Greentech Solutions Everywhere

Scott Stonham, sustainable technology analyst, content writer, keynote speaker, and connector of those looking to make positive change in business. Since 1997, he's helped bring tech innovations to market that we take for granted these days. Now, he's using his abilities to bring about real change for elevating the greentech sector. Listen in to hear Scott explain how any sized company can make sustainable upgrades to improve their brand. And he's got an information rich website to learn more from: https://wellthatsinteresting.tech

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Triple Bottom Line | Episode 50 | Scott Stoneham

Female Voice Over 
[00:02] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here’s your host, Taylor Martin!

Taylor Martin 
[00:17] Welcome, everyone. We have Scott Stoneham on today. He is an independent sustainable technology analyst. He’s also a content writer and a connector of those looking to make positive change in business. At his heart he is a technologist with a rich history in innovation, marketing, and leadership. He’s also the founder of a very unique website called wellthatsinteresting.tech. It’s his island on the web where he shares tons of articles and experiences on anything and everything green tech. Scott, tell our listeners how you became the green tech expert that you are today. 

Scott Stoneham
[00:59] The story to this goes back 20-something years. I spent a lot of time in my early innovation career working for a big telco. I worked with big companies like Vodaphone and here in the UK, I worked with companies out of San Diego, Qualcomm, that does all the mobile chips. I got this love of technology, and it goes back to my university studies of cybernetics and control engineering where we were studying AI and robotics and all these cool things that are coming to market now, really. Then my career kind of went on a funny path following job titles and pay rises. I traveled a lot over the world worked with startups and little companies. There was a time when I was like, you know what? This isn’t good for me and it’s certainly not good for the planet. I took a moment to kind of reflect and think, well what skills do I have that I can use to do something better? It was around kind of 2017 where I was actually standing in front of the sink looking out on a very typically British gray, drizzly sky and I’m like, I got to make a change. 

The company – I was leading a startup that was originally based in Seattle. We expanded here, and we got acquired and I was in a big company doing these things I didn’t want to do. I left and I spent some time consulting trying to figure out what it was. I remember it was 2019. I was at a swimming pool in central Europe in Slovakia and I’m like, “Ah-haa! I know what it is!” I thought what I’ll do is I’ll take all of this knowledge that I have across technology, marketing, commercial domain startup, multinational and put it into something that I like doing and that’s talking about technology and how it’s being used for good, basically. It took a while and then it ended up being focused and wrapped around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Today, all of my work focuses on how technology can be a force for good, and I align that in one way or another with one or many of the UNSDGs.

Taylor Martin 
[03:03] What are the some of the services that you offer people? Your website is great because it’s just an endless amount of great data. Thank you for writing all that content. What are some of the services that you offer? 

Scott Stoneham
[03:15] It varies. I kind of categorize it into two pieces. It’s the pieces that I do that are on the website, on site, and then there’s stuff that I do offsite. The onsite stuff is really creating this thought leadership content in this space of sustainability and technology but doing it in an independent way for purpose-driven, impact-focused leaders who are trying to use their technology to make a change in this world, to do something positive. I give them this independent platform where I tell their story in maybe a way that they can’t or wouldn’t normally do. It gives them a different kind of lens for other audiences to hear and see about what they’re doing. That’s a key piece of it. The other thing that I’ve found to be really valuable there is if you’re a founder of a startup, you go from nothing to something by having this wonderful vision that motivates and drives people.  At some point, when you get funding and when you get a team, all of your day job is about getting more funding, spending the funding, and running the team. What happens is that vision that was so powerful to start with gets lost. What I try and do with this is help that vision live longer. Tell that story, tell it for them when they’re just too busy to tell it.  

That’s a lot of what I do there. I work with venture capital organizations as well to help them tell the story of their investments. They're great at talking about return on investment, but I try and flip it and talk about return on impact or the return of impact, really. So that’s onsite. That leads nicely to other things as well which happen offsite. I work with all sorts of organizations, different sizes, to again take that independent perspective but help them tell a story that helps their business. Some names I can throw out there now, Open University, a big global university organization based out of the UK. I’ve done a whole bunch of work with them helping them flesh out some content on digital carbon footprints for a course that they’ve put together. Information services company Informer, I’ve done some work for them. There’s a whole bunch, but I won’t go on. That’s just kind of the offsite stuff helping them, and there’s workshops and keynote speeches and all sorts of things. I could list it for hours actually, but we don’t have hours and I don’t want to bore your listeners.  So that’s it. It’s onsite, offsite, but it’s all about this content and telling stories. 

Taylor Martin 
[05:52] When you say telling stories, I think marketing. Are we talking marketing or are we talking about telling stories for additional funding or we talking about stories for all stakeholders? 

Scott Stoneham
[6:00] I think all stakeholders, but the key for me here is telling a story in a way that people actually want to listen to.  A lot of these pitch decks are – a lot of the startups, when they put a pitch deck together, it’s directly for the investors and then other people find it difficult maybe to consume that. When I put these stories together, it’s a case of creating the context. Why is this important and how could this have an impact? Then I position the company I’m working with as a potential answer to that problem. I like to think of it as creating that kind of emotional engagement with the issue. The issue leads through to the solution that’s being presented rather than just talking about facts and figures. 

Taylor Martin 
[06:47] I think the days of facts and figures are gone. I think they’re going away. They’re declining. I think what you’re doing, what you’re saying is more of what’s going to be the norm or is the norm for some industries, obviously, but I keep seeing and hearing that this broader context of storytelling as well as the transparency of the business and how it operates in the world. To me that is now the norm or is really close to being the norm. Do you feel the same? 

Scott Stoneham
[07:14] You  mentioned one of my keywords there, transparency. To quickly answer your question, then yes, I think the answer’s yes, I do see that happening. Somebody referred to my work as storytelling for impact and I said, “Okay, if that’s what you want to call it, I like that.” Coming back to transparency, in this line of work people are afraid of greenwashing. If they’re aware of it, then great, then they’re afraid of it. I think my feedback to them is there’s also danger in not talking about the great things you do. There’s a London Business School study of 2014 I think, what a while ago, that said if you’re doing good work, then you almost have an obligation to talk about that good work because it inspires and shows direction. Now there’s that line between green hushing, as it’s called, and greenwashing.

When it comes to greenwashing, I think that the basics are  you need to start from a point of integrity. Integrity is absolutely key. Carry on doing the things that you say you’re going to do even when no one’s looking, and transparency. That kind of rolls together, integrity and transparency. If you keep those, if you build those into the heart of your business and everything you do, then I think that’s going to take you a long way to avoid being slapped with a greenwashing flag because with those two things you will tell people when you get it right, but you will also tell people when you get it wrong. That lends forgiveness. If you’re totally honest and transparent and you say you know what, hands up. Got it wrong. This is what we’re going to do to fix it, then I think that even when you get it wrong, you get some more forgiveness. If you get it wrong and don’t tell anyone about it, then you’re never going to get forgiveness. 

Taylor Martin
[09:00] I think it goes back to integrity. That’s what you’re describing. If something goes – you say we’re going to do this, and it doesn’t work that way, we say it didn’t work and here’s why and here’s what we’re going to do because of that, not just being transparent but you’re also increasing your integrity in the market. I think going back to all this is about investors are wanting this. Investors want to hear this more longer-form story because they know that other investors out there and the people behind the business and the consumers behind buying the products and stuff like that, they want this. That’s why I feel like it's becoming the norm, which I’m like that’s great. Finally, things are now moving in the right direction. The ship is slowly changing its course. 

Scott
[09:42] Let me just add on to that piece. I speak with a lot of investors about this, those who are on that journey and those that aren’t, but the narrative is changing from – I ask people how do you balance impact versus return on investment to your investors? It’s changed just in two years, the change has been quite phenomenal. In those two years, it’s now moved to this point where people are saying, if you’re not investing in impact, then you’re not really investing. In 10 years’ time, when you expect that impact to come through, if you haven’t considered about sustainability and the impact on the planet, people diversity, biodiversity, then you might as well just throw your money in a drain. If you’re not investing in impact, then you’re not investing at all.

Taylor Martin
[10:25] I’m all for it, man That sounds great. I agree with the two-year segment. Just from my lens, I have seen it change dramatically. Like I said, it’s a shift that’s correcting its course in a very strong way. I want to get back to the services that you offer. How does it differ from larger companies to smaller companies? In America, I think half of our GDP comes from small businesses, so it’s not like small businesses don’t mean anything. Small business is half of our GDP in this country. I always like to say, okay, how are you servicing the small companies and the larger companies?

Scott Stoneham 
[11:05] That’s a great question. In the UK, 99% of our business is small businesses.

Taylor Martin
[11:11] Wow! 

Scott Stoneham
[11:15]  Actually, a lot of the work I do on site, I would say around 90% of that work is weird small businesses. It’s startups, it’s startups at the pre-seed, maybe seed and Series A, maybe Series B level, so a lot of that is naturally small companies. Now, where I go out and provide services directly to organizations, that’s where the split becomes a little bit more pronounced. For larger organizations, they tend not to need so much of my content creation skills for marketing because they have teams. Even still, there is a place for that and that’s where the independent brand comes in. Some of the names I mentioned earlier on, they have teams of people doing this but still somebody like me who is very uniquely focused on sustainability and technology and has that brand, it can really add something new to what they’re doing. There is a demand but not much.

In the bigger organizations, it tends to be more keynotes. Just last month, I was up in Manchester presenting to an organization up there, a few thousand people and it was helping them understand sustainability in a broader sense and then drilling down into some key things that they should focus on in their organization. Again, providing that outside-in perspective, taking them beyond everyday and thinking a bit broader and then how to bring that back. Then there’s workshops. I’ll be running a bunch of workshops throughout this year, probably six of them I think so far, with one particular group of companies. That’s, again, helping them bring sustainability into their strategy and policy-making. That’s on the bigger side of things.

[13:07] On the smaller side, the content for the website, absolutely, but one of the things that I found there was a real need for is – I’m going to take a little detour here and go to tell you about one of the things that I developed whilst I was working on the website. When I started putting the website together, I knew I wanted to have an impact. I thought my impact will be amplifying the impact of others through telling the story and that started me in the right direction, but I soon felt that’s not particularly genuine. It’s letting other people have the impact and then taking credit for it, so I thought, no that’s not good, I’ve got to do something myself. I started looking around at planting trees and things and it was big budget. I’m still only a two-person company with freelance help coming in here and there but it was all big budget; it was too complex. I started figuring out how I could do these impacts that would happen almost automatically as I went about my business as usual.

The first one that I worked on was, how do I integrate individual tree planting with actions on the website and this was two or three years ago. I developed that, I found a company in Canada actually that would help me do that through an API, so it’s all automated, so then we planted trees in Kenya, Madagascar, Honduras and other places. I’m like, okay that’s great, trees are great, trees are a great thing but then the tree-planting thing when through a bit of a backpedal. There were some scandals around offsetting and some of these plantations burning down or never even existing in the first place. Luckily, mine were fine. I started to do other things and I was looking more broadly beyond trees and I started integrating with things like an organization called B1G1 that allows me to have impacts with different worthy causes across the planet, all aligned to SDGs. That was great. I made a lot of really good impacts out of that. Got a lot of people saying, “How do you do this stuff?” That was a key for me.

[15:17] Small businesses, they want to be able to do something good, but they can’t afford to take their eye off the ball. Today it’s business and tomorrow business and the next day is business and if I do something else, it’s a risk. I started thinking, well, how do I take all of this stuff that I’ve built into my website and make it easily available to other people who are too busy to do anything else. I came up with this idea, this product if you like that small businesses can take. They can follow a video tutorial and implement this into their business, starting really small and simple. Really being able to start with that same journey I had, which was planting trees, but then maybe quickly add on top of that as well. With a small business, I want to give them the tools, give them the expertise and experience, the guidance to be able to go and have an impact from, well I say you can get it up and running in an hour. Download these things, get up and running and start planting trees in an hour. Ninety-nine percent of the UK, I can’t address it all one by one so I’ve got to try and scale it. That’s a way I found to do it.

Taylor Martin 
[16:25] How have your clients reacted to this? Oh, this is a great solution because we’ve been having a problem with wanting to do it but we keeping feeling like – I don’t know, maybe they had to hire somebody to do it but you’re just giving it as a service.

Scott Stoneham
[16:38] Yeah, they almost use those exact words, actually. It’s been too complicated. It’s something we know we should do but you know what? I’ve got to raise another invoice, or I really want to do this, but I’m stuck in meetings day to day, or I really want to do this but I can’t afford to hire someone to manage it for me. There’s all these reasons why people don’t want to do it. There’s a bit of a resistance, a bit of a friction point to get going because they think it’s going to be another heavy time investment but it’s not really. If I can get beyond that resistance, then it’s like, a-ha, now the light’s come on. Okay, I can set this up and once I’ve set it up, it just runs, I don’t have to do anything. There was one organization that implements it directly into their website to so every time someone contacts them, they go and plant a tree. There’s another one that does it through a different email integration. Every time they deal with a key client, they do a bcc field and it plants a tree and let’s them know. There’s all sorts of different ways they do it and now others are implementing B1G1 as well. 

I’ve started working with some carbon removal capabilities as well, so not just offsetting but removing carbon. I’m helping some of those customers understand how they can move to that next stage. Once you get passed that barrier of, oh, I’ve got to do something, it’s like, yes you do, you have to do something but I’m going to give you a way of doing it quickly and easily and it just carries on growing with you instead of you having to hire someone or spend your valuable time managing it.

Taylor Martin
[18:07] It’s an easy lift, something like this. If you’re doing it monthly or quarterly or whatever, over time it starts to accumulate and that can really be an effective messaging in your ESG report or your marketing materials or even for your investors.

Scott Stoneham
[18:23] I absolutely agree. Like I said, I’m just a two-person company, the website has been running three or four years, I can’t remember. In terms of the transparency thing, I publish all of the data, so it’s there for everyone to see. I have dashboards and I look at it every now and then and I think, wow, okay that’s quite impressive. It’s quite impressive I’ve achieved that. The great thing is, I’ve achieved that just by doing the things that excite me and drive that passion and things I believe in and it’s just come along with me. The more I do of it, the bigger my impact but it doesn't feel like I’m biting off too much. I know that if my business takes one of those moments where it pauses, or rests, or even goes backwards, I’m not over the end of my skis, I’m not overexposed on this thing that I now feel guilty that I can’t do. It just feels like it breathes with me.

Taylor Martin
[19:11] Yeah that’s great. It’s not tied to anything in terms of a function of the business but we just have  a subscription based-system with Icology, with an I, and they do all kinds of tree planting but they also have projects, solar projects and water projects and all things like that. I love it because it’s always changing. We have our own web page within their website and when you go there, we get to scroll down and get to see all the things where the money is going to and everything. It’s really great. I love that ability to be able to tangibly see the outcome of your giving.

Scott Stoneham
[19:50] Totally. I think it’s really important, micro businesses like mine, small businesses as well, even large multinational organizations, there’s a drive right now for people to feel more purpose when they’re at work. That goes across white collar, blue collar; it goes across the lot. People want to feel like they're part of something bigger. As leaders, it's our obligation to find a way to make that happen and the way to make that happen is to give people the chance to do these small things every day that have an impact. For an organizer, he doesn't have to cross the earth. I mean, but it will do if you don't do it. That's the thing.

Taylor Martin
[20:33] That's right.

Scott Stoneham
[20:34] This thing can really align, and this is – I'm not an ambassador of the UN. I'm not sponsored by the UN, but this is why I do love the SDGs because there's something in there for everyone to feel passionate about. If you as an organization can find a way to let your employees say you know what? I'm going to support – I'm really passionate about quality education, so I'm going to choose this project. Every time I hit my goals, hit my targets, you, my employer, are going to help me make an impact towards that particular goal. I'm going to feel good about that. I'm not just going to – I get paid my bonus, whatever it is, but I'm also doing something good. I might even sacrifice a bit of my bonus to go and do something good. Those conversations do happen. Really allowing that purpose to be integrated at a personal level throughout that whole business is so important, I think, nowadays more than ever.

Taylor Martin
[21:27] Yeah, and it's a growing trend, happily so. I want to circle back to what we were talking about earlier about larger corporations. Can you give us some examples of how you've worked with large corporations, and give us a sense of the steps involved and how you work with them?

Scott Stoneham
[21:44] You're right, so let me take one example of UK-based company then. The issue – and it's hesitating and pausing here because I'm trying to figure out how far back into the backstory I need to go to illustrate it. It's one of these things where it starts off quite small and then grows into something much bigger. The issue was that there was a new person coming into the organization, and they were taking over the legacy role of corporate social responsibility, CSR. In that role, they were really trying to bring out more about the CSR that this organization was doing and they wanted to do it from a point of view that didn't ruffle any feathers. In that sense, they came to me and said look, we'd love to do an interview with you where we can talk about this stuff, but it's you saying it and not us. It's like, that's perfect because that goes nicely into that independent content that I can provide outside. They used that internally to start talking about CSR and actually to flesh out some of those points within their organization that created resonance and also created friction so they could really start to figure out how this worked. It gave them no risk internally because it was me talking about it, not them. That led to more work where we started doing some workshops on what's the difference between CSR and sustainability and how has CSR worked maybe in the past; where has it fallen down? How do we need to change that moving forward? That was workshop-driven. Then there was some more content around that as well where we were doing some interviews with stakeholders, and that was going across their internal domains as well. Then ultimately, it ended up with this broader keynote [23:33] company all hands last year where we pulled all of those things together, got everybody in the room, thousands of people in the room and online, actually. It was talking about this journey and then we've come from here; we're now here; and what it means to us – sustainability, what it means to us is this and this is what all of you are going to do, what we are going to do, actually, importantly, this is what we're going to do as a leadership team. This is what we ask of you. That was where it was turned back over to the employees to say okay, well, we understand where you're going as a leadership team; we understand your promises, your pledges – also with those two important words, integrity and transparency. Employees were asking now how do I take part? What's my role in this bigger vision? That's a really long story, but kit shows you how all these pieces come together. 

Another one is more like technology scouting where all organizations say I really want to solve this particular sustainability challenge in my organization. One of them was to do with energy management, basically. This whole thing with the energy crisis right now is tragic in many cases for those who are severely affected by it. On one hand. It's doing something that is very difficult for humans to do, and that's changing behavior. We saw the end of last year energy – CO2 from energy consumption dropped quite a bit across Europe On one hand, it's because it's slightly warmer winter, so we're using less. On the other hand, energy's expensive, so people are using less of it. That goes to show just like with COVID that, again, it's another strange way of looking at it but COVID was a motivator for change. We were motivated to do things differently for a health reason. We're now motivated to do things differently because of a finance reason. The same thing is happening at this particular organization. They were looking to cut costs of their energy consumption and they realized we can also start to think about this in terms of carbon emission reductions. One of the people in the team were quite conscious that at some point when the energy comes back to sensible pricing, they wanted to make sure the organization didn't suddenly flip the switch the other way again and forget about sustainability pieces of that. They're using this period of time to integrate as much intelligence and automation into their systems to help them continue to understand their carbon emissions and their carbon footprint and keep control of it in a way they couldn't do before when they never had the authority or mandate to make it happen before. In that case, I want to help them find some technology to, one, measure the energy and communicate that energy and ultimately let them control how they use that energy Technology scouting in a form.

Taylor Martin
[26:30] I love that, but one thing that just keeps popping to the top of my head because here in America, when I'm traveling or even at night in my own hometown, I'll see buildings, commercial buildings, with all the lights on. There's probably two people in there. I'm like, do you need to have all those lights on for two people, maybe security guards, all night long? Really? Seriously? That right there is such an energy waste. Hearing what you're talking about with being able to manage it, I'm sure they went through that routine and much, much more.

Scott Stoneham
[27:01] Yeah, and I think the – we see that here now. We see that here as well; it's not just the US. You can drive through London, all the lights are on. There's a historesis in this issue because a lot of those companies have purchased their power in advance. My dad, last year, he purchased a – he signed up to a five-year fixed deal on his energy terrace, so he's laughing. I want to drive my EV car down to his house and charge up down there. The big companies are like that, as well. They're not so driven at the moment by those energy costs because it's the same as it was a year ago or two years ago. Where I've seen literally just in the beginning of this year, actually, is that those power agreements are running out. Now people are signing up to new power agreements and they're like ah, this has got a bit of a bite to it this time. Now they're beginning to see that confluence, if you like, of that financial situation and the carbon consideration. I think my guess is at some point in the coming months and coming year, you'll start to see less of those lights coming on because actually, it's costing a lot more now than it did December.

Taylor Martin
[28:08] Right. What are some other things you see companies wanting to do, technology-wise, to help reduce their carbon footprint?

Scott Stoneham
[28:15] Procurement is a big piece. I have to say, a lot of my work at the end of last year was revolving around digital carbon footprints. In doing that, we've spent a lot of time looking through scope one, scope two, scope three, so greenhouse gas protocol definitions of those. If you look across those scopes, many organizations are quoting numbers about we're going to spend this amount of money to become net zero by 2030 or whatever it is. When they're talking about net zero, many of them, not all of them, are still talking about scope one and scope two, and that's easy, really. That's the easy stuff to get a handle on, and it's also the smallest for most people. That scope three emissions, when you start thinking about all of these other things that cause emissions from whether it's where you you put your pension money or your investments to commuting to and from the office or other things, that is the biggest – 80 to 90% of your carbon emissions come from those things that are indirect in your business.

In that, the biggest chunk of that is typically products and services. When you start drilling into this and people realize oh, my gosh, I thought I had this kind of footprint and now you're telling me it's almost twice that size because of scope three, they say, “Tell me where I focus first.” It's like, products and services. When we're talking about the digital stuff, when you talk about your laptop or your phone or the screen or mic or whatever it is, you can typically break down its lifetime carbon emissions into two pieces You have the bit that happens and is embodied into that technology before you even touch it, the embodied carbon, and then you have the operational stuff, the stuff that you generate when you're using it, energy, which comes from energy. In that sense, this embodied carbon is accounting for 80% of its total lifetime carbon. It seems really coincidental that it's that lovely 80/20 rule again, but it kind of is depending on where you look. It can be as high as 90% in some smartphones. The key thing there is that we really have to focus on using the tech we have for longer and buying less while at the same time, that 20% that's remaining, that's the operational. A lot of that operational cost is from things that – like you mentioned, leaving lights on. We leave things on because we've become accustomed to it. These little red dots, we don't worry about those little red dots. We don't worry about leaving the computer on sleep or standby, whatever it is. Actually when you add it all up en masse, it can be a significant chunk. I say don't stand by, turn off. Wherever you can, don't leave it on standby. Just turn it off and you'll see big improvements.

In my office here, I now have a single switch on the wall. When I leave the office, I don't just turn the lights off. I turn everything off. One switch, turn the whole lot off. I know three other people who've listened to me say that and they're like, you know what? I'm just having a kitchen redo. I'll do the same thing. That's a small thing we can do and it makes small things. The big thing is procurement. Let's cut out as much of that 80, 90% of carbon emissions that come – that we generate just from buying stuff, whether it's through refurbishment, through reusing or just using it longer.

Taylor Martin
[31:43] Just speaking of that one switch now, we're building homes in the United States that have that select when you leave the house. It's right there at the exit in the front door. You just click a switch and everything turns off. There's no vampire devices sucking energy.

Scott Stoneham
[31:59] Yeah, I think that's really wise. It's such a simple thing we can do. I mean, there are caveats to that as well; there are some things you don't want to switch off when you're out, but it just takes a little bit of thought and a little bit of design to make that work.

Taylor Martin
[32:09] Yeah, I mean, basically what you're saying is small efforts can have a big impact once they're accumulated.

Scott Stoneham
[32:15] Absolutely, I think there's a saying from Vincent Van Gough that goes along a similar line; “Great things come from a series of small things coming together,” and I totally believe it.

Taylor Martin
[32:26] I love it. How does your work relate to mental health and eco-anxiety because that is something that's happening. Some people take this whole environmental challenge that we have before us with a bit – a good dose of anxiety. How does your work deal with all those and relate to that?

Scott Stoneham
[32:45] Through personal experience. In the early days of doing this and getting more and more involved in the climate stuff, I read articles about how some leading climate scientists can only really be active and productive in the role for ten years before they burn out. It's like okay, I start to see that. There's a really good example. I was preparing for a – I was on a train, actually, preparing for a big speech I was doing, the one I mentioned earlier, in Manchester. It was all about the power of small things, how we could do small things and how that would all come together. Then there was that Nordstream pipeline sabotage or explosion in the North Sea. The amount of damage that was doing to our environment eclipsed in hours what the entire EU was doing in an entire year. I think it was a number like that. I forget; it was a while ago. I remember sitting there reading this and thinking well, what the hell am I doing? What is the point? If one thing can happen like that and then instantly wipe out all of that good, then who am I to say that all of these small things are actually going to make a difference? I'm talking rubbish.

I really had a real bobble. I realized then actually one, this is eco-anxiety in me. This is how it's coming out. I'm worried and I'm feeling like I can't do anything myself. Then two, I realized it's even more reason why I should be doing what I'm doing, even more reason why we should be doing all these little things. We have the power to do it and make that change when we work together. These things will happen. There will be another volcano explosion somewhere. That will have an impact. There will be these catastrophes that happen, but we have to carry on doing these things ourself. There is a really worrying rise in the amount of anxiety around climate called eco-anxiety or climate anxiety I think it was Stanford did some research and some studies on how to deal with that and overcome that. In summary, it's everybody feels like they can – everybody needs to be able to do something, no matter how big, no matter how small. It needs to be easily achievable and something you feel like you can achieve today, tomorrow, and the next day. It needs to feel like it's part of something bigger.

This, to me, talks about everything I've been talking about already. How do you let everybody feel like they're part of something bigger and they can do something positive and impactful for the climate every single say? This is by doing – integrating these small things into what you do every day, aligning with the things that drive people and give them passion and then communicating it back to them, saying yeah, okay, I know you been doing these small things, but look what we've done as an organization. Feel proud about it. Feel like you've actually made a difference. In summary, I mean, the eco-anxiety thing is worrying. It's scary. I keep getting hit by that bat, that baseball bat of eco-anxiety. What on earth are you doing? What's the point? Then I just bounce back and say no, this is the point and I need to use whatever I can to help others who are not as – in this position that I am, help them learn from this and help them continue to take that step forward and feel good about it.

Taylor Martin
[36:03] Now I think all of us are doing that. All of us are having this battle that you're having, and I think enough of us are righting this ship, as I mentioned earlier. I feel like that is the heavy lift that we're all under. We're all doing our little part to make that little – that little part to make that big shift. I think we're all dealing with that eco-anxiety.

Scott Stoneham
[36:26] I think there's one thing that came to me today, actually, literally today. I realized that a lot of this pressure I put on myself is that I think I need to change everything by the end of the year or by next week. I forget the thing that I keep telling people, and that's that incremental approach. If we keep doing small, positive things, it will add up and it will take us in the right direction. Every now and then you get that moment of haziness where you think oh, my gosh, it's got to be changed by next year. There is a huge amount of urgency in our situation in the climate situation, but we do have time if we start doing the right things now. It's if we do the wrong things now that we rapidly run out of time.

Taylor Martin
[37:12] Do you think this is becoming a “risk” for businesses to not do these little things, not to implement some of the things you've discussed?

Scott Stoneham
[37:20] I do, absolutely. I don't think it's becoming. I think it has always been, but it's being acknowledged as such now. I'm not so naive to think that when I speak to these investors, they're putting money – they're paying attention to impact and sustainability because they want to do good for the planet. There is a return on investment and like I said, if you're not investing in impacts, you're not investing because of that risk. The investors want to see that you're taking sustainability seriously because they want to know that if one of your facilities gets hit by a tornado, or a hurricane, or another one gets impacted because your supply chain has just disappeared because of some event on the other side of the world, they want to know that you understand that that can happen and how you can mitigate against it. Otherwise, you're just not invsetible. It's there more and more because people who control the money flow want to see how you're going to stand up to and mitigate these things that are becoming more and more inevitable.

Taylor Martin
[38:29] Yeah, I concur with that whole-heartedly. I want to talk a little bit more about your website, this amazing resource of information. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about it and paint a better picture than I did at the beginning of the podcast and also any information on your webinars and stuff like that?

Scott Stoneham
[38:47] Yeah, absolutely, thank you. Yeah, it was – thank you for the really kind words that you said at the beginning of this episode. The website itself is really a collection of content that talks about how technology is doing these really great things. That's what it is at its heart. You can go into the website and you can find an article, and you'll see the little SDGI icons across the top. If you start clicking through those, you can start to see articles that are also related to those SDGs, so you can really dig into quality education technology itself in that or helping to provide clean water and sanitization. You can do that, and that's a lot of the content. Then there's also other resources on there as well. There's some generic marketing resources, some templates I've got there. There's also the webinars you mentioned. Becoming a Business for Good, that's the one that helps you understand how you can bring these incremental impacts into your business. I think those are the two resources that I probably will show you right now. All of this interesting content which I hope will inspire and give you this view that technology is actually having an impact and it can be a force for good, and these are all the amazing things that are happening that you probably don't hear about if you're not paying attention to this.

The other thing is for businesses, go in there and look for Becoming a Business for Good, find my webinar. It's on YouTube as well, so you can find it there. That'll talk you through why I did this and how you can do it, and how you can get access to these tools that I've provided.

Taylor Martin
[40:21] Yeah, I have to underscore one more time, people, the resources on this website are really deep and rich. The website address, again, is wellthatsinteresting.tech. It's so easy to remember.

Scott Stoneham
[40:34] It came about from a conversation on Whatsapp, actually. I said to someone, “Oh, you should check out this technology,” and they're like, “Oh, yeah, have you thought about how it can be used for this?” I'm like, “That's interesting tech, isn't it? Oh, hang on.” That's where it stuck.

Taylor Martin
[40:48] There you go.

Scott Stoneham
[40:49] Yeah, it's all good.

Taylor Martin
[40:50] Scott, thank you so much for being on today's show, and thank you for sharing all your knowledge, your experience, your stories, but also like I said, that website, wellthatsinteresting.tech, it really is just a huge resource for people to tap into, so thank you again.

Scott Stoneham
[41:05] Thank you so much. It's been a great conversation. Thank you for having me.

Taylor Martin
[41:08] Absolutely. Over and out, everybody.

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[39:13] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.