Storytelling, villains and using pensions for the planet

Each month, we are interviewing a range of influential and inspirational leaders from across the climate and nature transition. These interviews are intended as a window into innovative and exciting ways of approaching the transition and to spotlight the people who are at the forefront of these changes. This month, we sat down with Ashok Gupta, Director of the New Capital Consensus project. Ashok has a long history of financial expertise and is also Chair of the Financial Systems Thinking Innovation Centre (Finstic), Chair of Mercer UK, and Chair of EV. New Capital Consensus is a coalition of non-commercial, apolitical organisations that have come together to explore how the current UK investment system contributes to the country’s current problems of low productivity, inequality and low levels of investment. Its objective is to find ways to release investment capital to address societal problems, like those above and in particular, to green the economy.

I have a lovely, handmade, wooden key box with decorative in-lays of keys on the covers. It was a present from a dear mentor and friend, sadly no longer alive. Every time I see it, it reminds me of him, his wisdom and compassion.

Your parents go out to work and earn money to enable your family to buy things, have a house, car and holidays. But your grandparents either have stopped work or will need to at some point. So how do you think your grandparents can still afford to eat, have a home and holidays when they no longer work? It’s because when people earn money, they try to save some for when they get older and can no longer work.

In the time between your grandparents saving the money and needing it, which can stretch for many years, it helps them and others if that money is used to build businesses that provide us all with food, transport, schools, toys and other things we need. We call this investment. We want this money to be invested in a way that helps the people who saved it, but also to help create a better place for us all to live in and to help the earth and nature to be healthy. Just now all this is not working as well as we’d like and we’re trying to find ways to make it work better.

It always frustrates me that the people who win arguments are often those with the best story and not the best solution. So, for us, storytelling is key. After 18 months of work, we completed our first piece of research in the form of a ‘landmark’ report, which analyzed the investment system, its problems and recommendations on how to fix it. This was a 70-page dense technical report which we knew few people would wish to read.

The team came together and distilled the report into a 10-minute story, with some very creative visuals, that we used to launch the report in both the City and Parliament, with the Pensions Minister speaking at the latter. It had a fantastic impact and enabled us to engage many people who otherwise would struggle to understand the issues and what needs to be done.

We are still at the start of this journey and need to build on the launch but feel optimistic about our ability to capture the imagination and attention of policymakers, the financial industry and commentators.

If we are going to fix the country’s investment problems, we need to be able to persuade the Government to do things that are politically challenging. We need to equip them to overcome resistance from many influential organizations and commentators who have business models and reputations they wish to protect.

So, we need to build support for change. How do we do that? We’re still not sure. We do know that politicians are influenced by the press and that the press feeds off heroes and villains' stories. That’s not helpful to us. We need a broad coalition and throwing blame around for the current sorry state of our investment system is unhelpful and creates enemies. Thankfully systems thinking practices tell us that there are no villains in a system, the villain is the system.

We are trying to find ways to build support among thoughtful commentators and senior industry people who can help us influence Government to be more radical. We know that unless we are able to fix the UK investment system, we will not be able to fix any of the other systems, i.e. transport, education, health, food, energy, etc. that all need investment, nor will we be able to support a just transition. As always, excellent communications and storytelling are at the heart of this problem

Recognition by industry and policymakers that financial system reform is needed as the current system is failing UK society. In the nearly 50 interviews that we carried out with leading financial industry figures, we were surprised by the amount of frustration about the way the current system fails to meet the needs of UK society, savers and the environment.

We were really excited by some of the killer facts we uncovered. The fact that too often we invest more money in Amazon, and several others of the big US tech businesses, than we do in the whole of the UK. The fact regulation and accounting has inadvertently undermined financial institutions’ ability to pool risk. We were able to use quotes from participants in our report to illustrate the issues.

The current governments focus on stimulating economic growth, plus the appointment of a number of ministers in key positions, like Torsten Bell as Pension Minister, creates the potential for more radical change. This could widen the Overton window and potentially lead to far more significant, long-term policies being implemented.

I would love to be able to gather together for two days some key ministers and politicians, senior civil servants, leading industry figures, serious thoughtful commentators and regulators, plus some others in think-tanks who have given serious thought to the UK investment problems. Attendees would need to be able to understand the whole system, its components and how it connects together, as the gathering would be based upon whole-systems solutions.

We would run it using something like a ‘citizens assembly’ process, in a real spirit of shared problem solving. We would cover on the first day what needs to be done and on the second, how to win public support for the changes. It would build very quickly wide advocacy for the changes required and speed up the whole political process.