Heading into our 5th year in business, the company’s focus areas remain governance, professional ethics, leadership, and strategy & policy development. This is where it all began for us in 2008, with the company’s focus areas shaped by the experience and passion of its founder, Mike Scrafton.  A development has been an increasing emphasis on work developing public policy and organisational responses to climate change and sustainability issues.  Again, our interest in this field builds on Mike’s personal experience and expertise, while also reflecting demand for services in this complex area of public policy.

Climate change and sustainability

The company has become increasingly engaged in work around climate change and sustainability issues, including undertaking a major project in 2011 dealing with governance arrangements for complex, multi-source service delivery in the water sector.

Ethics training

Ethics training remains a passion for Mike, and a high priority focus area for the company. In 2011, with the Nous Group, Mike developed and delivered a well-received  ethics program for school principals that focused on building practical skills for resolving ethical dilemmas in the workplace.

Leadership and mentoring

This has continued to be an important part of our business. Mike has worked with executives from a wide range of organisations, including New Zealand government departments, Australian federal government departments, and state government departments and agencies (in Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland). Mike has also enjoyed the opportunity of working with not-for-profit organisations, including the Salvation Army, and with one of Australia’s leading providers of community health and residential aged care.

Organisation and governance reviews

Public sector governance has never been of more importance, with new governance models emerging to meet the challenges of modern, complex public service delivery. We have been pleased to do work in this area in a diverse range of policy and service delivery contexts, including the Victorian urban water sector and the higher education sector.

Sharing in new thinking

To keep up with leading thinking in our focus areas, we try to regularly attend conferences and seminars in Australia and overseas. Highlights included:

2010 – Global Footprint Forum, Italy. The Global Footprint methodology is a rigorous and powerful way to look at the sustainability of national and global consumption patterns. This work provides a way of calculating and comparing the demand on nature (ecological footprint), and the capacity to meet this demand (biocapacity), of more than 200 countries, territories, and regions. Read more about Ecological Footprint Science. For an example of the use of the methodology in public policy development, see the 2011 report by the United Nations Environment Program which suggests that greening key economic sectors  – investing just 2 percent of global GDP in green key sectors of the economy – could cut humanity’s Footprint in half while actually boosting economic growth. See ‘Towards a Green Economy’. Interested in reading more? Subscribe to Global Footprint news updates.

The 2011 – European Future Energy Forum, Switzerland, consisted of an exhibition of future energy technologies, and a program of presentations tackling key policy and regulation issues. Central to this discussion were issues confronting governments everywhere – the complex question of the right mix of policy measures to achieve energy/emissions reduction targets, and the allied challenge of providing an ongoing, stable and predictable energy regulation framework that facilitates investment. These issues are further complicated by the unpredictable and potentially disruptive trajectories of innovations in technology, and the Forum canvassed a range of potentially disruptive new technologies (in various stages of development).

Other conferences attended included Sustainable Development 2011 (July, Wessex, United Kingdom). While variable, the papers presented at this conference provided examples where innovation in sustainable projects in less developed countries can provide lessons and opportunities in implementing sustainable solutions for Australian policy makers.