The Provocateurs:

Des Dearlove:

Hello and welcome to the Provocateurs podcast. I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. In Provocateurs, we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with some fantastic people. Now, this is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. My co-host is Geoff Tuff. Geoff leads Deloitte’s sustainability work globally in the energy and industrial sectors. Geoff’s also the author along with Steve Goldbach of two best-selling books, Detonate, which came out in 2018, and Provoke, which inspired this podcast series. Geoff, great to see you.

Geoff Tuff:

Des, as always, it’s great to be here. And also as always, we have a fantastic guest. Although this time the guest and I have a little bit of shared back history, I won’t get into it right now, but before we’re getting going on the recording, we were sharing some mutual acquaintances. But I’m thrilled to say that we’re joined today by Weslynne Ashton. Weslynne Ashton is a professor. And by the way, there’s a lot of things that Weslynne’s got going on, so this is going to be a bit of a long introduction. But Weslynne is a professor of environmental management and sustainability at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she holds joint appointments at the Stuart School of Business and the Institute of Design. And she also co-directs ID, the Institute of Design’s Food Systems Action Lab. She’s a sustainable systems scientist and her research is grounded in industrial ecology and the circular economy, which we’ll be talking about a lot today. She’s got a focus on increasing sustainability and equity in urban food systems and developing regenerative economies in post-industrial regions, newly industrializing countries and small island states.

Weslynne works with private enterprises and underserved communities across the United States and the globe to build capacity for just, sustainable, and circular practices. Going beyond physical resources, she researches how organizations, economies, and societies rely upon and work to regenerate multiple types of capital. An example of those types of capital are human, cultural, natural, digital. I’m sure we’ll hear all about the variety of different types of capital that she works on. And then final thing, in 2024, as you know all too well, Des, Weslynne was named to the Thinkers50 Radar list of up-and-coming thinkers whose ideas can make a positive difference in the world. And if we have enough time after that long introduction for the rest of our podcast, I will say welcome, Weslynne, and we should get into some of the conversation.

Weslynne Ashton:

Great. Thanks, Geoff, and thanks, Des. It’s great to be here with you.

Des Dearlove:

Tell us a bit about your backstory. Now, I know you grew up in the Caribbean. And we’re all in our minds on this cold winter’s day picturing sunshine and beautiful white sandy beaches. I mean, given that that’s where you grew up, what drew you to industrial ecology and sustainability?

Weslynne Ashton:

Well, I grew up in Trinidad and Tobago, which is one of the most industrialized islands in the world. So whilst there is white sand beaches and palm trees, coconut trees, and rainforest, there’s also a lot of heavy industry. And Trinidad is a very significant oil and gas producer. So growing up I saw this juxtaposition between nature and natural resources and a lot of heavy industry and pollution. So from early on, I think I had an interest in how we can operate our industry in a way that would be less impactful on the environment. And I did my undergraduate degree in environmental engineering at MIT, which was very focused on engineering remediating problems that existed. So we have this pollution and how are we going to clean it up? We have all of this wastewater being generated, how do we clean it up? And I had a term in that program where we started to think about, well, what can we do differently to redesign our industrial systems so that they are less impactful and they are operating more in harmony with nature? And that is essentially what the field of industrial ecology does.

So I started my PhD in industrial ecology at Yale, kind of in the early 2000s, precisely looking at how we can build what we call industrial ecosystems. So our industries mimicking the organization and behavior of natural ecosystems, operating in harmony with them, but also delivering and satisfying the needs of people, the people who are present in those areas, as well as thinking about the generations to come. So that was really what I call a very transdisciplinary work because you need to know the engineering, you need to know the business. So what are the motivations for firms who might be collaborating to work on reducing their waste impact, collaborating to manage energy collectively, to manage water collectively? But there’s also a social aspect as well. So I pulled in some sociology and did social network analysis to understand, well, there’s the profit motive, why a business might choose to make a decision, but firms are socially embedded so the decisions they make are also dependent on who they know and the relationships and trust that they have with other managers in other firms.

So I really see myself as this transdisciplinary scholar who builds on engineering and scientific approaches, but also takes social science. And Geoff and I were talking, there’s also a design piece in here because in thinking about how we design these new systems, these new configurations of industries, we have to understand, well, who are the people who are involved? What are the types of decisions that they make? What are their behaviors? And we think about this both from a human-centered, the individuals, as well as a systemic approach because we’re all embedded in social and ecological systems. So I think that’s how I talk about my journey as being in this space of sustainability science.

Geoff Tuff:

So I think, Weslynne, you may have covered just about every possible concept that we need to go and drive sustainability in the world. So I think we’ll have to break it apart and focus on the various different piece parts. I’d like to start with one part that you are well known for, and it happens to intersect with a term, a concept that seems to be all the rage these days, and that’s the circular economy, which you talked a lot, in your experience as you were growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, about all the efforts to clean up the industrial waste. But it doesn’t stop with just cleaning up, it sounds like, it’s actually doing something with that waste, and whether you call it regeneration or circularity or what have you, tell us a little bit about what circularity or the circular economy means to you.

Weslynne Ashton:

Yeah, so I think at a basic level, there’s a contrast between the linear economy, which is our predominant paradigm where we extract resources, convert them into products for consumption, and then discard and dispose those resources at the end of life. So the circular economy thinks about how can we redesign what we’re producing, change consumption patterns, so we’re reducing the amount that we’re consuming, we’re sharing products and services across more people, so we’re really getting more value out of the things that we’re producing. And at the end of life, we’re capturing those materials, perhaps through good design so they’re more recyclable or they’re bio-based so that they can be decomposed or digested, and they re-enter the manufacturing supply chain. So we are circulating.

So circular economy I think has been very techno-economic focused. So it’s been focused about materials and also the economic value. And what I argue for in my work is that we need to also think about the different types of resources that all companies utilize. And so this idea of multiple capital is really necessary to expand that perception of what is circular and what can be regenerated. So we rely on human capital, the people within our organizations, and we’re not going to circularize them, but we want to improve the capital and we want to regenerate that stock of intellectual knowledge, the skills that people have in order to be a more vibrant, successful organization. So for me, the circular economy includes the materials aspects, the material, the economic, as well as social, and regenerating the different types of capital on which organizations depend.

Des Dearlove:

Okay. Now, last time I talked to you, you were talking about an example in Barbados, seaweed and white rum were involved, as I recall. It’s a great example-

Geoff Tuff:

In the conversation, Des, or in the example?

Des Dearlove:

In both. Seriously, no, it was only in the example, I think, as I recall, let’s not give Weslynne a bad reputation here for drinking while she’s doing interviews. No, no, no. But yes, it was a really good example.

Weslynne Ashton:

Yeah, so islands are microcosms of the world. We see that most islands probably import more than 80% of the food that the people on that island consume. So we are heavily dependent on imported materials. And the waste that’s generated either has to be buried somewhere or shipped off the island. And so we see issues of environmental crises, climate crises, even social crises coming to a head much quicker on islands because of the limited space that they have. So my colleague, Legena Henry, who is a professor at the University of the West Indies in Barbados, teaches a class in renewable energy. And she conveys that she and her students were thinking about, okay, Barbados wants to get to net zero, they’re a small island, energy is really expensive, driving a car is really expensive. And so they thought about, “Okay, how can we change our transportation fuels?”

So they looked around and said, “Okay, what do we have available?” So Barbados is known for rum, and so there’s the rum distillery waste. But on islands of the Caribbean and throughout the Eastern Atlantic, we have an increasing problem with sargassum. And sargassum is a natural floating seaweed biomass, which is actually an ecosystem where small fish, a number of species, actually need for their growth. But with climate change, we have increasing numbers of sargassum washing up onto the beaches in the Caribbean and in the Eastern Atlantic. And so this presents a problem because you no longer have your white sand beaches that your tourists want to come to. That material, once it washes up on shore, starts to decompose and so it begins to smell. So it is a nuisance problem once it comes onto the shore.

So she and her students thought, “Oh, well, is there a way to combine this rum distillery waste with the sargassum seaweed to make a fuel that can power the cars on the island?” So they have been running a number of pilot experiments to run automobiles on compressed natural gas, that’s the result of this biogas digestion process, as well as using that biogas to convert it into electricity and run electric vehicles. So they’ve now been running a couple tests on the island and are building out their first kind of larger scale plant. And the idea is that this is something that can really be a form of sustainable fuel for transportation on islands like Barbados. They’re also doing some work now in Grenada. So the idea is spreading.

But this is a circular economy and it’s circular economy that’s born out of a need. So the need here is energy security and affordable energy for middle class people on the island to get to work, to have the buses, the transportation, get to where they need to. So the rationale is about this human need, so it’s what the people need, but recognizing that sargassum is a resource once it washes up on the island, but it also is a vital part of the oceanic ecosystem. So it’s not a matter of getting rid of sargassum, but really only harvesting what comes ashore so that there is harmony maintained with nature. And I think this is a great circular economy example that really points to ingenuity that we find in the Global South.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah, it’s a super cool example. I can see why it’s stuck in your mind, Des, and for all the reasons you just said, Weslynne. It’s focused on a unique human need at that place for those people at that point on the planet, and it’s a system solution. Like the professor and her students were not looking at a single material or a single challenge to go and create some sort of circularity behind. They were saying, “What if we combine two different dynamics that happen to be happening right here and come up with a solution?” So awesome example.

Can you tell me or tell us a little bit more, though, about the other types of capital? Because it’s easy for some of us who are thinking about circularity of plastics, or what have you, to say, “Look, you need the material, you need the technology, you need some way to collect it and process it. And that’s the circular economy.” But it sounds like you have a much more expansive definition that includes other types of capital that need to be regenerated in order for it to truly be successful. Why is that?

Weslynne Ashton:

Yeah, so we think about eight types of capital in my work, but there are many different configurations. So the baseline is thinking about three—natural, land, labor capital—that are natural capital, our human capital and our financial capital. And folks, including sociologists, so I build my work on the sociologist Cornelia Flora and colleagues who have done a lot of work in rural sociology, looking at rural economies and how do they thrive. And they identified seven types of capital. So our natural, our human, our financial, our manufactured capital, which is all of our goods and services that we have created. Social capital, the relationships between people and so who I know might help a colleague get a job, so that social capital is valuable for economic activities, whether it’s job access or opportunity access in terms of firms. We have political capital, which is how power is distributed, how is decision-making distributed within an organization or between organizations? So what are the types of power and access that an organization has access to within a country, for example? We also think about cultural capital. So this is the sum of the cultural heritage in a particular region. So the customs, the food, the traditions, which is really difficult to monetize, right? And I’d argue we should not monetize it because there’s so much value that’s bigger than just saying, “Okay, how many people can we get to come to this festival? So what’s the dollar value?”

I think I recently heard, and I can’t remember the number now, but the Taylor Swift Eras tour generated more than a billion dollars in revenue? That’s cultural capital that’s being monetized through culture, through that music, through that act of being a Swiftie and purchasing merchandise to associate. But there’s other value with being part of that community. The final capital that we added to this mix is digital. And we know that we’re now operating in a largely digital economy. And so our data is valuable, all of the tech companies monetize that and advertising. So there’s value in access to data and having data. So these are the eight types of capital that we think about that all firms rely upon.

Geoff Tuff:

And if I could just ask a quick follow up on that one. So is the purpose of identifying all these types of capital to make the economics clear? What I mean by that is sometimes, especially in the early stages of any sort of developing clean technology, whether it’s a circular technology or some sort of new energy source or what have you, traditional value change and traditional value exchanges don’t clear because we don’t see the amount of value that’s released. So I could imagine one reason to think about eight different types of capital instead of one or two is that there’s many more opportunities throughout that entire system to identify value that’s being created or released and therefore monetize what’s happening with the other types of capital in a different way. Is that too limited a way to think about that?

Weslynne Ashton:

No, I think that’s a good way to think about it. And my main argument here is that businesses, and I think what I’d provoke, is that businesses have too narrow a view of the value that they can create and draw upon. So by expanding the view to include all of these different types of capital, which as capital, there’s a stock of it that we draw upon, we can add to it, we can regenerate, or we can deplete it. So if we properly account for these types of capital, we can see a more holistic view of value that’s being created by drawing upon these capitals and regenerating them through the activities of the business.

So I would argue that this is a direction that is critical for the long-term viability of business. We’ve been too short-sighted only thinking about financial success and financial growth as the metric of success. And in the long-term, I think we’re going to have to think more holistically. There are several groups that I feel are active in this space trying to develop metrics and methodologies to help business account for these different types of capital. 

Des Dearlove:

I think, if I’ve understood the argument too, that some of the problems that we are experiencing now is that these capitals, they don’t appear on the balance sheet, particularly when organizations are using natural resources, for example, that isn’t costed in. So it’s like, I think, in economics we call it externalities. So to some extent, these companies aren’t really paying… I mean, what we’re seeing in terms of how goods and products are priced and understood does not allow for the damage in some cases that’s being done. And different economic and commercial decisions would be made if this stuff was properly accounted for. So how do we get… I mean I heard your point about people trying to interpret and come up with metrics, but how do we get these capitals onto the balance sheet? Because that seems to be the thing. That’s what companies, at the end of the day, that’s what people are trained to respond to. But because these things aren’t on the balance sheet, they kind of get ignored.

Weslynne Ashton:

Yeah, yeah. So I think with the rise of integrated reporting, which aims to pull together financial and non-financial aspects of performance into annual reports, I think this is the direction that I see something like these multiple capitals accounting for, the multi-capitals coming onto those balance sheets. So we do have the international sustainability standards boards and IFRS really developing this framework. I think what’s currently being more and more incorporated are the environmental metrics, and we have to start somewhere. So I think we have the financial, we have an increasing accounting of natural capital. I think a better accounting of human capital and social capital are what I see being integrated more. And I think we need examples.

So one of the things I am working on currently with partners at my university, the Illinois Institute of Technology, is how do we measure the societal impact of the projects that we are incubating through a National Science Foundation research initiative? So we are developing this framework to say, okay, if we invest in this project that is trying to use AI for helping students manage their schedules and kind of have better performance in their university career, well, what are the types of capital that we’re drawing upon to create this product? And how is it contributing to the individuals who are benefiting from the service? What is that larger societal impact across these different measures?

So I think building up the number of cases is one way of doing it and kind of changing the story. So Geoff, you appreciate this as someone who has a design background. When we think about systems change, we often think about, okay, well how do we need to change the information flows? How do we need to change the policies and the architecture of choices that people have available to them? But at a very fundamental level, if you read Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems, is that we need a change in values and mental models that underlie the paradigms that we operate within.

And the way that we change values and beliefs and mental models is through stories and narrative. So I think it’s really important to use these cases to shift the stories as well as building the methodologies to integrate the assessment into our annual reports for companies. So there’s the stories and then there’s the structure that enables companies to actually say, “Okay, this is how I’m measuring the type of cultural capital that I’m using and this is how I’m regenerating it through the actions of the company.” So we do have this more holistic view.

Geoff Tuff:

That’s great. I’m tempted to take us off on a tangent saying, so how likely is that in the coming political environment? And I’m not actually going to drag us in that direction because it could take us a long way there. And I think a lot of us can draw some assumptions. I would like, though, to go in a slightly different direction, and if I may, I’m going to ask you a two part question here. So the first part has to do with the reality that you’ve worked in this field in lots of different places. You’ve worked in Latin America, in Asia, in the islands, in the US, et cetera.

So the first question is how are we doing globally? It’s easy to pick a certain country or a certain sector and assess the progress, but how are we doing globally? And then the second part of the question is why should those of us that may live in the West or in more developed economies be paying more attention to global dynamics? And I mean, as you said before, this is a systems challenge and a systems issue that we’re dealing with. I’d love to hear a little bit about your perspective if you’re talking to a Western audience, why do we need to be paying attention to, call it, more developing countries, what have you, as we try to achieve some of what you’re talking about?

Weslynne Ashton:

Well, I don’t think we’re doing well.

Geoff Tuff:

I kind of assumed that was going to be the starting place. If we were doing well, we’d be talking about something else.

Weslynne Ashton:

2024 is the hottest year on record. We have wildfires raging in the Southwestern US around Los Angeles, while the middle and the north of the country is in a deep freeze. We’re actually warming up today in Chicago. I think we’re going to go above freezing for the first time since last year. There are a number of initiatives and commitments that have been made by larger enterprises, multinational enterprises, to reduce their carbon footprint, to implement more sustainability measures.

And I think there are pockets of success, but on the whole, we’re not moving fast enough.

I think that we are not doing enough to really shift the needle. And I think a big reason for that is that we are locked into a paradigm that says to be successful, a business has to grow, it has to grow its profits, and it takes a very short term view. So we need new tools, new ways of thinking that are not embedded in this paradigm. I think about the Ghanaian symbol and concept of Sankofa, which says that we must look to our past and learn from it. So the exact saying is it’s allowed to go back to get what you’ve forgotten.

So I think that there are Indigenous communities, lower income communities, marginalized communities around the world that are not locked into this dominant paradigm, who are operating in economies of care, economies of sufficiency, who are doing things differently. And I think that they are going to be, one, source of inspiration and two, that inspiration and those cases need to be invested in, otherwise they’re going to remain little niche things in pockets in different parts of the world. But I think this different way of thinking about what’s the purpose of business? Is it for the profit of shareholders or is it for the benefit of the wider variety of stakeholders who work in that company, live next to that company, use the products from that company? So thinking more holistically about the stakeholders and also thinking about the long-term viability. So I think this broader view of what it means to be successful as a business is necessary. And we can look to examples of startups from some marginalized communities that really have care and sufficiency as core elements in their business models.

Geoff Tuff:

And those can probably be the sources for the stories that you talked about before.

Weslynne Ashton:

Yeah, I think so. I think, yeah, there are many stories, I think really interesting ways that people are adapting to changing climate with excess pollution, with the loss of some resources to make businesses that serve the needs of the people who are living in that place while generating revenue and reinvesting that revenue for the benefit of that broader suite of stakeholders.

Des Dearlove:

You’ve mentioned, Weslynne, a couple of times the word regeneration. That’s a word we are hearing a lot at the moment. In fact, so much so Thinkers50 is going to dedicate our gala awards and conference this year to the idea of what that means to be a regenerative organization. But this is a new language. And is language important to change the narrative? Because obviously regeneration has, well, a different meaning, but definitely has a different sense to sustainability. Sustainability seems to be that sense of trying to minimize the damage, whereas regeneration, I mean if I’m understanding it correctly, and I’m sure you will correct me if I’m wrong, it is about more than that. It’s about doing more good.

Weslynne Ashton:

Yeah, so one of my mentors is John Ehrenfeld, who was a professor at MIT. And the concept that John uses is called flourishing, that both sustainability and regeneration fall under this umbrella of flourishing. So a sustainable system is one that enables the individuals, whether that’s an organism, whether it’s an ecosystem to thrive in the long term. So one can thrive by doing what you’re doing and kind of having a stable line of action, but we need regeneration to continuously adapt and to leave things better than before.

So just a silly little anecdote, I tell my kids that you leave the room better than you found it. If you’re doing something and it’s not enough to just leave it as it was, as you met it, but to think about, “Well, how can I actually have a more positive impact on a space that I’m in?” So I think the idea of regeneration is that we are not just using at a stable level, but we’re actually doing things that enable resources, and I’ll throw in capitals, to be regenerated for the use of future generations. So we think about all of our resources on the planet as stocks, we can be circular. So circularity has an implication of doing as much as we can with what we have, what we’re limited to that stock. Whereas regeneration thinks about how can we rebuild, how can we create more of those resources?

Geoff Tuff:

And I recognize that we’re getting probably close to our time so I’m going to ask you another challenging and maybe two-part question if I might. But we had Paul Polman on the show and one of his comments was that 80% of the changes that we need to make are now possible in so much as we have the technologies to do them, we know how to do them, et cetera. And that the reason perhaps that we’re not making them is that we have a failure of leadership and that is the main stumbling block.

I’d love to hear your commentary on that, and especially commentary as it relates to leaders who work in for-profit organizations where a lot of the values that you’ve espoused in the conversation today may not be shared by the shareholders of that organization. What is it that we can do to encourage leaders to move before others to adopt some of the thinking that you’ve brought to us here today? And actually, I’ll leave my question at that. If I add the second part to my question, it’ll be truly too complicated.

Weslynne Ashton:

I think I agree with Paul Polman that we absolutely have a lot of the technology, the technological solutions that we need to make a difference and what we’re missing is the commitment and will from business leaders as well as political leaders to put those into action. I think it is a tough question to be the maverick and do something that no one else in your industry, like your peers, your cohort is doing. And I would argue that we are in a crisis, and my mind is on Los Angeles and the fires there and the companies that are operating there. That if we continue business as usual, we’re going to have to deal with more wildfires, more environmental catastrophes, more climate problems, more social problems, coming from areas that are besieged by climate crises.

So to get ahead of them, I think this takes some courage and foresight to invest and to try to bring others along in your industry, in your sector to be bold, to make these changes, which really take a lot of commitment. And by using different metrics, beginning to tell different stories, you, these leaders, can be at the forefront of making the changes that are only going to become more and more necessary if we continue on the path that we’re on.

Geoff Tuff:

And I will say, Weslynne, that one of the key takeaways for me that will stick in my mind for a long time from this conversation is the whole notion of expanding your definition of capital to multiple sources of capital and the possibility of actually creating some economics behind that I think could be one of the keys to unlocking that first mover willingness.

Weslynne Ashton:

Thank you.

Des Dearlove:

Hopefully a little bit of optimism, a little bit of good news. I did see a survey carried out, which was put up on the World Economic Forum’s website, that showed that nearly 80% of US consumers prefer regenerative brands to sustainable brands. So much as obviously we need the courage in the boardrooms, possibly in the marketplace there are signs that being a good business could be good for business. So hopefully that’s something to think about long-term as well if you are one of those business leaders that, actually, that’s the way the world is shifting. And as people say, you really do need to be on this train because it’s already leaving. Let’s hope that’s right.

Weslynne Ashton:

Absolutely.

Des Dearlove:

It doesn’t always feel like it, I know.

Weslynne Ashton:

Yeah, I agree with you 100%.

Geoff Tuff:

So maybe as the very last question, it’s got to be a quick answer Weslynne, because we are definitely out of time here. But what’s your provocation then, given everything we just talked about and what would you say to our listeners who are wondering what’s the one next thing they should do or think about in order to create some change?

Weslynne Ashton:

I think businesses and leaders in businesses ought to think about the stories that they tell about what’s valuable and think more broadly about the value that they’re creating for their customers as well as their stakeholders.

Geoff Tuff:

Thank you.

Des Dearlove:

Fascinating conversation, Weslynne. Thank you so much. But that’s all we have time for so huge thanks to our guests, Weslynne Ashton, and to you all for listening. This is the Provocateurs podcast and we’ve been Des Dearlove and Geoff Tuff. Please do join us again soon for another episode of Provocateurs.

Weslynne Ashton:

Thank you.