At the end of a rather damp and turbulent 2023, Dr David Cliff of Gedanken, reflects on what we may see in the year ahead.
I’m not one for usual festive season platitudes. Those of you who know me, know I concentrate on real issues and real debate about what goes on in leadership, business, psychology and society at large.
The last few years have seen pandemics, crises in our public services, wars around the world and an intensification of the climate crisis. Without doubt, the damp, dreary times we have had in the last few months have been amplified this year by the action of El Nino, but the ‘omnipresence’ of changing climate cannot be dismissed from this, the science suggests that the acceleration factors around climate change are proving worse than even pessimistic climate scientists’ predictions. This throws down the gauntlet that COP 28 in 2024, is something of a true watershed of change. If it is not, we are becoming too close to the edge to be able to retain the earth as we know it.
At home, there is undoubted political turbulence. The tribalistic warfare that is going on within political parties, wherein quasi-illuminati influence the internal selection of leaders and policies that are often at odds with the will of the majority of moderate people, will doubtless continue. David Cameron’s presence may offer a steadying stabilising hand; however, our Premier may yet have an ‘Ides of March’ experience. We may yet see a Labour government that gets in, but because, as Jeremy Thorpe once put it, “not because Labour deserves to win, but the Conservatives deserve to lose”.
The Middle East continues to fuel world tensions that have amplified the tensions between Russia and Ukraine and the sabre rattling of China towards Taiwan. Ceasefires and negotiations in the Middle East, are almost an inevitability in what is an intractable situation of enmeshed complex socio-political histories, tribalism, and sectarianism that has gone back for decades, if not millennia. Mediated by the simple plea of the world, that bombing babies, whatever the offence, is just not acceptable.
At home, we see reactions to that as the diaspora of world conflicts come together to make their own protest. This consumes huge amounts of police resources on things such as hate crime and other factors, when for many citizens who spend virtually all of their lives in a twenty-mile radius of where they were born, still seek to have the police respond to burglaries, minor road traffic offences, shoplifting etc. that remain real concerns despite their somewhat less “global” lifestyles.
With over 7.5million people backed up in the NHS system and doctors haemorrhaging from the system, both with a combination of burnout and better prospects elsewhere, we have a health system that struggles to respond quickly, however much money is thrown at it. A bit like creating Nightingale hospitals as a knee-jerk reaction to a crisis, one needs staffing to run a system and AI and automation will only take you so far along the efficiency spectrum when it comes to the arts of healing, and dare I say, good leadership.
Returning to climate, we have a major value shift in terms of all our lifestyles. Without doubt, the desire for acquisition, and a better life must be tempered against the sustainability of the biosphere we all occupy if we are in any way to address the sustainability of the planet and fuel security in a harmonised way, rather than seeing these as opposites.
The recent increases in oil production in capacity by many of the major oil companies is projected to continue particularly in the US and we are seeing the awarding of more licenses for the North Sea at a time key parts of our green agenda in the UK have been ‘kicked down the road’ several years.
It’s truly for all of us, as members of the electorate and, as members of the business community to look to how we represent our values in how we lobby organisations, how we work with our own companies and supply chains, our corporate and social responsibility. We must constantly re-visit our values and ethics as a real credo to how we lead, organise and develop our organisations and instil change that is productive, and sustainable. It is still for countries, such as Britain to lead on climate and in doing so we need to re-establish our position in that role, not from a position of fiscal might, but from a position of moralcentredness.
May 2024 be good for you and your organisation and may your contribution to the community, the business economy and indeed world sustainability in the year ahead, be equally so.
www.gedanken.co.uk