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Online course

Understand what on earth
planetary boundaries
mean for business


Post Growth Business 101 teaches you to escape 16 misleading assumptions when making sustainability strategies.

$150

What's included

  • 16 lessons
  • 150+ minutes of video
  • 170+ further readings
  • 135+ slides ready to copy
  • Available on demand
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What to expect

What's included:

We've based the content of this course on what companies hire us to educate them on. It's distilled into 157 minutes of video, which covers:

  1. Why green growth fails to deliver results fast enough
    and sufficiently
  2. How the inequality and ecological crises are connected
  3. Cases of companies that get sustainability right and wrong.
  4. How to start implementing post growth thinking in a business.

After completing the course, you:

+ Know why 16 common business assumptions are misleading

+ Can spot the 16 assumptions in a business context

+ Can escape the assumptions by thinking differently
(like a post growth business)

+ Can start a conversation about the assumptions in your company

Explore the lessons

 
 
 
 

BONUS: +175 further readings


Relevant papers, books, reports, articles and podcasts for each lesson, including our notes. Something we wished were available when we started.

BONUS: +135 
ready-to-copy slides


You get all slides from the course, in Power Point and Google slides. Easy to use with text, images, and sources.

The 16 Lessons.

Each lesson is built around:

  1. One common and misleading business assumption related to sustainability
  2. Arguments for why it's misleading when considering planetary and social boundaries
  3. Examples of how to think differently about the issue, including business cases when possible.
  4. Suggestions for how to start a conversation about it in your business. 

The lessons are distributed across three themes. You can see them all below.

 

Environmental

  1. Assuming you can decouple carbon emissions from economic growth sufficiently to live up to the Paris Agreement (no evidence of that happening)

  2.  Assuming some new technology will magically appear and solve point 1 (techno-optimism ignores that hope is not a strategy)

  3.  Assuming climate change is the only problem (when there are 8 other planetary boundaries)

  4.  Assuming stable prices on energy and materials (when energy expenditures are increasing)

  5.  Assuming that increases in energy efficiencies lead to absolute energy and material reductions in a growth-based system (the money you save, you use to grow the output, to make more money, which cancels out the initial savings - also known as The Rebound Effect)

  6.  Assuming that you can recycle your way out of the ecological crisis (the 2nd law of thermodynamics explains why that is not possible)

  7.  Assuming that services have no, or an insignificant, ecological footprint (services cannot entirely replace the material sector)


Inequality

  1.  Assuming you can be a part of the solution to the ecological crises without addressing inequality (they are connected, and inequality is rising)

  2.  Assuming minimum wages are enough (they are not living wages)

  3. Assuming you have to be the hero (justice is the answer, not charity)


Business Strategies & Goals

  1.  Assuming net zero - "do no harm" - is enough (a world in overshoot calls for regeneration)

  2.  Assuming you can offset carbon emissions and continue business as usual (If you have a shitty product and offset, you still have a shitty product)

  3.  Assuming if you "don't do it this way, someone else will do it and do it worse" (it's a louse excuse; the leakage effect is rarely 100%)

  4.  Assuming you can only scale impact by growing your company's size (avoid growth tunnel vision; there are at least 7 other ways of scaling impact)

  5.  Assuming bigger is always better (small is beautiful and less fragile)

  6.  Assuming you can wait for legislators to level the playing field before you act sufficiently (change doesn't come out of nowhere; it comes from bottom-up initiatives)

 

Course: Post Growth Business 101

$150

What's included

  • 16 lessons
  • 150 minutes of video
  • 170+ further readings
  • 135+ slides ready to copy
  • Available on demand
BUY NOW

Membership

$350/year

What's included

  • Course: Post Growth Business 101
  • Exclusive Course Forum
  • Handbook: Setting Limits to Growth  
  • Online Meetups
  • 250+ resources
BUY NOW