Christiana Figueres - Climate and Our Leadership Challenge

An Interview with Sharon Daloz Parks & the Adaptive Leadership Network (October 23, 2022)

Full Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Sharon Parks: Good Morning! You are in Costa Rica at a very early hour.

Christiana Figueres: I have to tell you, Laura, when you live in the tropics, you really want to be up before the animals start. So I'm always up, certainly before dawn—4:30 is my get up time. So by now it's 7:00. All the animals are up. So I've already checked out all my friends. So it's not so early for me.

Sharon Parks: You said this hour could work for you, and we are very grateful. However, I am not Laura. Laura, do you want to come on camera?

Christiana Figueres: Let me see who Laura is—that’s Laura! So who was the other person I was speaking to?

Laura Berlind: This is Sharon Parks.

Christiana Figueres: That's Sharon! Oh my gosh!

Laura Berlind: I'm the one you email at midnight. This is the person who's going to do the interview with you.

Christiana Figueres: Sharon, so you and I are going to be in conversation, correct?

Sharon Parks: Correct.

Christiana Figueres: All right. Thank you for that.

Sharon Parks: We want you to know that there are about seventy people here this morning, from several countries, who are all deeply dedicated to caring about the art and practice of adaptive leadership in our time. You have seen a draft of our questions, but I have another one that will come along—and who knows how our conversation will evolve?

Christiana Figueres: Doesn't matter. I'll just follow you.

Sharon Parks: So let's begin with this question: A part of the art of leadership is the capacity to inspire. And, in adaptive leadership, we speak of the importance of showing them the future. You hold the conviction that “the creation of a transformed future requires first a condition of possibility.” You have written compellingly about the stubborn gritty optimism required in the face of the now daunting specter of climate change and its certain consequences. And early on, after your appointment as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, you came to believe that your “primary task was to be a beacon of possibility that would allow everyone to find a way to a solution together.” Can you describe how you came to that sense you’re your primary responsibility was to be a beacon of possibility?

Christiana Figueres: Yes, that's actually pretty simple. Because, Sharon, I took over the responsibility for the international negotiations in June of 2010. That was 6 months after the Copenhagen debacle, for anyone who remembers that, and that was a conference that was held in Copenhagen. It was known by many before we got there as "Hope-in-hagen" because there was so much hope that it would be at that summit that the world would adopt a global climate agreement. And for many different reasons, that did not occur. Quite to the contrary, it was probably one of the most successful failures of the United Nations. I call it a successful failure because we derived many, many lessons from that. But the consequence of that is that there were thousands of us who had been in Copenhagen, who thought of ourselves as survivors of Copenhagen, and who went away from that meeting in utter despair and in other utter gloom—fully convinced that there would never be a possibility to get a global agreement.

In fact, in my very first press conference, as newly minted Executive Secretary, some journalist asked me: "So, Ms. Figueres, do you think a global agreement is ever going to be possible?" And I heard myself (without engaging my brain) say, "not in my lifetime". And that "not in my lifetime" came from me, of course—deeply from me—but it also was reflecting the mood of the entire system. Everyone was convinced that it was too complicated, too difficult, too expensive, too many interests, competing interests, and the most despondent of all said, “It's too late anyway, so let's not even try again.” So, obviously, when you then pick up that responsibility . . . I don't remember what the written terms of reference were that I got from the Secretary General, then Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, but, basically, you know, his instructions to me were “pick up those pieces from the garbage can, and see if you can do anything with it.”

Well, that's a daunting task. And it was pretty clear to me by the time I left that press conference that if that was the energy that I was bringing to this process, then there was no possibility of change. And my responsibility was precisely to devote all my energy, all my time, all my conviction, and all my ingenuity to prove myself wrong and to begin to spark in everyone's head, heart, mind, and soul, the tiny little light of possibility. Yes, it seems completely impossible now, but can we go? And I remember drawing for my team, drawing a big arc on the whiteboard and saying, “Okay, let's draw an arc that goes from Impossible, to Maybe Probable, to Likely, to Possible, and then to Delivered.” And we went through that arc in 5 years, from 2010 to 2015, with the attitude that impossible, which is what I inherited, is actually not a fact. It's an attitude. It's only an attitude. And attitudes we can change. So, the transformation of the attitude was at the bottom of the Paris Agreement—and then, of course, there were a couple of bells and whistles to go with that as well.

Sharon Parks: Thank you, and thank you for the spirit and conviction that you are embodying and that we get to glimpse this morning and recognize that it did take form in you and clearly continues to be at work in this volatile time.

In the practice of adaptive leadership, we typically, as you did, have to work across boundaries, deep and persistent differences, and many factions, and we must strategically intervene in complex systems and act beyond our formal authority. As you have reflected on the process of bringing almost 200 countries together, along with 500 UN staff members, negotiating more than 60 topics across five negotiating tracks, you have written that you “continually paid attention to the underlying challenging dynamics, guiding them into a constructive space so that innovative solutions could emerge from the fertile ground of collective participation and wisdom. And that careful and well targeted interventions were repeatedly necessary to ensure forward momentum, but could never become overbearing.” Can you describe an example of guiding challenging dynamics into a constructive space and also examples of well targeted interventions?

Christiana Figueres: As you can imagine, there are just so many of those. But perhaps I would like to focus on one level of the system, because part of this transformation that needed to occur (and it's not just relevant for that, it's relevant in anything that we want to do) is there are always different levels of the system, because the system by definition has different levels. You have to understand how those levels of the system interact with each other and how what is present at one level of a system is present in all levels of the system. Hence, if you change one factor at one level of the system, even if you're not targeting all levels, there is an indirect change that occurs at all other levels.

And it was pretty evident to me that there were several levels of the system that were involved, and the one over which I had most control was myself. That's the level of self, obviously. And then the next level of the system was the 500 members of the UNFCC secretariat staff. Outside of that, then you have obviously the governments. That's the next level of the system. And then you have all the stakeholders. So at least you have four levels of the system, but you could subdivide that into many others.

So, to just take the Secretariat, because most people when they think about the Paris Agreement, they immediately go to what governments did. Yes, governments did an amazing job. But we would never have been able to seed the ground for that change if we hadn't started at the level of the system that is right underneath that one, which is the Secretariat, those 500 people who, in 2010, when I assumed the responsibility were completely demoralized, fractured, despondent, just completely in the garbage can, honestly. Because they had worked so hard for the Copenhagen meeting and nothing had come of it, and the Secretariat was hugely blamed for it. So to work with those 500 people to understand their pain—and I could because I was in Copenhagen, not as a member of the Secretariat, but I was there as a negotiator. So I could really empathize with the pain. I felt the pain - so I embraced that pain and embraced that despondency, understanding where it was coming from and useing the pain as the chrysalis for growth.

So how then do you, do I, in this case, start motivating the people, bringing new skills into the team, bringing self-confidence, fostering self-confidence in themselves, which had been completely eroded, strengthening the team over many years actually until they went from a team that was in the garbage can to the top performing organization that they were in 2015, without whom we never would've been able to have that agreement? Rallying the troops was very, very important. And that changed the dynamics at that level of the system. You can't have dynamics of desperation and gloom and utter hopelessness at one level of the system and expect the other level of the system to behave any differently. They're all intertwined.

So you start with the ones that you can influence the most, which was first myself, I'm responsible for myself. And then the Secretariat. And over time, I could see that transformation was occurring. And when they became the top performing organization that they did, then I knew that we were ready to tackle the larger task. Of course, at the same time, I was doing a very similar process with governments and with other stakeholders. But you have to challenge the dynamics. You have to understand where you are. What is the dynamic that is ruling the capacity to act—the agency of those who are within the system? And where do you want to take that dynamic and understand that things are always changing? Right?

“Impermanence” is one of my huge lessons that I have learned, which is everything is always changing. There's nothing permanent. And so the important thing is to give a direction to the change because change occurs anyway. Can you give a direction to the change so that you can begin to see that the dynamics are moving in the direction that is needed?

And just as a quick example of an intervention with my team: The management team was 14 people with whom we met, of course, every week and throughout all the years. And there was one person there responsible for a very large and important team under him, who was always--whenever we made a suggestion, "let's do this, let's do that, we had a plan, we had a strategy"—and he would always pull it down. "No, that's not going to work because this and this and this and that." And I saw myself in the beginning getting very angry with him. "Well, come on, you know, we have to think of innovative things. We have to do things differently because how we did them before is not working so obviously we have to change." And then one morning I woke up and I went: "Oh my God. He is actually being incredibly helpful! He is the Cassandra of the team. He is the one that is ensuring that there's always a critical view, that he is the one who can find the weaknesses to any plan, to any strategy. He's the one that is finding the weak links. He is absolutely brilliant. His role is really, really important." So then I had a meeting with all of them and I said: "Right, this person is now going to be officially, permanently the Cassandra in the group, and I'm going to give you the responsibility of always pointing toward our blind spots that we have not seen.

And it was so helpful, right? So everybody thought this was crazy. Some of them thought it was funny, but most of them thought it was crazy. But that intervention, making him move from being the obstreperous person to being the most helpful person on the team, was very helpful for him because then he felt heard and empowered, and he started thinking even more critically, becoming more helpful to the team.

Sharon Parks: Wonderful example! Thank you. In your talking about how every part of the system, every dimension of our reality is connected to every other dimension, we want to ask you a particular question arising from this conference as we have been holding together the challenges of governance, equity, and climate. As you are well aware, there are those who arguably and compellingly, for very good reasons, would say that we really cannot put our energies into climate until we have dealt with the issues of equity and inequity in our societies and in our world. And there are others who will say we have to deal with climate first, and we'll deal with equity later because of the urgency of climate change. How have you responded to that? How do you hold that in your own practice of leadership?

Christiana Figueres: Well, I actually have come to the point where I think it's humorous that people think that there is actually a chronology to all of that. There's just no chronology to it. The fact is, it is all one package, if you will. There's no doubt that climate is the mother of all injustices and, if we have injustice today, then it's being exacerbated by climate change. So when we address climate change, we have to address not just the physical parts of it, not just the CO2 in the air, we have to address, with the same intention, we have to address the differences that are dividing us racially, gender wise, income wise, on and on and on, generational wise—there is so much intergenerational animosity right now.

And the fact is that what climate does, just think of climate a little bit as a yeast in the bigger bread of our social existence here on this planet. And what it does is it accelerates it, right? It makes anything that is there grow larger. It makes the storms, the droughts, the floods more frequent and more intense. It makes the inequities between people more intense. It makes the injustices that we have seen for years—north and south, one generation to the other, one gender to the other—more severe. And so that is why, when you speak about climate, you can't only have a technical response because a technical response only puts a band-aid on the issue and everything else is festering underneath.

So you have to understand the interrelationships that are already here - that were not produced by climate - they're already here. They always were here. I think young people call it intersectionality. But it's basically the fact that all of this is interrelated. It's only us humans in our infinite wisdom that think that we can parse this out, that we can deal with X over here, Y over here, and W over there. No, in reality, in our world, all of this is interconnected. We have to perhaps separate it and give it different names because otherwise we wouldn't be able to conceive it in our feeble little brain. But the fact is all of this is completely interrelated.

Think of it as a tapestry that is woven from many different color threads. It's not like you can say "Okay, well, let's pick the blue because blue is my favorite color. Let's work on the blue first, and we'll worry about everything else later." Well, then you don't have a tapestry. So it's all completely interrelated, and hence there is no chronology. And that is why climate is both so challenging, but also so transformational. It is putting an alarm clock into the transformation, the social and environmental transformations that need to occur, but that of their own don't have an alarm clock. Climate puts the alarm clock in, because science has told us we have to be at a certain point in our emissions by the end of this decade. So climate is the accelerant and the alarm clock for all of these injustices.

Sharon Parks: Someone here just said, “Wow!” It probably didn't make it into your microphone. But I think that's what we feel in our souls when you name the profound interconnectivity, and it is so much a part of our work in this time to actually be able to grasp that reality. In adaptive leadership, and in keeping with that reality of interconnectivity, we often contend that “you don't even think of doing it by yourself.” No one can move a complex system by themselves. We need, at least, partners, allies, and confidants. And you have in the acknowledgements of your current book, The Future We Choose, (I always look at acknowledgements), you have one of the longest such lists I have ever seen in any book of people you regard as essential partners, colleagues, advisors, close friends and family. Good partners and allies are often hard to find. How have you cultivated this network and can you give an example of a time when an ally or a confidant was absolutely crucial to making progress?

Christiana Figueres: When you have something as daunting as climate change, as you said at the beginning, you don't even think of doing it yourself. That is like ridiculous. That would be like, you know, an ant thinking "OK, I'm gonna pick up the elephant all by my little self.” I mean, it is just ridiculous, right? You have to. There's just no other way around working with others and honestly having the trust that everyone else is also moving in the same direction. And that's not always easy because you don't agree with everyone. You don't agree that, you know, whatever intervention or whatever position or whatever suggested strategy, you don't agree with everyone. But you have to understand that you may not agree with the HOW that they're suggesting right now, but you are all together in the WHAT. And the WHAT has to be something that you are sharing.

Think about it a little bit as a large river that has many tributaries, and all these tributaries come from different mountains, and through different landscapes, and they're each very different and having very different dynamics. But they're all adding water independently. Right? And the origins of that water are very different, but they're all contributing to the big river. And that big river sets the direction, but is not a straight line. Rivers flow in many wandering currents - and that's the way the change occurs - in a wandering fashion. So you have to also be flexible. You don't simply say, "Okay, this is where I want to go." No, you know what your destination is. That's given by science in climate change. And then you have to be willing to be flexible and to take on the differences that you are exposed to.

So, here was a very fun example of that. December, 2014, we're in Lima, Peru, at the summit that was just one year before the Paris Agreement. And it was very important that at that meeting we get to very fundamental principles that were going to be the backbone for the Paris Agreement. If we hadn't gotten that then in 2014, we wouldn't have been able to build the Paris Agreement over the next 12 months. And we had done a pretty good job over the previous two weeks. But here we were down to the line, and there was one piece that was still not agreed among all countries. And that was how do you account for both the historical responsibility that is very different between North and South and the future responsibility that becomes a shared responsibility. And, that, as you can imagine, is absolutely fundamental to an agreement that has to have all countries on board.

So there we were at two o'clock in the morning. I'm sitting in my office. I'm looking at this text. Everybody's hysterical because, you know, we don't have the agreement in the text. And I'm looking at it and looking at it, and it just does not gel for me. I'm like, “God, this text is just not going . . . And I hear a knock on my door. Right? Two o'clock in the morning, I open my door. Standing in front of the door is the Minister of Climate Change of China. And he says, “Madame Secretary, I thought I would bring you an idea.” And I said, “Please do come in.” So he sits there and very, very, very brilliantly he brings my memory back to a bilateral agreement that the United States and China had signed just a few months prior to that—a bilateral agreement. But, here in Peru, what we were trying to do was a multilateralagreement that 196 countries could agree to. This is very different from a bilateral agreement. And he says, I think there might be something there that could help today. And then he stood up and he said goodbye. He stood up, and I was like, “You've got to be kidding me. What?”

So then I pull up this agreement right on my screen, and I begin to examine every word. Now, of course, I had read the agreement, I had been part of it, and I was so grateful for it. And I begin to go through that agreement word by word, and then all of a sudden the phrase sticks out to me, and I'm like, “Shit, this is it! This is it!”

So I take that phrase that the two of them had agreed on. I write it on a little piece of paper. I stick it in the pocket of my pants, and I run down the hall. And people are beginning to look at me, and I'm like, “Oh, oh, this is not good.” So then I compose myself. I walk very elegantly, very gracefully over to the US delegation office, knock on their door, and I say, “Guys, the Chinese have just made a suggestion—indirectly—but this is the suggestion. Can you live with this?” And they say, “That's from our agreement.” I say, “That's the point, that's what he told me.” They say, “Yes we agreed with it then. Of course we can agree to it.” I say, “Okay, so can you then work it into the text?” So then the lawyers are called. By now it's four o'clock in the morning. The US lawyers start to put it into the text, da, da, da, da, da. They take the Chinese phrase, they make some changes and they say, “Well, this is what we can lay within this text.”

So then I write it on a little piece of paper, put that in my pocket, and then I walk very gracefully, because you can imagine there are thousands of people watching me right outside in the halls because they want to know what the heck is going on. Why can't we adopt this text? Well, we can't adopt the text because we have this piece that is not agreed to. So I walk over, you know, my heart is pounding. I walk over very, very slowly over to the Chinese, knock on their door. Of course, they're all awake waiting for me. And I go, "Hmm, this is what the US could live with. Can you live with it?" And they say, "Well, you're gonna change this, change that." Anyway, I went back and forth, back and forth, until we had something that they could all live with.

And then I asked the United States, “While I get that text ready, (because you have to get it ready in the UN system), can you please negotiate that with all developed countries?” And to the Chinese, Can you please negotiate it with all developing countries?” So the three of us were working in tandem. One, we're working on developed countries. The other's were working on developing countries. I was working with the UN system to get it into the text and then, you know, we pulled it all together.

But what was amazing to me in that story is who did the solution come from? It came from China at two o'clock in the morning, personally delivered through the minister. Someone who you would think, if you read the US press, you always think that the Chinese are obstreperous and they're not helpful and da da, da da. Well, he was incredibly helpful. He was very, very helpful. The whole time, during my whole term, he was incredibly helpful. And what he did in Peru saved the day and laid the foundation for the Paris Agreement.

Sharon Parks: Wow. This time I’m sure you can hear the wows and applause. And I think part of what we so appreciate is the profound humanity that you covey through your account—and we identify with your racing down the hall and then realizing you have to look elegant.

Christiana Figueres: Even if it's two o'clock in the morning!

Sharon Parks: Another dimension of what we are all caring about here is that in the practice of adaptive leadership we must recognize that often people can feel that change might be a good thing, and we don't necessarily fear it, but we do fear loss. Understanding that real and perceived losses are central to the resistance to addressing our climate challenge, how did you recognize and manage the fear of loss and grief as you worked with differing countries and factions? An obvious case is that, given that there are trillions of dollars of carbon assets, oil, gas, coal, still in the ground, what kinds of incentives have best chance of motivating leadership in highly dependent petrol states (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia, Venezuela, etc.) to assume significant losses and not extract such resources. On the other hand, how do you work with the issues of loss with the vulnerable 20, or sometimes we say the vulnerable 40, whose countries may not survive at all, managing loss and grief in the midst of change?

Christiana Figueres: Yeah. Wow. That's I think the most difficult part, embracing that loss and that pain that so many people are facing for their countries, their homes, their livelihoods, and that all of us are facing for our biodiversity and for our ecosystems that are degrading so rapidly. The sense of loss on this planet, the sense that the past 70 years were the pinnacle of richness of life, richness of the web of life, was at its richest just before we started destroying it. And that's really painful. That's painful, and that is what is at the bottom of the climate grief that so many young people are feeling. So my first reaction to loss is to embrace the loss. To embrace the fear, to embrace the pain that comes with it, not to deny it, because if we deny it, it eats us up. So we have to be courageous enough to embrace the loss and to find that loss inside of ourselves because we all feel the loss, even if it's existential loss like some people feel, but if we don't feel at least that tinge of loss in ourselves, there's no way that we can develop the empathy for those that feel existential threat. That's the first part.

The second part is for those countries that are in existential threat, that sense of solidarity with those people has to come from a deepness inside of us that is way deeper than our head. Way, way, way deeper than our head. I'm sitting here at home in Costa Rica. I live right on the beach and I can tell you last year was the first year that I was living here, and actually just a year ago, because it was October, it was the full moon of October and we usually have a king tide. And it was the first time that I had experienced the king tide. And I was petrified, because all of a sudden this incredible ocean was just coming at me with such a force, with such a vigor, completely unstoppable. And I forced myself to stay out there and take all of that in throughout the entire night because I knew that if it got any worse I could run, get my sneakers and climb the mountain behind me. But I really wanted to get in touch with the dread that is felt, for example, by Pacific Islanders who have no mountain to go to because their islands are just a few inches off sea level. So that loss, that fear is something that is deeply human and that all of us have to be able to touch inside of us if we want to be able to be productive agents and be able to work with those most vulnerable people.

For those people, the work is to get in touch with that fear, but also help them to accelerate their resilience. And what I have always admired so much is the capacity, that especially those people have to increase their resilience. For them it's not a legal text—it's their daily experience, their daily life. So they've been working on this for a long time without knowing—and here's the difficulty—without knowing if they're going to succeed. Because nobody can guarantee success. Let's just deal with that. Nobody knows if we will be able to address climate change in a timely fashion. Nobody can guarantee success. That does not mean that we're indifferent to it. The Pacific Islanders definitely are not indifferent. They're doing everything they can every single day to increase their resilience and to adapt to the changing circumstances that they have.

Now, the third piece is the loss of income. Let's put it the way it is, excess income, on the part of those countries that have been selling oil and gas for decades. First, let's accept that when they started that, certainly in Saudi Arabia and that whole neighborhood there, all the Gulf states, when they discovered oil, they were very poor. They became very quickly rich. But they had no idea when they started this, of the consequences that it would have. So let's not blame them for having done that because they had no idea. Where they do have responsibility is for the future. Now that we all know (and they know also), what is their responsibility for the future? And what I did with them, because obviously I needed them to adopt the Paris Agreement as well, was to invite them to look into their future and to understand. So what does the future look like for them? They already live in one of the hottest areas of the world. If we get any hotter, how are they going to deal with that? How are they going to even survive? How are they going to walk outside? They're already living almost from air conditioner to air conditioner. Will they be able to continue that? How are they going to import all of their food? Just think yourselves into the future and what do you want to do?

And, furthermore, because renewable energies are today already commercially competitive against fossil fuels, we already know that fossil fuels are stranded assets. But despite the craziness that we have right now because of the Russian invasion, which is an anomalous circumstance, that does not reflect the fact that oil and gas are no longer commercially competitive. They're also no longer politically competitive because everyone has understood the price that we pay for being dependent on oil and gas that comes from erratic states. So those countries have understood that they're sitting on very valuable assets right now, but that those assets in the mid and long term are stranded. Because they have built an economy that is dependent, on one income, oil and gas, they need to diversify their economy. And that's what they've been doing. And we don't read about that because they're doing it very, very carefully and very much under guarded measures. But they are diversifying their income because they know that 20, 30 years from now, they will not be able to sell any more oil and gas, or certainly not the quantities that they're selling now. They will have some residual, it's a long tail, some residual sales, but certainly not what they're doing right now. And they understood. I didn't travel to any country more than I traveled to Saudi Arabia in the preparation for the Paris Agreement. I went there more often because I knew that they were the ones that were going to act as the most powerful hand break. And I needed, we needed, the system needed for them to be able to understand the consequences for them if we did not adopt the Paris Agreement. So loss comes in many different flavors, in many different ways, and we deal with loss differently depending on the characteristics of the loss.

Sharon Parks: Thank you. And we might add that sometimes the loss is disappointment in our own efforts. Thus leadership is a practice, and we learn the art of leadership in part through experimentation. And we have discovered that often we learn the most from our own leadership failure. Is there anything that you have learned about leadership through your own experience of failure?

Christiana Figueres: A lot. A lot. And first let me say that I just am always grateful for failures and that's why I called Copenhagen the most successful failure of the United Nations because we had a 300 page study written by a third party that went into all the aspects that were not well done in Copenhagen. And it became our Bible. It became our Bible on how to do things differently and was really the center of a lot of the innovation that came over the years in order to improve the process and the system. And sometimes what I think is fun about failures is that sometimes failure happens not because you caused it, but just because the link was not strong enough. And so you have to understand that. Sometimes you want to deliberately break the mold that has been used for many years and in order to open up space for something different, and something is more helpful to the current situation.

And what was evident to me throughout those six years is that we started learning from failure slowly, I would say. Because we went from, let's understand what happened in Copenhagen, then let's go to the next summit, which was in Mexico and let's do an analysis of what were the successes and failures there. And we started doing this on a yearly basis. Then it was pretty evident to me that's not enough. Let's do this on a six month or three-month basis. And then by the time we got to Lima in 2014 and certainly for Paris, we were doing an analysis of weaknesses and failures every night. So we set up something that we called the operation center, which was a nightly session in front of a whiteboard. I was usually on the floor because by that time I was so exhausted. So I was always sitting on the floor with my team sitting much more demurely in chairs. And we had the best strategists there around us, and we went through what happened that day. Because we always had a strategy for each of these negotiations that we went in with, fully well-knowing that it was a good intention, but that it would be changed constantly. And we learned, never stick to the original plan.

Because of impermanence. Things are always changing. So you have to have a plan, but you have to be flexible, right? Go as a river. Go as a river. Do not go as a highway. You go as a river. And so every night we would get together. We would get from the whole 500 people who were supporting this, they would send in their reports, we would distill it, we would put it all on a whiteboard, and we would go - right, what can we continue to do tomorrow that we planned that we would do? And what needs to be changed immediately because it did not work today? And so this commitment to see and learn from what had not, I mean, if you want to call it failure, that's fine. I always called it like learning opportunities. What are the learning opportunities today? And then go as a river - change immediately that night. Make the decision, right, tomorrow we're not going to do this, we're going to do that. And then send out that guidance to those who had to then take that to the different tables.

So especially when you're under a high-pressure system that needs to deliver something by a particular date, it is really important to have those constant tweaking opportunities that are looking not just for what did we do well today and let's pat ourselves on the back, but, more importantly, in our Cassandra style, what happened today that cannot happen tomorrow? And that was incredibly helpful, incredibly helpful. That "OC", as we called it, the Operation Center, was the nerve of everything that happened. It was truly responsible for being able to fine tune constantly, so that we could prove ourselves wrong constantly. "Oh, we had thought of this, but obviously that's not going to work. Change this!"

So go as a river and learn, learn, learn, learn from everything that goes on.

Sharon Parks: As a part of that, (and you seem to embody this), but we want to invite you to reflect on this particularly: Along with others, you are now calling for measured optimism in tandem with carefully directed, nonviolent outrage. How do you, in your ongoing work, think about that dialectic between optimism and outrage and how those are so important to you that you actually have a podcast by that name?

Christiana Figueres: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that shout out. Yes, we have podcasts called “Outrage and Optimism” because we feel like those are two energies that we bring to this, and we should all bring to this. We should have to be outraged by the fact that it has taken us so long to address this, and we have to be optimistic because otherwise we can't go farther. So, I saw that this measured optimism, I'm a little bit concerned about myself if I ever said “measured” optimism. I have to go back and find out when did I say that? Because that is absolutely not my intent!

So here we go. Failure, failure, let's learn. It's not measured optimism that we can bring to this now, it's urgent optimism. Not measured. Urgent optimism. Because, let me speak to the urgency, right? Science has been abundantly clear, lucidly clear that we have to be at one half current global emissions by 2030. That is only seven years from now. Seven and two months. That is a scary deadline. And so what we have to bring to this is a sense of urgency. Not a sense of measured anything. Forget that. It's urgency.

And I call it “stubborn optimism” because we know that we're going to encounter many different barriers, many different challenges. And that doesn't mean that we then sit back and twiddle our thumbs. It means that we then look for, “Okay, can't go through this door, then where's the window? Well, we go through the window. Can we go under the door? Over the door? On the side of the door?” We always have to look for the opportunities to move forward. And, as I’ve said, we are understanding that there are many different levels of the system. So if one thing gets stuck at one level of the system, you can work at the other level of the system and move forward.

So that always has to be there. And the difficult thing for me, frankly, is to do this at the same time as I have a non-attachment to outcome. Because we cannot guarantee success. That to me is my own personal, deepest pain - that we cannot guarantee success. But that doesn't mean that we don't give it our absolute darndest.

Now on optimism, I really want to be very clear what I mean by optimism. Optimism to me is not being naive and ignoring the science or ignoring the consequences that we're already seeing. Or ignoring the fact that Pakistan, one third of it, is currently underwater. That's not what I mean. Optimism has to be fully, fully knowledgeable about the science projections and about the consequences now. We're absolutely imbued with the reality. Optimism is also not simply naivete. Sitting back there and saying, "Oh, well, somebody else will take care of it." No, that's not optimism either. For me, optimism is the necessary input, the necessary energy that I bring to any challenge. It's not the output. It's not, “Okay, we did a great job today,” and therefore we are optimistic. No, that's a celebration. And honestly, we don't celebrate enough. So little successes that you have, celebrate them, right? Let's celebrate them. But that's not optimism. Optimism is not at the end of a process with a success. It's at the beginning of the process in front of any challenge that we're facing, whether that's a personal, a family, a work, or a global challenge. Whatever challenge it is, we have to go at it with optimism if we want to stand a chance of any success. Because if you stand in front of any challenge, (and I can go into many—but you can pick your own challenge, whatever your personal challenge is with your spouse, with your children, with your grandchildren, with your grandmother, whatever. If you have a challenge and you go at it with pessimism or with fatalism, you are bound to not succeed at all. Optimism does not guarantee success, but it certainly gets us much closer to success.

So that's optimism for me. It's my daily choice that I make when I wake up in the morning. I choose to be optimistic about our work. It's a choice. It's a courageous, responsible choice because if I don't have that positive attitude, I honestly can't get out of bed. I do a lot of reading on the science about the consequences. Can you imagine? I would be miserable and unable to work. So you have to be very informed, but you have to make a choice: “Yes, I understand the threat that we're facing, and precisely because of that threat, that is why I get up in the morning and I am going to do my absolute darndest, precisely because of that. Because, frankly, we don't have an option. Not delivering on climate change is not an option.” We can't do that. The consequences are so dire that there's no way that we cannot go at this with our full, full agency.

Sharon Parks: Reflecting on what you are saying as you talk about making that choice, what you do every morning when you wake up, and that the work is like a meandering river, it's not a straight highway and so forth, we sometimes say that in adaptive territory you have to develop a stomach for chaos, and clearly you have done that. And clearly you know what we're talking about when we say that. We are wondering, we are curious, do you have personal practices that help you to hold steady, to make that choice every morning in the face of discouragement, hostility, obstructions, turbulence, and the like?

Christiana Figueres: I do. I was very blessed, in the year 2013, to have discovered the teachings of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen Master who just passed on this year and who was an engaged Buddhist monk who taught the most valuable personal skills that I have ever encountered. And, in the year 2013, I discovered him because I was thrown into the most severe personal marital trauma that I had ever experienced. And it was 2013 and I was in the middle of creating the groundwork for the Paris Agreement. And, talk about chaos! I had total chaos and trauma in my personal life and very difficult circumstances in my professional life. And so I was very blessed to discover Thich Nhat Hanh who I became a student of. And those of us who are students of his call him Thây (teacher).

And he has many, many lessons but one that was incredibly helpful to me is the notion of impermanence that I've already spoken of. The fact that you cannot get attached to anything, any experience that you're having in life or to anything else, because it is here now, but it will not be there in the same form tomorrow. Impermanence is a reality. It's a reality of our human experience. It's a reality of nature. It's a reality of physics. It's a reality. It's a constant reality. The only thing that is constant is impermanence. And so to understand that everything is constantly changing means that you have the opportunity to affect that change.

And I remember clearly the day that I read one sentence from Thây, that says "No mud, no lotus". And I understood that. You talk about stomach for chaos and discouragement and obstructions and turbulence, the lotus flower is in many Asian traditions and is the symbol for blossoming of opportunities and possibility. But what was so incredible to me to learn is that lotus flowers (they do not grow here in the tropics, so I did not know them), but lotus flowers grow only in the mud. You have to have stagnant water and the bottom has to be incredibly muddy and hopefully stinky in order for these lotus flowers to be able to take root in that mud and then eventually shoot up this long stem that they shoot up and then they bloom. If you don't have the mud at the bottom of the pond, you will not stand any chance of having a lotus.

So, "no mud, no Lotus" has been such a helpful lesson to me to understand that, of course, we always want lotuses in our life. Of course, we always want things to go well. Of course, we want harmony with our family. We want success here, success there, da, da, da. Of course we do. But if you don't have mud, you're not going to get a lotus. And here the science and the art and the magic is to understand that mud, to embrace the mud, to understand that it is part of our reality and to be able to transform that mud into the stem that blooms a lotus. So uncertainty, mistakes, obstructions, challenges, all of that belongs in the mud bucket, and the mud bucket is precisely the chrysalis for growth and learning.

Sharon Parks: I'm remembering a resonant piece of wisdom that comes to us from our Asian regions that goes something like: "Can you wait for the mud to settle and the right action to arise by itself?"

Christiana Figueres: Exactly.

Sharon Parks: And it sounds as though that's the deep recognition that holds you. In your book, you reflect (I think both you and your co-author) that you have a meditation practice and that you can tell the difference between the days when you practice and the days when you don't. Can you comment further about that?

Christiana Figueres: Yeah. Well, today I didn't meditate. Exactly. I got up early.

Sharon Parks: In that case, you're a very bad advertisement for meditation as an essential everyday practice!

Christiana Figueres: Very bad advertisement! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I wanted to take advantage of the light hours to go for my run. But let me say this. I didn't do a sitting meditation. But I've come to understand that you don't have to sit in silence to meditate. That actually you can meditate throughout the day no matter what you're doing if you do it mindfully. So, Thich Nhat Hanh actually talks about brushing your teeth meditation, walking meditation, washing the dishes meditation. And that has been incredibly helpful to me. Because, yes, there is a different meditation when you really do sit down and bring everything to a pause. But incorporating mindfulness and becoming much more aware of the here and now throughout your day, no matter what you're doing, I have found incredibly helpful because what it's doing for me is, it is integrating that much more into my daily life. So it's not the sitting from 6:00 to 6:30, I do that also. Not every day, but I do that. But it's also how mindful am I being when I am walking the beach? When I am running? When I am planting? When I am pruning the trees? When I am brushing my teeth, as he says.

So incorporating mindfulness, which is being aware of the here and now, and trying to settle the mind so that the mind is not a movie house - you know, we used to, well some people still go to the movies. I know, but we used to go to the movie and there was that sound at the end. And the mind is like that. It goes like those reels. I don't know if anyone here is old enough. Well, you and I are, Sharon, so you and I are old enough to remember that there were those reels, then they go around. And that's what our mind, our monkey mind, does to us, right? It goes around and around, around, around and around. And if we're mindful about whatever we're doing right at that moment, then you begin to calm that swirling reel and you begin to find some spaciousness to come back to yourself and get more, more peace, more energy, more space, more space for contemplation and honestly just do things more carefully.

It's all about over time diminishing our reaction to things. Trying to find that space between whatever is thrown at you in life and how we react and usually we react very, very quickly to anything. At least we react in thought. And so trying to slow that down and not react either in thought, in word or in action immediately. But being much more careful about that reaction. That to me is meditation.

Sharon Parks: Paradoxically, it sounds as though you not only have a mindfulness practice that helps you to slow down and find that spacious place, but, at the same time, you have a running practice which is caring for your body and yourself as an instrument as you do this work. As you observe many people these days learning to care and respond to our climate challenge and attempt to offer leadership in the face of what now confronts us, what concerns you? Do you see repeated mistakes, deficits? And what encourages you?

Christiana Figueres: What concerns me the most, Sharon, is the prevalence of climate grief or climate despair, especially among young people. The fact that there are thousands and thousands of young people who, as per so many published studies now, say that they spend at least 50 percent, if not more of their time, thinking about the horrors of climate change. I did not have that when I was growing up. And they're growing up in a very, very different world. The fact that they are so concerned, the fact that they are so overtaken by hopelessness, by helplessness. So scared and fearful about the future that many of them in increasing numbers have decided that they're not going to have children because they don't want to bring children into a world that is destroying our livelihoods. That, to me, is my gravest concern.

Because of what I said before, if that is our habit energy, if despair, grief, hopelessness, helplessness is the habit energy that we carry around with us—and I totally understand why that's happening—then that is robbing them of their agency. And I really am concerned about that because, now, if they're young enough, there is little that they can do about this. But, as they get older, we're going to be handing over the baton to them. And they will have to pick up the baton. And my wish for them is that they would actually be cultivating both the sense of identity with the grief and also their agency to make a difference because they need both. But, right now, so many of them are cultivating only the first. And I understand that that is the case, and I can understand why. But it's very concerning to me and it's concerning to me because of their mental health, because of the burnout that they're already feeling, and these are young people and they're already in burnout.

So, I'm very, very concerned about the mental health of young people. And I think it is our collective responsibility as the elders here to support these young people. Not to condemn them for their hopelessness, helplessness, and despair. To truly embrace that, with them, because we feel it also, but also to help them to come out of it, or to complement it with a sense of agency, of conviction, of ingenuity, of what they can do for themselves.

And what encourages me, on the other side, is so many what I call eco-entrepreneurs that I meet and read about, many of them young people by the way, who are devoting their unbelievable mental and technical and all kinds of other skills to developing solutions that I would never have thought of when I was their age. I happen to chair something called the Earthshot Prize, and we scour the world for these amazing examples. And it is just so, so inspiring and so gratifying to see how many young people, in every continent, in so many different countries, in so many different sectors are actually producing new solutions that are commercially viable, that are interesting, that are actually going to create a much better world. And they are doing it on a profitable basis or on a nonprofit basis, but being very successful. And so that spirit of eco-entrepreneurism is one that I really celebrate and that encourages me and gives me, you know, gives me a sense of, ah, okay, great, this is moving forward.

But bottom line, bottom line, Sharon, this is about not giving up. Youth can't give up. We elders can't give up. Systems can't give up. We are midstream. You don't give up when you are right in the middle of the river. You have to keep on going until you cross to the safe shore. So, not giving up.

Sharon Parks: You are extremely generous with your time, with the gift of your heart, mind, and soul. We thank you. I promised you that if you wanted it, I would give you a last word unconstrained by whatever question I might ask. Is there anything you want to add or can we just thank you with whole hearts and deep, deep gratitude?

Christiana Figueres: Yeah, no, thanks very much, Sharon. I really appreciate this opportunity. You work on adaptive leadership and now, as I look back, to see what was done, I'm beginning to understand that there was some kind of a structure and logic to this. Which I'm grateful for, to begin to understand that, because that wasn't the way that I went at it. And so all of these questions and the work that you do and Ron's work has been so helpful to me to realize, “Oh, that's what was happening there.” It helps to make sense of it all. So thank you very much. Thank you to you and to Ron Heifetz, if he's there, and to everyone else for putting a structure to something that didn't feel like it was structured at all.

Sharon Parks: Ron is here, and he joins us in wanting to thank you in a our most wholehearted way.

Christiana Figueres: Let me see him. Can he come to the camera for a sec? There you are!

Ronald Heifetz: Hi, thank you so much. Your big brother and also your former boss were both students of adaptive leadership, and it's such a pleasure to meet you, and it's so inspiring to hear your story and how you discovered this path. We're going to excerpt pieces of this recording and show it in class. I can already see how I'm going to use it even next week.

Christiana Figueres: Uh oh!

Ronald Heifetz: Oh, no, you're just fabulous. I can't wait to meet you in person. I hope I get a chance to do that someday.

Christiana Figueres: I would love that. I would love that.

Ronald Heifetz: Thank you so much. Please give my best to Jose if you see him.

Christiana Figueres: Thanks. Thank you, Sharon. Really good questions. Thanks very much.

Sharon Parks: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Be well.