Precision activism — An emergent practice for a critical decade
The era of turbulence of complexity
2023 will mark one third of our way through the most critical decade for climate action. And where are we?
For me, one of the best examples of why that isn’t a simple answer is Exxon Mobil. Exxon is responsible for releasing more than 40 gigatonnes of CO2e since 1964. That’s 40 times what the entire world needs to mitigate in order to reach our 2025 goals.
In Q4 of 2022, Exxon recorded the highest annual profits in its entire company history; $58b. This figure is 450% more than what the entire private sector is managing to mobilise towards the $100b fund for loss and damage in developing countries (2020 data) and 3 million times what almost half the world’s population survive on for an entire year.
Unpicking where the fine lines between the destructive volition of one fossil fuel company, and the dysfunction of the system it exists within that allows it to happen, is paralysingly complex.
If only this was a unique example. We are living through a polycrisis. We have a climate emergency, a planetary emergency, political and social uprisings, sky-rocketing inflation, a cost of living crisis, and new geopolitical tensions all converging at once. And it is against these backdrops that we are called to create change.
Systems change or bust
So we furiously write new policies, and despair when we see them roll back in the next political cycle; We co-create roadmaps with industry leaders, underestimating the subversive power of the late majority and the laggards to slow progress; We edit global texts to the lowest common denominator; and we earnestly invest in tackling carbon emission reductions, only to learn it’s negative impacts on nature. It’s exhausting and the concentric circles we navigate feel dangerously close to incrementalism.
So systems change it is, then, right? Ever more so, this has become a mantra that we, as leaders, call for more than we truly understand or are capable of to deliver on.
Most climate or nature initiatives can be plotted on a spectrum from incremental actions perpetuating the status quo, to rolling in a hand grenade and designing from the ground up. Is the current system broken, we ask? Yes. Do we need to redesign our systems from the ground up? Desperately so. But can we afford the 50–100 year timeframe to get there? We don’t think so.
The 103 Ventures response
This is why we created 103 Ventures. Sitting firmly in the middle of the spectrum of change initiatives, we tip our hats to the visionaries designing the future world we will step into, and hold out a hand to today’s leaders trapped in the quagmire of today.
We term our work precision activism, working at the intersection of business transformation and financial innovation in pursuit of sector level coherence and change. Precise, because we think in acupuncture-fine interventions, and activism, because acquiescence characterises many of our failings to date.
We bring together a team who can see and understand the inherent complexities of the current system, converse and co-create with the visionaries, yet plan and deliver on the minutiae of detail that needs to happen in the present day. We underpin all our work with a rigorous research practice, and then with razor sharp precision, we exclusively focus on the most impactful and actionable interventions, capable of measurably nudging a complex sustainability challenge forward in the next 1–3 years.
Systems intervention points in practice
For how such an approach is delivered on the ground we would refer to our work with the Urban Land Institute, Europe. Like most of our work, we tend to be called in when the pre-existing methods of change aren’t working. A net zero strategy, an investment thesis, an industry roadmap etc.
ULI Europe had developed a Europe wide programme to enable their 45,000+ members to play a role in the rapid decarbonisation of the built environment in Europe. However, when looking at the regional and national roadmaps, tangible progress against the sectors’ goals were not being achieved. We worked with ULI Europe and their team to (i) understand the current system, and (ii) map the entire landscape of change. From there we discovered 43 cross cutting barriers to change, and identified 18 intervention points where significant progress could be achieved if razor sharp focus could be applied to delivering a solution.
At the end of the first year, we honed down from the headline challenge of a lack of retrofit in commercial real estate, to the first big hurdle — a lack of integration of quantified transition risks into everyday investment decision making. We developed a set of industry shaping guidelines to enable the standardisation of the treatment and disclosure of transition risks up and down the value chain. We sent those to public consultation and then designed a suite of supporting interventions (which we call levers for change), around the guidelines to ensure they aren’t just published and disappear into the ether. These include: developing an automated tool to reduce friction of adoption, a data sharing initiative to support the release of sensitive information, the development of a common agreement on carbon pricing for the sector and facilitating critical mass adoption. For some helpful write ups, check out these FT and WEF articles.
Building the right enabling programmes around our strategy
What sits around this strategy is a suite of supporting programmes that enable the systems intervention point logic to succeed:
Field building & collective Intelligence
Much of the time, when we meet a sector level client, while faces show up to the meeting, the worldviews and mindsets, and the relationships and interpersonal connections do not yet align with the ambition. The result, we find, is a waste of vital resources spent attempting multi-stakeholder change before deep enough alignment is achieved, so that the adequate depth of insights and quality of innovation can be harnessed. At the heart of this work is building 21st century competencies in our stakeholders and perhaps most importantly the capacity to sense, learn and adapt in real time. For this, we have brought in Suzy Glass. With a background in the cultural sector, she is a specialist in supporting stakeholders to think, act and work more collectively, so that their systems level impact can outstrip their individual capability.
Net zero transformation
Deep within every industry or sector, there are key actors that can have a disproportionate impact on their peers if they choose to take the lead. Following on from our Net Zero Transformation report: A framework for accelerating change in an era of turbulence & complexity, we have committed to work with one company per sector, to evidence a more transformational way of working. At the heart of this work is the concept of portfolios of innovation, inspired and influenced by the great work of EIT Climate KIC and more recently Net Zero Cities, which is in itself a method to build portfolios of interventions carefully constructed for their synergistic effects. The programme, when delivered well, has the potential to positively impact the individuals, the company, the value chain and the wider systems within which it operates. To support this work, we have two exceptional new 103 Ventures team members we will be announcing in Q2 2023.
Demand led innovation
At the heart of most systemic challenges there are alternative product, service or infrastructure based solutions that need to be scaled within a public or private sector context. Never has this been more relevant than in the multi-industry deep decarbonisation required in the frighteningly short timescales we are afforded. This is where the core concepts of demand led innovation can flourish — cultivating a pull for innovation rather than a push of innovators, facilitating industry wide solution preferences, coordinating between stakeholders where competitive habits prevent or slow progress, and sequencing and deepening engagement to ensure the right amount of clients and capital is available when it is needed. Again, we are excited to announce a known demand led innovation expert and advocate as a new team member in Q2 2023.
Harnessing the synergistic effects
For 103 Ventures these programmes and approaches all naturally dovetail with each other. With the systems intervention point programme with ULI Europe, a need for deeper insight creation has been identified among owners and occupiers and a collective intelligence focused community of practice is being delivered for 2023. When delivering our latest net zero transformation programme kicking off with Hines, we fully expect the demand led innovation approach to significantly support its commitment to be a market leading sustainability company. When delivering a demand led innovation approach, up-skilling the stakeholders in systems intervention points and portfolios of innovations can mean that one programme can pinpoint an exact solution to the root cause, accelerate the scaling of the solution, and build support for its underpinning infrastructure. It all connects.
Precision activism — our commitment to an emerging practice
So, to finish where we began: It’s 2023 and where are we? We are part way through the critical decade for climate action and we are all rightfully worried about our pace of progress.
With this next phase of the 103 Ventures journey, we aim to support the industry leaders among us who want to create precise and tangible results now. In the process, we are committed to working out loud, sharing our successes, mistakes and learnings. Because, we hope, as a result, an emergent practice of precision activism can take hold.
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Thoughts and build welcome, as always.
e: kate@103.ventures
w: 103.ventures
