Future Ready – What does that mean?

Being Future Ready is all about using the best knowledge available, being transparent about risk and creating a successful business or organisation that builds the society and economy of the future.

It is about ensuring that the organisation you lead is a legacy rather than a liability for those who will follow you.

There is a lot of help available these days to boost and structure our existing knowledge and values:

  1. 17 (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030
  2. The Paris Agreement. My interpretation of that is: Zero and negative greenhouse gas emissions as fast as possible
  3. The Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)

These globally agreed frameworks offer clear targets to help every organisation define what success means both in core activities and in meeting expectations of the next generation.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

The UN Sustainable Development Goals are sometimes cherry picked to match existing strategy. However, I strongly believe that choosing certain goals for positive impact cannot be done in isolation from a single clear target not to negatively impact even one of the goals.

Stockholm Resilience Centre has visualised the interdependencies of the SDGs, showing how they together describe a framework for sustainable development, where economic success is dependent on a strong social development, which in turn is dependent on functioning and resilience natural systems, including the global climate and food production systems

The Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)

Any vision of the future must address investor or funder relationships. The TCFD aims to improve the engagement of the global financial markets by providing clear guidelines and tools for companies. It is a suit of tools than open up a critical new conversation with the financial markets; an opportunity not to be missed by any company.

Watch the introductory video to the TCFD on https://www.fsb-tcfd.org/about/

These tools are useful for all types of organisation, gathering internal and external experts in finance, operations and climate change to clearly chart risk management in a systematic and transparent way. I believe that risk management is not defensive, it is a way to identify and feel confident about the chosen pathways forward.

Home