FROM CORPORATE BEHEMOTHS TO THE NEXT GENERATION, MUI WO RESIDENT ANNA ILES IS INFLUENCING THE WAY WE LOOK AT SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE. ELIZABETH KERR REPORTS
Ask anyone on the street what a ‘futurist’ is and most will stare blankly, before floating some kind of science fiction concept. Is it Star Trek-y? OK, that’s what I’d say. But Anna Iles is a futurist, and you really want her shaping your businesses ideas and ushering your kids into adulthood. Anna is articulate and focused from behind the screen in a local café, though no one would hold it against her if her mind wandered every so often. She’s on an intensely scheduled break from work – as a futurist and mother to three boys under three years old.
She had twins just seven months ago, which fortunately wasn’t a complete surprise. “You sort of know, you can feel it. I felt incredibly pregnant at only a few weeks,” she says with a laugh, and an ever so subtle nod to what is currently a harried home life. “While there was something significantly different, you’re never quite prepared for it,” Anna adds. “It’s always a shock. And yet they are wonderful now they’re here.”
Here being Mui Wo, where she and her husband decamped three years ago, partly because Anna is a runner. “It’s a great little community where you get more space for less rent,” she says. Of course, the running has fallen by the wayside recently, unless it’s behind a stroller.
LONG-TERM THINKING
When UK native Anna, 39, speaks, we best listen. Not that she throws her weight around, but she’s coming from a place of knowledge. Educated at Oxford and earning a master’s degree from the SOAS University of London, she’s also a certified life coach and worked for several years as a journalist before switching to sustainability consulting.
“I pivoted from reporting on what’s changing to also thinking about where it’s all going,” she explains. “What sort of impacts changes happening today might have on our future.”
So Anna put her money where her mouth is, and now specialises in sustainable futures, “agile organisational culture” and guiding individuals and businesses on how to bear sustainability in mind when making decisions.
She started by setting up the Future Centre with Forum for the Future in 2014, handy because that was in Singapore where her husband had been transferred for work, and now she’s associate director of the Sustainable Futures Lab for US consultancy Business for Social Responsibility. BSR is geared towards human rights, which is sadly often an overlooked element of the sustainability issue. We’re not seeing the people for the trees, as it were.
“I do think there’s a disconnect between the environmental and human side of sustainability issues,” Anna says. “And it’s a shame we’ve been so siloed in our visions. Sadly, there’s also been conflict between supporters of animal and human rights.” Some of it can be chalked up to how poorly the media has communicated that connection, though the message is starting to trickle down. As Anna says: “All these issues are interrelated.”
WORLD IN FLUX
Right now, Anna’s attention is on analysing emerging trends and helping businesses and corporations understand how these can have a fundamental impact on them. She agrees that buzzy ESG goals often come across as cynical in the public arena, and that corporations need to do better, and be better, but points out that awareness is growing. Movements great and small (going back to Occupy Wall Street and #OscarSoWhite), human rights demonstrations – have inspired a wholesale reassessment of history, power, economics, gender, race and accountability.
“These are trends that are causing people to think about both corporate history and its role in shaping the future,” Anna begins. “There’s a huge uptick in awareness – both about sustainability and the need to cope with volatile circumstances. I’d say since COVID, yes, but also due to other factors, like the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Exposure which strongly encourages business to do climate scenario analysis. We need to think about how the future might play out.
“There has also been a huge value shift towards worker’s rights, rebalancing the power between employers and employees,” Anna adds. “People are thinking about what human rights really means across the supply chain.” There’s more scrutiny, regulations and demands for respect where multinationals operate, including elements of what Anna calls disruptive activism, which can result in brand, product and business boycotts by both consumers and states.
For the record, Anna authored two books on the subject when she was still Anna Simpson – 2014’s The Brand Strategist’s Guide to Desire and The Innovation-Friendly Organization in 2017. So if you want to know how to adapt to change and consumer demands, and still make your shareholders happy, start there.
FIXING THE FUTURE
While the books on innovation, and her role with BSR, are for the so-called grown-ups, Anna is also the author of three children’s books: Jacob and the Dust Sprite, Buffalo’s Long Bath and Alba and the Stone Goddess. True to form, the kids’ books provide more than simply a fun read. “The aim is to support child development from birth to early reading by encouraging curiosity, exploration and enquiry; supporting sociability by showing how friends can help and guide each other; inciting interest in wildlife and the natural world and encouraging children to recognise their emotions and trust their instincts,” she explains.
These days, Anna is particularly stoked about her work with younger generations as director and chief innovation coach with Flux Compass, an agency she set up in 2017 upon arriving in Hong Kong. Flux has an eye on the long term, and turning out visionaries and strategists who will make the world more liveable. With Flux, she’s worked with World YMCA, Young Friends of the Earth Europe, UNICEF in Iraq, and schools and universities in Hong Kong. Get them young, right?
“It’s partly, ‘Yeah, get them young,’ but it’s also because their minds are so much more open. As adults, we come to know how the system works and our default is to say ‘That’s not possible,’ but the beginner’s mind is really powerful. And our education systems are lacking the capacity to teach how to think strategically and across systems,” Anna laments.
“I enjoy working with young people and watching their minds adapt to these changes and run with them,” she adds. “You look at professionals and they are sometimes nervous to talk about emerging trends and where they might lead; they fear they should have expertise that they don’t. When we’re talking about the future, we have to recognise we don’t know what it will be, we have to be open to many possibilities, and we have to be free to ask questions.”
And that’s what it’s about: Making companies into the kinds of entities future workers won’t be ashamed to have on their CVs; the kinds of entities that understand change is a constant. As Anna says: “You can’t just assume that these things – water from your tap, food on the shelves, power – will always be there.”
In the meantime, Anna is quite content not making holiday plans even in the wake of the freshly announced abolition of quarantine. The family did a seven-day quarantine earlier this year, and they’re still recovering.
“We haemorrhaged money going to the UK in the spring, so we’ll be here for the rest of the year, but we might be able to bring family here,” Anna finishes. “With three little kids the trip was a challenge.” Surely not as challenging as fixing the future.