I worked out that after Doncaster it reaches Thorne and then follows a more or less straight line until it reaches Goole, where it then joins the Ouse and flows into the Humber Estuary.

Disappointed by my ignorance I decided to go exploring, so I took my bicycle on the train to Goole and cycled back to Sheffield, following the river as closely as possible. The first thing I noticed was that for the first 15 miles I cycled in dead straight lines. Now, this is not normal. As rivers get close to the sea they should meander from side to side as they slow down. The Don does not do this because the current river is artificial, cut in straight lines by Dutch engineers in the 17th century to make it easier to drain the surrounding land and to make navigation possible.

The second thing I noticed was that it was also often difficult to actually see the river as it was hidden behind high berms, embankments built to stop the river from flooding. This is necessary because drainage means that the level of the land has dropped and is virtually at sea level. In fact, it was only when I reached Stainforth, just north of Doncaster, that my GPS unit told me that I had climbed to more than 10 feet above sea level. This is, of course, no surprise to people who know villages like Fishlake which are more or less at sea level, and which are constantly at risk of serious flooding. The simple fact is that when land is at sea level, water cannot drain away.

Climate change is going to make this problem ever more serious. There is conclusive scientific evidence that the Earth’s temperature is increasing and that global sea levels are rising. Current predictions from NASA suggest that sea levels could rise by as much as 5 feet by the end of this century. If this were to happen an enormous area of north Lincolnshire stretching from Gainsborough in the south to the Humber estuary in the north  and from near Doncaster in the west to Scunthorpe in the east would be at a serious risk of inundation.

To misquote from the film Jaws, we are going to need a bigger berm.

As this extent of sea level rise is now inevitable we will need to invest heavily in building higher and higher walls to protect agricultural land and towns such as Goole, Thorne and Fishlake to name just a few. But this is just a sticking plaster. As the sea level rises, saltwater will penetrate further inland and this will have a negative effect on agricultural productivity.

Climate change is also going to mean increasingly serious and more extreme weather events such as intense storms and heavy rainfall on the Pennines, which will rush to the sea through rivers like the Don. Indeed, we have already seen this happening with the catastrophic Sheffield floods of 2007 and of Fishlake in 2019.

Rainfall run-off from high ground into rivers is made worse when there are fewer trees to slow the flow of the water and allow it to soak into the ground. This is the situation we have in South Yorkshire where our moors have long been managed for the benefit of grouse shooting rather than to protect the environment. In urban areas we have also covered hillsides with tarmac roads and driveways to houses to make life easier for the motor car. As this rainwater flows down into the Don, the level of water behind the embankments will get higher and higher as it finds it harder to flow to the sea.

This all suggests that as the decades go by that we will have to deal with an increasing number of serious floods, and will be constantly having to make decisions about whether to protect urban areas or agricultural land. So to try and reduce these problems we need to think seriously about prevention rather than protection, for example, by planting more trees across the high ground in the centre of northern England and regenerating peat bogs which can absorb water and store carbon dioxide. This will, of course, not be popular with communities who feel they rely on traditional activities such as intensive farming or grouse shooting but we need to be able to look at the bigger picture about the geography of northern England and the welfare of everyone.

The chances are getting ever stronger that when my grandson talks to his children about Sheffield’s five rivers that he will be telling them that the Don flows into the sea at Doncaster.

In 1935 settlers in Australia were facing an environmental problem as their sugar cane farms were being ravaged by cane beetles. What they needed was something to control these beetles and the solution seemed to be a species of toad from the Americas.

About 100 toads were imported and used to breed thousands more which were then released into the cane fields. Without any of the predators that kept their numbers under control in the Americas the toads had a fine life: nearly a century later there are thought to be more than 200 million of them. However, cane toads secrete poisonous chemicals to defend themselves against predators and this has led to populations of their predators collapsing. This destroys natural balances in plant and animal populations and reduces overall biodiversity significantly. They are even linked to the deaths of humans and their pets who have touched their toxic skins. What does not seem to have changed is the number of cane beetles.

So what lessons can we draw from this story? One is the problem of huge single crop plantations which are a haven for animals with a taste for that crop. The other is the danger of major, uncontrollable technical fixes to solve problems caused by non-sustainable economic activity such as plantation agriculture.

It also applies to climate change: for different reasons, Governments, industry representatives, climate change deniers and other anti-environmentalist groups all say that whatever happens we can use new technologies to solve environmental problems.

There are many examples of this. We are encouraged to buy electric cars as they are ‘green’. But the electricity to charge their batteries has to come from somewhere, often through burning fossil fuels. There are also environmental problems associated with the mining of the minerals used in the batteries and their eventual disposal, and manufacturing batteries uses large amounts of energy. What the push to ‘drive green’ does is to make us think we can carry on using private cars just as we have always done, when all that achieves is to kick the can of environmental destruction a few years down the road.

Recently a farmer in Herefordshire was sent to prison for 12 months for illegally straightening and clearing the banks of a river flowing through his land because he claimed it would prevent flooding. In fact, what such actions do is to speed up the river flow, causing erosion of the banks leading to downstream silting and increasing the risk of flooding elsewhere. Not my problem! In fact, rivers should flow slowly and occasionally flood upstream land: this keeps river flows more regular and the flooding helps increase soil fertility. There is also the significant loss of habitat and hence biodiversity, again which has a negative effect on the long-term fertility of the land.

Globally we have the Holy Grail of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Huge machines will suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it somewhere safe for thousands of years. It sounds like a great idea but currently only works on a laboratory scale. To make a significant difference to atmospheric greenhouse gas levels the machines will have to be huge … and will of course need energy to run them. That is, of course, if the technology can be made to work at the necessary scale and without costing vast sums of money.

Another idea being considered is to spray reflective particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s heat away from the earth, cooling it down and protecting the icecaps. A nice idea, but apart from turning the sky white rather than blue it could lead to unpredictable weather patterns or even overcooling, creating an ice age. It also does not respect political boundaries: what if a country decided to take this into its own hands and sprayed particles into its own skies but they drifted over other countries and destroyed their environment?

There are many other ideas, such as to spray chemicals into the ocean to encourage plankton growth which would absorb carbon dioxide. Just search the Internet for other ideas under discussion.

Given the environmental crisis that we are now in, it is almost certain that we will have to look to technological change to prevent or reduce the effects we can see. The danger is that these new technologies may not work as well as hoped or may cause new, unexpected problems … that may of course call for technological fixes.

We also need to remember that the people calling most loudly for technological fixes are those people will profit most from them or who stand to lose most from adopting more sustainable lifestyles. For example, much of the international emphasis on carbon capture technologies has been encouraged by representatives at United Nations conferences from Saudi Arabia, a state which it totally reliant on oil production.

Ultimately technical fixes do not solve the patterns of behaviour that are causing the problems, and may of course just encourage them, irrespective of their unexpected consequences. Just think about those cane toads.

Many practitioner guides to carrying out an LNA draw on the idea of the O-T-P principle, first outlined by McGehee and Thayer in the 1960s. This stands for Organisation, Task and Person, and recommends that an LNA starts by looking at the organisation’s goals or objectives, then working out what tasks need to be carried out to achieve this, and finally analysing the persons who will carry out the tasks. This sounds quite logical for making strategic change but has some significant limitations.

First, it is a top-down and very unitarist approach, with an unquestioned assumption that what is good for the organisation is good for the people employed. Of itself, it does not encourage much employee participation in developing objectives at any level and hence working towards employee commitment.

Second, it is a reductionist approach, meaning that we start off with one or two high level objectives and then break these down into multiple lower level objectives, each relevant for particular tasks or people. The assumption here is that by adding together these objectives we will achieve the high level objective, but this is a dubious assumption. This is because it is incredibly difficult to break down complex ideas that a high level objective embodies into meaningful sub-tasks. The reductionist process ignores the complex sets of factors that link individual activities together, and we often end up with different people doing different tasks which overall do not have the desired effect.

A third weakness in this approach is that it is less well suited to situations where a particular local problem has been recognised and where we are not really dealing with a strategic change.

In such a case an alternative approach is to focus on the local problem and use what is called something like performance problem analysis or performance engineering. One influential model in this approach is Tom Gilbert’s Behaviour Engineering Model. This says that when analysing a performance that we think needs improving that we look at two areas; the supporting environment and the performer’s ‘repertory of behaviour’.

In the supporting environment we have to consider whether or not adequate information is provided, whether the performer has suitable equipment and what incentives are provided for desired levels of performance. For the performer we have to consider whether they understand information available, that they can use necessary equipment, and that they have the necessary motivation to perform adequately. The BEM helps us to develop a more holistic understanding of what affects local performance, but it can still be difficult to work out what particular changes will be most useful. Gilbert himself suggested that when trying to improve performance we should work through the supporting environment factors in turn to see what works and then move on to the repertory of behaviour, but that approach can take a lot of time. It is also another reductionist strategy and ignores any systemic connections between the different factors.

A development of the BEM is the Mager and Pipe Performance Analysis Flowchart. This provides a useful checklist which can take the analyst through a series of questions to help them identify what potential causes of inadequate performance exist and to suggest general ideas that may help.

Again, this is a useful tool for helping us to consider a performance problem in a more holistic way, but it still relies on the analyst being able to being able to understand what, for example, rewards poor performance or what other obstacles might exist. This means that the analyst needs to be able to understand how an organisation is functioning and what could be improved.

It is at this point that a systems thinking perspective can be very useful. A systems thinking tool that is ideally suited to using in an LNA is called the Viable System Model, or VSM. VSM was developed by thinking about how biological organisms remain viable, through processing information from their environment and regulating internal processes so that they adapt to the world around them.

As such, VSM is interested in how information flows around an organisation and pays little attention to structure. As a result, we can use a VSM analysis at any level in the organisation, from looking at the organisation as a whole down to seeing how an individual carries out their day-to-day work. For an LNA we would probably be looking at how a department or team functions, but can use the same principles to see how that departmental functioning integrates with the organisation as a whole.

In the VSM model there are five systems of information flow that we need to think about. Starting from the highest level, System 5 is the Policy system which is where the department defines overall departmental goals and operational ethos. System 4 is called Development, and this gathers information from the operational environment to understand how this is changing. This interacts with System 5 so that the goals and ethos can remain relevant to the outside world. System 4 also provides information to System 3, Delivery. This is the system that sends information to operational teams to help them carry out the customer-facing work of the department. System 3 also has a feedback system, usually called System 3*(3 star). This sends information back about what is happening at an operational level. System 1, or Operations, is the work that the department does that the outside world sees: in a software company this would be coding or in an engineering company machining or casting, and in all companies includes a sales function. Organisations will generally have multiple System 1s. System 2 is a system which coordinates the activities of the various System 1 activities, for example, making sure that coding activities are aligned with sales of software.

In a viable organisation all of these systems need to operate effectively at all levels, so, for example, a departmental level System 1 will have its own five systems, including a System 4 which gathers information from its own operational environment and feeds information upwards through the organisation.

This might sound a bit complicated but it is all logical and once you have grasped the essentials, it can make carrying out an LNA much easier. We can draw on ideas from other models such as the BEM and the performance flowchart and use a VSM analysis to understand how well information is flowing through all the different systems relevant to the level of our analysis. That will then give us an idea about weaknesses in the system so that we can decide whether there are knowledge and skill issues to be addressed or structural matters to be remedied.

Why does this happen? Over the years I have done a lot of research into this question, and what I have read suggests that there are a number of factors contributing to inadequate needs assessment processes, both in terms of quantity and quality. The fact that this does not seem to have changed over the years even though it is a common topic of discussion suggests that there are dynamic forces controlling the situation. So I decided to use a system dynamics approach to try and make some sense of what is happening based on the many research papers that I have read on the subject.

This diagram shows a causal flow diagram containing feedback loops which, from my perspective on the situation, show why learning needs assessment continues to be problematic.

Just to explain the conventions used in this diagram, oval shapes are variables and rectangles are external factors. A ‘+’ shows a positive relationship where an increase in one variable causes an increase in the next one (or both decrease) and a ‘—‘ shows an inverse relationship where an increase in one variable causes a decrease in the next one (or vice versa).

In this article I will first review what the significant factors influencing LNA activity are, and will then offer an explanation about how they interact.

My reading round the subject identified a number of significant factors :

First, a thorough LNA may well identify weaknesses in how the organisation is managed or in some aspect of operation. Senior management may therefore think that it is safer to just ask HRD to design and run a training programme rather than for it to identify weaknesses that they would rather keep hidden or unacknowledged.

The second factor is about power dynamics in organisations. Human Resources is a service function, and typically has less power in strategic decision-making than core functions. HR also generally has a higher percentage of women working in it than in other organisational functions,3 and the unfortunate nature of gender dynamics and power imbalances combined with HR as a service function means that core functions exercise a lot of power over what HR can actually do.

The third factor relates to the problems that often exist about actually defining what the goal of any learning programme might be. Organisational problems are almost always ill-defined and complex. Problems overlap and interact, and how one person defines the problem to be solved may well be quite different to how another would. This can make it quite difficult to identify clear goals for any learning activity.

The fourth factor is about the very common belief that new knowledge or skill will be a solution to any performance problem. This is often related to the first factor, that new knowledge and skill can overcome any organisational weaknesses. It also reflects a unitarist management philosophy, that what is good for the organisation is good for the employee, and overlooks the possibility that employees may feel unhappy or uncomfortable about particular things they have to do, in which case new knowledge or skill may not be adopted.

Finally, the actual process of carrying out an LNA is not easy, and the needs analyst needs to have a thorough understanding of how organisations work and why things are not working as required, as well as how organisational learning can contribute to necessary change. It is not easy to acquire the necessary levels of knowledge and expertise in all these knowledge domains, and practitioner textbooks are often overly simplistic in how they explain the process of carrying out an LNA.

So how do I think these interact? To me it seems as if there are three reinforcing loops. Firstly, in what I call the time loop the lack of management desire for an effective LNA means that time allocated to carry out the work is restricted. This means that the LNA will not be as effective and this will strengthen the perception that LNA’s are not an effective use of time, creating a cycle of negative reinforcement. This is also driven by the relative weakness of HRD to lobby for more time.

Second, the basis loop is driven by the problem of defining goals for performance improvement leading to terms of reference for an LNA being poorly defined. This contributes to reduced effectiveness of LNA activities, making it harder for an LNA to identify organisational problems contributing to poor performance and to challenge the assumption that a lack of knowledge or skill is the key problem.

Third, the skill loop means that when LNA’s are not seen to be effective there will be fewer carried out, so that the skill of HRD practitioners in carrying them out will be limited, and this is reinforced by the limitations on LNA models that are available.

The important thing to note about reinforcing loops is that they can reinforce both positively and negatively, depending on the factors influencing them (in systems thinking terminology, the points of leverage). The analysis therefore suggests that the five factors above are all issues that need to be addressed in order to reverse of the negativity of the overall system so that the effectiveness of LNA’s can be improved. This would mean that:

I hope that this analysis of a system for carrying out LNA’s has stimulated some thought in you as a reader. It does represent my particular perspective and thoughts about what is happening, and is intended as an encouragement for more discussion and reflection rather than as a definitive explanation of organisational dynamics.

The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of Western democracies which are becoming dominated by populist politics. Populism has been a hard idea to define, but its politics are generally characterised by a narrow focus on a limited range of simple issues that resonate at a personal identity level. The issue par excellence is immigration, and we see many countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Italy and Hungary, to name just a few, where fear of outsiders ‘invading’ or ‘swamping’ the indigenous inhabitants is used to justify a range of repressive activities.

Populism is also characterised by a simplistic emphasis. Immigration is reduced to outsiders wanting to take ‘our’ jobs, houses, religion, and so on. These simplistic ideas are repeated over and over in the media, sometimes because that suits the political preferences of that media outlet, but sometimes because the news cycle works so fast that there is no time to look in more detail at the reasons why immigration has become such a big issue.

Reflecting on the most immediate hysteria in the United Kingdom about overcrowding in asylum processing centres, I thought about ideas put forward by Joseph Tainter, the American anthropologist. He suggested that as societies develop they become more complex, in terms of how resources are produced to support members of society, and in how more difficult it is to produce the knowledge needed to keep making the society ever more complex. We can represent Tainter’s ideas in a causal feedback loop as shown above. As the complexity increases, the cost of increasing the complexity increases, but as this happens the marginal return on this investment decreases. For example, the development of computer technology and the Internet in the late 20th century represented a huge leap forward in what our societies can do, but recent changes in the 21st-century have been more incremental than quantum, albeit at great expense.

This means that there is less investment in making new changes, unless consumers can be persuaded to keep buying by heavy advertising and marketing. So, for example, recent turmoil in United Kingdom politics has been about the need to increase economic growth, which in my country’s case depends on consumer spending. From Tainter’s argument, as less investment is made the growth in complexity cannot increase, and over time the causal feedback loop stabilises. Society does not become any more complex or sophisticated.

But what happens then? A society that has been indoctrinated with the idea that things can only get better will become restive, and easy prey to populist ideas which put the blame on outsiders. It is a much more difficult task to expect people to do the hard work of actually thinking about the complex network of factors driving the way the world and our own particular societies work.

Of course, simplistic populist policies about stopping immigration will not do anything to stop the powerful reasons driving immigration from the global South or poorer European countries. I do not want here to try and explain what these forces are, rather my point is that education of children and adults everywhere needs to include skills in thinking systemically and about complexity. We all need to be able to understand that the problems that we are facing in the modern world are not amenable to simplistic, populist activities, and that the people pushing these ideas are dangerous emperors with no clothes.

The potentially catastrophic implications of the environmental degradation we are now witnessing across the world are at last, if much too slowly, making us all aware of the impact human existence is having on the planet, and making some of us reflect on what we can do in our personal and professional lives to change the negative environmental dynamic.

This is certainly true in the learning and development world, where ideas about ‘green L&D’ and ‘sustainable HRD’ are moving into mainstream professional practice. However, in thinking about what we as L&D professionals can do to make our organisations more environmentally sustainable, we should remember that environmental degradation is a direct consequence of the socio-economic system that we (and by that I mean those of us in advanced Western economies) have decided to create and maintain. Tackling environmental sustainability therefore means that we must also address issues of social sustainability, as arguably the only way that we can realistically move towards environmental sustainability is by living in societies that are less obsessed by individual wealth and power.

And in reality it is these issues of social change where the work of L&D professionals can probably have the greatest impact, as we are directly responsible for how the societies within our organisations function. So, if we can strengthen our organisations’ internal societies and help our organisations to strengthen external societies we should be able to play a significant part in protecting our natural environment.

But how can we do this? Immediately we run into some problems. Firstly, while there is generally some general understanding about what the big problems are in our natural environment (even though there is little consensus about how to tackle them), there is much less agreement about what is wrong with societies, let alone how they can be improved. This is because social sustainability is an inherently political question, and as a consequence of that what issues need to be considered as contributing to social sustainability are highly contested. Secondly, as well as considering the impact our organisation may have on society, we also have to consider our organisation’s internal social sustainability: does our organisational culture, structure and general functioning walk whatever talk it may have about its commitment to sustainability?

Given these challenges, what are the issues pertaining to social sustainability that L&D needs to address? Academic research into the subject over the last 30 years has struggled to come up with a framework that has the same clarity as something like the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s planetary boundaries concept, but my reading of this work suggests that there are four interconnected and overlapping areas that are important:

Some of these have less obvious relevance to L&D professionals, but some such as meeting basic needs and social equity are clearly within the remit of those working in Human Resource Management, if we distinguish this from Human Resource Development.

It is also useful for us in L&D to reflect on the concept of ‘capability’, as put forward by the development economist Amartya Sen. Sen distinguished between ‘functioning’, which he defined as including factors such as those described above, and the capability to lead a life which allows people to take advantage of such functionings. Here we can clearly see that the role of L&D is to ensure capability, to make sure that people have the necessary knowledge and skills to take advantage of social sustainability-related functioning.

So what are the practical implications for L&D? There will be many, but as a starting point we need to make sure that the learning programmes we design and deliver are available to all who contribute to our organisations, irrespective of whether or not they are contracted employees or self-employed. The design and content of learning should take into consideration the needs and interests of all people, regardless of race, faith, sexuality, ableness, and other factors. Learning activities should promote discussion, collaboration and knowledge sharing between people. We also need to evaluate the external, societal implications of our learning and development activities, rather than obsess over whether just internal objectives have been met.

We also need to acknowledge external social sustainability responsibilities. Organisations exist within communities, and we in L&D have skills that can contribute to a wider society. It is time to forget the Friedman Doctrine, the idea enunciated by Milton Friedman in the 1960s that businesses have no social responsibility other than to deliver profit to their shareholders. That is the sort of thinking that has led to the environmental and social crises we face today.

Social sustainability is inextricably linked with environmental sustainability. Building a healthy, cohesive society will make it more likely that we can together take the actions we need to save our environment. And I think that strengthening social sustainability is something that is most definitely in the hands of L&D professionals right here, right now.

In recent years there has been increasing discussion about the idea of the so-called 15-minute city. Developed by a French-Colombian urban planner called Carlos Moreno, it proposes that urban areas should be designed so that everyone can access places of work, shops, healthcare, schools and entertainment facilities within a 15 minute walk from wherever they live.

Based on research using mobile phone location data which shows that most people will use a car to drive if it is going to take more than 15 minutes to walk somewhere, advocates of the idea say that it will reduce pollution and energy consumption and will encourage people to take more exercise and improve their health. It will also reduce the amount of time that people spend commuting to their place of work and should strengthen the sense of community that people feel about where they live.

Of course, this is nothing new. Before the days of mass car ownership people’s lives were much more centred around their local communities, with easy access to all the facilities that they needed. However, driven by ideas originating from the highly car-centric United States of America, urban planning since the end of the 20th century has largely been based around the concept of individual car ownership, and this has meant that cities and their surrounding areas have been designed to make car driving easier. Urban areas have different zones for living, working, shopping and for being entertained, and to get from one to the other you have to drive.

As more and more people drive, public transport disappears, reinforcing the need to have a car. Roads become wider to cope with increasing volumes of traffic and in the process become barriers between different parts of the city, dividing communities. Urban areas have sprawled, people move to the suburbs, drive into and out of cities to their workplaces, large supermarkets have appeared on the edges of town, and services such as cinemas and hospitals have become larger and centralised, rather than being dispersed.

This has all been very good for car drivers, but not so good for people relying on public transport (which has withered away) and people running local shops and services (who see customers disappearing to the likes of Meadowhall). It is also been very bad for the environment, with vehicle emissions driving up greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere and vehicle-driven pollution contributing to a wide range of health problems.

The 15-minute city therefore represents a radically different model for designing cities. It offers a number of benefits as described, but there are some problems. It could reinforce existing social divisions, making it less likely that people with different social backgrounds will interact and get to know each other. It could strengthen the process of gentrification, making some areas more desirable and pushing out people with less money. Implementing 15-minute city ideas will also be difficult in urban areas which have been based on traditional vehicle-centred models, although in time appropriate changes could be introduced slowly.

Interest in the15-minute city idea has been stimulated by various changes in modern life, including the significant contribution of urban driving to greenhouse gas emissions and the role of urban anonymity in the increasing problem of street crime. However, many people have become interested in online conspiracy theories which link 15-minute city ideas with other initiatives such as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, pervasive CCTV, Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems, facial recognition software and Clean Air Zones, and claim that they are part of a plan to imprison people in specific areas. We have even had the Conservative MP for Don Valley, Nick Fletcher, standing up in Parliament describing 15-minute cities as an “international socialist conspiracy”.

It is important not to dismiss these concerns, even though some originate from conspiracy theorists accidentally or deliberately misrepresenting these ideas and how they actually work. Unfortunately there will always be tensions between such issues as the individual freedom to drive in a city and the collective freedom to breathe clean air. It is important that local media such as the Sheffield Telegraph continues to provide a forum for these issues to be discussed so that everyone can read about alternative perspectives and explanations. This is not necessarily easy to do on the Internet, where what we see and read is driven by the desire of Google, Facebook and the like to increase their advertising revenue by leading people into ever-narrowing rabbit-holes.

The idea of living in a city where we can easily walk to find whatever we need is an attractive one. And, as Oliver Coppard, the Mayor of South Yorkshire recently stated at the South Yorkshire Transport Summit, “This is not radical. This is the world our parents or our grandparents took for granted. This is the world our children and grandchildren deserve.” Driving freely around a city is not a fundamental human right but is something we have come to take for granted. Unfortunately it has costs such as congestion, pollution and increasing social division. 15-minute cities do provide pointers towards an alternative future.

(This article was originally published in the Sheffield Telegraph in March 2023)

In June 2007 Sheffield was engulfed by a flood after torrential rain fell on the hills above the city. Two people died, there was enormous damage and the city spent over £50 million in strengthening flood defences.

This was not a unique event. Flooding happens in many places across the United Kingdom. For example, the Calder Valley has flooded several times in recent years, in 2014 much of Somerset was under water for weeks after Atlantic storms and high tides coincided, and the city of York seems to be perpetually under threat during winter months.

What is common across all these events? One is the kneejerk response in each case: to build better flood defences and to improve drainage through dredging or river widening. But another is a regular failure to talk about systemic factors contributing to these disasters.

Historically, Britain would have been heavily covered by trees, and trees form a very important first line of flood prevention by slowing water flow and absorbing water through their roots. However, population growth and intensive agricultural activity have removed much of this tree cover, so fallen rain now flows much more quickly across the land and into rivers. In many areas this has been compounded by centuries of animal grazing: as sheep and cattle walk ceaselessly around fields they compact the soil making it less permeable to falling rain.

As rainwater flows over the surface of fields it carries topsoil away into streams and rivers. Then, as the rivers meander slowly across lowland plains towards urban areas this slowly settles as silt, reducing the ability of the rivers to drain the water. This makes flooding more likely, and as this has an impact on agricultural productivity farmers will often build embankments or dredge rivers to increase flow. But the water has to go somewhere, and often ends up constricted by culverts and bridges as it flows through towns and cities, so the problem of flooding is simply transferred to urban areas. The private benefit to farmers leads to increased public cost in towns and cities.

Pennine towns and cities such as Sheffield and Hebden Bridge are also affected by the clearance of forest on high ground to create open moorland for hunting and shooting. Grouse shooting in particular demands that large areas of heather each year are burnt off, but research shows that burning peat soils such as in the Pennines causes much faster water run-off when there is heavy rain. Irrespective of the moral issues surrounding shooting wild birds, the pleasure for those rich enough to go shooting has a social cost to those of us living in the towns and cities below. Grouse shooting and deer stalking are often claimed to be an important part of rural economies, but they have a negative effect on society elsewhere. (For an interesting read on this subject, try local author Bob Berzin’s novel Snared (https://bob-berzins.co.uk/)). Private gain but public cost.

Flooding in Sheffield is also exacerbated because its many hillsides are heavily covered with tarmac. Our society’s dependence on cars leads to vast areas being covered by impermeable tarmac and concrete roads. This is compounded by people concreting over front gardens to create parking spaces. We only have to walk down a typically sloping Sheffield street in heavy rain to see the amount of water that rushes down beside the pavement to see this happening. While it is possible to turn a permeable garden into a permeable parking space using appropriate materials and designs, people often look for a quick fix: again, private gain but public cost.

As climate change intensifies we can expect more extreme weather events, which will include more rainfall and more powerful and wetter storms. Already, we have seen that in 2019 the new flood defences at Meadowhall were overwhelmed.

Sticking plaster solutions such as flood management schemes and dredging lowland rivers are not a solution. Rather, we should look to making upstream land better able to absorb rainwater as it falls. This means reforesting moorland areas and shrinking the areas dedicated to hunting and shooting. This will not be easy: the rich and powerful who enjoy these pursuits actively work to prevent changes to the landscape.

There needs to be more joined up thinking about how river catchments work. Currently, responsibility for managing different parts of rivers is divided up between different bodies and agencies, each of which have their own particular sectoral interests. For example, rivers should be allowed to meander across a landscape and flood surrounding agricultural land if necessary, but this will only be possible if farmers accept this as a solution and can be compensated appropriately.

Town-dwellers can make a contribution: replace impermeable drives outside our houses with permeable surfaces or make sure that run-off soaks into soil near our house rather than pours downhill; direct rain from rooves into water butts or install green rooves (which can improve house insulation). This may be a private cost but it will be a public gain.

Prevention is always better than a cure, and this is certainly true for flood management.

(This article was originally published in the Sheffield Telegraph in January 2023)

Economics may be seen as the study of how societies value the environments within which they live. Food is grown then bought and sold, minerals are extracted and then used to make something which is then sold. So how we manage economic activities has a profound effect on the environment.

In simple societies economics is about exchange: some people grow food and exchange it for fuel, while others cut down trees or dig up coal and exchange it for food. The invention of money put a price on these commodities and made it possible to develop much more sophisticated societies but it also meant that understanding economics became more difficult. 19th century economists decided that a scientific approach was needed, and they started to try and find mathematical rules and equations that could predict exactly how economies worked.

Such ideas are still very influential today. So, for example, current government policies are based on keeping taxes low because their mathematical models predict that this will make the economy stronger. They persist in this belief even when evidence shows that the models do not predict what happens, such as in the 2008 financial crisis.

In the United Kingdom and the United States the dominant economic theory is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism emerged in the 1950s as a reaction to the highly planned and repressive economics of the Communist bloc by emphasising the right of every individual to have choice over what they do with their money, hence the importance of low taxes and minimal government regulation. All economic decisions should be based on what “the market” says should happen, so if you can make a profit by chopping down a forest and selling it, that is the right thing to do.

These mathematical models always require assumptions about what to include and what to leave out. One assumption economists make is about what you put a price on and what you do not. Economists talk about “externalities”, which are resources free to everyone and which they can ignore in models. So, for example, air is an externality: industrial activity can draw in clean air and pump out dirty, poisonous air and this does not have to be calculated as part of the price of what the industry does.

As western industrial activity developed, the problems caused by such pollution started to be recognised, and governments started to create laws which regulated pollution. However, because neoliberal economics emphasises the importance of minimal regulation, Conservative governments always strongly resist restrictions on economic activity, as is seen in the reluctance to act against private water companies discharging untreated sewage.

The belief in the market means that nothing has any value until it becomes part of the market. One factor contributing significantly to the disastrous Sheffield flood of 2007 (and others in the Calder Valley) was the removal of trees on the moors above the city decades ago to turn this into a landscape suitable for grouse shooting. After all, tree-covered hills have no value unless you can use them to make money.

Another major problem with relying on the market is that it means that decisions are made on what makes money in the short term. Burning fossil fuels and chopping down the Amazon rainforest gives short-term profits but causes problems in the longer term. By 2123 many essential commodities may be incredibly expensive as a result of climate change and the loss of biodiversity, but confirming that market economics works will be little consolation for people alive at that time.

When economic models do estimate long-term costs they assume that costs as time goes by costs will decrease. The question here is by how much, and for environmental issues the decision is largely ethical: what is the value of a healthy environment to future generations? Neoliberal economists discount the future heavily, typically quoting a figure of about 4% each year, whereas the UK Government’s 2007 Stern Review on the impact of climate change said that a figure of about 1% was more ethical to protect future generations.

The combination of ignoring externalities and discounting future costs heavily creates an unsustainable economic system that is driving us towards environmental collapse.

In recent years scientists have tried to play neoliberal economists at their own game by putting a value on what the natural environment does to contribute to the environment. They have identified that the environment performs four essential “ecosystem services”: provisioning (supplying food and water), regulating (affecting climate and water flows, as with moorland trees), cultural (recreational and spiritual benefits) and supporting (regenerating soil, photosynthesis, and so on). If we were to develop industries to do all of these things, it has been estimated that it would cost about $125 trillion every year, which is nearly twice as much as all current economic activity in the entire world.

To conclude, economics is not a science: it is about politics. How economic systems work depends on the values that decision-makers hold. There are many ways to run an economic system to give people a good quality of life within a healthy environment. Unfortunately, our current neoliberal economic system is designed to do exactly the opposite.

(This article was originally published in the Sheffield Telegraph in January 2023)

Managing immigration into the United Kingdom is currently in the news almost every day, but the discussions about what is driving immigration rarely discuss the factors compelling people to undertake long, dangerous journeys to an uncertain destination. While many factors influence these journeys, environmental factors are of increasing importance and as the 21st century develops they may well become the biggest single driver.

Reporting about immigration often uses different words to describe migrants, sometimes selected for political purposes. For clarity, a ‘migrant’ is anyone who moves from one place to another with an intention to stay. When people leave their homeland to find better job prospects in another country they are an ‘economic migrant’. A ‘refugee’ is someone who has been forced to become a migrant, perhaps because of war or natural disaster in their homeland. An increasingly common term is ‘environmental migrant’ or ‘environmental refugee’, and this is used to describe someone whose homeland has become impossible to inhabit so that they try to move to another country.

Neither migrants nor refugees have a legal right to move to another country, but countries may allow them to do this, as we have seen with refugees from Ukraine.

Then we have ‘asylum seekers’. This is where the biggest confusion happens. Asylum is a legal status which may be given to someone who has “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion”. This legal definition comes from the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, a treaty agreed in the aftermath of the Second World War by the then members of the United Nations. It is important to remember that the United Kingdom played a major part in its creation.

When a migrant arrives in the United Kingdom and claims asylum they need to be able to show proof of this fear of persecution. For example, they may have to prove that they are a Muslim in a Buddhist country or a socialist in a right-wing autocracy, or a homosexual in a country where that carries a death penalty.

Much reporting about the English Channel small boat crisis describes people in the boats as ‘illegal migrants’, a meaningless but inflammatory term. Undoubtedly many will be economic migrants who have no legal right to enter the United Kingdom, but many will be escaping persecution and will want to claim asylum. Under the terms of the 1951 Convention, to which the United Kingdom is a signatory, they have a legal right to come to the United Kingdom to do this.

So where does the environment come into this discussion? As climate change strengthens more and more countries will become impossible to inhabit and people will have to move. The scale of this displacement is hard to predict, but there are some estimates that as many as 200 million people could have to leave their homes by the end of this century. To put that into context, there are currently about 70 million displaced people around the world, so it is easy to see that the problems we now have with migration will become many times greater over the next decades.

Governments are responsible for looking after their own displaced people, but many of the worst affected countries are poor and unable to provide necessary basic protection. These countries have contributed little to cumulative global carbon dioxide emissions and it should be the responsibility of industrialised countries such as the United Kingdom, as historically and currently large emitters, to provide necessary financial support. After all, if your neighbour dumps rubbish in your garden you would expect them to pay to clear it up: this is known as the ‘polluter pays’ principle.

However, as conditions in these countries deteriorate and people displaced by environmental change try to survive, tensions will increase between them and existing residents. Incomers from different ethnic groups, with different religions, or with different social values may find themselves persecuted, and so they will look to migrate and seek asylum in other countries because they have “a well-founded fear of being persecuted”. So, although the 1951 Convention does not in itself provide protection for environmental refugees, if they can show that they are being persecuted because of having had to move within their homeland, then they will have a legitimate claim to asylum.

This is why the United Kingdom Government’s current attempts to stop people entering the country are misguided and ultimately futile. Much of the anti-immigrant political rhetoric claims that migrants all come to take our jobs, claim our benefits and put children in our schools. It is true that many migrants are looking for a better life, but many are coming and will continue to come because their homelands are uninhabitable and they are suffering persecution. Rather, we should try to improve the rate at which migrants are processed in order to distinguish between economic migrants who can be repatriated and legitimate asylum seekers. We should also engage with the international community to agree new migration conventions which will meet the demands of the late 21st century.

Violent anti-immigrant rhetoric will do nothing to stem the rising tide of environmental refugees.

(This article was originally published in the Sheffield Telegraph in December 2022)

Back in September, we had a Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer who had a plan to increase economic growth. They did not last long but were replaced by others who also had plans for economic growth, but different plans. Since that time the media has been full of economists and politicians from all parties all talking about how to increase growth, but what is missing in this discussion is an explanation of what ‘growth’ is.

The print and television media have been very poor at explaining what these people mean when they talk about ‘growth’, so this is an attempt to explain it.

On the face of it, growth is a good thing: we enjoy it when our children grow up, we plant seeds and bulbs hoping that things will grow, and perhaps because it is a simple idea we never question what politicians and economists are talking about. What they mean when they say the economy is growing is that something called the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is increasing. GDP is a single number, calculated by adding together all the financial transactions that go on in a country every month. So when GDP increases it means that the value of these financial transactions is increasing.

Now, what financial transactions can be included in calculating GDP is decided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD. This means that it is easy to compare the GDP of different countries to make sure that everyone is counting the same transactions. Some transactions which go into the GDP are easy to imagine: every time you go to the supermarket, ker-ching, the GDP goes up. But the GDP also includes estimates of transactions for the services of sex workers and for the sale of illegal drugs, so next time you are offended by seeing a sex worker or a drug dealer on the street, please remember that they are simply doing their best to increase economic activity in the country and should be congratulated.

GDP calculations are not interested in whether the financial transaction is for a good thing or a bad thing. In 2010 the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig contributed $65 billion to the United States’ GDP. This autumn, the residents of Kiveton Park have had to breathe in toxic fumes because a local recycling centre has an ongoing fire which is proving impossible to extinguish. I am sure they are reassured to know that every time the fire brigade attends to try and put out a new fire, ker-ching, up goes the GDP. The war in Ukraine will boost British and American GDP because we are selling weapons to Ukraine, ker-ching.

There is also a fundamental problem with talking about continuing economic growth. If the economy grows by 2% a year (a common target), the whole economy will double in size after 35 years. But how can we do this without increasing the number of people working? Impossible for our mainly service economy in the United Kingdom, unless we allow more immigration. Oops, not politically acceptable.

So when politicians and economists become obsessed by increasing growth and making GDP higher we really must question exactly what kinds of transactions they want to stimulate, because blindly increasing growth is most likely going to make the world more dangerous and less healthy in which to live.

But it does not have to be so. We could change the definition of what is included in GDP to take into account the enormous amount of work that goes on where there are no financial transactions. For example, grandparents looking after grandchildren, people (mainly women) looking after elderly parents, women (again mainly women) shopping, cooking and cleaning for their families. Putting an elderly parent into a care home and paying for it increases GDP, while looking after them at home does not and is not acknowledged or rewarded.

I think that if people really knew what growth and GDP meant, that they might see it for the enormous confidence trick that it actually is and suggest that we should measure the quality of our lives differently.

What are the other possibilities? We might think about a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a measure used in some American cities which gives an economic value to indicators of a healthy society, such as air and water quality, protection given to the natural environment, and so on. We might think about measures of equality, such as the GINI Coefficient which can show what disparities there are between the rich and poor in a society (spoiler alert, the United Kingdom is one of the most unequal societies in the world), or even Gross National Happiness (spoiler alert again, increasing GDP does not increase happiness, and can make people feel worse).

Local newspapers do not often publish articles about basic economics such as GDP and growth, but this is one reason why politicians and economists get away with making such a mess of our lives. If we as ordinary citizens were better informed about ideas that these people throw around without explanation we would be better able to challenge them, and make real, positive changes in our lives.

(This article was originally published in the Sheffield Telegraph in November 2022)

I have been heartened recently by reading LinkedIn posts talking about the increasing strength of Learning & Development in organisations, and of the recognition of the important role that L&D can play in promoting a green agenda.

However, at times like this my 40 years in the business weighs heavily with the memory of so many false dawns in my mind. So reflecting on the George Santayana aphorism that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, I thought that I would look briefly at the history of L&D to see what we need to do in order to break any possible cycles that may thwart this progress.

L&D as a discrete organisational activity only appeared in the 1950s, as a continuation of the Second World War mobilisation and the post-war economic boom. By the 1980s the concept of ‘Human Resources’ was well established in Western economies, and developed particularly strong roots in those countries which embraced neoliberal models of economic development. A neoliberal perspective sees everything as a financial marketplace, and human resources are no different: the concept of human capital emerged, and employees started to become seen as assets to be exploited. “People are our greatest asset” was a mantra in the 1990s but served to obscure the dehumanisation of the workforce. This was perhaps my first false dawn as I entered L&D consultancy as an enthusiastic 30-something.

The rise of Strategic Human Resource Management strengthened the central importance of the organisation and its needs in all L&D activities, and learning design and development became oriented towards making sure that everyone could carry out exactly what the organisation needed. However, with organisations desperate to succeed in an ever-more competitive marketplace where scant regard was paid to environmental and social sustainability, the needs and interests of employees and the wider society was ignored. L&D became focused on making sure that employees had the technical knowledge to do what the organisation needed them to do, and largely failed to take into consideration the hopes, fears and values of employees in the processes of learning design, development and delivery.

However, now in the 2020s the power of the me-obsessed baby boomers and the political economy they embraced is waning, and we are increasingly aware of the environmental damage and social instability that the late 20^th century has wrought on all of us. Thankfully, many Millennials and those from succeeding generations are better educated and less self-obsessed than my generation has been, and they are throwing down the gauntlet for a more environmentally- and socially-aware L&D.

But the corporatist mindset and associated vested interests will resist change which threatens existing power structures. So my message is that green L&D needs to go beyond following a carefully-designed organisationally-limited sustainability agenda, using learning design tools crafted in a previous era to deliver just the corporate agenda, and to instead develop formal and informal learning programmes that will emancipate employees, will help them craft their organisation’s sustainability agenda and will help them contribute to organisational learning in a way that is personally meaningful and rewarding.

So I hope that by presenting this past as I remember it, readers will feel inspired to move forward in a way that challenges old orthodoxies and really does help to create a new future for L&D and our world.

The LTG model that the MIT team develop looked at the relationship between population, industrial output, food production, pollution, availability of non-renewable resources, birth rates, death rates and the level of services that could be provided (health and education), and made projections about how these might interact through to the year 2100. The predictions were not good. Although they ran the model with different conditions, the one that was seen to be most likely given the way the world economy ran in the 1970s was that most things would progress steadily until about 2030, at which point there would be a collapse as a shortage in natural resources made it harder to deliver services. In 1972, 2030 was literally a lifetime away (mine certainly), but now it looms large.

As George Box said, all models are wrong but some are useful, so how useful has the LTG model been? Although it was roundly criticised throughout the 1970s by neoclassical economists, several studies conducted during the last 20 years have shown an alarming accuracy in its predictions, so if nothing changes, we may be not far away from catastrophe.

But one of the more interesting aspects of LTG is little known. The report was commissioned by the Club of Rome, a group of intellectuals and professionals, on the basis of a paper written by one of its members, Hasan Ozbekhan, entitled “The predicament of mankind”. In it Ozbekhan listed 49 ‘continuous critical problems’ that he thought the world faced at that time. The paper called for the then newly emerging computer technology to explore the relationship between these problems to try and develop an understanding about how they were connected and what the implications might be. LTG was the result.

However, Ozbekhan was not happy with the result because he felt that the MIT team had focused very much on hard information that was easily quantifiable and amenable to system dynamics technology. One of the continuous critical problems that they did not take into consideration was CCP-18, “Growing irrelevance of traditional values and continuing failure to involve new value systems”. Subsequent research by Alexander Christakis  into the 49 CCPs using different computer analysis techniques has shown that CCP-18 is a root contributor to all of the other problems, suggesting that a failure to deal with value systems dooms everything else.

A cursory reflection on late 20th century and early 21st-century value systems seems to confirm this. By the 1980s the world was dominated by neoliberal thinking and the importance of the individual and their choice — consumption, lifestyles, the need for new things, to better oneself.

I am not sure that we have learnt much about the possibly fatal nature of our Western value systems. During 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic there was talk about ‘building back better’, and movement restrictions might have encouraged people to reflect on what was actually important in their lives and what they wanted for the future.

Will this have triggered a new enlightenment?