Gordon Lambert shares insights from his decades-long journey, addressing his roles, strategies, and contributions to environmental change and corporate evolution. Lambert has been engaged in business and sustainability in the energy sector for 40 years. In 2015, Lambert was appointed by the Premier and Cabinet to the five-person panel that designed the Alberta Climate Leadership Plan. In 2016, he chaired the Alberta Climate Leadership Technology and Innovation Task Force, with $1.4 billion in carbon levy revenue being committed to innovation as an outcome. He also serves on the Export Development Canada CSR advisory council and as the Suncor Energy and Sustainability Executive in Residence at the Ivey Business School.
GORDON LAMBERT
The number one most powerful place to intervene in a system is mindsets.
I would just like to remind the audience that collaboration is a joint effort to achieve common goals. That's needed more than ever in this world we are in, with these large, significant problems that no one entity can solve on their own. But it's a higher bar than cooperation. I term cooperation or define it as the pursuit of individual interests jointly. You can feel the difference between collaboration, where everyone has skin in the game, there are no free riders, and everyone's pulling on the oars together, versus cooperation, which can be things like industry association tables or discussion groups, where people are sharing information but are not really committing to joint action. I just want to flag that I often see cooperation being called collaboration, but they're two very different things that are very important for the future we are going to be playing on.
BRUCE PIASECKI
I think Gordon hit a key point to start this dialogue, which is that change is required. If we think of how in modern society there is a dominant culture, like a nuclear reactor dome pressing down on the great majority of people, some people become reactionary and push towards the past, denying present facts, while others become progressive to the point where there's a shrillness that they can't even be heard. Once you acknowledge the fact that the dominant culture is about markets, pricing, law, and science, one of the things that Gordon is so wonderful about is creating joint efforts. He has formed very elaborate alliances as he did at the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, which involves the real game. The real game is moving that dome forward with time. Change management, which is what we are going to talk about, involves figuring out how to get people within the dome to speak truth to power, a topic that's very much on my mind after Phoenix and Gordon's mind. If the real game is progress towards social needs, this includes the use of innovation, the idea of diversity and inclusion, and leveraging change.
LAMBERT
I had to educate a senior executive team deeply on what the state of climate science was and what it meant for the enterprise. It was uncomfortable for the oil and gas legacy firms that have done the same thing for many decades and have been central to our energy system. They had to hear that the future is not going to unfold as they imagine, and they have to change in order to get there.
I was fortunate enough to receive a basketball scholarship to avoid Vietnam and military service, even though my father, a Marine, died when I was three.
I felt that mentality and that railroading role of a call sergeant mentality of my father through the decades, even though I didn't know him. What I'm bringing up is the vast pathway available to everyone listening. If you think about creative tension, situational awareness, and guided discovery as the real game, one can live a life of self-delusion without ever participating in the real game, and youth is available in the real game.
