Author: Timo Peach

Ways into making an impact.

Posted on by Timo Peach

 

Why could a business do with an injection of effective theatre? In a Covid-transformed world, change is on everyone’s agenda, but there may be any number of reasons why you could do with a creative critical friend and great storyteller right now. Triggers for your business or clients to take a fresh look at how they are doing things, that could be a starting point for us to help:

 

ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIAL GOVERNANCE
Wellbeing in the workplace and the place of business in society and planet – we can help encourage your people with a refreshed sense of context.

SUSTAINABILITY METRICS
Resource understanding and energy transition – we can help you get your head around the global challenges at local level.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Automation and innovation – we can help you understand what you really need beyond the tech jargon.

NEW ECONOMIES
Circular planning and social enterprise – we can help you redefine what success as part of the human planet even is.

DESIGN THINKING
Human-centred problem solving and first principles courage – we can help you get a bit of this and see your next challenges with new eyes.

BRAND ENGAGEMENT
Storytelling and creative development – we can help you articulate your more truthfully compelling tomorrow, to build more than an audience – a community.

EVENT MANAGEMENT
Campaign and experience enhancement – we can step in lightly, to help boost an upcoming kick-off or take the whole event strategy off your hands.

 

 

 

Brand encouragement in crisis.

We bring theatre and knowledge to hosting your planned event.  Start the impact simply, but having the voice of Unsee The Future and co-host of The Global Goals Music Roadshow inject life, passion and informed playfulness to your corporate gathering around transformation and ESG. Thread together the story properly, in the planning and the live experience.

We offer creative critical strategy, to help you be readier, sooner. From thought starting about climate, politics, automation and how to turn your work to something with a new chapter of purpose, to breaking down the process with some design thinking. We help you make better contextual sense of global challenges, right where you are locally, understanding frameworks, like the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, to encourage human values and culture change.

We can help you develop new frameworks of response. If you’re currently wondering where to even start finding the language for it, or what your new goals could look like. But we do it with a distinct sense of creativity and theatre. Helping you understand the story you feel you are in – and encouraging you with the tools and outlooks to write a whole new chapter.

We can bring a wider perspective to your table. For us, it’s about casting a new light upon mindsets, behaviours, habits – the stuff brands are built on. As well as life systems. And a key influence in reshaping culture is one particular first principle – asking a better mix of people to see it. We can help you get different voices into your usual room, to diffuse the echo chamber.

 

 

 

Words, pictures, platforms, experiences – they are all just creative tools to amplify your voice, where it needs to be heard more clearly. Working with a network of like-minded talents, across digital, film, events, spaces, talks and workshops, we can help articulate the next level of your story, exploring and enabling the next level of your strategy. Joining you for a stretch of your own journey as a critical friend, a consulting eye, a creative fixer, a connecting partner. Trying to work with people whose outlook we want to champion.

“We want to help business leaders that are ready to make a first leap find help and inspiration, to make clearer sense of why they still want to be in business in an age of radical shifts. And what kind of business. We want to encourage how they can help build a richer, more hopeful, human-planet tomorrow. Helping to shape truer and more sustainable human life; not just aesthetic work, but zoetic.“

 

What is the thing you most wish you could tell people about? Pop the kettle on and tell us.

 

Say hello directly by email >
or by calling the studio 01202 433811 >

How is climate change putting pressure on business?

Posted on by Timo Peach

 

There’s no getting away from it. All economic, social and health challenges are ultimately framed within our relationship with the planet’s resources and there are many effects that increasing environmental crisis is having on human activity.

 

Some are more immediate, short term problems demanding attention from CFOs and Sustainability Managers, and some are longer term that also need preparing for. While social impact champions have to bring a very connected outlook to their role, for many people they are interacting with it’s still hard to see the realities and opportunities of the climate crisis and economic transition. But first contact is already happening across business, showing up as pressures from outside an organisation and within, including:

• emissions reduction regulation.
• cap and trade tariffs.
• energy transition costs.
• divestments and market valuation shifts.
• digital transformation, especially increased home working.
• automation.
• changing property assets and relocations.
• higher costs for goods and services.
• whole supply chain resilience.
• changing weather pattern demands, dangers and damage.
• changing customer behaviours.
• changing society pressures and brand perceptions.
• workforce health, engagement and adaptability.
• new, younger workforce attraction.
• innovation and scoping.
• longer term resilience strategies.

There is a lot to do. The changes in society are profound, and all of us are being increasingly affected, but it can be hard to help others see it clearly around us, or what might be coming ahead.

Momo believes that all of these challenges are ultimately cultural – behaviours driven by ways of seeing the world. And that to truly have impact, we need to create experiences to trigger emotional impact. So seeing these issues in a more connected way, brought alive with inspiring theatre, can help us unlock new ways of seeing everything.

 

Not just the environment nerd’s job.

Tackling these impacts isn’t simply the role of the resident Sustainability Manager. Or even something an ESG consultancy can bring in on their own – it’s a complete company thing. An every worker job, that ultimately feeds a total brand story – the immediate impression of a body when you think of it. But this doesn’t have to mean some impossible conformity drive facing managers – it’s more helpful to imagine that anyone can live it where they are. Anyone can embody social impact honestly and spark new relationships across departments and resources in little daily ways. And such practice tends to spark an essential ingredient in any organisation: Passion.

“I could talk about this all day, honestly” said Hexagon MI’s President of Design and Engineering Software, Roger Assaker, when I asked him about the impact of sustainability issues on his teams; “it gets me passionate.”

A way for anyone in an organisation to consider where to start telling a bigger story relevant to planet crisis times is to simply consider the key business competencies, values and priorities. As Social Impacter at Lob.com Christine Louie Dyer puts it: “What problems are your leadership team trying to solve? What are your products or people uniquely positioned to do?” Starting from the truth of who your team, your customers, your audience are is always the way into managing change.

And it’s also a central principle of good storytelling – something people are in clear need of in times of crisis.

—

A generation being called to wake up – but to what?

Posted on by Timo Peach

 

As Timo Peach is selected to support TEDx Southampton 2020, in a first little introduction to his talk he asks: How will the pandemic generation interpret – and be remembered for – it’s human to human contact?

 

A crisis will sort the grown-ups from the kids. It’s a generalism always intimated when you’re learning about yourself – you don’t know who you are until adversity finds you.

Will you turn out to be the sort who panics, or keeps a cool head in the crucial moment? Will you be someone to speak up or keep your head down? In the ledgers of history, will you show up?

Well, in an era of converging crises, only highlighted by the COVID19 pandemic, every day is a back to school day and we all have a lot of homework to wake up to at once. A continuous bad Monday, for which there isn’t enough coffee in the world.

 

LISTEN TO THE UNABRIDGED POCKET PODCAST OF THIS POST,
in an Unsee The Future 15m Think Blink >

 

At the moment, that world is looking less and less like it knows how to make human connections. Whatever motivating sense of history we choose to steer a course by, everyone of us is living at a busy intersection of car crashes. But in crisis, I’m not sure there is a “sort”. I think it’s terrifying dumb luck whether your wits are about you in a split second moment of decision or not. The difference, where one can make it, is likely found in something as boring as preparation. Knowing yourself, knowing your context, and doing a little personal prep work. Heroes have simply already packed their lunchbox.

In November, there is an event that’s going to try to help you with that a little bit.

 

 

Label everything!

As TEDx Southampton put out its call for speakers to represent the city’s place at the heart of South Central, I found myself thinking about that word Generations. The historic figures that loom largest in our imaginations tend to be those that had a very conscious sense of story about themselves and built around it intentionally. Collective ages that had a knack for theatre as much as engineering, and for the British the generation to loom largest over them may be the Victorians. We are still living with their plumbing and transport infrastructure, after all. To say nothing of many other structurally determined legacies. And fancy latin labels.

Two generations after both world wars, my own generation’s enlightened reaction to a dawning realisation about the failings of modernist promises, as well as imperial ones, was to ever so bravely adopt a wan enui about it all and quietly get on the property market hoping something more meaningful would just turn up for us. Except it didn’t. Our kids did. And they’re pissed off.

But are any of us alive now so different from each other?

The label my class seem happy to have adopted is Generation X. Named after Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book, I think people my age imagined we were being cute, supposing we were embracing reality by not so much consciously dropping out of the system as letting our eyes slip out of focus behind the MacJobs counter.

Who built the world we’re all dining out in? And who is building the one beyond us? I think, in a sense, we are all Generation X – Y Millenials, Zedders and Alphas alike, all continuing the indefinition of homogenous robot life in neo-liberal consumerism. Searching for the true definition of ourselves.Because re-reading my copy of the book, thirty years later, chilled me: It felt like so little has changed that I barely noticed it was a story written just before the internet existed.

But. Times are a-changing now. Can you not feel it? Something is in the wind. A storm is whipping up. Climates are shifting everywhere. We’re searching for genuinely new stories of us. Perhaps ones rooted in more ancient scales of futures. Wondering what we can build that will last half as long as some generations before us.

Which has prompted the centrepiece of my talk. A question that has me staring at the long scale of history from a sudden new perspective.

Is Generation X about to discover what its name stands for?

 

 

“While I myself am selected as an alternative speaker to the twelve scheduled for the day, I’m happy to walk through the process with them and let the theme challenge my own sense of purpose in making human connections.”

 

Fight everything!

The maginficent Mayflower theatre TEDx Southampton 2020 is being carefully Covidly staged in couldn’t be a more inspiring setting of precenium oppulence for the arts, back when funding such things seemed vital, and they weren’t being lit red in an emergency of potential loss. While I myself am selected as an alternative speaker to the twelve scheduled for the day, I’m happy to walk through the process with them and let the theme challenge my own sense of purpose in making human connections. For it is stories that help us notice the details and make those connections across the generations, as my dear friend Michele O’Brien, storyteller and actor, put it to me.

As I look at the convergence of crises on us all today, I think we will all need to be practicing so many of the personal resiliences and character homework being explored across our speakers on November 11, if we are to respond to the complexity of our unique times with health and purpose. In the swirl of our lives in events, we will have to demonstrate our own constancy. And courage.

It can be done. I think we live in oddly possible, formative times… if we don’t panic, but prepare. And there are always certainties in our histories and never in our futures – that’s how it works. That’s what every generation is called to face. But we will need firm human connections to make lasting choices.

Generation X is being called to wake up. But what call will we each answer?

Answering the call and having a go and plunging into the woods is the only way to write any new stories of us. But it may also help us make much more deliberate marks on the world. Ones we’d rather be remembered for.

DISCOVER THE WHOLE LINE-UP OF SPEAKERS AT TEDx SOUTHAMPTON 2020 >

Drink up – the story we’re in just changed, mate.

Posted on by Timo Peach

Calling time on motion. For a time. Before we lose the plot. And control of the narrative.

 

From the cocoon of a car yesterday, I saw high street life that appeared unchanged, people filling Thursday evening pub street tables. To bed in a project I think could be significant, I slightly awkwardly agreed to a public meeting that hadn’t been cancelled. I sanitised a lot.

I also ended up meekly waiting in a pub. It didn’t give me that usual nice local feeling.

We’re living through global crisis without real precident. How are dumb ol’, well-meaning, waddling, wonderful you and me meant to make sense of it? From what can we learn, right now? Shouldn’t we be told something certain? I’m not sure we are being; news and information is fast-moving and rather open to interpretation, just as much from government teams as the rest of us.

So here’s a question: Without harder edged central government leadership, what will we all do? Work the circs to keep our own wheels on – financial, social, supply. We’ll do what life does – blur the edges until the borders are shut down. But leadership is more than being unambiguous about work. Leadership is about story. Really painting a picture to live in. Perhaps the only shared adversity our close-to entire living generation knows is terrorism. And it’s based in war language we didn’t live through: “Keep calm and carry on.”

The WW2 generation knew what keeping calm and carrying on really means – that you are part of a whole. How much you consume, what work you do, what lights you switch on affect everyone. Their security, their war efforts. It didn’t mean making the pub quiz your hill to die on.

Everyone had to hustle, in a nation at war. And war efforts are unrealistically mythical, sanctified almost, in populist folklore today. But at the time, everyone had to learn fast what story they were suddenly in, to play some new parts within it. Because: life and death. The terrorist story is closest peace time has had to this. Violently disruptive behaviour, ideologically targeting “our way of life”. Told it often. In the face of that, Dunkirk spirit, as the British call it, surfaces fast; “We mustn’t let them win.” Normal life must continue.

Imagining a coronovirus to be a terrorist threat is totally the wrong story to picture ourselves in now. The worst thing we can do is keep life going quite “as normal”. It shouldn’t even try to LOOK normal. Normal human transit is how viruses win fast.

We need to show ourselves some radical un-normalities. To shock our behaviours a bit and truly curtail how those sticky little coronal molecules pass around and fly up into our soft, gooey human intakes. We need to help each other by manifesting what response looks like. We need to really get on changing our behaviours now, not simply to avoid getting ill ourselves but to help all of us avoid a truly unhealthy lengthy un-normality. A societal shut down that can’t recover fast enough for us to stay resilient. Mentally, nutritionally, economically.

#Covid19 is not a terrorist threat. It is a biological threat. Terrorism can bite me – I’m going back to the pub. Biology can infect me and everyone I touch – so I’m going to keep my physical distance from you. For us both.

What I need, living under threat, is clear help to do the right thing. Because I am life, I will leak out. Where government fails to tell us what story we’re in, we have to write one – partly by acting it out with our bodies. To stay as sane as sanitised. That is how we square up to the new normality. And to its opportunities and need; remote working, delivery models from shops, community gap filling, checking in each other much more via devices, lightening strain on the system. Facing some personal shadows.

This is a phase. It will pass. But we have to be as present in the moment as we do mindful of bigger context. We can be okay, but maybe we can find more calm sooner by helping each other embrace the story we now find ourselves in. One with some bloody interesting plot twists.

I’m really looking forward to being able to share them down the local as soon as we can make it happen.

Photo by Sergey Isakhanyan on Unsplash

Impact activity.

Posted on by Timo Peach

 

The curve. I know you are always just ahead of it.

You surf and pivot. Obviously. But are you helping to flatten it, the curve?

Information Is Beautiful has gone from being an informative thread of lovely data visualising graphic design to an informative book of lovely data visualising graphic design to becoming an almost verifiably trusted information source, it seems, and David McCandless’ collection of charts on Coronovirus does do a typically clear job of contextualising the now offcial pandemic.

But, at time of writing, I think it’s missing something. Something potentially a bit vital for real context. Reference to the impact curve.

Data should speak dispassionately, of course. Take all the drama out of the story, right analitics priests? But I wonder if this is just another in an immediately unfurling loo roll list of Previously Sensible Seeming assumptions, bouncing down the stairs in streaming seconds while we panic waddle to the bathroom door with pants at our ankles, trying to keep the conference call on mute. Assumptions that dawning real human planet consequences really rather want to challenge us about.

Because all data is human. Always. And so is its interpretation. Edited. Cultural. Biased. There are implications of who is behind the numbers, recorded or omitted.

What role can dumb ol’ you and me play in the numbers of an epidemic?

The impact curve of this virus is essentially a forecast of how a more focussed spike of cases, landing closer together on world health systems, is more likely to disrupt all the other life-saving work going on in hospitals, regardless of how recover-fromable this virus may be in the supposedly cool headed data. If we can slow down the spread of this resiliently virulent virus, and so crucially “spread” its cost to ICUs, wards, surgeries, patients’ waiting times and nursing staff’s nerves across a wider period, together we might actually tip its impact below the Collapse The NHS Or Italy line on the graph. By all making some behaviour changes now, not waiting for government.

Were we to actually manage this, we’d undoubtedly then wonder what all the bleedin’ fuss was about. Like Y2K. Cuh.

The same principle is being applied by more of us attempting to tread out a growing desire for environmental action: “If we all did our bit, it would all add up.”

That’s true. But it’s fluffing slow. More conscious shopping, eating, traveling… it can feel like a mucus drop in the ocean compared to the corporate and national level changes needed to shift CO2 behaviours. Especially while your brother in law is still driving his Hummer to Corner News to pick up his paper.

So there’s nothing like a good bit of drama to fluff the politics into action, is there? But how the hell can you and I or your brother in law draw lines on this?

Christopher Mims suggests this: “Here is the paradox and obligation of living in a democracy experiencing a pandemic: we are all going to decide, *collectively*, through our daily actions, through decisions we are making right now, if we are going to overwhelm our healthcare system or not.”

Left to think for ourselves, where would you and I shrink the horizon line of our influence to? What should we begin to exclude – consumery retail, leisure centres, yoga classes, the shared work space, the coffee house, the supermarket? The school run? ..The weed run?

And if we did feel obligated to self isolate even before being diagnosed with Covid 19, how would this impact the real metric already straining the redlines of us all at the moment – wider wellbeing?

How do we manage this? Our mental health. After years of grinding division, austerity and rain. (It has been raining for years now, officially; you don’t remember the sun.) Or drought. How do you make the most of a potential lock down, drastically reducing physical human interaction, or even weather on the skin, all while knowing your business could go dry fast and the more vulnerable of your loved ones are at some sort of infectious risk?

Many are saying widely, Covid 19 is forcing our hand to look at the endemic ways culture has normalised some very damaging behaviours to us and the material natural world we’re part of – the nature of our travel, valuation, time, comforts and purposes. And it is, perhaps, a call to embrace complexity. I mean, don’t announce this in the CoOp, while the customer infront of you is arguing with the manager about their right to clear the shelves of bog roll, it won’t help any.

But having to really think about our every interaction – blimey. It’s nuts. But it might wake us up in a new way to the miasmic interconnectedness of our lives – to system, soil and society. To each other. If we treat it as someone else’s problem, and nothing to do with business as usual, we’ll be waiting for non existent parents to turn up and tell us what to do. Or over-stretched health care professionals.

Does adult human planet behaviour partly look like us dumb lot trying to “flatten the curve” wherever we are day to day, by actually thinking about everything and everyone we touch? Some funny new greeting protocols and behaviours to slow down Covid 19’s spread. It’d be an interesting take on consumer activism – to really think biologically, to spread behaviour. But perhaps the best way to do it would be intentionally – with solidarity. Even, amid the sobering reality of it, finding a bit of stoic celebration at the suspension of the matrix. If rain days were snow days.

Could we manage a two week Christmas Day? Or is that idea just too much trauma?

And what might the world look like, emerging from our bunker?

How do we reconfigure ourselves to get ahead of the curve on crises? To take ourselves with us, as it were, and out smart our own behaviours? We have just so many problems to solve at once – but they are all ultimately interconnected. And cultural. Behaviours born out of beliefs. Perhaps, as we face such a disruption to our interconnected lives, instead of worrying about what the impact might be on me, on you, we should be wondering what what impact we’d like to make. And who needs us to.

Photo by Josh Riemer on Unsplash

 

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