Karen, Richard, and Matt are professional relations: business partners who are also family members. This issue, Karen edits her son Matt’s interview with her husband Richard, about the latest environmental education course from Foggy Outline: Doing business on a sick planet.

“It’s a course that’s been itching at me and one I had to get out”

Matt
You and Mum already talked about the course in the newsletter back in August – what’s new since then?

Richard
Very little has changed – it just seems to have been a very long process! That’s partly down to me, because I’ve procrastinated, but it’s also about knowing how to do something on the website and then it being 2 or 3 weeks before I go back to it and I’ve got to relearn it all again.

Matt
We’ve got more control because we’re doing it ourselves but more control means more choices, means more decision-making time.

What is this course we’re talking about?

Richard
Doing Business on a Sick Planet – 9 Reasons why you should think about the Environment when making Business Decisions.

It is specifically intended to try to make people think about the environment and how it affects their business and how their business also affects the environment, and to make people realise that the environment is vitally important to all businesses and how all businesses operate but people just ignore it because it’s there and it’s providing all of the services we need. The problem we’ve got is that in a very short period of time some of those services will start to fail.

Matt
So this is very literally speaking your ultimate course? Why this course for the ultimate one?

Richard
Business is the cause of many of the problems that we’ve got and many of the problems that we’re causing are also going to have implications as far as businesses are concerned, so I think this is an important story to tell. It’s a course that’s been itching at me and one I had to get out.

Matt
I’ve got a bit more of a behind-the-scenes look at this course than I have at any of the others, so I know it had a kind of original form as a workbook. How’s it been adapting it to the form it’s in now on the website?

Richard
What I’ve done is to take the information from the workbook and put it into exercises within the course material itself. Each section of the course is an information type video and then I’m trying to help people put themselves into the situation where they’ve got to think about that particular issue more effectively and to come up with some answers about how they might react in those circumstances.

Matt
So now we transition from the ‘making the thing’ portion to the ‘selling the thing’ portion. I prefer the ‘making the thing’ portion to the ‘selling the thing’ portion! Are you the same?

Richard (Laughing)
Absolutely, I’m definitely in the ‘making’ side. Selling is the difficult bit. I’ve put together a plan of how to get from now to actually getting people buying it. I’ve already written blog posts and LinkedIn posts, emails and all sorts of things which will become the marketing collateral that goes behind it.

Matt
You don’t like the selling part as much but you have put the work in?

Richard
I’ve put the work in and in some respects the work in doing that has been fairly creative.

After I’d finished writing the course, I came across a LinkedIn post from a lady in New Zealand. She had been invited to give a talk to the New Zealand Chamber of Commerce. She asked these business people:

“If you were told by one of your people that you had a critical supplier to your business that was not being paid, there was no replacement supplier available, that it was in danger of failing and that the services or stuff it provided were critical to your business – if you had been told that, how would you react?”

And suddenly, she said, the people woke up – because she was talking to them in terms of their business and the things they understand from a business perspective.

That’s what I’ve tried to do in a slightly different way in this course.

Matt
So, in that thought exercise, the unpaid critical supplier is the environment?

Richard
Absolutely – the unpaid critical supplier is the earth.

There’s more to this interview. Buy us a cuppa on Ko-fi to support our work, and you can read the unabridged versions of this and every Professional Relations interview.

• 23-24 June, Excel, London: Dad will be at Reset Connect, the sustainability and net zero event for business, investors and innovators. Reply to this email if you’d like to organise a meeting.

• Renewable Energy Jesus (Miguel Velez) won San Francisco’s annual Hunky Jesus competition on Easter Sunday.

• Dad reviewed Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman.

• On Ko-fi, I rounded up all the audio drama projects I’ve got in the pipeline and what stage they’re all at. (It’s a free Ko-fi post – you don’t need to buy us a cuppa to read it.)

• Cory Doctorow digs deep to find some silver linings in Trump blowing up the old order. Dad says, “He provides some good example of the law of unintended consequences. Unintended and harmful for Trump but good for the rest of us”.

Gaze

Deep in its bowel, where the ink floods roil, something dawned on the Tower of Art.

I posted Auditorium, chapter 1 of Gaze, the start of a new serialised story I’m writing with help from Tower of Art, a journalling game by Yanahn about a traveller who wakes up in a tower born from human creativity.

Imagine you wake up in a house full of psychological Saw traps devised by someone who considers you a degenerate artist, and you’ve got the vibe.

Check back for chapter 2, Studio, on Monday.

Doing business on a sick planet

We’ve all been looking at the course too long to make rational choices about it at this point, so Dad’s inviting a select group of people outside Foggy Outline to beta-test it. You know who you are.

I Need A Miracle

I’m knee deep in an application for funding from Arts Council England. If I can get some public funding for I Need A Miracle season 2, I might not need to crowdfund for as much, which will make hitting the crowdfunding goal more realistic. But competition for Arts Council funding is notoriously fierce, and the application is a real slog. Sometimes you have to do hard things for projects you love!

Merely Roleplayers

We’ve recorded the first session of the epic Vigil finale, The Long Night. Natalie Winter (Gwynned), Ellen Gould (Jess Butterworth), Chris Starkey (Cameron Jarvis) and Josh Yard (Jinny Greenteeth) have concluded their characters’ stories (unless we decide we want to do any pickups).

Next we need to plan sessions with the rest of the cast, which I’ll then braid together in the edit.

Josh is in Geoids Musical Theatre’s production of Catch Me If You Can at the Bridewell Theatre from 2 to 6 June – get a ticket and you can see him as well as hear him! (He won’t be doing his old lady Jinny voice, though.)

Richard highlights Rob Hopkins:

One of the cofounders of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network, Rob Hopkins has developed into one of the most important thinkers and communicators in the field of environmental and social change. His most recent work focuses on how we can rediscover our individual and collective imaginations to help us see beyond apocalyptic visions of our future. His work enables us to visualise a much more optimistic and positive future for the world.