Sufficiency, Regeneration, and the Art of Flourishing: Some Reflections
In a world grappling with environmental challenges, the pursuit of a sustainable and flourishing existence requires a reevaluation of our lifestyles and the adoption of strategies like sufficiency and regeneration. This blog based on a whitepaper, born out of the...
Regenerative Leadership (repost)
War, loneliness, inequity, biodiversity loss and climate crisis. Despite our good intentions, we are struggling to tackle the great challenges of our times effectively. By breaking down grand challenges into small tangible problems that are solvable, we keep failing...
Scientific Insights on Human Flourishing
As a practitioner, I often have a general understanding of theory and spend most of the time learning through experience. So it was refreshing to listen to an academic presentation on human flourishing sharing outcomes gained from rigorous research. Exploring the...
The door to a new society is opening: what World do we want to live in?
Climate activism is unlocking political awareness Climate awareness is becoming connected to climate action in many different spheres. The consciousness of young people, being aware and frustrated led to the emergence of a new movement. Greta became its voice and...
Driving System Change Requires Transformation Know-How
Over 7.6 million people went on strike asking for climate action in September 2019. Movements like Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion are openly showing how the present efforts of governments are not sufficient. People care about our common future and ask for...
Scaling Social Enterprises Globally – The Power of Coaching
by Tanya Murphy with Nadene Canning, Biliana Vassileva & Katrin Hauser Accelerate2030 powered by the Impact Hub Geneva & UNDP and partnered with scaling4good. Accelerate2030 is a multi-stakeholder program co-initiated by Impact Hub and UNDP in 2016, with the...
Changing people’s behaviour: Where to start?
How great would it be to have a magic wand that makes people change how they behave? I would have used it to switch people to biking from driving cars; to buying consciously rather than based on sexist advertisements, or to voting based on long-term wins...
Scaling: what did we learn?
With contributions from Anaïs Sägesser and Majka Baur Since the inception of our Scaling4good initiative, 2,5 years ago, we have analysed many documents and talked to exceptional people motivated to transform our societies and economies at a faster pace than currently...
Scaling your business or scaling for impact? Contradiction or powerful synergy?
By Katrin Hauser and Daniel Zimmer Scaling, the art of deploying new solutions that have successfully passed their proof of concept phase, is most of the time approached from a business perspective, which can be summarised in a simple question: how...
Why does awareness cause behaviour change? – Diego Hangartner’s interview
Diego Hangartner has almost 40 years of experience in researching the mind and lead for years the Mind and Life Institute. In the post How does the mind work? he summarized three key elements: our minds classify experiences as positive, neutral or negative...
How does the mind work? – Diego Hangartner’s interview
In his youth, Diego Hangartner was a member of the Swiss rowing team and participated in World championships. While everybody was physically similarly ‘fit’ and trained, he became increasingly aware that the main difference was the mental fitness. Outcomes...
To change the mainstream tap into their values – Sonja Graham’s interview
In the blog post How to develop lasting behaviour change interventions in organisations? I talked with Sonja Graham, Managing Partner of Global Action Plan UK about a successful sustainable behaviour change program they ran in a hospital. Since 2017 GAP UK...
3 stages of waking people up to their power for change – Colin Beavan’s interview
During his life, Colin tried many paths to find a way of living that makes him feel truly happy: working in a well-payed job, later serving NGOs and finally following his passion for writing. Though the recipes of our society did not seem to work. He was...
How to develop lasting behaviour change interventions in organisations? – Interview with Sonja Graham
Right away, when talking with Sonja Graham, I heard her passion for understanding how people behave and how their behaviour can be influenced for the good of society and the environment. For the last 7 years, Sonja has been one of the driving forces...
Empowerment is the key to sustainable behaviour change – Interview with Marilyn and Alexander Mehlmann
I met Marilyn and Alexander Mehlmann in Berlin where they came to speak at the SustEcon Conference. In her blog, Marilyn calls herself Globetrotting Grandma. I love how she introduced herself: it shows her open mindset and her great sense of humor....
Behaviour change science as a magic wand for changemakers
With the “Designing for Behaviour Change” project scaling4good is scrutinizing the behaviour change topic. This is the first blog of a series on this topic. Changemakers: this is for you! But, who are the Changemakers? A Changemaker is a person that does not only dream of improving the life and well-being of people and other living beings but is actively working towards turning her or his vision into reality.
Innovation and scaling for impact
In the discourse related to the current grand societal challenges we continuously hear the call for innovation. This is for instance true in all major international conferences addressing climate change or the Sustainable Development Goals where agreement is easily...
Platforms as scaling instruments
Information technologies bring a lot to scaling processes. They facilitate large-scale dissemination of ideas, provide new marketplaces and contribute to reducing the marginal costs of services and products as clearly explained by Jeremy Rifkin. Using online...
Scaling-up scaling-out: lessons from exponential organisations
In scaling, it is important to differentiate the growth of companies (scaling up) from the replication of successful initiatives (scaling out). Scaling-up has been given more attention because growth is what a “normal” company intends to do. Scaling out is equally...
Scaling: what do we mean?
The stability of our planet is at stake Our economic and demographic growth and development are taking humanity on planet Earth on a dangerous path. Since the middle of the 20th century, our environmental footprint has become so important that the entire Earth system...
Contagious sustainable action: quantitative theory of change
A first building block of a solid theoretical basis for action To solve or mitigate global problems such as climate change, good, sustainable individual behavior needs to be adopted by enough people to have an impact on society at large and the world. But isn't the...
Scaling: the case of Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) solutions
Scaling innovations or new solutions goes much beyond the classical deployment of new technologies using market forces. It is also the deployment at scale of new practices or solutions that are local in a bottom up approach combining a diverse set of approaches. The...
Managing transitions: critical yet neglected…
Transition approaches often neglect the fact that the old model needs to die to allow the birth of the new one. Each transition has losers who may become strong barriers to the new model. Is there such a thing as a lean transition? As compared to our ancestors, we are...
Disruptive innovation: new hybrid public-private cooperation models needed!
In this post, we propose novel ways for public and private sectors to cooperate and get your views on the feasibility of new models that break the traditional Manichaean divide between public and private. Currently literature about scaling is still at its infancy...
Personal Transformation: Progressing to the internal
Climate change is a symptom of current predominant personal and societal values, belief systems and aspirations which continue to lead our actions into an unsustainable direction. There is currently a large gap between “doing well” and “doing good”. Strengthening the...
Knowing when you are successful: the importance of impact measurement
As highlighted in my last post on collaborative scaling, agreeing a common agenda for success and setting clear targets are some of the key success factors for getting to impact. In my role as coach or mentor of many startups I have observed that too many impact...
Changing behaviour: from concerns to real action
Lessons from the Greendex survey As it looks, we have never been as conscious of the need to change our behaviour for the sake of humanity and the planet. According to the National Geographic Survey Greendex 2014 a growing number of consumers feel concerned by their...
Scaling impact through collaborations
“Connecting the dots” is one of the possible routes to accelerated transitions. But what mechanisms, what methods have been tested to speed up the connections?Every transition occurs in a system and any systemic change ambition must involve stakeholders. Thus...
Scaling adaptation: an ethical imperative
None of the current approaches that we are aware of is likely to generate a large movement on climate change adaptation. As climate change remains being seen as an issue for the future with the bulk of efforts concentrated on mitigation we risk postponing action for...
Maximise your impact by pursuing a public sector exit
Scaling your initiative by handing over to a public authority: in certain areas handing over your philanthropic or social entrepreneurship activities to the public sector may be the most effective way to reach e.g. nationwide coverage. This scaling mechanism goes...