Andy Middleton | The TYF Group

In conversation with Sabina Enéa Téari (Foresta Collective: www.foresta-collective.com)

S.E.T.: Andy, what was your intention back when you started TYF? And how did you see it develop over the years?

A.M.: With TYF we went through a number of phases that were not planned, but were an evolution, as my own thinking and the nature and thinking of the people in the business changed. I was 24 when I started and at that time just doing cool adventures close to nature was enough for me - we were not trying to be agents of change in anything more than reclaiming the meaning of adventure in a world that already seemed to be forgetting what it meant.

Pretty soon we started working with businesses and teams and it didn’t take long to realise the scale of disconnection between work and meaning and the dire implications of working in an economy where four out five people are not actively engaged in the work they do. So the early work we did in consulting was reconnecting people to purpose at work - we got good at asking simple, powerful questions about what mattered. I saw that connection between people, work and personal impact was unexplored in most leadership programmes, so spent time learning and teaching at Cambridge University’s Institute for Sustainable Leadership and Schumacher College to calibrate my thinking against the then-leading thinkers in this space - and realised that almost nobody in the environmental sector had the skill set to make change in business. 

It was clear which hat I needed to put on - because few others were wearing it - so I started working on questions on how to reconnect people and purpose at work and the environment in ways that make sense in business. Gradually as our ideas got bolder and braver I realised that they have a potential to change a good chunk of the world. 

We started working more deeply in education with young people and what felt important on that journey was helping people move away from the trap of thinking “we are not good enough, someone else can do this better” as a way to never fully commit to making change happen. I’m sure that a belief that you can make change actually makes you more responsive to the signals you get from people around, and you notice very quickly whether your ideas are genuinely inspirational and whether they hit the ground where it most matters. Gradually we got better at pitching and practicing and stitching different areas together (forestry, biodiversity, education, health etc) - into a single tapestry that people can understand. Today, most of my work is about connecting people who can recognise and share their parts of that jigsaw, together building a picture of a shared future. On our website we say that our mission is to help people fall in love with nature and we do that by offering people better stories. By using our business to build community, we help people grow and then act on their desire to build, and be the teller of better stories. And here I think it’s important to stop being scared about the difficulty of joining things together.

S.E.T.: Can you give an example?

A.M.: We’re increasingly aware that buying more things isn't the answer to sustainability and at the same time, most of us don't live in either a society or a climate where it's okay to have no clothes. At the simplest level, let’s make sure that if buying clothes, we're buying ones that are not stitched together with child labour, that are fair trade, organic, etc because each of those garments are also part of a story. We end up wearing other people’s stories as well as using clothes to tell a story about ourselves. TYF’s retail business’ purpose is to make people more conscious shoppers, regardless of whether or not they buy anything from us. The relationship with the customers is much more about seeing our customers as partners on the journey, rather than people who've just come into a shop to maybe buy something. When you take two products, how would you ever know that one is made of slave labour and one isn't? The only way of knowing is by learning to read the labels, ask questions and have conversations that deepen our knowledge. We are working on better ways to help customers compare the buzz of buying a cheap T-shirt made by a 12-year-old with the warm glow of buying an alternative made with organic cotton and certified Fair Trade stitching.

S.E.T.: And then there are the costs of damaged nature that aren't included in the description of a product…

A.M.: Nearly all the damage done to nature so far is legal. Brazil is being deforested now with its forest being cut by companies acting lawfully and encouraged by Bolsonaro. The biomass power stations in south Wales are processing shiploads of wood from Canadian forests and are doing it legally but it doesn’t seem to make ‘Future Generations Sense’ to ship firewood 3000 miles to burn for steam. 

Compliance with legal standards is the floor level compliance goal for most governments and businesses but the problem is that if every business in the world just complied with legal standards we will disappear as a species because complying with legal standards was never intended to create conditions for any species to thrive. Nearly all of the emissions of carbon, or damage to our land, soil, or biodiversity have been done within the law, according to legal standards. We need to respond to kind of a shared reality and a shared awareness of what's happening in the world. People in academia, for instance, might have really good insights, but they're not geared up to make change happen. Public sector is hampered by short term thinking, misunderstanding risk and tick-box culture. Charities are often funded in really limited ways that don't allow them to do imaginative things. Businesses are usually successful at money-making but hitting the wrong goals everywhere else. So we are looking at a new kind of agent, that catalyses radical collaboration, that is leading towards regeneration of natural systems and ‘good ancestor’ action. 

S.E.T.: What impact from your work, intended or unintended, stayed in your memory most vividly? 

A.M.: In my 20s I worked as a a beach lifeguard and, while the majority of our time was spent stopping people getting into difficulty, we also trained hard to deal with emergencies. The most serious of those were ‘after hours’ when I happened to be at the beach windsurfing or surfing and being in the right place at the right time meant that I was able to save two people from drowning. A lovely touch was that a couple of years back, someone came to the TYF shop and asked for me. It happened to be the wife of the guy I saved, saying that he was only here today because I was on the beach then. They’d come back in the area and wanted to come and say thank you. 

With TYF we’re certain that what we do changes people’s lives and often get emails from people saying that what we did changed their career or mindset trajectory, or it offered a glimpse of the future they could have. On one lovely occasion, we received a letter of complaint - something that’s pretty rare, saying that we’d let him down, we should have known how powerful our adventures are and should never let him book for just one day. Coasteering changed his life, he said, and the most important thing was that he learned how to play and let go. 

Experiences in the ocean feel particularly powerful and help people realise they don’t need to be in control all the time, and can’t be. There is something elemental about the power of the moving sea and its physical energy, that makes you feel very small and insignificant in a non-threatening way. Coasteering shows through play that while we cannot overcome the waves, we can learn to think and react differently to challenges that swirl around us and to gain a different perspective that helps us turn potentially dangerous energy or events into opportunity

S.E.T.: When you think back to moments where you had to call upon your courage doing the work you do - what comes to mind? 

A.M.: One of the things that you've got to be pretty good at if you want to do adventure at any serious level and stay safe, is to be good at noticing the patterns of change around you in the ocean, the winds, the waves, the people you're with, and permanently be adjusting to the meaning of those, noticing the interplay between those factors. And then, based on your interpretation, understand what they might mean in terms of different choices that you need to make going forwards. 

When we are kayaking in a rough sea next to the rocks, the timing of our passage between two islands will be completely determined by the capacity of the people who are in the kayaks and how big the waves are. If you get the timing right, you can go through an incredibly exciting journey between a gap in the rocks, and if you get it wrong you might get hurt. Judging risk and making choices is something that people that are good at adventure learn how to do. Understanding this helped me a lot when faced with tough challenges or big questions in business, to be able to stand back from those and look at them from a perspective of risk and say what’s the risk of me doing this versus not doing it. 

One example of this was working with TYF’s very first corporate client, British Aerospace, a company who make aeroplanes and aeroplane parts. And they also make weapons. They don’t sell weapons, but they make them, and they say ‘but we're in the game of making peace’ - and while there may be peaceful outcomes sometimes as a result of weapons existing, for much of the time that's clearly not the case. We ended up being increasingly uncomfortable with this paradox; even though the people we were working with were good people and they were our biggest client at the time, we ended up saying sorry, we really love you as humans and we wish you well but we can't work with you anymore and we’re sacking you as a client. Making that decision was a really important stage of our development. We knew that it was a business risk but there’s no point in saying your values are important then not acting on what you say. Making that decision gave me and colleagues courage to start following our path with more confidence and a stronger voice. What was the real risk? If we hadn't made that decision, we would have lost some of the rights to talk about change and following your heart. Losing that was too big a risk to take. 

To read the full magazine from Foresta Collective follow the link below. 

foresta-collective.com/sustainability-magazine