How To Take Your Ideas Upstream
An Upstreaming course that helps you create the post-carbon world we desperately need.
You work in a sector that has been incredibly effectively in what it was designed to do: Spinning the wheels of consumption ever faster.
That purpose now feels at odds with a world of rising fires and floods, the weather going crazy and the sea warming too much.
The irony is that your skills are, with a little tweaking, precisely what we need now.
The irony is that your skills are, with a little tweaking, precisely what we need now.
We need these skills to help imagine, inspire and engage people in Humanity’s great ever pivot to a post-carbon world.
Why We Created The Upstreaming Course
We created a very powerful short course ‘Upstreaming for the Great Transition’ to ensure your talents and voices get heard at the highest levels in business.
Why the hell does it matter? Shouldn’t marketers be consigned to the dustbin of history along with the over-consumption of depleted resources they enabled?
Maybe.
But there are 3.2bn people working for businesses worldwide. Many are tiny Mom n’ Pop outfits but others rival states in the power they have to shape our world.
We have to find a way to harness the power of businesses to drive change.
If all these people do their recycling at the weekend but then go to work and spend the next 8 hours harming nature, we’ve had it. We need to find a way to harness the power of businesses to drive change.
The Upstreaming course gives you the know-how, the examples, the language, the evidence, frankly, the philosophy (sounds grandiose but it’s true) to help take business leaders with you.
Showing that you can still have a job, and create a thriving company in the post-carbon world is vital. Who is making the case? Who is offering a competing vision to the Doomist “We’ve all had it and there’s no such thing as good business” message?
The Power to Inspire Better Choices
Marketers and Creatives; your ability to paint a picture of an appealing alternative future is unparalleled.
You have the imagination to see how things could be different. You know how to inspire the best in people. You know how to make the complex simple. You know what levers to pull and when, to change behaviour. Now imagine all that talent was being used to inspire better choices.
Imagine if these skills could conjure up new kinds of low- and no-carbon business models?
How might your idea create new revenue streams from waste?
What if you were able to build a whole new high value rental proposition in place of an ownership one?
What if you could build brand loyalty through socialising, facilitating community-moments over ‘retail therapy’?
Marketers Have the Will, they Just Don’t Know Where to Start
Not long ago, I gave a talk a roomful of marketing, strategy and creative people.
We were discussing how to help businesses make the leap into the post-carbon future that is barreling down the road towards us at breakneck speed.
Afterwards, chatting to some of the agency folks, it became clear that there was a real lack of confidence about how to have these sorts of conversations in businesses.
“I worry I’d look naïve talking about sustainability in business and be patronised out of the room”
People worried they’d be dismissed as either an anti-business activist, or not commercial enough.
The Upstreaming course helps you present an alternative. Talking the language of sustainability AND business, of doing well by doing good.
If you’re interested in joining us, in person, or virtually you can find out all about the course here.
We have a few places in the sessions at a reduced price for those who may not be able to pay the full amount, in order to ensure diversity and access for all.
If you feel this is you, please contact us at leo@edenlab.co or david.wilding@edenlab.co and tell us how you intend to use this course to make an impact in the world.
Who is EdenLab?
EdenLab is a sustainability innovation firm. We help businesses create new business models, sustainable value propositions and go to market strategies to make them resilient and successful in the post-carbon world.
We’re working with big corporates and ClimateTech start ups to remove and prevent 5 million tonnes of carbon from entering the atmosphere over the next 5 years.