Anthropy: The emergence of a new positive vision for the UK

The recent Anthropy summit provided a fantastic new platform for leaders seeking to create a new positive vision for the UK. This inaugural event, the initiative of John O’Brien, took place over three days in early November, at the extraordinary Eden Project in Cornwall.

Collaborative action

The summit spanned 12 stages, 130+ sessions and over 300 speakers, covering an expansive agenda on culture, diversity, purpose, humanity, leadership, communication, social impacts and environmental crises.

Anthropy was attended by more than 1200 people, including thought leaders from politics, business and charity including those from EY, John Lewis, IPSOS, Disaster Emergency Committee, One Young World and many more.

The need for dialogue has never been greater. The need for radical collaborative action has never been greater. Anthropy is a significant addition to platforms trying to add energy to the policies, programmes and projects that we need.

A new report inspired by the event, A Future Vision for the UK, is set to be published in the Spring. Plans are already in motion for an Anthropy 2023. There’s a great video summary of the event in-progress here from Sarah Walker-Smith, CEO of Ampa.

How might we frame the climate emergency?

One of the key themes I explored at my first session was the need to find the right framing for climate change now that extreme weather events are here now.

Three key ideas from our climate communications session included the need:

• to use simple, conversational language to engage people
• to place extreme weather risks into our daily lives, much in the way of travel advice and existing weather forecasts
• for government and business to create a national programme to help communities respond to extreme weather

My session, run with Jonathan Shanahan from Radley Yeldar, shared some key materials including:

• A great report on Words that Work in corporate reporting is available here:
  https://ry.com/thinking/words-that-work/words-that-work-effective-language-in-sustainability-communications
• A report on mainstreaming climate change aimed at marketing directors from Boston Consulting and Sustainable Business is available here: https://go.sustainablebrands.com/mainstream-green-guidelines
• And a BEIS report on principles for behaviour change initiatives including climate change is available here: https://cms.qz.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/net-zero-behaviour-change-initiatives2.pdf

Anthropy is committed to action, so a number of key organisations are collaborating on further work to share good practice based on insight. Please let me know if you are interested in joining us.

How human are we?

As you would expect from a platform called Anthropy, a major theme was our need to become more fully human in all our organisations. My conviction, as shared in previous updates is that our organisations are at best only 40% human.

Our report “The Human Organisation” is available here and defines nine principles of human organisations.

Cause for optimism

To discuss further your interest in next year’s Anthropy, framing climate change or tapping into our full humanity in your corporate culture, just drop me a line at: John.Drummond@CorporateCulture.co.uk