“We don’t want to depress people”: the sustainability podcast that bridges theory and practice

“Really good practice is better than really good theory,” says Professor Jan Bebbington, Rubin chair in sustainability in business and director of the Pentland Centre at Lancaster University Management School. That sentiment is particularly interesting coming from a self-professed “geeky academic”.

Jan is co-host of Transforming Tomorrow, a podcast designed to educate business people on sustainability in an open and accessible way. This means translating complex topics for a broad audience, and episodes always explore real-world applications. 

“If you get tied up in esoteric descriptions, nobody benefits,” Jan explains. “It’s a translational process. When you’re chatting to somebody in a podcast studio, you can’t help but get into proper explanations that are about everyday lives, things real people might do and see.”

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Her co-host, Paul Turner, is research and engagement content manager at Lancaster University Management School. Paul brings an outside eye and a playful edge to the conversations, which do a great job of drawing the listener in. 

“Even though we’re discussing serious topics, I don’t think we take ourselves too seriously,” he says. “We’re discussing some very serious issues here, like global warming, plastics pollution, poverty and hunger, but we don’t want to send people away feeling depressed. Whatever the topic, we want to present it in a way that gives people hope.”

Mining asteroids

Transforming Tomorrow was shortlisted for the Sustainable Futures category of Management Publication of the Year, a prize co-run by CMI, the Chartered Association of Business Schools and the British Academy of Management.  

In their appraisal of Transforming Tomorrow, the judges highlighted the hosts’ “clear effort to bridge understanding between practice, policy and complex theoretical ideas”.