An examination of the field of Sustainability and the Circular Economy – this is a ‘Big Picture’ view and touches on Dr. Lee’s own experiences over the course of her learning, application and continued work as CEO at S2A Associates and Associate Professor (Reader) in Sustainable Systems Analysis, University of Surrey. Covering: Design Freedom, Lifecycle Approach, Societal Change, Sitting in the Middle, The Circular Economy and Where it all Started.
We’re here on a wonderfully sunny autumnal morning at The Avenue by Haatch Desks in Peterborough and I would like to welcome Dr. Jaqi Lee to the insight4business podcast show thank you for joining us thank you for having me you’re welcome now I’ve only known you for a short period of time Jaqi having attended the food industry sustainability programme running partnership with the STFC food network and IntelliDigest where you ran a workshop over two days looking firstly at life cycle thinking and supply chains for sustainable food production followed up on day two looking at the tools to make this happen and I haven’t mentioned two wonderful organizations based here in the UK and would ask the listeners and viewers of the show to take just five or ten minutes over a mini break to learn some more and look them up online IntelliDigest combine innovative research with advanced engineering to solve global food sustainability challenges and their vision is a world where no child goes to bed hungry I’m very lucky to have had some one-to-one support from Dr. Ifeyinwa Kanu their CEO as I look to further my knowledge and improve my organisation to support their outlook the STFC food network is part of the science and technology facilities council this is a government agency who carry out research in science and engineering and funds uk research in areas including particle physics, nuclear physics, space science and astronomy having spent time learning from their members on one of the workshops it is simply amazing to see how their cutting-edge science is supporting the work to make food production sustainable an effort that requires truly global collaboration and effort so your workshop really opened my eyes to the work which needs to be undertaken by industry which is by no way insurmountable and hopefully after COP26 we’ll see a greater impetus to start such important work.
Where do you see the greatest impetus coming from Jaqi I think now it has to come from industry is at the front edge of this it’s up to them the decisions they make as to how their activities are undertaken and once we need guidance and leadership from the political classes ultimately it’s business decisions and business actors that will make the difference on this so I was clear and happy to see that at COP26 it was indeed the industry who was saying come on we need to do this come on government make the agreements we want to go net zero we want to make the difference we want to make the changes to our business we need some clear guidance from you so we know the playing field we’re working on but it’s definitely now I think an industry leading activity and certainly for big players and indeed smaller and smaller companies as the word spreads through supply chains as they say yep so that’s as I see as well as the larger industry pushes this forward there will need to be some support for those smaller organizations as well as we move forward absolutely so you have a degree in mechanical engineering and materials from 1992 and you also hold a PhD in environmental systems analysis from Cranfield in 1996. how have you seen the landscape change in those early days of your career in the areas of engineering and environmental systems hugely there really is no comparison when I started in engineering and my first role was at uh Rolls-Royce environment didn’t really exist in the sense we understand it now we had HS&E and environment was very much on the health and safety very small focus very narrow, narrow, narrow thinking and it was what was needed at the time that was perfectly acceptable but it didn’t have that that wider viewpoint that wider understanding when I went back to Rolls-Royce in 1998 we I was working very fortunately in the Strategic Research Centre and that allowed me to bring in some of the wider life cycle thinking that I’d developed my understanding my knowledge and my through my PhD into a big company and they were great and they were accepting that this was a new way of thinking but that was still you know nearly 15 years ago and again when I took the knowledge that I had out from the company to the wider aerospace it was met with yeah that that’s really nice but what’s it got to do with us type attitude now it’s only been in the last I would say 10 years and 10 to 5 years we’ve really seen industry step up to the plate on this and start to address some of those really big issues and now sustainability is commonplace everybody talks about sustainability everybody talks about the circular economy I’m not convinced everybody knows what they mean by that yeah but everybody talks about it and most people have now heard of it and most people would now not say climate change they go what’s that they would actually go yes climate change they may or may not agree with its causes they may or may not agree with how we deal with it but at least it is now in the public and the business sphere of understanding in sphere of awareness which it never was when I first started so a lot has changed in the 30 odd years that I’ve been playing around in this field playing around absolutely playing around but you do yeah even 15 years ago, even 10 years ago we’ve seen that shift just in the last just in the last decade big, big, change and I should say broadening and widening the scope of understanding for the average person in the street that come that’s part of it isn’t it I think it’s part of it it’s there are there are two sides to this you have the public who need to put pressure on their if you like their suppliers they’re the people they buy from to say well I’m not going to buy my product from anymore because I don’t like the way that you’re doing things and that’s always been a very slow very niche market and will always continue to be because not everybody has the luxury of being able to make some of those decisions on the other side you have the big business for whom this might well be a strategic business decision how can we make a difference between us and our competitors how can we be leaders in the field some businesses like to be leaders some like to be followers and then of course you have the political playing field where you have governments national governments international committees etc. coming together hopefully to recognize that this is actually a global problem and this is one of the first interesting things about climate change is it’s only the second really major global problem we’ve had to deal with – we had the hole in the ozone layer and we came together for that for the Montréal Protocol but this is only the second real problem we’ve had that’s actually global in nature most other environmental issues can be relatively local so there’s never been a need for this level of collaboration and agreement and so it’s a new playing field it’s a new way of working and people are not necessarily used to that and don’t particularly feel comfortable in that type of arena.
At insight4business we work with companies to look at their operational systems and processes and to streamline them by removing waste and decrease increasing efficiency to make them more profitable is this part of the design freedom function when considering design for environment or even design for sustainability it is if you think about what you can do with the product you are constrained by levels of what we call design freedom at the lowest levels you can become more efficient you can change products and processes to use less energy use less materials you might change the design slightly to change materials away from one that you know potentially has a worse environmental impact as you go through the levels of design freedom that the bigger changes you want to make the more freedom you need the more time you need the more resources you need the more inventiveness that you need because actually to make a big system change it’s not just what you’re doing it’s what everybody around you is doing who you interact with as well they may be constraining you that in the short term means you cannot change things but in long term in relationship building you can work together to make bigger changes and that’s where that design freedom comes in but certainly the starting place is always what’s happening in an area that I can improve here and now that’s going to be cost effective that’s going to deliver benefits to the community to my business and the environment hopefully as well, but moving forward from that it requires the wider view point of understanding supply chains wider stakeholders the wider task environment absolutely moving forward you need this life cycle perspective the systems thinking if you focus purely on making your little bit of that supply chain better you run the risk of what we call burden shifting where your bit gets better but you simply outsource the impacts to somebody else up or down your supply chain and you cannot avoid that unless you take this system’s life cycle approach absolutely and that came out of the workshop it was eye-opening as soon as it was there in front of me that it made perfect sense but it’s one of those common sense light bulb moments it makes sense when you know and you think well why doesn’t everybody see that but until it’s made absolutely clear it can be sometimes difficult to understand that makes me makes me consider what role in an operation is it we have the you know there’s the leadership tiers but is there a role that could be looking at that should be looking at this perhaps ideally I would say yes but it’s never going to happen that way so for me life cycle thinking is a strategic position, the guys who make the big decisions on where is the business going what should we be making I mean actually more importantly what shouldn’t we be making because that question is very rarely asked they need to be able to look and say what’s what are the strategic relationships we need to foster in order to ensure that our product meets the needs of community the business and the wider environment and that sometimes doesn’t happen but it’s not to say that those people down and in on the shop floor and actually further down the tiers management shouldn’t also be thinking about this these guys actually the ones who have the knowledge about how the product is made the issues on how it’s manufactured and unless that information gets fed up to strategic level you lose a lot of that actually this is a small easy, easy win that we could take so we need to look at this as well you need them both and they need to meet in the middle top-down approach again involving everybody within an organisation because these are the internal stakeholders yeah that makes good sense yeah thank you.
We’ve touched upon a little bit of your early career could you tell us where your own interest in sustainability started is there a route there that a seed that grew yeah I mean it was it was it was a sea change moment I remember I was watching the tele the television coverage of the Exxon Valdez disaster and seeing the pictures of the sea birds being dragged out absolutely covered in oil and the sheer number the sheer vole and it made me realize that and I remember sitting there with tears streaming thinking this this this isn’t this isn’t right we shouldn’t be doing this at the time I was in the middle of an engineering degree engineering was you know the hard topics like thermodynamics and electronics and mechanicals materials and all this kind of stuff and there wasn’t anything in there about earth sciences about the environment that we actually needed in order to make all these wonderful things as engineers and I still believe that engineers are fundamental to the solution to this because we make solutions and eventually to train correctly we can make really good solutions but in order to train engineers correctly we needed to get engineers to understand the natural world because we were utilizing the world as a free resource and it’s not so I went back to university I was lucky enough to be doing a five-year master’s course that allowed me to take some courses from other departments so I immediately went off to the geography department and said I want to take some courses in natural science will they fit in they said yes you can do this love them absolutely thought they were fantastic really opened my eyes and that started me on the journey when I finished my degree I didn’t know what I wanted to do still wasn’t really sure I wanted to go I didn’t I knew I didn’t want to go back to Rolls-Royce and work at Rolls-Royce I’ve been there twice so this is the first time I knew I didn’t want to go back there so where was I going to go and somebody said do a PhD and it had never occurred to me before then to do a PhD again I was incredibly fortunate I basically wrote down what I thought I would like to do for my PhD sent it off to a university they said this sounds great come along and do it now I recognize that that’s actually very rare it doesn’t happen very often that way so I was very lucky to be able to go off and do my PhD in environmental systems assessment and I worked on something which 20 years ago was you know at the beginnings of its of its birth if you like it was a topic that we kind of knew a little bit about but didn’t know much about it grew into what is now known as life cycle assessment but at the time it was very new people really didn’t have data and I also approached it from a way that again has come back into fashion through the circular economy which is what we call I suppose it’s the integrated system I wasn’t only interested in in looking at engineering systems on its own I wanted to see what happened when you looked at the whole integrated system so I my environmental systems assessment looked at a manufacturing process a farm and a housing estate and I wanted to understand the links between them so where did the farm wastes go what happened to them where did the outputs from the house what did they need where did they get them from how was the energy produced they’re a fully integrated system utilizing a very rudimentary life cycle assessment type process in a graphical form because I thought I might as well do everything together make it nice and easy engineers like pictures so let’s put it into a picture and it’s only been in the last I suppose five to ten years I’ve actually realized that what I was actually trying to do was create a circular system but I didn’t know it as such then I’m kicking myself now obviously because if I’d written the book in 1996 when I did my PhD I would now be more famous than Ellen McCarthy but I didn’t do anything about it for me it was my PhD it was done but it was the start of understanding for me that I cannot look at engineering as a single point you have to look at it in the wider sense of everything else that goes on around it so my point of where I am now is I spend 90% of my time at the Technology Human Interface because that is where we have the issues and that’s where I find the most interesting systems approaches and how you have to resolve the human interaction if you want a system and a solution to work it just sounds to me having learned that you were you it seemed you were the right person at the right time to come out of that engineer with the engineering background that the analytical approach and to have founded the interest that’s that sea change moment yeah and then to take action and do something about it to be asked what about PhD it does sound like it came together and it was, it did and I think at the time you don’t see it but obviously looking back on it then then it clearly was because it has given me a very unique perspective in that I don’t follow an engineer I don’t follow social science I don’t follow economics I sit absolutely in the middle because for me that’s what it’s all about you can’t have a solution which is focused entirely on people because it won’t work technically and it won’t work economically. You can’t go to economics because you’ll knacker the environment and it won’t necessarily deliver to people so you have to be able to sit in that place a unique vantage point and look in all directions and because I’ve also worked in industry and worked in academia I also sit in a very lucky place in that I am interested in the latest thinking but I also recognize that you can’t put the latest thinking into industry because it’s too far forward, so you have to translate the latest thinking into language and tools that industry can actually apply. If you want industry to move down this road and that’s where I find it interesting. You talk to industry and find out what they need you to take the latest thinking from the academic blue sky point of view and you make a solution that fits in the middle, that encourages businesses to take that next step. It also means that academics can see that their work is being applied and actually they’re not just thinking of in their ivory towers and they can see there are benefits in some of the work that they’re doing because they can see what comes out at the end of it they can see it makes a change. Very well summarised thank you!
So can you explain a little about the work undertaking to gain your PhD and help our listeners and viewers to gain an appreciation of what environmental systems analysis is and perhaps how they could start to understand the environmental systems around them at home or work perhaps yes it comes down to what we’ve mentioned before life cycle thinking and looking at more than just what’s immediately in front of you and thinking a little bit about what happened before it got to you so looking at a cup of coffee for example so not only do you have to look up your supply chain you also have to look down so what happens when you finish what do you do with your coffee grounds do you check them in the bin what do you do with your waste jars do they go in for recycling how for example are you if you if you are lucky enough to have a compost heap what are you actually doing with the compost where is it going are you using it or if you do what I do which is keep putting things on the compost heap until you have a massive mind and do nothing with it because I never get around to digging in the garden that is what’s happening in in our garden as well yes it’s a very it’s a very common thing but I did on that point I did think recently what am I going to do with this 100 gallon compost thing, surely there is somebody I can give it to help yes there is always but you have to think about it becomes it has to become an active process and I think that’s part of this this uh life cycle thinking it’s an active process you’re not just accepting things and saying this is what it is you’re actually starting to think and awareness is 90 of the problem if you are become aware of what’s happening and aware of the impact that you are creating you are far more likely to make conscious choices to do something different and that might mean first of all that you have to spend a bit of time going off and finding out information and it may spend a lot of time not actually doing anything but just getting information and then when you have the information then you can start making behavioural changes but you can’t do anything unless you know and you can’t become you can’t know anything until you become aware of things how do businesses start to engineer sustainability in to their products where should they start and firstly is there a good reason to do this it’s legislation yeah there are bits of legislation say you can’t use particular materials therefore they have to change their product their process to avoid those materials sometimes it becomes a driver from a particularly strong willed member of the strategic board the MD might have set up his business focused on environment and so everything is focused through environmental sustainability and so that is simply then just the way that the business is about the leadership and the governance that’s set up it can even occasionally come out of the workers if the workers have a strong enough voice and the management is prepared to listen so it’s not unheard of and it can come that way and it can also come from what we call a mandate to operate by the company’s customers if the company find their losing business and they do a focus group and they find they’re losing business because customers don’t like the way they’re doing something or don’t like the product in some way that’s one of the quickest ways the company will then change its stance because the company wants to remain in business so if it finds its losing customers through this mandate to operate it will then it can change its route to doing that so whether or not it’s a desire to behave in a good corporate citizen way or whether or not it’s a requirement from legal needs or government policies or legislation or even just that they feel that they can get a better customer base it doesn’t really matter what the driver is as long as they start yeah as to where they start we touched on this earlier they start with the low hanging fruit the things that are easy to do now no company is obviously inefficient because that wouldn’t mean that they were not making as much profit as they could do so companies are generally pretty efficient but what they’re not necessarily good at is having that slightly wider perspective which makes them see beyond their gate to gate operations and that can sometimes open up opportunities that they weren’t aware of before so looking up their supply chain and down their supply chain could say actually if we partnered with this supplier we could come up with a better input to our product or if we partnered with this waste disposal company we could get our products back or we could get something back that would be good because that would be a raw material input for us so that wider thinking that wider awareness can open up opportunities and yes the initial actions are going to be small they’re not going to be a complete revamp and overhaul of the company ethos or product portfolio but it’s the starting point for thinking and as I said earlier what do we make but more importantly what shouldn’t we make what shouldn’t we make yeah well what shouldn’t we do making this taking some action starting gives you a basis to build from absolutely and the first couple of years it’s going to be little things it’s going to be efficiency measures but it’s going to be learning about your product in more detail and learning about that why do value change creating a dialogue within the organization potentially create well as I would hope looking at your supply chain having the dialogue with your suppliers having the dialogue internally in the operation having a dialogue with your customers yeah and it’s not just the people that you sell to it’s the people that might actually interact with your product after your product is finished being used by your consumers the energy material inputs are greater for the for the circular economy than they are for the virgin system so I look on circular economy as an application of appropriate lifetimes and fitting deaths whereby you recycle when and where it is appropriate to do so and you don’t when it isn’t and there are many, many activities we have which are dispersive which means that actually collecting everything back together to enable it to be re recovered recycled reused in some way are so expensive and so difficult that actually it doesn’t make any sense to do that and it also means that you need to think about when and where you use more durable materials if you are going to use something that is only going to be used for five years you don’t make it out of materials that will last a hundred years if you’re going to make something that you want to last 25 years you don’t make it out of plastic that’s only going to last three so utilizing the right materials for the right lifetime and ensuring that you can do something appropriate with it at end of life is what makes a sustainable system and sometimes that will be recycling and sometimes it won’t but you only get to understand that when you look at that full life cycle systems picture and that’s yeah that’s about engineering in sustainability engineering and sustainability I just I know of I believe we make mobile phones smartphones yep that have this incredibly short lifespan because in in context yes because phone companies want to keep making funds and selling phones we could make some we could make something more longer lived you could but that but that would go against the business model against the business model again that comes down to the business and the leadership but it also comes down to their markets consumers like or liked having new phones every year three years ago yeah okay so there are generations people who will always get a new phone when it comes out because of the new gadgets and gizmos now if you think about people’s attitudes and behaviors go back to after the war everybody was you know make do amend things have been in scarce and short supply so everybody used made use of everything as best they could for as long as they could we then shifted into behaviours which is a consumer society where we use things for as little and we get rid of them you know they break we throw them away we don’t mend them and we go and buy another one I think we’re beginning to find that society’s values are changing again and we’re now starting to move back to wanting to things that last longer and so the business model of a new phone every 3 years may not actually still be around in the next 10 years because people might have decided that actually they don’t want their phone to be changed every three years because they want to have something they feel is better for the environment it lasts longer so customers will businesses respond to what their customers want if customers have values the business mandate changes and they will start to produce things that the customer wants i.e. phones that may last longer yeah let’s hope but that that’s the difference it’s about customers having a power to say something and when it becomes a large enough customer base businesses will take notice. Thank you!
After the workshop I now have a favourite grey area which is the answer. “It depends.” It definitely gets the grey matter working can you explain how this relates to understanding sustainability within organizations yes the answer it depends is a standard answer for any question to do with environment so what should I do well it depends and it all depends on context so for businesses understanding sustainability you need to know your operating environment you need to know where you are when you are who you are because in a different country or at a different time or a different part of the country your best environmental solution may look completely different so this idea that one size fits all is unfortunately a fallacy and it doesn’t work I mean you can apply it to a certain level but after you know when you start when your area starts to get too big or you know you’re changing the culture too much the solution won’t be the same and so being cognisant and being aware of what you are trying to do where you are trying to do it will give you an answer to what is sustainability for you at this time another thing I would say is that once you decide to find in the business what your sustainability is it isn’t going to stay the same so you’re going to need to go back and review it not every year but every five years maybe go back have a look is sustainability still what we think it is all the things we’ve done in the past five years how has that changed things what is our next goal going to be sustainability is not a destination it’s a journey and you’re never going to get there you’re never going to be entirely sustainable because the surrounding environment to you is also going to be changing so you may well be sustainable at a time but if things around you change then actually you’ll need to change with it we can see this and perhaps the biggest example is through climate change you know we’re starting to see the fires the droughts the floods, how you operate in that kind of business changes almost on a yearly basis now and so the answer it depends is unfortunately the right answer but again I keep coming back to this it depends because you have to look wider than your own system again the topic that’s running through is understanding that the breadth of the arena in which you operate understanding those wider stakeholders and the task environment in which you operate the systems thinking approach systems thinking it all comes down to systems thinking the life cycle perspective and that makes you look at things in an entirely different way and I’m not suggesting that businesses have to become amazing organizations that have perfect sight along their value chain because that is unrealistic but I do think an awareness outside their own gates is the good starting point for this that’s a great point you make about sustainability being a journey I i consider myself a lifelong learner learning is a continual journey through life I lean on continuous improvement continuous improvement lifelong journey sustainability also makes perfect sense as a lifelong journey it is it’s not businesses started to to ask a question how can I be sustainable and I often think well you can be more sustainable but I don’t think you can ever be truly sustainable because circumstances change around you so you have to be fleet of foot you have to be prepared to change to manoeuvre and of course this is where actually sustainability benefits the smaller company because they can move faster bigger companies are usually quite set and whilst they have resources and knowledge which benefits them in the in the journey to sustainability uh they sometimes find it quite hard to move and it takes a long time like the oil tanker it takes three miles or so to stop and turn around whereas a small so the dynamic smaller company can move much faster yeah can move much faster on this lots of businesses understand the importance of data but how you measure is as important as what you measure and could you give some examples to illustrate this concept please yeah there are lots of people out there who will tell you the data that you need to gather to you to understand your impact on sustainability you need to understand your energy data your materials inputs your materials outflow your waste etc and there are lots of standards that tell you this as well and these standards are very useful for guiding businesses into understanding what information will help them to make better sustainability decisions what some of the standards don’t do however is tell them how they need to measure this and there is a good reason for this is that every business organizes their activities in different ways and it also depends if you are a new manufacturing facility or an old manufacturing facility that will depend on how easily you can separate out your energy consumption to buildings or to particular product streams so older businesses generally have electricity measured to a building in that build and they may have three or four product streams running through so it’s very hard for them to separate out how much energy is being used specifically to make one product newer facilities may actually have individual product stream measurements because they were set up that way they were built that way so you have a choice generally of two ways of measuring you can either do what we to do bottom up which is where we stick machines or measuring machines on individual parts of the process and then add them all together or you can do top-down measurement where you have an aggregated value that comes in at a factory level and then you make assumptions you will allocate it according to the number of parts made or economic value or some way of allocating it down to a particular product if you measure take those two for the same product in the same factory and measure one top down and one bottom up I can guarantee the answer would not be the same and that’s partly because there are centralized systems that come in and sometimes are measured and sometimes aren’t measured but that difference can be quite significant and so when you measure what you need to do is to say okay we are always going to measure in the same way we know that the value we’re going to get out is not necessarily the right number but it will be comparable with anything else we measure in the same way so we’ll be able to see if we are improving because our number will have dropped not that the number itself is actually right but the number will have dropped if you start measuring some things as bottom up and some things just top down it becomes very, very hard to compare now it’s fine if you do it consistently the same way but actually you get some companies who measure in all sorts of different ways and they keep changing the way that they measure things I’m not saying you shouldn’t change because if you get a better way of measuring things than that that’s fine but you do need to be aware that actually the how you measure is actually as important as what you measure because if you don’t get that right and you’re not consistent you’ll never have any way of making sure that you’re actually moving down that journey that you might actually simply be measuring differences in the measurement techniques not actually differences in what you’ve done that that’s that is a worry of course and even within thinking even within sectors yeah I I’ve I have a history in flexible packaging 20-plus years that’s a sector that I’d normally think of within manufacturing terms and yeah companies could be using top-down bottom-up approaches where again I just want to standardize and tell the industry this is how you are best doing it almost but I can’t but I can’t do that but to be consistent allows you to be comparable between the different data sets consistency and there are other things that you need to think about when we we spoke on the training course about life cycle assessment and data gaps and when you’re trying to understand the environmental impact of a product you will look at all the inputs to and all the outputs from a particular system if you have lots of information about one little part of that process and not much information about the rest of it when the results come out should look that that little part is actually worse than anything else it’s not it’s just simply that you’ve got more information so being aware of data gaps and being aware of the what we call the granularity of the data also helps you to understand what comes out the back end there’s a very good adage in engineering which is garbage in equals garbage out and that’s true of all measurement systems but it’s not just the quality of the data it’s the data gaps as well that you need to be aware of and how that might skew your readings of the results so there’s a lot of science involved in reading the information that comes out of all this data that we’re now all quite happily gathering that we all have big data and big data analysis but actually understanding what you’re seeing is a really important part of that and be able to sometimes pick out what’s noise in the data and what is actually a true issue that you need to be looking at it’s certainly a specialist role to be able to manage the data from the whys and wherefores of and then making the sense of it and using it in the wider system there is a lot to it yeah last couple of questions in your view what is the key to tackling big picture issues such as sustainability we may have touched on some of the themes before I don’t mind reviewing those the key is communication open-mindedness and systems for me, if you cannot see beyond your own little bit and I’m not saying that you need to be an expert in everything, but you need to see where your bit fits into the big picture and you need to be able to understand who do you need to make relationships with. If you have a product that has a particularly expensive component or particularly expensive material you need to make a key relationship with the people at the end of life because you would like that back that has value to you but unless you realize that then you’re never going to make that that link you’re never going to pick the systems up and you’re never then going to work as a team to get a better solution overall so for me it’s about communication the systems thinking and being open to ideas and open to other relationships that that’s fantastically succinct it does it does wrap it up and pull it together and it hope also leads nicely into to my final question given that I’d like to finish on a leadership theme which I’ve not focused on within the podcast shows as yet but I’d like to introduce this area so maybe I could ask in your experience what do you see as a key factor a key factor of factors in successful leadership when managing and developing teams or projects maybe you know especially given the context of sustainability something new to be considered within organizations okay so this very much I think it depends on the type of leader that people are and for me I am somebody who appreciates inventiveness you know sustainability is a difficult complex issue we’re going to have to be inventive if you want to solve it so as a leader I would I would like to see I encourage inventiveness in the team I encourage that trial and error on the understanding that if it all goes wrong the buck stops with me so yeah I take responsibility if something goes wrong but I also encourage the team to be creative and try these new things I think you cannot do that unless you’re open with your team and you cannot do that unless you have good communication and I don’t think that any team works well unless they trust their leader to make the best decisions that they can on the basis of the information they have so you have to have trust openness communication and inventiveness for me absolutely fantastic way to wrap up the podcast show thank you so much for uh yeah thank you very much today it’s been a pleasure thank you 😊