Courage the Cowardly Dog was a surreal series about a pink dog named Courage who lived in a state of near-constant fear, whether the danger was real or imagined. In each episode some supernatural, alien, or threat descended on his home, and Courage had to overcome his terror to save his owners.
Today, much of society runs on a quiet operating logic of fear and risk-avoidance. And not without reason: war and geopolitics have sent oil and gas prices lurching again with the shadow of inflation, parts of the economy are still recovering from the after-pandemic, and large amounts of capital have drifted back to fossil fuels — a strain on anyone worried about climate. Add the fear that AI will hollow out familiar jobs, a sharp policy reversal in the United States, and the ongoing argument over the EU’s Emissions Trading System, and you get fog. And in such a nebulous space, the instinct is often to avoid the wrong decision rather than to make the right one.
Daniel Goleman called it the hijack: the moment the brain’s ancient threat system overrides its slower, reasoning part, and when our values go quiet and survival takes the wheel. We stop acting on what we believe and start acting on what keeps us safe, at least for now.
The cost of such hijack is considerable: a new world is taking shape in front of us and it is one in which repairing the impacts of climate change costs far more than addressing its root causes.
This summer, Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency called Europe’s slow electrification a “major mistake,” saying he had “hoped and expected that Europe would have been more responsive” to a crisis it had already lived through once. Electricity still accounts for only about a quarter of Europe’s energy use, leaving a continent that imports most of its fuel more exposed than it needed to be. His remark allows two readings: one is a call for more renewables; the other is a warning about caution itself, a complacent decade spent protecting what already exists instead of taking the leap to to move towards the energy transition.
Times of change also bring opportunities: energy demand will keep rising, with AI data centres the latest bottleneck, and in some developing countries there is a real chance to leapfrog straight to clean generation. The transition is unstoppable.
And although the future may feel bleak today, it is far from settled; the question is how to change course. Otto Scharmer (MIT) points to sensing what is coming, and to presence as the ground for generative dialogue, or in other words, the capacity to co-imagine future clean scenarios for the industry while still meeting its non-negotiables: reliable energy supply, profitability, job security, and innovation.
Faced with so many challenges, how do we reach for something genuinely new rather than falling back on what we already know? Much of the answer lies in how courageous leaders regulate the full range of emotions a crisis provokes, going beyond pure technique. It is a move from the detached, rational actor to one who also acknowledges shared vulnerability in the face of a humanitarian crisis, and who uses that presence and human creativity to co-create new systemic clean scenarios worth testing.
Changing a system as rigid as energy is a formidable task, but where there is will, there is action. And where there is action, there is change. That same rigidity means no single actor can move alone: any new future is likely to need a constellation of actors, enabling the surface of natural leaders who do not necessarily hold the title in their job description.
The gap between will and action is where emerging futures most often stall. That is exactly the moment courage is needed. Fear, though natural and often useful, cannot be allowed to paralyse us. Any startup founder or corporate innovator will tell you that fear is real (see interviews) but so are the courage and the freedom to leap toward the unknown and bring genuinely new solutions to complex systemic problems. Like Courage the dog, we sometimes need reminding that we are much braver than we actually feel
“Could I live with myself if I don’t try this?”
Christophe Williams, founder and CEO, Naked Energy
Williams had a career most people would protect: two decades in advertising, first as a film editor, then directing high-end commercials. Part of the inspiration to make an impact in the energy transition came from his grandfather, who ran a pioneering alternative-energy division at engineering firm John Laing in the 1970s, testing wave devices in the North Sea. He founded Naked Energy, a solar-thermal company targeting the heat decarbonisation.
He is blunt that leaving his previous job was no natural progression. “It was anything but a natural step. There was a huge amount of fear”. Despite of this, he persevered and alongside his day job wrote the business plan in the margins, taking the leap after winning an early competition and seed funding, a sum he freely admits he misjudged. “I thought the investment was going to get me to the point where I could take the technology to market. I was very wrong.”
However the early investment didn’t seem to matter when I asked what made him leap towards his future: “Could I live with myself if I don’t give Naked Energy a go? The answer was no!”.
More than a decade on, he sets the bar where it belongs. With startup mortality rates so high, he has survived and thrived: “I feel so immensely proud that we are still here”. And speaking to him, you get the sense that the impact is only starting.
“Not if it’s going to work. How are we going to make it work?”
Julia Minici, co-founder, Afterwind
Minici left a succesful finance career at large bank intending to stay near what she knew: advising and investing in startups but after a few months it did not hold. “I cannot be arm’s length. I cannot just deploy capital and wait”. Half-measures were never an option: she tried briefly to keep a foot in both worlds and concluded it fools no one: “people read your bluff”.
As in many changemaker’s case, the inner feeling of uneasiness calling yourself to do something kicked in. There was fear but there was also conviction – and she leaped: “I couldn’t wait for the change to happen. I needed to be in the driving seat”, and so it was her turn to make it happen. She founded Afterwind, an innovative company solving a large issue: what to do with the retired wind turbine blades.
She frames the work as responsibility rather than opportunity: to customers, to investors, to the people she employs. Which is why the operative question moves from a different perspective: “This is not whether ‘is it’s going to work’? It’s how are we going to make it work”.
