Thou shalt tell a story

These words are carved in stone and hanging on my wall at home.  You might ask where they come from and why have I got them hanging up there.  Well they were sent to me by the organisers of TED Global a few weeks before I gave my TED talk on nef’s Happy Planet Index. They were one of TED’s ten commandments, which include other pearls of wisdom such as “Thou shalt not murder powerpoint” , “Thou shalt not steal time” and “Thou Shalt Prepare for Impact”! 

I have never before felt such intense pressure before a talk. I guess one option would have been to panic but I choose instead to follow the advice that golfers use “The more I practice, the luckier I get”.  So I practiced and asked for as much feedback as people would give me.  I even for the first time had some coaching from nef’s regular editor of our reports, Mary Murphy, who also moonlights as a speech coach. She helped me structure the talk and encouraged me to dare to strip the contents back to the bare essentials.For sure the practice paid off as when I stepped on stage a quiet calm came over me and I just delivered the talk I wanted to.

So now we are all hoping that the TED commandment about preparing for impact will come true. We all know at nef that there is a long way to go to achieve a Great Transition to a world that we all want, a world which is sustainable, socially just and with high levels of personal and social well-being.  In short hand a world where good lives don’t cost the earth.

Whilst there is a long way to go I think we can be happy that slowly the world is coming round to the ideas that we at nef have championed for many years.  At the moment, I am in Bangkok, precisely as my TED talk is launched online.  I'm attending a UN brainstorm on creating a roadmap for achieving green growth in Asia.  This is just one of many encouraging signs that institutions are starting to think constructively about our core agenda. 

And this is the story that I think we need to be telling the world.  We need to saying that yes there are challenges ahead but there is much that we can do. We need to be encouraging people to engage with our agenda in a positive useful way.  Most of all we need to inspire people, organisations and governmental institutions to work together at creating a Great Transition.  This is the story that I hope we will be able to tell in the future – a story where it all went right.