Reskilling for Our Climate Crisis

By Bob Leonard and David Ross

The major problems we face today are global in scope including the COVID pandemic and its implications for the worldwide economy, but businesses must also prepare for the mother of all crises — our climate crisis. Our climate crisis ensures that we will be operating in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Uncertain (VUCA) environment for decades. It is crucial for organizations to determine what new skills will be required to develop and deliver the products and services needed to meet this global challenge.

Some of the skills are obvious — those needed to reduce carbon footprints of supply chains, manufacturing processes and the products sold. There is plenty of information available around that. We have decided to focus instead on the skills that will enable organization to deliver innovative products for a new world — the carbon free world that we must transition to.

New Product Development

Our climate crisis is a global, extremely complex systemic problem. It cannot be solved by using siloed legacy thinking. Designing a low-carbon future requires unprecedented levels of collaboration, creativity and imagination.

Much of what we need to do to successfully alleviate our climate crisis is related to design. The 20th century was left brain…