prophecy. We cannot say which new initiatives might become transformative. Equally, it may be that elements from different initiatives will combine to help build more sustainable models. Some may, in turn, catalyse further insights and solutions and create chain-reactions through which a more sustainable future can evolve.

It is in this spirit that the Cranfield School of Management has been mapping a range of different initiatives and organisations, which implicitly or explicitly have as their raison d'etre, the renewal of capitalism.

Some of these are formal initiatives such as Better Business Blueprint, from the Archbishop of Westminster. Others are workstreams around a 'manifesto' such as McKinsey managing partner Dominic Barton's 'long-term capitalism'. Some pre-date the global financial crisis, such as Tomorrow's Company; others have emerged in the aftermath, like Al Gore and David Blood's 'sustainable capitalism'.

Some such as Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild and the Henry Jackson Initiative seek to engage businesses in education and enterprise projects to create a more inclusive capitalism. Others, including the MBA Oath or a new social enterprise supported by Boston Consulting Group, are seeking to provide tomorrow's global business elite with a personal code and experience to be more responsible capitalists.

Some of the business-led corporate responsibility coalitions like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development are asking how nine billion people can live reasonably well within the constraints of one planet by mid-century, and what new business models might help address this. Initiatives such as Conscious Capitalism bring together business people, academics and other interested parties.

But while it is one thing to tell a story of renewing capitalism; it is another to believe in that story enough to change our behaviours, enough to make the story come true.

Great stories need to be coherent, authentic, relevant, dynamic and sustainable. Stories with those qualities are more likely to be believable (appeal to the head) and compelling (appeal to the heart). But they also have to be road tested – in the way, for example, that Al Gore did with An Inconvenient Truth. He did his 'woodshedding' (a jazz term for solitary practice to improve technical skills) crafting and re-crafting his presentation, and 'jamming' (testing his ideas with others) in the storytelling department, giving that presentation hundreds of times before it was made into the movie.

All the initiatives and workstreams we are mapping are plausible candidates for being part of moves to renew capitalism but their respective narrators are going to have to do their own 'woodshedding and jamming'. They'll need to test their narratives with business leaders, politicians, NGOs and ultimately consumers, who have to be persuaded they can enjoy a 'quality of life' but by consuming less 'stuff.'

Perhaps the media and academia can bring people together to 'test' their stories with audiences of business faculty, teachers and interested others. Maybe people also need to have a chance to experience first hand a more sustainable lifestyle, perhaps through visiting show houses of the sustainable home, office or factory of the future. Seeing is believing.

Cumulatively, do the initiatives and organisations we are mapping offer 'a compelling vision of a future that is both prosperous while remaining within planetary boundaries'? Not yet, but building on these foundations, we have a better chance of developing such a vision – and, crucially, popularising the essential ideas.