I could barely get through Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Climate Change from A to Z”. It was a viscerally disturbing read. My takeaway was a) everything we know is going to change b) some of that change will be horrifying c) we are not yet acting effectively to prevent that change and d) there might be hope. I have go back and re-read it, I don’t actually recall a hopeful coda to the article. The climate picture is bad, whether you believe Elizabeth Kolbert, or the UN, or a US national security assessment.

I wish I understood how to write with Elizabeth Kolbert’s force, but I don’t. How do the rhetorical dynamics of logos, ethos, and pathos play out in her stories? The one thing I can offer is “teknos” - a form of argument which is prescriptive: here is an idea about how to do something.

The proposition of urgency is action. Do something. What do you or I do? What’s my agency? What will make the necessary change happen? Maybe the answer to adequate global progress on sustainability is changing the mindsets, the commitments of ~1000 people - heads of state and government, CEO’s and largest investors. One could view ESG as market-directed movement toward that end. (One could also view ESG simply as a rational approach to pricing systemic investment risk in a future that is happening before term - it’s just good business.) Power is sensitive to markets, but we are each just specks in any one market. Nevertheless, the advice from activists all is exercise whatever agency you have.

My work centers on helping people and teams make effective decisions through analytics, group framing, systems modeling, and creative & critical thinking. Decision making is a way of unsticking action. Our natural impulse is to act; when we don’t recognize what to do, we pause to decide. The impact I am seeking is to help businesses succeed at sustainability by easing useful action.

What blocks action on sustainability projects? I’ll speculate here - I’d like to know more. Assuming business and government are economic-rational and self-interested, the existential risks of the future are discounted to below the exigent needs of today. This quarter, this year, is concrete and real - even ten years out is too contingent and too abstract. Many US voters struggle to get by month to month. The policies that matter most affect the here and now, and not the maybe later.

But. Our future is arriving early, and we’re not ready. What does a future need to look like in order to act now? How do we think about the direction of the status quo, how do we think about possibilities, how do we think about exploration of unknowns, how do we think about things in a way that allows for at least the beginning of action? What does an opportunity need to look like in order to trigger investment in innovation? And, across the industrialized economy, how do we mobilize to do this?

Too many potential actions – investments – in developing sustainability solutions are too hard to think about and to commit to. The market answer is to make sustainability more rewarding. The skills and technology answer is to improve our capabilities to tackle hard sustainability problems at the managerial, risk taking, and analytic levels. The mission of Decision Rubric is upskilling sustainability innovation at scale.