Be brave, but don’t be boring

Notes from the closing keynote at the City Nation Place global conference in London on the 9th of November 2023.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I’m grateful for this opportunity to share a few observations and reflections from the work we’ve been doing in Sweden during the past few years on how to explain what futures in cities will look like.

My hope is that you will find these ideas useful and thus feel the urge to steal them. In fact, I want to encourage you to steal more things. At least ideas!

People in the back, please put down those chairs! Focus on ideas instead. You shouldn’t steal furniture or other people’s objects unless you absolutely must.

I will refrain from using PowerPoint today. I’ve often received feedback when doing so from people in the audience who felt my slides had neither power nor points, so I’ll do it this way instead.

Four years ago, Sweden's biggest publicly funded innovation program realised it had a problem. Viable Cities, as the program is called, was conceived ten years ago with a bold mission: making several Swedish cities climate-neutral by 2030.

In 2013, this was mostly unheard of, not only in Sweden but everywhere. Given that many Swedish cities are old, cold, and ugly and that we live in the dark half of the year, just making them viable seemed to be bold enough.

Eventually, the program received enough funding to start and was designated strategic nationally. My colleagues then went to Brussels to get some inspiration for how to do this, only to be told by the commission that since no one had done it before, they looked forward to being inspired by Sweden.

As the program got off the ground, it chose to use the mission-oriented approach, an innovation method described by Professor Mariana Mazzucato here in London. That is, in turn, inspired by President John F Kennedy’s approach to the moon mission. He said he wanted a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and when people asked how he told him he had no idea. “You go figure it out!”

Since no one knows how to solve the problem or exactly what the goals feel like, everybody gets to work and do things together and in parallel. Stuff is tested and stuff fails; then someone learns something from it and tells the other. It’s a collective creative mess where everybody takes on a range of problems. Eventually, someone realises a few work on this problem and others on that problem and so slowly progress should be made.

In Sweden, we have no idea what we’re doing and somehow that is very comforting. We learn from our mistakes and make progress.

A few years after the program started, a few of the biggest cities in Sweden were working on this, and they began to speak about “we’re going to become climate neutral” and “zero emissions by 2030” and things like that. And that’s fine if you’re in the transformation business or a public servant talking to other public servants, peer to peer—or really nerd to nerd.

But then somebody made the mistake of telling their spouse about or attempting to explain to their mum what they were doing, and Viable Cities realised it had a problem.

And that’s because no one really understands what a climate-neutral future is.

When I say we’re going climate neutral, what you hear is that I want to take away your burger and your car and that you can never fly to Spain again.

When I offer you a meatless burger, you think it can’t possibly be a good thing. It sounds like two buns of bread, and where there should have been meat, there is less of it. They even call it the impossible burger, and naturally, you think it’s impossible that it is going to be tasty. A meat-less burger sounds like an engine-less car. It can’t be good!

Sure: the Paris Agreement, climate neutral and zero emissions and all that but those are boring goals that seem to make your life worse. And what do we call a boring goal? KPIs.

And KPIs are not what makes people happy!

And so my boss who set up this innovation program, and I think she’s a mathematics professor, realises that this problem of explaining what we do cannot be solved with equations and processes alone. It involves people and people with feelings, and as you know, people are c-r-a-z-y. You need someone who understands them, perhaps someone who is a little bit more like people in general (crazy). And so she set out to hire me.

At first, it was a confusing experience for me. We met a few times, and she attempted to explain everything to me, but I got confused by all this innovation program jargon and the interactive, collaborative, iterative, process, mission-oriented... something. Finally, on our third meeting, when this felt bordering on harassment, I finally asked her, straight out, “What do you want from me?!”

She explained that she wanted to hire me because she needed someone to explain the future to people in a way that didn’t sound frightening or boring. People really do have to stop eating burgers, driving cars, and going to Spain all the time.

I said, “Oh. I understand! And… no, thanks. You got the wrong guy! Sorry. This sounds too boring to me.”

And then she said: “No, you’re wrong! I got this all figured out; I’ve done the calculations. You’re the right guy for this.”

I don’t know about you, but I always feel inferior when speaking to people who are professors of mathematics, so I obliged and joined her at the KTH Royal School of Technology in Stockholm, which is hosting the program.

It didn’t take long to realise that the university campus environment suits me well because, as you may see, I dress like a nerdy professor from the 1970s.

I prefer vintage clothes because they are of higher quality and low emission since they are not new, and they are also cheaper. They increase my quality of life. I mean, look at me! This suit was probably worn by a nerdy professor in the 1970s who recently died.

May he rest in peace — for he’s not getting this suit back!

As I settled in on campus, I understood that my first task was to explain what we were doing in a non-jargon way. I joined a few meetings as a translator, and at some point, my boss explained something I didn’t understand, something like climate zero neutrality 2030 emissions transformative urban blah blah blah. Someone turned to me to get it translated, and I said, “I guess we aim… to make it possible… for all people in Sweden to live… a better life within planetary boundaries… right?”

And that stuck.

My background is in corporate sustainability. As a journalist at the Swedish equivalent of Business Week, I’ve covered more than 500 companies worldwide to understand how they use sustainability to drive innovation and profits. Because I like new things and because I’m greedy. Money always interests me.

I also know how to tell a story. Over the years, I’ve given hundreds of talks on how to make money from sustainability and advised multinational companies in the Nordic region, such as Coca-Cola, Danone, and Eon.

Early on, I learned that if you make people laugh when you talk, you may sneak in a piece of fact or two while their mouths are open.

Being a country boy from the southern part of Sweden, I also get very easily bored with management speak and consultant jargon and generally with people using complicated terms as if they’re teenagers pretending to be grownups or someone who wants to impress their mummy.

This is something we, white middle-aged men, do a lot.

To communicate effectively, you also have to tell things in a way that makes sense.

Everybody is more comfortable with simple language, and that makes them prone to listening to you. There is no such thing as an amazing opportunity, as the Americans call it. Something is a problem, and you deal with it, and you move on!

To solve our problem, I uncover how one may explain the future less frighteningly. One of the first things I did was to reach out to the design school in Umeå, one of the best schools for automotive design.

Carmakers create concept cars and tell people that this is a vision of the future but that the future probably won’t look anything like the vision but they still put it out there, as tangible and emotional versions of the future and ask their audience “What do you think?”. And that taught me about the importance of making the future feel real.

It also made me realise that cities and elected officials generally oversell their future. They tell their audience that here’s the future, and this is precisely how it’s going to be or needs to be.

The major mistake here is that they engage in marketing. Everybody hates marketing! Even people in marketing hate marketing because they have ad blockers on their computers. There is a little bit of self-loathing going on there, I suspect!

Persuasion and explanation are one thing, but marketing is often something else. Place marketing, place branding, and creating slogans for a city are often misdirected efforts, as many people put too much emphasis on adding new things and trying to change things rather than working with what they have.

Let’s say you have a boring Spanish city and add a museum. You’re not solving anything. Boring Bilbao plus the Guggenheim does not equal a new sparkling, lively, bun Bilbay, but Boring Bilbao with a new building that looks crazy.

And then, with lovely San Sebastian just a short distance away, a city that has everything you would want and is situated by the sea, a new museum can never make up for that. Here’s a better slogan: “Bilbao —not as boring as you would think.”

Never oversell the future. When I see sketches of new city developments, they are clinically depressing. You got thin white people walking around in clinically hygienic streets and floating cars. There’s no emotion!

And so I started to think about who is really good at telling stories with emotion and the future, and I realised no one does this better than Pixar Animation Studios. And particularly with the movie Wall-E.

If you haven’t seen it, the story is set in the 29th century and is about a robotic trash compactor, Wall-E, and its interaction with an unmanned probe, Eve, searching an uninhabitable earth for plants. The movie conveys a dystopian image of a world in which humanity has abandoned Earth after years of overconsumption and environmental neglect. As the probe shows a plant, it goes into permanent standby, leaving the confused Wall-E trying all kinds of ways to reconnect with Eve, but to no good.

He tries to take her to places to rekindle their relationship, including watching the sunset, and I cry almost every time I see it. By this point, we’ve watched 30 minutes of the movie, and oh, there’s no dialogue whatsoever. Still, I cry. Why? because their reactions are relatable and emotionally true.

To tell stories about a place, you also need details. This is because the content needs to be relatable and because people care about local issues.

So, I started to study the story The Little Red Riding Hood and compared various versions of that story. In Sweden, the story is named Rödluvan and the grey wolf lives in a dense forest made out of pine and fir. As I read more versions from other countries, I realised that the forest is adjusted. In France the forest is not made of firs and pines, but of oak forest — and the wolf smokes Galouise.

In Spain, the wolf has beige fur and strolls casually around among olive trees, behaving the way you imagine Spanish people are.

Think about what we eat. Here in the UK, they eat something called marmite, which the rest of the world knows as shoe polish. Crazy!

In the northern part of Sweden, in Umeå, they have something called rolled-up pizza, which is basically a pizza with a kebab on top that you fold. Then, you drink it with a local orange beverage that is much sweeter than Fanta. Disgusting! But local.

To tell a story about the future, it also has to be scientifically accurate. We’re a publicly funded innovation program, and we’re also nerds and we like facts.

So, to understand how to explain science and fiction, I turned to science fiction and found this quote by William Gibson: “The future is already here, abait unevenly distributed.”

This is the thing. There are already people in London and your cities living extraordinary lives within planetary boundaries. And as public servants, we must help people increase their quality of life.

So rather than focusing on how we all must transform and change everything — because that sounds boring and hard — we’re focusing on how the future will be felt.

The result of this work is a method of telling stories that make public officials and politicians more brave in their climate ambitions without sounding boring, as they do want to take our cars, burgers, and trips to Spain away.

The key is—paradoxically—to talk about an ordinarily, quite boring day. It’s about not overselling the future, nor promising that everything is going to be fine, not that everything will have to change. But rather, it's about pointing out how much will be the same. Our lives are mostly the same now as before the launch of the iPhone, and our lives in the future will mostly be the same as now.

So when I say you cannot be boring, that’s in the way you tell things. But what you show can very well be boring, because boring is also comfortable and reassuring, it makes us feel safe. And this is particularly true for us Swedes.

So we came up with this concept of showing a day in the life of a citizen in our cities and how she lives an everyday life, does regular things, and experiences the fun and the friction of what happens on a regular day.

In one of the scenarios, we make someone's bike stolen, which is a frustration everybody can relate to because even in a sustainable world, bikes will get stolen.

In another story, our hero has unhealthy eating habits, and it ends with her sitting on the tram and shoveling french fries into her mouth. Because you know what- they are vegan! In the future, you will still be able to enjoy junk food so saturated with fat that it will give you a cardiac arrest and kill you — but within planetary boundaries.

At the end of this story, the audience realizes that we just told them what the future will feel like rather than what it looks like.

As the great American philosopher Donald J. Trump once said, “I feel this to be true.” That is, in fact, a very insightful comment about the human experience.

Facts matter less than we think! Facts are overrated when it comes to convincing people. Making people feel that something is emotionally true, locally relevant and scientifically accurate is a better approach. (But you’re in a hurry, focus on the emotional experience.)

Never not try to sell your city; have your residents feel it instead and create communication around that. How does it feel in your city on weekends? How does it feel to get childcare close to home? How does a good quality of life balance feel? What is the food like?

Remember. You will be able to smoke, get drunk, argue with someone, be betrayed, have junk food, fall in love, laugh and live a better life.

Nobody really knows what a green city is like but everyone understands what a good city feels like.

Today, we have 23 cities in our program that focus on quality of life, partly based on this way of thinking.

However, recently, I realised there’s a catch. You cannot use words climate neutral, sustainable, organic, or any other climate jargon. Because you will piss some people off.

I’m now in a phase in my studies where I meet local politicians, people that others have labelled “climate sceptics” or someone who oppose transformation.

I go to their cities, sit down with them, and listen. We often share a meal, and I ask them to describe what they think should be fixed and what language they use to describe it.

What they tell me are things that are emotionally true to them, that are locally relevant and quite often scientifically accurate. Not always, but often enough. I’ve met a few people with thin foil hats as well. This is not to say you must agree with everything they say, but you must listen.

And I ask them about how they feel about the “progressives” and the left when they use a charged word as “organic”, and they tell me they feel it goes against common sense. “Why should we procure organic carrots and produce from Spain when we have great carrots growing traditionally just a few kilometres away?”

So, I think that this might be the new frontier: understanding why people oppose it. It’s not that they are mad or bad, neither insane nor malicious in their opposition; they just think we might be moving too fast without considering alternatives or common sense.

People with privilege have no idea how it is not to have privilege, and so they call these people without privileges stupid!

I do think the environmental and climate movement should exercise more empathy. It indeed seems they want to silence the far right or the incels rather than listen to them. They forget that people in pain usually are the ones who are the most hateful. People who are afraid of change are often opposed to it. But if we can show these people that most of tomorrow we’ll be like most of today, we can help them by taking some of that anxiety away.

Most of the people I’ve met aren’t angry or afraid; they don’t like some teenager calling them names, or the media calling them names, or privileged people with posh Oxford English using complicated language to shame them without recognising their own privilege!

They, too, want other stories about their city's future. They want to talk about how we can increase quality of life and love to hear examples that are emotionally true, locally relevant, and scientifically accurate.

You must be brave. But you can never be boring.