Climate Crisis: How to lead through adversity with Tim Jarvis

I think leadership these days is perhaps even more ego driven than it was in the past. You can't fake it. You've got to have genuine passion for doing things. You've got to empower your team. Look, I think in the climate space we've used guilt and fear based messaging for such a long time to try and get changed. They were all thinking that death was imminent. I think, as I was saying, I think you control the things you can. I think once you start to become aware of what people power can do, it becomes actually a very liberating thing. So I think it's about. About finding positives in university.

Tim, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Thank you.

Absolute pleasure to finally sit down with you. I've been following your journey and an intrepid journey it has been. So I'd like to start with asking you a question around adventure. Where does your appetite for adventure come from?

Look, I think to an extent you're born with it. For me, I've always done it. I've always been an inquisitive person. As a kid I was very inquisitive. I was always looking around the next corner and my father would always say, where's he gone? As a small kid and so I sort of had that in me. But I grew up actually in Malaysia as a small child and you know, obviously pre Internet and my parents would just say, go and entertain yourself. And I, I spent a lot of time outdoors in an environment where you could explore new things. It was just endless sense of exploration. There were monkeys and snakes and wild dogs and tree climbing, but all in a tropical kind of context. And it was all unfamiliar to me as a seven year old. And so I spent the first four or five years of my life up to the age of 12, just out exploring in between school and homework and things like that. And I guess that sort of really cemented in me the need to. The love of the outdoors, the need to spend more time in it. And that's just continued into. Into adulthood.

Brilliant. Very few adults get to do that. You know, lots of us have this adventure as kids, but very few of us get to carry that into adulthood. So you're getting to bring that joy right through.

I think if you. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think if you. I mean expeditions, which I now do, are very simple, almost childlike endeavors. You go, want to get to the top of that, the far side of that, meet them, do this, challenge myself to do that. They're very simple things. A Lot of complexity comes with it. But actually, at their heart, they're almost childlike in their simplicity. And it comes from a sort of a, you know, a kind of an idealism and a fascination with the world that just comes from almost a childlike place within your being. And I think if you just keep doing it, you retain that sense of, you know, who you were as a child, that continuity almost all the way through.

I love that. And when we look at what you're doing right now, you're following your dharma, your passion, your purpose. You're very purposeful in what you do, but you're doing it for a bigger purpose, and that is around sustainability and the climate. So for the leader that's listening right now, before we go into some of the intricacies of your expeditions, why is it important for us to be leading with a filter over our lens around climate and our commitment and responsibility to sustainability?

These are big questions. But, I mean, I think we're faced with two existential threats, if you like, and they don't relate to Covid or Ukraine. They really relate to climate change and biodiversity loss. I think they're the big narratives that are always in the background. And if you're in business, you need to be really aware of those two major drivers.

You know, we're getting to the stage now where, you know, in the case of carbon, 200 years, 250 years of emissions have got us to the point we're now at now we understand the errors of the past, but we now really need to put that genie back in the bottle. And of course, it's not easy. Any business person has to be aware not only of the impact they're having on the environment, but the impact now that the environment is having on them, on their business and the viability of their business. And in fact, now as a corporate, you know, board director of a corporate organization, you actually have to report back on what you think the impacts of a degraded nature or degraded climate might have on the viability of your. Of your business. You know, there's an actual drive to do that. And so it's important for you to understand what impacts you're having, but also the impacts that those things are having on the viability of your business, it's huge.

And for the individual who's sitting comfortably right now, maybe in a city, not really seeing too many effects at this point, you've been out and you've seen what's actually happening. So how can we bring your experiences into the listener's ears right now? And go, hey, it's time for us to get our eyes up and our ears open. This is what's happening. And, yeah, you might be comfortable now, but things could change. What do we have to start thinking about right now? Well.

Well, yeah, you know, I've always seen things from two perspectives because I've had two parallel kind of careers, if you like. One is as an environmental scientist. The other one is doing the adventure stuff, if you want to look at it like that. And the environment stuff tells me all the numbers I need to back up the stuff I see as a climber or a polar expeditioner to substantiate some of the stuff that I sort of anecdotally observe when I'm out there. So I've always been hitting people with the environmental messages based on the science of what's going on. I work a lot with industry and politicians, but the expeditions allow you to go to remote places, and then you still see humanity's footprint. And you realize, you know, Antarctica doesn't have any industry or defense or anything else, just some tourists and scientists, basically small numbers, relatively. And so any effects you see there, you know, are being caused elsewhere. And it really brings home to you how big our. Our footprint is. So to answer your question, I sort of use the fact that I see humanity's footprint in these really remote places as the start point and then bring it back to what an individual can do back here to change that. Because you don't change it there, you change it, you change it here.

And all too often, I'll be chatting about these things with leaders and with friends and family. Yeah, but look, there's no point in us doing anything because those big countries, like whatever the countries might be, they are dictating everything and they're undoing the good work. What's your response to people who have that kind of take on it now? We can't make a difference?

Well, it's interesting. I mean, expeditions involve two really useful skills that I've learned that I apply to other things. One is you break the total down into small pieces with any big undertaking. And the other one is you control what you can. So in Shackleton's little boat sailing across the ocean, you don't worry about the next storm that could wipe you out. You worry about focusing on navigating correctly, keeping the boat upright, keeping the watches accurate, and you just do what you can, and you don't worry about the rest. And we need to adopt that kind of mentality when it comes to dealing with these big existential problems like climate or biodiversity loss. In terms of the. Our contribution's too small for us to really worry about Australia, actually the right wing end of Australian politics, which was in the ascendancy until the Labour government won last year. We're really all about that. You know, we're only 1%, 1 1/2% of global carbon. Why should we worry? We should worry because as we sit here in wonderful Sumner, here in Christchurch, we've got this wonderful lifestyle here in New Zealand or Australia to which many other countries aspire. And if we're not seen to be setting a positive example, and I say we in a place like Australia, digging all the coal and getting all the natural gas out and selling, selling it that we can, then we seem to be preaching one thing and practicing something else. So we can't expect the more populous countries or the ones with a bigger footprint like India and China and the US to follow suit, or Indonesia right on our doorstep if we're not seen to be doing something ourselves. Goes back to the first rule of leadership is don't ask people to do stuff you're not prepared to do yourself.

Yeah, leadership is an action. It's a doing.

It's an action.

Yeah, I love that. And when we think about, say, you going from being a scientist to being an explorer, where was the transition there going from? Let's say, not necessarily in the lab, but, you know, more of that academic and the research based, hey, I want to get into the field. What happened there for you to transition across?

Well, there's never really been a distinction. I mean, I think in earlier life I struggled with the fact that I couldn't really clearly define a career path for me. Quite apart from the fact that back when I graduated from uni, there wasn't really sort of environmental science as a, as a topic. It was. I did geography first of all. And so there was never really a clear distinction. I couldn't really see one because I felt everything was just so interconnected that how do you disassociate your love of nature and your desire to protect it with the love of spending more time in it and challenging yourself in it. And it's always been part of one interconnected thing for me. But you Fast forward now 30 years from those early days and I now see actually that the adventure stuff is a very good way of getting your foot in the door to have an environmental conversation with someone and that intuitively people see that they're all interconnected anyway and people want to hear what I've seen in Antarctica. But they then want to know what they can do in Christchurch on a Tuesday morning if they're running a small to medium sized business.

I think there is no distinction really. And for me.

I've never really found one. I've always just been interested in the one lifestyle which is all about trying to do more in this space. Either spend time in it or advocate for it.

Maybe my time has come.

No, that's great. And this when you're adventuring and you're exploring, how have you found that impact the science, the data that you have here, has it shifted some of your perspectives of the science stuff when you've seen what's happening in the real world?

Yeah, look, I mean anything I say when I go on an expedition is not just a sort of anecdotal climbing a mountain or there's a glacier that looks to be retreating. That's climate change. I always back up anything I see out there with, with proper peer review science. But when you're out there and in very remote places, you have the opportunity to gather data, to actually feedback to scientists, to enrich their data set or help them more with the modeling they're doing or just report back generally on the sort of stuff you've seen. So I found actually it starts to cross fertilize. Yeah. Where you're out there and you're actually gathering data when you're on an expedition.

You know, it's really interesting like if we go back to.

The trip. So we had Roald Amundsen and Captain Scott heading down to be the first to get to the Pole. So obviously Roald Amundsen did the job and got home. Captain Scott, obviously we know the story there. But on the way back what I found fascinating was that even though they were under pressure, they're under stress, death was imminent. They were still gathering stuff for science researching.

Yeah, I think Scott famously, when he was, when, when the bodies were found, because two died initially and then of course Scott and the other two were, were found. Wilson and Bowers were found in the tent as a three at the end. And they had the tent and the, and, and the main sleds expedition sleds. But when they looked at the sleds, they found there 30 kilos of rock samples in there and that these guys have been desperately pulling for their lives with, you know, dwindling strength and yet they still bought, you know, 30 kilos of rocks with them.

What psychology do you think behind that? Why were, why did that happen?

I think, I think, you know, for me There's a few things. It's a bit like when you look at Hurley's wonderful images of the ghost ship of the Endurance when it, when it started to go down. I think for him as a photographer on Shackleton's expedition, focusing in on bringing back that creative end product of these wonderful images helped distract him from the fact that they were all thinking that death was imminent, you know, so it gave him a focus to sort of take his mind off the other stuff. And he could see that, you know, the crushed ship and these ghostly images we're bringing back were just these world class images of these incredible events as they were unfolding. I think for Scott, I think perhaps he felt, yes, science was incredibly important, but with Amundsen having beaten him to the prize, he certainly needed to come back with something. He wasn't going to get first place, so he certainly needed to come back with the science. So it was important to him that he brought the samples home.

That makes sense. And let's talk about Shackleton. So why Shackleton? What inspired you to really dig deeper, learn more about him and then follow in his footsteps?

Well, I mean, I'd always known about Shackleton. I mean, there are a few who don't. He's so well known. Even though ultimately he wasn't really successful with his expeditions. I mean, he went south with Scott on his original Discovery expedition, he was invalided home. He then went down again on his first expedition of his own and turned around 97 miles from the Pole. And then the third one was where he, the Endurance was lost and they famously did this rescue mission which saved everyone, but ultimately kind of wasn't successful in the original goals of the expedition. Then he went down a fourth time and died the night he arrived on South Georgia on his final expedition. So he wasn't in a traditional sense successful, but I like everything he stood for. You know, he was a people person, he was emotionally intelligent. He never asked people to do stuff he wasn't prepared to do himself. And he thought of his team first. You know, he brought all of them home alive on both of those expeditions that went wrong. The teams he was responsible for at least, and they're admirable qualities in a person and they're ones that we really need today, I think, 100%.

And it's interesting. So all those years ago he had those leadership traits and there's been hundreds of books written on leadership qualities, but actually he had them all way back then. What do you think influenced him to have such great leadership abilities and insights.

Well, I think it depends what attributes you mean. But I think, I mean he was a fan, I think he was a fantastic crisis leader. So he was good at reacting to change situations and improvising and coming up with a new plan and then inspiring people to want to follow that new plan. And I think that in turn required emotional intelligence, which is something he had in spades. And emotional intelligence is about understanding your strengths and weaknesses. And it's about understanding if you want to get a group of people pulling together, you've got to understand everybody's influence by slightly different messaging. And how do you sell the notion of pulling as one, as part of a team effort to different individuals and get them really excited about all of that? And he just had that. And I think that in turn came from the fact that he was really a bit of an outsider. So he was a. The Shackleton's as a family originally were Quakers and then became Catholics, but they were operating in an island of Michael Collins and separatism. And he had to tread the fine line, navigating all of that landscape, living in a place like Athai, where he was from, which is on the edge of the pale, which is very much the divide between the kind of Protestant, English influenced island and the Catholic island to the west. He was Merchant Navy rather than Royal Navy. Merchant Navy requires, you know, proper empathy with people to get their buy in. You can't just rely on rank to issue orders like in the Royal Navy. So he developed a style of, a persuasive style of doing things rather than just order. And then he had a lot of female influences in his life, his mother and his sisters particularly. And that made him a bit more empathetic than a typical Edwardian male would have been, which made him better at putting himself in other people's shoes and understanding how they were seeing a situation and then being able to relate to them. So I think there are lots of things that made him more emotionally aware.

Person and then he brought that to bear on the expeditions.

It's amazing. You mentioned one thing about crisis leadership and I think it's important just to talk a little bit more about that because I see the rhetoric I feel, hear and experience with people that I'm working with or speaking with. There's a lot of worry about the crisis that lays ahead in the coming months and years, but at the end of the day I feel there's always an ambush ahead, there's always some kind of crisis that's going to present itself. What have you learned from being in shackleton's footsteps to deal with crisis as a leader?

Well, I think, as I was saying, I think you control the things you can, and that allows you to sort of almost get rid of the noise of these bigger existential problems and worrying too much about them. You focus on the things you can control. You break down the total into small pieces and you work on solving the bit that, again, you have a capacity to control, and you chip away at that. You understand that it's important to show people tangible evidence that the agenda is moving. So if you've got a team in a state of crisis and you want to convince them that they're going to be able to save themselves, you show them what that looks like. And you periodically reward them with showing them that the agenda is really moving forward. And, you know, you remind them of the vision piece behind all of this. When Shackleton lost his ship, he said, the bad news is the mission to cross Antarctica is off the vision, which is the why we were here, which is to test ourselves and return as heroes or whatever it might have been. That bit is still intact. It's just the new mission is saving ourselves and we will come home showered in glory from having saved ourselves of the wreckage of this expedition, just as if we'd crossed Antarctica, which was the original goal. I use that sort of vision mission piece to talk. Talk to companies who may be involved in, say, fossil fuel energy generation and say, look, your vision might be to supply energy to businesses and people, to enable them to be all they can be. That doesn't need to change. It's just the way you generate the power needs to change. So I think there's so many things we can take from the expedition experience that help us remember the why we're doing something which helps us be better at changing, because we're not just focused on doing things the way we've always done them. It's all about, you know, kind of why and what we're trying to achieve is the big thing. How we do it can change in accordance with the landscape as it changes, because we've got this broader sense of purpose as to why we're doing it. So there's a whole, you know, it's such a rich vein of material as to how you navigate that, 100%.

I love how you depict that and you let others attach their meaning around how they're going to get there rather than be dictating and telling others. Yeah, that's really powerful as a leader.

Yeah. Look, I think in the climate space we've used Guilt and fear based messaging for such a long time to try and get change in the climate arena and it's very evidently not getting the job done quickly enough. Sure, it motivates some people when you tell them the problem is big, it's existential and you know, you've got to get cracking. Other people, they just become completely overwhelmed. The scale of the issue in it and it switches them off. They think, well it's too late, my contribution is too small. Even if I knew what it was I had to do, you know, so it's about getting that balance right, turning.

It to more of an aspirational focus for that vision rather than desperational.

Yeah, that's right. And you know it is how you look at problems on expeditions. You know, I can honestly say that when problems come to me my initial thought maybe, ah, guys, the problem that rapidly is replaced in my mind with what's the opportunity here to learn something? And so we had bad weather on Shackleton's trip. We would say this, this is bringing us closer to what he went through. Good weather, hey, good weather.

Enjoy it.

You know, fantastic. It's all about, you know, to use management speed, failing forward and trying to find a positive out of any sit that comes your way. And the more you suffer the closer brings you to that original experience. And you approach these things almost as challenges rather than obstacles blocking your way and you relish the opportunity to demonstrate your prowess in overcoming them. And it's how you frame that.

And tell me about the expedition. So why did you choose to reenact that? So from remind me of Elephant island to South Georgia. What inspired you to want to do that?

Well, it's the biggest, it's the big expedition in the biggest expedition really in the polar exploration space is Shackleton's survival journey. So it was always out there as a thing. I think the thing that really made me do it was Shackleton's granddaughter asking me to do it.

But a parallel theme was the fact that I'd done a lot of expeditions in the modern way and I was always interested in seeing how well I would have stacked up against the explorers of old doing things the old way, you know, without GPS and Gore Tex. And so you did it? We did it. You know, we rebuilt his boat traditionally. The idea is that it will be based here permanently and it's in its spiritual home in Christchurch or Akaroa, which is fantastic. Home of Worsley. We wore cotton smocks and woolens and leather boots. We ate lard. We used traditional navigation, know just A sextant and a compass and set off from Elephant island, where he'd left the majority of his men just off the coast of Antarctica and sailed to South Georgia in some pretty challenging conditions and then crossed through the mountains using, you know, the lack of equipment that he had.

It was a challenge to see if it could be done. But all the while I was thinking, you know, the leadership that he stood for, if we can demonstrate we can still do this in the modern era, as modern people, we haven't lost that ability to do it. Maybe there's a metaphor there. We can say, look, if we can do this kind of thing, can't we distill some of those lessons and apply them to some of the other problems we're faced with, you know, and which is what I now find myself doing. Incredible.

And what were some of those lessons that you, those leadership lessons that you learned personally rather than. Because it's one thing to read about it, but it's another thing to go and do it. What did you learn about yourself and around leadership on that journey?

Well, I think leadership is, you know, it's a privilege. It's something that has to be real. You know, you can't fake it. You've got to have genuine passion for doing things. You've got to empower your team. I think the idea of leading from above in a very hierarchical structure is a bit of a false, a falsehood. I think you have situational leadership where, yes, you have a kind of a chain of command, but in a little Keelis rowboat on the Southern Ocean, when a storm hits, you don't start looking through that chain of command you have. Each individual makes decisions that can affect the livelihood of everybody. And they do it.

In the knowledge that it's the right thing to do. You know, you need to react quickly. You need to get to that point by giving individuals ownership of whole expedition. I always say I want owners, not employees. You know, you want people who lose sleep over things, but also share in all the upsides of the expedition. And they're not just bit part players where me as the leader takes all the recognition in the event we're successful. But if there's a problem, they get blamed. You know, it's about really being equitable with that. You recruit better than you. I felt I was the weakest link as the sailor in the whole team on board the boat. And you know, it's interesting, when we did the exit interviews, or Discovery Channel, for whom we made a film, did exit interviews, they did an interview, a Bit like this. One on one with each of my team. Each of those team members without me in the room said they felt they were the most important contributor to the success of the expedition. Which when I first, they said it very diplomatically, but that was kind of the message. And I remember seeing those interviews thinking, should I be offended? And then I thought, well, actually, perhaps the best measure of a successful leader is the fact you've empowered your people to be all they can be. And they do genuinely feel. And maybe they were right that they were the main reason for the success. Baz with the climbing and Paul and Nick with the sailing and Ed for the filming and Seb for the boat building, they all did their thing and felt that they were the key thing and maybe that's the best measure of success.

Yeah, it says a lot about you in terms of your leadership empathy to go. They've got great skills and actually their skills in that specific area are much superior to mine in that area. Yeah, I'm going to give them and honor them, give them the time, the skills, the resources.

Yeah, your role is really to kind of, to allow them to operate at the highest level, you know, in the knowledge that each one of them has to still have not only knowledge of their area, but they've got a. Understand how their role fits in with everybody else's. So that if there's a problem occurring over here and it's just imminently going to, you know, fail and cost the expedition, they can kind of spot that and step out of what they're doing and intervene.

And what are you seeing nowadays? Because you get to connect with a lot of leaders, business leaders, team leaders, sporting leaders. What are you seeing now that people are maybe missing the boat on, so to speak, in terms of empowering others, in terms of hiring people who are much better at specific roles than they are.

I think leadership these days is perhaps even more ego driven than it was in the past, I think. So I think there's that. I think what we were just talking about, which is your role is really to empower others to excel, even if it means your role diminishing as a result. Sure, you get recognition as being called a leader of someone, but at the end of the day, your number one role should be to empower others to perform at the highest ability, to the best of their ability. That's the first thing. The other thing is short termism, which is what we really do suffer from. And we've got two unfortunate curves going on in the natural resources sort of environment space one is that the problems are getting, require more of a consistency of approach over a long time frame. And yet the people who are making those decisions are being judged on shorter and shorter time frames. And we as a society have been weaned onto needing instant hits and instant results in line with the sort of social media cycle. And yet the problems we're now realizing we're faced with, climate, loss of biodiversity, to quote two examples, they require really long term things. We've got to.

Now as leaders persuade people that this short to medium term pain they're going to face through sort of transitioning is worth it for the long term gain. But we're used to getting instant sugar hits quickly and it's not easy for leaders to sell the long story.

And you see that for publicly listed companies that's even more challenging because on a quarterly basis they're having to report to all of their investors and report to the stock exchange.

Yeah, you know, we are, we are living in a kind of growth obsessed society and we, you know, the fiduciary responsibility of a board director in a publicly listed company is to maximize profit for the shareholders. Evidently that's not really conducive to producing a good environmental result unless you're really taking all the environmental externalities into account. When you, when you work out what your actual profit is. When you factored in all the environmental costs of producing your goods as and services, the shining light that's appeared is this idea of.

There'S a thing called TCFD Task Force for Climate Related Financial Risk Disclosure. Basically means as a board member you've got to divulge what impacts you think the climate will have on your business, not what your business will have on the environment. And that's a board director's responsibility to do that. A board, you know, just as maximizing profit is so you've got, yes, bringing the dollars for the, for the shareholders, but you've also got to balance that with, with what impact a degraded climate might have on the viability of your business. Then you've got to sort of account for that and make sure you're hitting that issue off. And that forces you to be greener, I guess, which is a positive thing.

And do you believe that businesses, corporations, they can be financially successful and be contributing to a greater good?

Yes. I mean for sure. I mean at the end of the day, all the goods and services that people produce are consumed by us in society. And it would appear that we in society now are finally turning the corner on the environment piece and deciding that we need to protect it for the longer term. And so they're really only answerable ultimately to us as the consumer. We've just got to step up and, and show that whether it's electing the right officials into public office that we think will do their job well, or buying goods and services from corporations that we think are doing the right thing. But I think well and truly it's the future. And in terms of something like climate risk, you know, if we head that particular issue off with relatively small amounts of expenditure now, we'll protect our businesses and our society.

To the tune of orders of magnitude more expenditure later if we don't, if we don't get it right now. So it makes financial sense to do.

Absolutely. So Tim wanted to chat a little bit about risk. And I feel as a leader, taking risk, assessing risk, just embracing risk is an important part of moving forward. If we go back to the expedition, specifically Elephant island, straight to South Georgia, what were the risks that you came across? What were the risks you were willing to punt with and the ones you weren't? How did you assess? Asked Risk. Let's talk about that specific trip and how risk showed up and how you actually managed it.

Well, risk, look, it's a fundamental part of getting your planning right for any endeavor, but it's also fundamental to building resilience in a team. Because if you haven't assessed the risks, you can't prepare people for what is coming and therefore they can't psychologically prepare themselves for what is coming or be skilled appropriately to hopefully deal with some of those problems when they do come. So I wanted a situation where by the time, you know, six of us got in that keel less replica of the James Caird, the Alexander Shackleton, and headed off in the Southern Ocean, we all knew exactly what the risks were and we'd all signed off on them in our own minds. And we ran a very exhaustive risk assessment. It was 171 line items of a spreadsheet of stuff that we felt could go wrong, each one being an individual kind of risk. Fire, being hit by a whale, being run over by a ship, capsized, you know, you name it. And we'd had all those hard discussions about everything from, you know, what happens in that situation to if someone dies, do we continue? And, you know, that allows you to, as I say, build resilience and build a really kind of unified sense of why it is we're doing this thing and how far we're prepared to go to deliver it. And in reality, our risk Assessment is no different to the one that a corporate organisation might go through. It's just that maybe with a corporate organisation people feel the risks are not ones that they will face personally as an employee. You think it's going to happen maybe to the organisation, but they've got my back. Whereas for us we knew we were the ones in the boat. There's no one else who's going to die out there or suffer the reputational damage or the financial downside if this whole thing goes pear shaped. Whereas someone in a bigger corporate organization may feel that, you know, it's not going to affect them, or as society we might feel if climate change comes, it's going to affect somebody, won't be me. And so there's that sense that it's actually not going to affect you and it's important you bring it back to people and make them realize it could affect them and yet they are able to do something about it and it's important for them to do that.

I think again, great leadership comes down to influence in a positive and empowering way. So what I'm hearing is a leader's responsibility moving into the future is that we've got to remind everyone that they're on the boat and part of what happens is down to them, they can impact it. And in fact all these risks that sit out here, it could happen to them, it could be on their doorstep. Whether it's climate, whether it's geopolitical terrorism, we're all at play here.

That's why we've got to demonstrate pragmatic, what I call pragmatic optimism, which is a sort of phrase I think I've coined, I don't know, I might have read it somewhere, but it's all about calling it like it is, but remaining optimistic about prospects and saying, look, so when Shackleton loses the Endurance, it finally disappears below the waves. They don't all sit around crying and staring into the, into the distance. Maybe they did, but he gathered everyone around and said, now look, this is the situation we find ourselves in. This is what we have at our disposal. This is who we are as people. You do that, I do this, he does that. Let's see how that goes. We'll come back together, we'll change on the run and we'll, we'll sort of project manage our way out of this situation and we can do it. And I think actually that is empowering for people. If, rather than seeing climate or biodiversity loss as these existential problems you've got no control over, if someone actually spells out what they really look like and frames them properly and says, you know, the bad news is we face with these things, that's our reality. The good news is we can do something about them. And here's what your bit could be in that jigsaw to enable us to deliver that outcome longer term. I think that's actually empowering for people and certainly for corporates it plugs into what they do best, which is planning for the future and understanding how to balance budgets. And we just give them a carbon budget just like we give them a financial budget. And it kind of works for the way they operate. I think it's better than having an existential problem you just can't get your head around. You don't know how to plug in what it is you need to do into that equation for your business. If you can really spell it all out, a lot of corporate people are going, oh, thank goodness we've got it articulated in language that works for us, I think is actually helpful 100%.

And taking people from their head to their heart, I think is a key action step for people to move forward. So you and I are both fathers, both got young boys and they're both going to grow up and we may become grandfathers and great grandfathers. So what can we do with the next generation? What are the messages that we've got to be relaying to those youngsters, our kids, our grandkids, to ensure that we actually have this planet that we live on here in 100 years, in 200 years time?

Well, it's important for that next generation to show them what they can do. And I remember I'm now in my 50s, but I remember when I was in my 20s and I was at the Rio environment talks in 92 and I remember a guy my age then coming up to me as a 20something saying, you know, you, my son of the future, don't make the same mistakes we have made. And I now find myself saying the same thing. So I think the first thing we need to reassure the next generation down about is the fact that we are, we as a my generation are taking some responsibility for this and trying to do something, but that they are the ones who will inherit a lot of this. I think the key thing is showing them how they can play their part now in making a difference rather than waiting Till, if you're 14 and 11 like my kids or, you know, your son seven, you know, we very evidently can't wait for them to become corporate leaders or politicians to really influence the agenda, what sort of stuff can they do now? And I get people coming to my reforestation project who are kids and corporates and politicians, and the act of actually doing something about the problem really helps you live with the stress of worrying about this threat because you're actually making a difference. Schools, you know, in Australia and New Zealand, the population of people who are either at, you know, preschool school, tafe, which is, you know, technical college, university.

It'S about a fifth of our population, about 20%. They are a massive army of people that can be brought to bear on this issue if we can just tell them what they can do.

And as part of your work, they. Because you're on a massive mission and you're rewriting narratives, you're setting a vision for a more positive future from an.

Environment standpoint and climate.

What are you trying to impart? What's your message? If you'd one message to give a listener right now around, hey, here's how you can make a difference, what would that message be?

Well, I think it's be the change. Understand what you can do, which represents the most effective use of your time and skills to move the dial. Really, I find myself doing that. I find myself thinking, okay, which industries should I be working with if I really want to head off the climate juggernaut? You know, so I work with agriculture, I work with people in the housing sector. You know, 40% of Australia's carbon footprint comes from the energy required to heat light and cool buildings. So you've got to work with that sector, even if you don't have a burning desire to work with that sector. If you're serious about the issue and saving Antarctic, you have to work with people in the built environment sector, whether it's the embodied energy in buildings or the operational lights and cooling side. Agriculture, I work on reforestation and better regenerative agriculture techniques. Because regardless of what we do about everyone driving electric cars and decarbonising our electricity generation, they're all about not making the problem worse. But the agriculture piece is about drawing down all the excess CO2 that we've put up there over the last few hundred years. So, again, I'm quite strategic in the way I think about what sectors I should be working in if I'm serious about moving the dial. And I think each individual can do the same thing, I think everyone should pick a project close to them that they can get themselves involved with, where they can offer their skills, whether it's marketing or accounts or project management or ecology or anything in between, and actually get actively involved because that's over and above greening your own footprint. That's what will really move the dial.

That makes total sense. Yeah, it's interesting. I think it's one of those things we talk about but very few people take the action on. And I think making it simpler as you've done, reverse engineering it into bite sized chunks can actually make it more attractive to want to do something now. What about the government's role? So again, a narrative I hear from time to time is what's the point? I mean, the government has set this up and it's not going to work and we always just push it up here. It's their problem. What's your viewpoint on, hey, we've got this challenge, we want to try and solve for it and the government's over here. What do you do? Do you sit and worry about this, the government or do you say let's get on with it, let's focus on what's within our wheelhouse?

Yeah, look, it's a very interesting question. I actually feel that the better way to deliver outcomes is at a more local scale. So I actually think cities, for example, are a very good way forward. Christchurch has done a lot of good work with its regeneration, the red zone. And there's opportunities there, opportunities to show a phoenix rising from the ashes and show a very positive way forward from a position of adversity, which I think is a tremendous opportunity. So Christchurch has, I actually think local government is the best way to deliver things on the ground. They've got all the bylaws and the, and.

The means by which they can actually physically deliver things. I think broader government is all about just an enabling environment, creating the right sort of incentives and disincentives to do the wrong thing, setting up laws that determine what we should do. In Australia we have committed now under a Labour government to a 43% reduction in carbon based on 2005 baseline by 2030. Whether we make that or not is open to question. But it's federal government have committed to that, whereas the previous Liberal government committed to far less than that, 26 to 28%. So evidently federal government have to set out our stall and say that's where we want to go as a nation. The bigger vision piece. But I actually see the corporate world, I see schools and places of higher education and I see local government has actually been really good deliverers of that kind of, that kind of policy. Even though broader government perhaps sets the overall nation target.

See, that's really to me liberating and Positive, optimistic, as you would say, because it says that the everyday person can actually do something at a local level to impact a larger difference. It's huge.

Yeah, control what you can. I mean, I think green your own footprint. Look, I'm WWS ambassador in Australia, so not the wrestling, but the panda. But I went to the climate change talks in Lima, which are the ones preceding the 2015 Paris talks. And Lima, they committed to raise a bucket of money in what they call the Green Climate Fund. So all the world governments put money in commensurate with their ability to do that. So smaller countries put less, bigger countries put more. And they amassed US$10.2 billion.

In this pot. And it was meant to have been contributed to subsequently. And that's another issue. But at the time I thought, well, 10.2 billion, it's great to celebrate that. But the global economy at the time is 90 trillion. Wow. So 10.2 billion is 1 9,000th of that big figure. But in Australia, where I'm based, you know, we have the fourth biggest pension pot in the world at $2.5 trillion. Mums and dads, every employer has to contribute to your super. And then you top it up with your contribution. That bucket of money is 250 times the amount of money that the United nations has to solve climate change. In theory contributed to by all the world's governments. We can go online.

10 minutes after this interview, have a look at where your super is invested and move the little pie chart round and say, actually I wanted to go to the ethical side of the thing, please. I don't want to be invested in fossil fuel based companies anymore. I want to move out of that. Thanks very much. In the knowledge that the bucket of money that's then available to support the kind of companies doing the right thing is huge. So we, we actually have this tremendous capacity to really influence things just with the spend that we can bring to bear on supporting the right kinds of organizations. And I think once you start to become aware of what people power can do, it becomes actually very liberating.

Definitely. And it's just that one small personal decision like that could shift the needle.

Most of us could green our own personal footprint by tomorrow night. Wow.

How can we do that?

We can go online and change our super. We can decide to become involved in supporting a local charity that supports some sort of broader environmental good. We can change our diet, we can change the way we decide to travel tomorrow. You don't have to get in the car. You could cycle to work or work from home, which is of course more and more of a reality. You can go online and go to your electricity provider and decide to opt into green power rather than, rather than a normal suite of fossil fuel based energy that doesn't require changing any of the poles and wires to your house. It's just a choice that you've made that all the power you use in your house has now got to be derived from renewable energy. You can make all of those decisions and those things collectively. How you travel, what you eat, how your house is powered, how you invest your money, and whether you choose to engage in a local environmental cause are decisions you can make today. And that would probably be 90% of your carbon footprint. You could choose next time you fly to offset your flights by purchasing a really good carbon offset that supports both community and environment in maybe a developing country. You can make all of those decisions today.

So simple, so simple.

Once you've done that, you can rest assured now that your, your footprint is taken care of. Now let's get involved in that local initiative and think about broader stuff that we can actually engage with. But at least you no longer have that lingering feeling that you too are contributing at some level. You've ticked that box and you can, you can move on. It's actually very liberating.

Absolutely. And if we go a bit granular for a second, when you talk about eating, what are some of the changes, quick changes we could make from an eating perspective, nutrition perspective, that could help on that front?

I think it's about eating local. I think when I've crunched all the available information, I'm someone who's just come off five years of vegetarianism and actually I found that just a pure vegetarian diet.

I don't know that I got that entirely right. And so I supplemented that occasionally with fish. So I became a kind of a pretty much vegetarian with the odd bit of pescatarianism. But in Australia actually the seafood industry has got quite a high carbon footprint. So the calories of fossil fuel energy that get burnt to produce a calorie of edible food for seafood is actually really quite high in Australia because you bear in mind we're shipping a lot of it, you know, flying a lot of it, refrigerating it, it's quite a energy intensive exercise to physically go out and fish and process and refrigerate and that kind of stuff. So I actually decided that eating locally produced food, where the carbon footprint of most food is associated with the transport and packaging, eating fresh, eating local, where it doesn't have to travel anywhere is probably the best thing an individual can do. On the eating side it's not necessarily what you eat, it's a question of how far it's come. So if you get in your little boat and here we are near, in Sumner but near Akaroa, you could get out your little tinny and go and get some fish just off the coast here in your boat with more or less a zero carbon footprint associated with that activity. But you're buying in fish from somewhere else that comes on an aircraft very evidently you've got a much higher footprint. So it's about or even fruit from somewhere else. So it's not what you eat as much as where you get it from and how locally you can get it.

And again that's all self controlled. We, we've got full agency over what we do there.

Full agency, super simple full agency. And you know, it's just common sense and you know, frankly it is the way we kind of used to do things and yet we thought we knew, we knew better and now we're of course realizing the error of our ways. But it goes all the way back to the way supermarkets buy. They often buy produce even though it's produced locally from somewhere far further afield because they have a pre existing contract with those people. We need to untangle all of that and really think seriously about the carbon footprint of the food we eat.

Absolutely. Now I've got a few more questions. I know your time's very valuable but just a few more questions I'd love to ask you. So one's around adversity and we all face adversity, we can't ignore it. From your experience as a leader and being out in the field or in your own personal life, how have you found people respond differently to adversity? What does adversity do to leaders and people around you when they're making decisions?

Well, I mean adversity I think if you've done your risk and all of the planning around the say an expedition properly and you've framed it in such a way that people understand why they're doing it. Shackleton famously said, you know, men wanted their hazardous journey, months of bitter cold darkness, honour and recognition. In case of success, safe return doubtful. You know, it was probably apocryphal but he got people who came to the expedition expecting it to be miserable and tough, but ultimately kind of it would give them something spiritually and emotionally that they couldn't just buy. It wasn't money, it was more than that. So he framed it in a very intelligent way. But I guess people do react differently. Some people rise to a challenge, others are really sort of crushed by it. Others are burdened by it and think why did that problem come to visit me? Aren't I unfortunate? I urge people to try and reframe problems as challenges to be overcome and to be worked through and to try and find the positives out of that. And I've had some the good fortune to meet people who've suffered, you know, adversity in their lives and you know, at the time they saw it as adversity. Over time they've come to realize it was actually a gift that really help them to lift themselves and to reevaluate what was important in their lives. And they've seen that it's made them bring their A game to their lives almost in overcoming this apparent problem and they've actually ultimately regarded it as a positive thing. So I think it's about finding positives in adversity and that comes back down.

To your perception, your mindset. And when you say that I think of problems, personal, present possibilities, you know, so every time you've got that adversity the three Ps another problem presenting the possibility.

When we did our expedition we did it as a team of six like Shackleton before us and we got to South Georgia we found three of our team were out due to physical injury.

And that the three left were myself and Baz and Ed. So the expedition leader, the hard man of our expedition and the navigator, Paul. And we also had two cameramen who came in on a separate yacht the intention being to film the crossing of the mountains dressed in modern gear and you know, good caliber people. In the end they didn't participate. They, I think were employees rather than owners and didn't see that it was kind of worth it at some level to take the risk of doing it.

Three of my guys were out. Now I could have cried over the spilt milk or seen it positively and thought, well, hold on a second. Shackleton got here, three of his guys were out too, incapacitated and McCarthy left to look after the two that were injured. He did it as himself, Crean and of course Frank Worsley from Akara, the navigator and skipper. And can you believe that out of all of this we end up with the opportunity to cross the mountains of South Georgia with the same team of three as him, the leader, the hard man and the.

What's the chances of that?

What's the chances of that? That's a positive. So you could look at it negatively. We can look at it as a tremendous opportunity, a gift that's being presented. That's the way we really did view it at the time.

I love it. And when you got to the end and you all crossed the line, so to speak, how did you feel?

Well, ironically, we'd become so good at just breaking the thing down into bite sized chunks as you said that you got to the end. And bear in mind this had been six years of planning before several months of doing the thing.

It just felt like the end of that shift tick. And we got there and thought.

You know, sat down for the last time and looked at the old rusting whaling station and.

Looked at one another and there was no more shift to do. That was it. You know, we were kind of all a little bit bereft. I mean, gradually, of course it sinks in that you've done it but I think it took several months to really kind of acknowledge the fact that we'd, we'd finished, you know, and then you have the, the very real understanding that, you know, what we did with the last bits of Shackleton's trip, you know, we didn't live on the ice for 10 months and leave people on Elephant island for five months waiting for him to come back. And we didn't miss out on the dream of crossing Antarctica. We just built the boat, did the last rescue bit and then climbed the mountains. You know, that's a relatively short. And then you find yourself coming to terms with the enormity of what they managed to achieve. And you think, am I worthy of.

People telling me that I've done this thing? And I still would say that we didn't do what Shackleton did. We got as close as you can with bits of what he and Worsley managed to achieve but we didn't. And I think, you know, you have a sense of real kind of humility that comes with having done what we did. And then over time I've ended up with this realization that I need to use this thing to try and affect some greater good. And then you find yourself looking at all the leadership decisions that were made and how you can reapply them to some of the other issues we're facing. So the journey kind of goes on, really. To answer your question, I think that's.

Fascinating because the one thing, when I think of you, the more I've read about you and watching now, connecting with you, humility is a word. It comes right to the fore for me. You've got a strong sense of Humility, but also I feel like you've got a strong sense of personal responsibility to go, I did the thing, it was a big deal. I've learned a lot from it. Now how can I pass those learnings?

What am I going to do with it? What am I going to do with it? And I mean, if, if, if the emotional intelligence to understand that people are different in a team, to get them pulling as one requires being, selling the message slightly differently to each other. That's not a message for climate and how we deal with it. I don't know what is. As is being pragmatically optimistic, as is working back from the goal you seek to achieve with a kind of, you know, backwards mapping.

Project management based mindset almost that comes with expeditions all the way through to breaking the total into small pieces and really controlling what you can. I mean, all of these are skills that both Shackleton and we had to bring to bear on getting that trip achieved. But how relevant are they to what we now face hugely.

And just two last things. So one for the listener that's listening right now that want to learn some more of your leadership insights. Where can they go? And we'll make sure and put this in the show notes as well, but where can they go and read more or learn more about your insights?

Well, I suppose the first place is probably the website, if I can say that. Tim Jarvis there is a dot com, he's an architect, so don't ask him for leadership advice and don't ask me for architectural stuff or you could get some very bad outcomes. But so I would say the website then that will then lead you to a whole bunch of other things that I'm involved with. I have just made a film, Shackleton Greatest Journey of Survival, which is a one and a half hour documentary that's just launched in Australia, hopefully come to New Zealand too. And it's all about drilling down into some of the leadership that he stood for and how we can apply it to climate. And my hope is it will come here. And of course we've then got Thin Ice, which is the VR experience, which is showing here at the Antarctic center, which is using the adventure as a VR experience to really design for kids. But.

Big kids do, big kids love it too. And you get to see the adventure, be there immersively with wearing the goggles and then see the difference in the landscape between Shackleton's time and now. So timjarvis.org is sort of, I suppose, the place to go. There's lots of other stuff going on.

Well, we'll make sure and put that in the show notes.

Yeah. Great.

And one last question. So if we were to fast forward many, many years into the future, you knew that it was your last day. In fact, you knew you had about 10 minutes left on earth and someone very, very young, a young child in your life that you loved came up and asked, how can I lead my life on purpose? What advice would you share with them?

I would say find a thing.

Make it happen, and don't allow others to dissuade you. Don't allow others to tell you it's not possible.

I love it. Tim, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure to connect with you. Continually follow your journey.

Thank you.

Thank you. Hey guys, if you enjoyed the content today, please smash that subscribe button below. And if you want to become part of my community, I've got an amazing free Facebook group. Please come and join us. The link is in the description below. And also if you've got any questions about today's session, I'd love to know. Just comment below and I'll be sure to get back to you guys. Have the most amazing day.