Simon JD Schillebeeckx
on Nature Tech
“What’s wrong with climate tech?”
Simon JD Schillebeeckx believes there’s a persistent carbon tunnel vision and climate change is only a symptom of a much bigger problem, which is “the predatory relationship of the global economy with Nature as a whole”. We have to switch from 'Climate tech' to 'Nature tech' and think more holistically about Nature's “health”. Fair enough, right?
He knows what he is saying, because he is a much respected academic entrepreneur (also known as “Planet Hacker”), whose work focus is to better understand how digitization and sustainability are converging. The new business models that grow out of this collision are not only the topic of his research, but also the source of inspiration for his entrepreneurial activities.
He co-founded Handprint, a Nature Tech venture on a mission to integrate positive impact into every business transaction. They’ve built a platform that connects companies to fantastic causes they curate with the help of their global impact board. He is also the co-founder of Global Mangrove Trust, an NGO developing mangrove reforestation projects and designing a new approach to blue carbon certification.
As an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at Singapore Management University, he teaches sustainable operations and business model innovation.
Simon believes sustainability does not require more specialists, it requires more action! His insights are so valuable and truly inspiring: “social psychology teaches us that if you want to shock people into action, making them feel guilty is great. But if we want to motivate people into sustained, long-term action, making them feel guilty backfires, because people simply opt out and switch off. Nobody wants to feel guilty and unhappy all the time. That’s why we need a narrative of hope, of abundance, not one of despair and limits.”
No wonder his approach: he has surrounded himself with real #inspirators: his family, kids, business partners, friends and colleagues. All those who convinced him to move out of the ivory castle of academia and put his true beliefs into practice. And you can simply tell he is meaning it by the wonderful way he talks about them in #inspirators!
Thanks, Simon JD Schillebeeckx, for being a “Capitalism Cracker”!
#INSPIRATORS QUESTIONNAIRE
Name: Simon JD Schillebeeckx
Company / Institution: Handprint Tech, Global Mangrove Trust, Singapore Management University
Title: Chief Strategy Officer / Director / Assistant Professor of Strategic Management
Website: handprint.tech / globalmangrove.org / https://faculty.smu.edu.sg/profile/simon-schillebeeckx-1281
LinkedIn profile: linkedin.com/in/simonschillebeeckx
Country of origin: Belgium
Country you currently live in: Singapore
Your personal definition of Sustainability: Sustainability is about ensuring that life thousands of years from now will be at least as full of opportunities for nature (including people, animals, and plants) as it is today. It hinges on two complementary goals: reducing our footprint and growing our handprint. The two are separate goals that companies, governments, and individuals need to collectively work on.
Main business challenge you face: Piercing through the maze of large corporates’ coordination problems to get sustainability, CSR, marketing, product, technology, and finance divisions aligned on the FACT that creating positive impact in the world through the basic rewiring of existing business processes can create significant business value.
Main driver that keeps you going: I’ve been an overconfident kid since I was born, telling my mum I wanted to be the first person to ever win the Novel Prize for Peace and Economics in the same year! That should give you a sense of my ambition. I also feel that our mission at Handprint is simply too important to not be actively involved in. Then there are my twin babies Theo and Mia, together with my wife Anna, the most important people in my life. Leaving the world a little bit better for them than when I inherited it is the most powerful engine I can imagine.
The trait you are most proud of in yourself: My ability to stand on a stage, often unprepared, and tell people a story about the world that inspires action.
The trait you most value in others: I have had the good fortune of working with amazing people in the ventures I started and all along my professional career. They all have traits I admire and do not possess. I value my co-founder and CEO Mathias’s ability to keep spinning 100s of plates at the same time, keeping an eye on the big picture while growing a successful business and having a great life.
I admire my co-founder and CIO Ryan’s ability to be selfless in the achievement of our shared goals, to keep a cool head and a sense of asceticism, while being 100% emotionally invested.
I admire our Chief of Staff’s Mimi’s ability to coordinate and bring people together, to stick to the mission, and to focus on the minute.
And I admire my mentor Gerry’s work ethic and his ability to inspire people with knowledge and a relentlessly positive attitude.
I admire my wife Anna’s determination, her style, and her continuous pursuit of excellence.
I admire my brothers’ creativity and willingness to pursue their own path and their emotional intelligence. None of those characteristics I possess myself, which is why I think we work so well together.
Passions & little things that bring you joy: I know that I am privileged in life. I am healthy, have an amazing family, and have jobs that I love. So, in many ways, work gives me joy because I genuinely believe I am making life a bit better for many people around me. But nothing gives me more joy than seeing my kiddos smile in the morning, tickling them and hearing them laugh, and holding them and feel one of their many tantrums fade away into the comfort of just being held.
The #inspirators who determined you to take the sustainability path: All of the people I mentioned before have been an amazing inspiration in my life. Professionally, Ryan dragged me into entrepreneurship when he founded Global Mangrove Trust and made me a director. Without his conviction, I may have still been merely an academic.
Besides the ones mentioned above, I will always be indebted to my Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) Professor Luc van Liedekerke who took me under his wings to write my first dissertation on Buddhism and Economics. He inspired me to eventually pursue an academic path that led me to becoming an entrepreneur. Secondly, there is Professor Andy Crane who was one of my teachers when I majored in Nottingham (UK) and who four years later persuaded me to pursue a doctoral degree at Imperial College in London.
In terms of more well-known people, my biggest influence has been Architect and Designer William McDonough. His TED Talk on Cradle to Cradle, which I heard for the first time in 2007, truly defined my mission as an individual. His poetic narrative in combination with vision were my Aha moment in life. Listening to that talk (which I now force my students to listen to every year in one of my courses) made it clear to me I wanted to be involved in the design of better business practices. It has taken quite some years until I met the right people with whom to do this, but I found them.
A hint or starting point for companies or professionals that are taking the first steps in the sustainability journey:
Sustainability does not require more specialists, it requires more action. Many of my students ask me what they should study or what they should learn in order to develop a career in sustainability. I always tell them the same thing, whatever it is you truly care about.
I think there is a massive misunderstanding in the younger generation about sustainability. They think it’s some elusive construct that requires a lot of learning and that has high barriers to entry. If you want to be part of the 0.01% that is, of course, true, but we have quite some specialists already. By and large most people who are responsible for sustainability in companies learn on the job (or not at all), and sustainability ventures or nature tech ventures like Handprint do not need everyone to be a sustainability specialist. We need operations, sales, marketing, product, engineering, development, tech, HR and so on, like any other business. If you want to get involved into this super exciting space, all you need to do is do it!
Most used and abused clichés in sustainability that bother you:
Companies should aspire to become carbon neutral (largely nonsense).
All companies should try to reduce their carbon footprint as their main sustainability objective.
We should blame the fossil fuel industry for all the world’s evils (it’s really not all).
An honest piece of advice for young people who lose hope:
There is a lot to be fearful of. The changes in the climate and the collapse of biodiversity are real and if we do not act swiftly it will be too late to prevent.
BUT, we have made significant progress. The most likely to happen IPCC scenarios have improved a lot in the last decade. We are on the right track, although we are not getting there fast enough, but losing hope has no practical value. Nothing good has ever happened when an individual, let alone a collective, lost hope. We owe it to ourselves and all future generations to take action and work with the means we have at our disposal to do something that makes a positive impact. Everyone can do that, no matter how rich or how poor (though I admit it is easier when you’re rich…).
Social psychology teaches us that if you want to shock people into action, making them feel guilty is great. That’s why people donate money when they see horrific images of earth quakes, tsunamis, or cyclones and devastation they cause on people. But if we want to motivate people into sustained, long-term action, making them feel guilty backfires, because people simply opt out and switch off. Nobody wants to feel guilty and unhappy all the time. That’s why we need a narrative of hope, of abundance, not one of despair and limits. We need to focus on handprints and not (only) on footprints. And the beauty of that idea is so powerful, everyone can get involved in the creation of a handprint (a positive impact). No matter what you do in life, no matter how affluent you are, it is much easier to create a handprint than it is to reduce a footprint.
On top of that, network theory teaches us that in order to create mass movement, we do not need to convince 100% of the population, we do not even need to convince 50%. Typically, less than 10% of willing actors is more than enough to create systemic change. Digital technologies have made it possible for virtually anyone to create an audience and move people. This should give us hope.
Then there is technological innovation. Progress in fusion, led-lights imbued fishing nets, biomimicry and biofabrication, paint that absorbs carbon, artificial photosynthesis, the incredibly steep reduction in costs of clean energy. We are on a tipping point and we all have the power to make sure we tip in the right direction.
Books that had a major impact on you:
Everything Malcolm Gladwell wrote
Cradle to Cradle – William McDonough and Michael Braungart
The writings of Eckhart Tolle
Must-reads for any Sustainability professional:
Read what inspires you. There is no Bible. But the Cradle to Cradle book I would highly recommend.
Movies / Documentaries you would watch all over again: None to be honest. I love bad TV and silly series!
Blogs / Websites / Podcasts etc. you visit frequently: I read the Economist, Time Magazine, the FT, and the NYT. I listen to Football Weekly from the Guardian, the Ezra Klein show and the Daily by the NYT, and that’s mainly it, not everything has to be about sustainability.
Music that makes you (and your heart) sing: Ghinzu, Deus, Radiohead, Coldplay (I am stuck in the late nineties!)
Places you travelled to that left a mark on you: None more than Myanmar, Argentina and Colombia.
Global Sustainability Voices you recommend us to follow:
The Angry Energy Guy
Paul Dawson
Handprint
Trends in Sustainability we should keep an eye on: The transition from sustainability to regenerative strategy.
Best places for business networking (online or offline): LinkedIn and random encounters.
Events we should attend: Wherever you meet interesting people. I mainly attend web3 events and sustainability stuff, but very often I am bored by the superficial nature. The best way to make any attend worth your while is to make a very divisive statement that splits the room. People who like what you said will come to you afterwards!
Associations, business clubs, tribes you belong to – and why:
The Academy of Management (as a prof)
The Organizations for the Natural Environment (as a prof)
The Singaporean chapter of BLCC (as a Belgian)
Various LI groups
Sustainable Development courses / trainings / certifications that really teach us how to have an impact: Handprint’s regenerative strategy course.
Reasons to feel optimistic about our future in 2030: So many!
COP15 is a big one!
The progress I see in the Nature Tech ecosystem;
The number of VCs that I speak with on a weekly basis;
The fact that a post about nature tech on LI can go viral and reach 1.5M people in two weeks.
Reasons to feel pessimistic about our future in 2030:
The continued efforts from most fossil fuel companies to explore for more oil and gas (which we will never use);
The unwillingness of many governments and people to suffer short term consequences for long term gain.
Regenerative Leadership qualities much needed today: A few months ago, I did a 20 minute keynote on regenerative leadership in Vietnam. It would take more 40 minutes to jot the essence of it down, so I won’t. Invite me for a talk and I’ll be happy to dive into this. The most important thing is we need people who understand the power of regeneration and how it can be linked to business. It’s quite simple, every business process can be imbued with regeneration and doing this can create significant business value.
Quote that inspires you:
"Sometimes, sometimes you gotta be so, no matter what they say, you gotta find your own way!"
(Kane)
"The reasonable man tries to adapt himself to the environment, the unreasonable man tries to adapt the environment to him. That’s why all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
(George Bernhard Shaw, despite the latent sexism)
Your own quote that will inspire us:
