Issuu

Is Education the answer?

October 2022

“If we learn how to better educate ourselves, our businesses, our industries, and our communities can we create real societal change and build more profitable businesses?” Sarah Parsonage

Introduction from Sarah Parsonage founder of One Question

Chapter One

The Education Perspective

Contents

12 Chapter Two The Communications Perspective 20 Chapter Three

The Media Perspective

28 Chapter Four

The Legal Perspective

36 Chapter Five

The Food Perspective

The Regulation Perspective

Chapter Six

52 Chapter Seven The Advertising Perspective 60 Chapter Eight

The Finale

68 Conclusion from Sarah Parsonage

Introduction

One Question

One Question believes that business is society, and society is business. But today there is a delta between the two. Social profit and economic profit can align if we better understand the role our businesses play in society and equally society’s impact on our businesses. For the last five years, I have had the unwavering belief that conversation can create change,and that improvement is best sought and found through conversation. In short, that conversation can close the gap between business and society, if only you ask the right question. On the 14th of September we hosted a member conversation to discuss this year’s question, is education the answer? Hearing from many different individual and industry perspectives. I am not defining education in terms of the traditional education system, via an institution in which one person imparts knowledge to another based on an agreed set of principles. Rather, we explored what opportunity or responsibility

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might the legal system, the communications industry or the media have to educate society? Over the last few years, I fear we have lost the ability to listen and be listened to, we have lost the appreciation of context. We see society and business as black or white, good or bad. Nothing in life or indeed business is black or white, and very few things are all good or all bad. During the seven conversations I invited members to step out of our everyday echo chambers, allow ourselves to be vulnerable, and listen without judgment to perspectives and experiences that might differ from our own; that through such conversation and forging new relationships, we can balance building more profitable and sustainable businesses whilst creating genuine societal change. The report that follows is our review of the conversations, and our invitation to be part of the next conversation.

Sarah

The Education Perspective

Lucy Stevens The New School

Andy Boucher ESMA

James Scroggs New Working Class

Aliyah York Pupil Power

One Question

In a conversation about the power of education, One Question began with the education system itself. “The education system is built on a deficit model: You don’t have what is required to be successful in the world, so we’re going to teach you, and somebody at the front of the class fills you up with knowledge. […] We come at this from an asset-based model, which is asking, What have you already got in your DNA, or in your background, or in your experience, that we can build upon?” James Scroggs

Widely understood to underpin any number of societal structures, inducting children into a chain of tasks and tests that are designed to equip them for the world of work and adulthood, schooling – from nursery to university – will be the first thing that springs to mind for many when faced with 2022’s central question. Faced with the revelation that our current system fails a third of students, the efficacy and ethics of traditional education have been thrown into question. Student Aliyah York started Pupil Power to correct the deficits she saw in the current education system. For instance, so-called “soft” skills, like communication and relationships, might be harder to quantify than exam scores – but after two years of disrupted learning and digital rather than in-person teaching, it’s these interpersonal skills that have suffered most acutely.

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What does education equip us for? What are the metrics we consider most valuable, and how do we measure them? For young people who feel that their social class has more impact on their success than their education, and business owners grappling with high-achievers ill-equipped for the world of work, the status quo is falling short on myriad fronts. Confronted by the glaring absence of less tangible but no less imperative learning, people in and outside the education system have had no choice but to expand their definition of the category. With the value of more holistic and experiential knowledge more apparent than ever, thought leaders on the panel and beyond are proposing new systems that do away with the distinction between education and business for altogether more integrated – and mutually beneficial – experiences.

“I’m currently at an age when I’m asking, What does a CV look like? What are you guys looking for? Because from my schooling experience, it’s just my grades that matter – but employers need their young people with the ability to communicate and all the other skills that we class as soft skills, but that I would say were principal, essential skills.” Aliyah York

“The minute we stick with asking for top grades as the ticket through, we limit education and limit what we can do together. So for me, the ask would be collaborating on alternative outcomes that are useful and interesting to us, that we want to see coming through the system.” Lucy Stevens

Education and society are inextricably linked, each directly influencing the other. While business might be understood as the ultimate beneficiary of schooling, that transaction could stand to be refined or even reversed entirely.

The Communications Perspective

Kate Magee Management Today

Tom Buttle MikeWorldWide Paul Randle Sustainable Marketing Compass

One Question

When it comes to education, brands are rarely at the forefront of people’s minds. “We live in a capitalist society, so brands – what they’re selling in economic terms, in political terms, in education terms – are a fundamental part of the fabric of our society. Now, we can argue in sustainability terms, whether that’s good or bad, but it’s the truth of the matter. […] And so I think we’ve got to the point where there is this recognition, across a large wave of consumer society, that brands need to be somehow participating in society.” Paul Randle

In its purest sense, education is supposed to confer something like objective fact, and a brand’s loyalty to its business objectives is understandably seen to compromise that capacity for even-handedness. What’s more, considering the industry’s recent failures to predict several seismic cultural shifts, communications can seem like an echo-chamber with little bearing on the real world. But even if we – reasonably – question brands’ right to educate society, it’s almost impossible to extract them from the wider definition of education as experience. Faced with 2022’s constant

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connectivity, where our Twitter timelines are equally populated by limited companies as friends, brands sit on the peripheries of almost every conversation – even (or especially) those that affect us at both scale and depth. The recent death of the queen in Britain is a prime example – as brands from CrossFit to Ann Summers scrambled to react, it was easy to question the motives of companies for whom the situation bore very little relevance.

“You need to really unpack […] why a brand is participating [in a given conversation]. Does it have an integrity to the purpose and values of the organisation, to the people who run it, to the people who work for it, the investors, stakeholders, the consumers it serves?” Paul Randle

What’s more, conflicting causes and the counter-intuitive demand for ‘authenticity’ can see brands spreading their messaging and their morals too thinly. Even with a business’s positive public perception as the priority, saying nothing at all is often wisest – though easier said than done, especially for an industry with communication at its heart and in its name.

One Question

“Right now, if you got together the whole copper mining industry, and they were to sit down around the table and work out [how to adapt to the energy transition], they’d be in trouble with their own regulators about conspiring to fix the market, even though it’s probably what we need them to do as a society. And so actually, we’ve got legislation that’s an impediment to the direction that we need to travel on some of these issues.” Marshall Manson One Question Member

Despite its ostensibly creative core, communications can often revert to a default formula that feels safe but also staid. Much of this homogeneity is down to the people who make up the industry as a whole – even without considering the moral imperative to foster an inclusive workplace, a diversity of voices provides invaluable shortcuts to new perspectives in offices and the campaigns they produce. While institutional education remains imperative in terms of arming the next generation for jobs in communications, the importance of diverse role models and clearer career signposting underscores once again the power of sharing experiential knowledge beyond the classroom. As with so many industries, communications’ current predicament – same people, same ideas – is decidedly chicken-egg. It is only by breaking the cycle, applying the salve of education internally rather than projecting it outwards, that meaningful change can be facilitated.

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Are you looking at this as a moment to put a brand into the spotlight, or do you have a sustained commitment? We are MikeWorldWide, an independent global public relations agency. Creating authentic and lasting connections for our clients is why we exist. CO N TAC T US

The Media Perspective

Sarah Parsonage One Question

Janine Gibson The Financial Times

One Question

Compared to other business sectors, media’s remit to educate its consumers is much more widely accepted. “[45%] of us don’t trust the BBC to tell us the truth – we think that they have a special agenda, or are very biased, or a particular program is wrong. So that’s a profound problem for the role of media – and if the BBC can’t be trusted, then the rest of us are in trouble!” Janine Gibson

Yet while editorial standards at broadsheets have remained largely stable for decades, our trust in them has diminished; recent analysis by Press Gazette revealed that, in 2022, just 55% of the population trusts the BBC. Once a supposed bastion of accuracy and rigour, the national broadcaster is now competing on a much broader playing field than it did even a decade ago. Social media and digital publishing have cut turnaround times to hitherto unthinkably short lengths, and the traditional business model – source, write, edit, publish – for running a newspaper has come close to being untenable. How can publications maintain editorial standards and impartiality without being left behind in the digital revolution’s wake?

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As with any brand, media companies find themselves trying to reconcile their ethical and moral convictions with the realities of running a business. Similarly, audiences have to weigh their purported support for well-researched reporting against the inevitably higher costs it incurs to produce. In Britain and beyond, media isn’t a monolith. Even among one genre – say tabloids, blogs or broadsheets – publications will be operating under aims as diverse as their editors and financial backers. Treating them as one entity might seem temptingly simple, but ultimately does more harm than good in the fight to educate consumers. The more we can diversify in media, the better – at 92% white and with more than half of its industry leaders privately educated, journalism is one of the country’s most elitist professions; unsurprisingly, a homogenous cohort of producers risks an homogenous end product, all the more unlikely to hold each other to the high standards of accuracy that might redeem the industry’s reputation.

“The markets have been skewed by various things like no-paywall publishing, which means that a lot of people chase a mass audience based on advertising, that inevitably leads to a certain kind of content. [On the other hand], very expensive well-resourced journalism, for very expensive wellresourced news organisations, is now very expensive, and clearly that has democratic issues.” Janine Gibson “Fake news has always existed, but the open doors of the platforms and the lack of regulation there, the authority with which people can publish [something] that looks a bit like mainstream news, combined with the declining standards of some of the things that used to be mainstream news, have made this sort of free floor now very hard to pick through.” Janine Gibson

One Question

“I spent quite a lot of time on [my daughter’s] TikTok trying to figure out what the hell she’s doing […] and it’s terrifying. And she doesn’t have any concept of why this person, with charisma and authority and a knowing air of something or other, might be less authoritative than [...] the BBC.” Janine Gibson “[Platforms like TikTok are] too scared to come [to a conversation like this], because they know their time is running out. They’re going to have to be regulated. The force has been disruptive and they know it.” Janine Gibson

As market realities lag behind new consumer trends, education is indeed crucial when it comes to combatting misinformation in media – but as we have seen before and will see again, internal education must be the priority. While public awareness campaigns or perhaps classes in school could empower people to interrogate the trustworthiness of their media sources, the extra time and money associated with high-quality content means that publications and platforms alike will need to be incentivised or regulated in order to reliably produce it.

MAKE SENSE OF IT ALL

The Legal Perspective

Sarah Parsonage Imran Mahmood One Question Barrister and Author of You Don’t Know Me

One Question

Approached from a legal perspective, the question “is education the answer” takes on very serious implications indeed. “Are we dealing with complex social conditions? Is where you’re from as important as anything else? Is your upbringing key to this idea of criminology? Why don’t we get criminal gangs in Mayfair or Knightsbridge? Why are people in affluence not heavily criminalised?” Imran Mahmood

With the most recent data published by the Ministry of Justice showing that 57% of adult prisoners had literacy levels below those expected of an 11-year-old, the impact of education – or rather, the lack of it – on deciding the course of someone’s life couldn’t be clearer. Imran Mahmood’s novel You Don’t Know Me imagines a closing speech given by a young black defendant, protesting his innocence and detailing the circumstances that culminated in his being in the dock. From gangs to guns, You Don’t Know Me offers an insight into the way that environment and nurture can push people into the orbit of a criminal justice system whose gravitational pull is hard to resist.

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Working by degrees rather than binaries, the legal profession necessarily stands in opposition to black-and-white morality. When it comes to recidivism, offenders are unsurprisingly more likely to repeat criminal patterns where they feel they have no other option. Drawing a line from class to education and education to crime is easy; breaking it is another matter, but nonetheless imperative if we are to interrupt the socalled revolving door of prison.

“It’s difficult to exaggerate how much the education system [impacts people’s lives]. I’ve had probation officers telling me about young people aged 14, 16, and they are illiterate. [...] if you reach them at a point in prison, then it is possible to change that course, but it’s hugely difficult work because [...] the temptations are legion when they come out – quite often, it’ll be the head of the gang or the drug dealer that’s waiting outside the gates to draw them back in. [...] That intersectionality between criminality and being excluded from the school system [...] is huge.” One Question Audience Member

One Question

“From a legal perspective, what we need is accessible, conversational material at a super young age, that helps us get ahead of the rumours – like, I can carry a gun as a 14-yearold and I can probably get away with it. If I understood those conversations as a sixyear-old, they would stay with me forever. That message will fundamentally attach to me as a human, so when I’m given misinformation, I know to put my hand up and challenge it.” One Question Audience Member “What is the responsibility of the One Question community and of society to create a change, so that the ‘input’ for young people – their socioeconomic privilege, their culture, and race – does not determine the ‘output’?” Sarah Parsonage

The legal perspective, then, seems to be one from which the answer to our central question is a resounding yes – but because these issues (class and deprivation, institutional racism and environment) are systemic, rectifying them cannot be done by schools alone. Only by setting in motion top-down changes in every aspect of our lives, from the distribution of wealth to where we live and how we earn money, can we hope for meaningful change; for the line between who is failed by the state and who ends up incarcerated by it, to look a little less stark.

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The Food Perspective

Sarah Parsonage One Question

Will Beckett Hawksmoor

One Question

Food’s universal appeal and its deep cultural roots mean the hospitality industry is uniquely placed to educate society by offering it new and familiar experiences of community.

“As we get bigger, we hope we do better [in terms of our] purpose, but without the profit – without the fundamentals of just trying to do a really good job for your customers, doing the things that they pay you to do and making money at the end of the week or the month or the year – all the rest of it doesn’t work.” Will Beckett

On the other side of the kitchen door, the notoriously intense sector attracts individuals who thrive on its high-pressure atmosphere. How to reconcile hospitality’s human side with its historically cut-throat culture? Could education be the silver bullet? In developing his restaurant business Hawksmoor, Will Beckett found that clarifying his motivations internally was the best way to reflect them to the rest of the world. Building a business is testing, and crafting one with integrity takes time as well as effort; in order to ensure the longevity necessary to enact that metamorphosis, Beckett’s first duty was to make his business not only sustainable but profitably so.

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Of course, fostering a company culture like Hawksmoor’s (one which has earnt them numerous awards) requires trusting in metrics other than speed and profit alone. In competitive industries like hospitality, it can be tempting to go for the low hanging fruit of fast returns – equally, that cheek-by-jowl dynamic means that competitors pay close attention to each other. Leading by example, Hawksmoor has shown that a sea change starts with just one swimming against the current. Beckett is reluctant to suggest his standards be translated into legal minimum requirements: “It’s better to win the argument than legislate,” he says. Luckily, change is in the air nonetheless – while imitation is a new model for ‘education’ in this conversation thus far, it seems that integrity is contagious. As more of Hawksmoor’s competitors follow its lead, they influence their own circles; while there’s a long way to go yet, this is how industry-wide movements begin.

One Question

“There’s a slight air of selfimportance in what I’m saying that I should acknowledge [….] But I know that the things that we do, do drag smaller companies to feel like, actually, we can do this, we can be bigger and still maintain some of the integrity that’s really important to us. And also, [...] more importantly, it can drag some of the bigger companies — maybe slightly more grudgingly — to be like, Shit, this is now a minimum level. We’re gonna have to do some of this stuff.” Will Beckett

I’ve had lots of slightly nervous texts and emails from people asking what we’re doing on Monday, seemingly nervous about ‘getting it wrong’. Of course, Hawksmoor’s nimbleness depends on its founder’s continued involvement and passion; not every employee – or even every business – has the luxury of reflecting their personal conviction in the organisation’s protocol…

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The Regulation Perspective

Steven Lizars Sustainable Finance Partner at Deloitte, Trustee of the Soil Association and former Investment Banker

One Question

The global financial crisis of 2008 and onwards will have left no one in doubt that the financial system pervades and interconnects across our economic systems from global to local.

“If anyone doubted it, the GFC demonstrated that an understanding only of historic risk, is insufficient. Day after day of financial events that models suggested should happen only every hundred years meant a new lens for understanding risk was needed.” Steven Lizars

In this conversation One Question asked how regulation in the financial sector can drive positive momentum in addressing change and what role education has to play. Financial regulation takes many forms, from the financial resources that banks and investment firms must maintain to meet their commitments through to disclosures, transparency, and conduct. As Lizars explained, regulation has expanded significantly. Banks hold significantly more capital in reserve to absorb shocks and regulators have required stress tests to understand whether this capital is sufficient to absorb losses during a range of changing scenarios.

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A good example is in relation to environmental related risks. In April 2019, the Bank of England published a supervisory statement relating to climate risk and how banks and insurers should think about the financial risks that emerge from it. This includes the physical risks associated with climate change; but, also the socalled transition risks associated with customers, industries and assets who may incur significant costs to transition themselves to be fit for a low carbon economy. In 2001 the Bank of England required banks to undertake a forward-looking stress test based on climate scenarios.

“Stress testing has been a particularly useful tool for regulators. The lessons learned act to inform the banks and regulators, but importantly this influences how banks act in the future and the lessons learned are therefore transmitted to the broader economy.” Steven Lizars

Front and centre of the movement to decarbonise financed emissions is education. Banks must educate themselves on the greenhouse gas emissions that their customers are responsible for and that the banks are in essence financing. As Lizars says, once understood, banks have a strong incentive to help customers reduce this risk, educating them and helping them make the transition to lower emissions.

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“Not only are banks needing to incorporate the lessons they have learned from understanding these risks, but there is supporting regulation to require disclosures of them. Banks have a strong incentive to work with their customers to reduce climate related risks.” Steven Lizars

There are other areas within the broader E of ESG where regulation and disclosure are developing, and in turn driving education and change. In 2020 the Dutch Central Bank, the DNB, published a paper exploring the risks associated with biodiversity loss for the Dutch financial sector. The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, funded by NGOs and Governments, is currently working towards developing frameworks to allow organisations to report and act on nature-related risks. The public policy objectives that shape regulation within the banking sector are multi-faceted and extend beyond ensuring responsible and prudential management of risk. Treating different types of lending or borrowers more or less favourably in terms of the capital that must be held against the risk from a regulatory perspective, can create economic incentives for banks to act in a certain way and promote a favoured environmental or social outcome. There have been calls to positively incentivise

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certain types of green lending for instance. However, as Lizars observes, if ultimately banks carry too little capital for the risk they are taking, then the overarching public policy of a safe and sound banking system may be compromised. Ultimately,effective regulation can act to leverage the interconnectivity of the financial sector across our economic system for good. By driving awareness of climate and other environmental risks and stimulating engagement, and innovation on how to address it, we create the prospect of positive change. Lizars is cautious about the challenges of execution and delivery but optimistic about the ambition he sees. As he observes, the current cadre of bank leaders are keen to shake off the opprobrium that has often followed the industry since 2008 and be part of a positive change.

The Advertising Perspective

Sarah Parsonage One Question Paula Bloodworth Uncommon

Steven Keogh former Detective Inspector at the Met Police Kay Rufai Artist and founder of S.M.I.L.E-ing Boys Project

One Question

Posed as a thought experiment rather than a reductive quick-fix, One Question asked this session’s participants to apply their expertise to the Metropolitan Police. “I don’t know how advertising can reverse the decline [in public opinion] right now. I think there needs to be action, there needs to be a change […] It feels like an internal problem. […] If there’s a few good people [in the Met Police], maybe we need to build them up and make them feel like they’re part of something. Then advertising within might be able to have a role.” Paula Bloodworth

In the light of numerous recent scandals, could the power of advertising be leveraged to rehabilitate one of society’s most foundational – and most controversial – institutions? Defining advertising as using creativity to engender positive associations, Uncommon’s Paula Bloodworth felt that the Met’s core issues went deeper than a traditional campaign could reach. Suggesting in-house education as a first port of call, Bloodworth explained how defining the audience of a message can shape the message itself.

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As we have seen, external solutions to internal problems are rarely sufficient; so, as the West Midlands Police’s first ever artist in residence, Kay Rufai was uniquely placed to make an impact from the inside out. Matching officers to local residents impacted by their investigations and using excerpts of dialogue to contextualise images, Rufai managed to position himself as an intermediary between the police and the communities they interact with. As an institution, policing necessarily reflects shortcomings as well as strengths that extend far beyond its headquarters. Bakedin prejudices are just as likely to appear in officers as in the general public, and might even be magnified beneath policing’s lens of power. In this conversation most of all, the fiction of society’s institutions as separate from its fallibilities and fictions was starkly apparent. As such, education-assalve was more acutely important – its scope, far wider – than ever.

“When I was doing this residency, [the officer pictured] was the commander. [...] The story that I’ve married him to is [from] a young girl, she’s 15, from a [very deprived] area of Coventry.. [...] Her story was incredibly heart wrenching, because she had an exam that morning – but at 4:30am, she awoke to the sound of the police chainsawing her door. [...] They were looking for firearms [...] but they didn’t find any, and that was it. She never heard from the police, the door was never fixed. And there’s the public fallout because she lives in a council estate, and [the neighbours] think, well, [the police] found something no matter what you tell us. [...] You can imagine how somebody under such stress would perform in an exam where she couldn’t even [explain] why she was late, and that had a significant impact on her life.” Kay Rufai

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“The police are a reflection of society, they’re taken from society. So if you’ve got sexists, racists, criminals, there needs to be an honest conversation with everyone – your police force is never going to be perfect. All we can do is try our best to identify the ones that are racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever, and deal with those.” Steven Keogh “If you want to talk about advertising, there’s no one on earth that can ever tell them anything positive about the police, because the biggest advert is the actions that came in their lives.” Kay Rufai

As Keough explained, officers are taught to follow protocol – but education about the importance of treating members of the public in a way that makes their dignity a priority will go a lot further to repair police-community relations than reeling off legal rights. Those relationships have frayed over generations, with each incident compounding existing bad feeling; if advertising is about creating associations, then like their colleagues in the West Midlands, the Met police must contend with the negative ones that are already entrenched in public consciousness. By entreating officers to respond to stories of young people, Rufai’s project opened a dialogue between two groups of people who had otherwise co-existed in a hierarchy; while metrics like violence or drug related crimes weren’t impacted, the artist’s residency made other immeasurably valuable ripples. Placing narrative at the heart of his intervention, Rufai joined an existing conversation rather than shouting over it; instead of papering over old, ugly stories, there is something disarmingly simple about writing them anew.

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The Finale

Simon Gunning Campaign Against Living Miserably

James Golding The Connor Brothers

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In this last conversation, Simon Gunning and James Golding applied the day’s central question to one of the most high-stakes and widely relevant topics of all – mental health. “I don’t really know the answer to the question, but I think it is possibly as simple as reducing the stigma, taking the shame away […] I suppose that what we have to do is educate ourselves to be aware and to look inside ourselves, but also to be able to look inside other people, to identify when somebody is struggling and to create a space where that person can talk about that openly.” James Golding

Half of artist duo The Connor Brothers, Golding’s collaborative practice emerged when his now creative partner Mike Snelle had a breakdown and moved in with Golding. As the pair found their rhythm, they began making art at Golding’s kitchen table – to understand what had happened to Snelle, to make sense of Golding’s own history of addiction and mental illness, but also to make each other laugh. As the ad hoc project grew into an artistic practice, the pair took on their professional pseudonyms; the freedom afforded by the anonymity allowed Snelle and Golding to tackle topics that might otherwise have felt too exposing. In conversation

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with Golding, Simon Gunning spoke openly about the taboos that make those subjects so difficult to address head-on. When it comes to education’s role in unpicking this tightest of knots, the panel agreed that, while imperative, the relationship of simple awareness to better outcomes wasn’t linear: although the last 10 years have seen a huge increase in the frequency and reach of conversations about mental health, they haven’t translated to fewer crises or less suffering.

“We’re so bad at talking about death as a society that [maybe it’s not surprising that] suicide makes us squeamish, even attempted suicide or someone having a terrible, terrible life – surely the reaction should just be like, unmitigated sympathy, [but we still wince], and it’s the same with psychosis and addiction.” Simon Gunning

Knowing about conditions like depression and anxiety is not enough to stem their flow; people need to be informed about ways to address them – medication, therapy – but most crucially, they need to be able to access those tools. Private therapy is out of reach for a huge number of people – but with NHS services increasingly stretched, chronic underfunding and the ongoing ramifications of the pandemic, state support inevitably fails to provide for everyone who needs it. What’s more, environmental factors impact wellbeing on a national scale: already laid low by the pandemic and the social isolation of its stop-start lockdowns, 67

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“That version of education is a veneer, a symbol. It doesn’t actually cut deep enough.” Simon Gunning “[People] are terrified to admit that there’s something wrong with [a loved one], and I think that comes down to us not wanting to admit that there’s something wrong with the world or the system – we would do anything to protect the system. I don’t know when we’re going to start to admit that society is broken and that’s the reason people are fucked up and taking their own lives. Then we’d be breaking down this thing that we all support and endorse, [and that’s a] more tricky one, that’s more sensitive, because we might feel a bit guilty.” James Golding

economic precarity and financial struggle in the current cost of living crisis have exacerbated a country-wide tidal wave of mental ill-health. In the face of these monoliths, what impact can education hope to have? As we have seen again and again, it is impossible to extricate society from the forces that constitute it. The institutions that give our lives structure, the stories that give them meaning, must ultimately shift in order to make space for the smaller entities – food, media, law – to follow suit. As such, the answer to our question is perhaps about scale as much as substance. Education is ‘the answer’, if we can reframe the constraints of the conversation to encompass education itself – new ways of reasoning are crucial, and they’re just as likely to come from artists as politicians; from conversations as edicts. If in its purest form, education boils down to answering questions, it seems we must be prepared to ask altogether new ones.

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Conclusion

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The moral argument to build a business with integrity that fundamentally improves society is a straightforward one, but without regulation, this becomes a choice instead of a fundamental tenet of legitimate, purposeful, connected business. And unless it is fundamental we will always have two sides of one coin businesses’ fiduciary responsibility to shareholders versus the responsibility to society. The real question I, therefore, expected to discuss at this year’s annual conversation was not, is education the answer? But how? Against what commercial model, how can it scale? And how do we measure the impact both on society and the bottom line? And I was right, in part. However, the most significant thread from seven different industry conversations featuring twenty leaders was the importance of internal education within a business first. Businesses must understand and then educate their stakeholders on how they and their industry service society, and in turn, the role society plays

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in their business before they are in any position to educate society. Any form of regulation, be it through the lens of an Environmental Social Governance (ESG) framework or otherwise will be impossible to adhere to if the board does not understand that economic profitability and social profitability are intrinsically linked. And this must start with internal education. Educating our teams, shareholders and customers that investing in a diverse team is not an argument of optics or a PR strategy, but ensures that the audience we are selling to is reflected in our businesses, from product innovation through to the supply chain. A diverse board, leadership team and supply chain means the business reflects society and therefore our customers, whether in the education system or the advertising industry.

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The channel a CEO might choose to communicate strategically to 25000 employees across different cities is irrelevant if the message is not pertinent to the very people she is talking to. If the company fails to understand the challenges or benefits that are important to the individuals they employ, the channel they choose is largely obsolete. The core of a business is its people and educating our boards, our exec teams and beyond on the role and responsibility we have to the community we serve enables us to develop a sense of personal agency within leaders. Change is no longer top-down but bottomup and top-down, and at a time when society is turning its head to business and industry to lead, in addition to or perhaps in place of Government, empathy, vulnerability and autonomy in leadership is fundamental to the success of the business. It must start with education.

Sarah

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“If in its purest form, education boils down to answering questions, it seems we must be prepared to ask new ones altogether. And we must ask them in our businesses first. That will be our next conversation.” Sarah Parsonage

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