North is not up. It never was.

Hello and welcome to episode 6 of my newsletter to see the big picture and build the future we want.

I’m so happy to see you here!

This week I fell down a rabbit hole about meridians : the imaginary lines we use to slice up the planet. It sounds like a subject for cartographers. But it isn’t.

Greenwich is the world’s zero point for longitude and time. Not because of physics, geology, or any property of the Earth. Because of a nineteenth-century political negotiation in which one line beat several serious competitors. And now every coordinate, every timezone, every satellite fix on the planet is calibrated to a line running through a London suburb. China built its own satellite constellation to escape American infrastructure, and still calibrated it to the same zero point, because the alternative was a system that could not speak to any other. Europe sits, quietly and permanently, at the centre of the world's coordinate system.

North is at the top of your map for the same kind of reason. The universe has no up. It’s a convention, a useful one, and an arbitrary one. There are Australian world maps with South at the top. They are not wrong. They are simply not the one that won.

Here is what struck me, and why I’m writing this issue.

Nobody in your organisation believes North is up. Nobody has an opinion about Greenwich. They have simply stopped asking and that is a fundamentally different problem from bias.

Here’s what’s inside episode 6 of Wide Angle:

I. Deep analysis: Collective bias the conventions your sector never chose, why they’re invisible, and a three-question test to surface them

II. Three signals you shouldn’t miss this week

III. This week’s opportunities: a tighter, more selective list of senior climate and sustainability roles

I. DEEP ANALYSIS

The bias nobody has

We talk endlessly about cognitive bias in leadership. Confirmation bias, anchoring, sunk cost, loss aversion. Whole training programmes exist to inoculate executives against them. And they are real.

But they are also, structurally, the easy problem because an individual bias is something you hold. It sits inside your head, it can be named, and with enough vigilance it can be argued with.

A collective bias is not something you hold. It is something you stand on.

It doesn’t feel like a belief, because you never adopted it. It arrived before you did, embedded in the institutions you were trained by, the metrics you were handed, and the org chart you inherited. It doesn’t distort your answer to the question. It decides which questions are worth asking before you arrive.

That’s why the map is such a good way in. The bias in a map is visible, because a map is a graphic object: you can hold up two projections and see, immediately, that one of them made a choice. Try doing that with a strategy document.

And once you’ve seen it in the map, you start seeing it everywhere else.

Here are four conventions that are running your organisation, that nobody chose

The quarter. Why is the fundamental unit of corporate decision making three months long? Not because anything in the physical world, in a supply chain, in an ecosystem, or in a human career operates on a ninety day cycle. It’s a reporting convention that hardened into a decision rhythm and then into a perception of time. It now determines which investments look sensible and which look reckless including nearly every investment whose returns arrive over a decade. Nobody in your company decided that the future should be discounted at that rate. It came with the furniture.

Growth as direction, not as option. Growth isn’t treated as one goal among several. It’s treated as the meaning of the word “forward.” A company that stays the same size is not described as stable; it’s described as stagnant. That is not an analysis. It’s a grammar. And it forecloses an entire category of strategies durability, contraction, redistribution, exit before they can be evaluated, because they don’t parse as progress.

The org chart split between “the business” and “sustainability.” Someone, once, drew a line putting climate and environment in a function adjacent to the operating core. That was a decision, made under specific constraints, at a specific moment. It is now architecture. And every subsequent conversation every “how do we get buy in from the business?”, every fight over where the ESG team reports is conducted inside an assumption almost nobody remembers making.

The measures that present themselves as facts. GDP. Sovereign credit ratings. The discount rate. Cost per tonne. Each of these is a construction with authors, assumptions, and a politics. Each is now consumed as a description of reality. When a small island state’s credit rating makes climate adaptation finance prohibitively expensive precisely because it is exposed to climate risk that is not a fact about the world. It is a convention doing its work quietly, and calling it arithmetic.

Why this is the missing piece

Two issues ago, I wrote about the substitution trap: how sectors swap an input - the fuel, the feed, the material and leave the system’s logic untouched. Last issue, about the institutional retreat: how, when the legitimate actor withdraws, someone else moves in with different rules and different blind spots.

This is the layer underneath both. We substitute inputs rather than redesign systems because redesign would require questioning a convention that no longer presents itself as a question. Electric cars instead of redesigned mobility, because “a car per household” isn’t a hypothesis, it’s the floor you’re standing on. Certified buildings instead of rethought buildings, because the brief was written before anyone in the room was born.

You cannot redesign a system whose founding assumptions have become invisible. That’s not a failure of intelligence. It’s a failure of visibility and visibility is a thing you can actually work on.

The test: three questions to surface your sector’s collective bias

What is presented on your dashboard by default and what do you have to go looking for?

Open Google Maps in any city and you will find a fast food restaurant more easily than the local school. The school is there. But commerce is rendered by default and public services must be searched for. That’s not censorship; it’s hierarchy, made invisible by convenience. Now open your own reporting dashboard, your board pack, your risk register. What is rendered by default? Whatever you have to hunt for is, functionally, being decided against every week, by everyone, without anyone choosing.

What has never been measured, because nobody thought to add it up?

A group in Vienna, the Gender Atlas, mapped the street names of the city by gender. The data had existed all along. Nobody had ever summed it. The result: roughly 109 kilometres of streets named after women, against about 1,500 kilometres named after men. Nothing was hidden. It simply had never been aggregated, because no one had asked the question. What is the equivalent in your organisation the number that could be calculated tomorrow from data you already hold, that has never been calculated because the question has never been posed?

Which of your constraints are physics, and which are conventions wearing the costume of physics?

This is the hardest and most valuable question. Some constraints are real: thermodynamics, material limits, the speed at which an ecosystem recovers. Others merely behave like they’re real: the quarterly cycle, the discount rate, the assumption that a project must be profitable within a fixed horizon, the belief that only some categories of actor are allowed to convene others. Take your list of “we can’t do that because…” and sort it into two columns. The second column is usually longer than anyone expects and everything in it is, in principle, negotiable.

What to do about it, starting Monday morning

Run the default audit. Take the last board pack or dashboard your team produced. List what appears without being requested, and what required someone to dig. That first list is your organisation’s real priority hierarchy regardless of what your strategy document says.

Compute one number nobody has ever computed. Not a new data collection exercise an aggregation of something you already hold, along an axis nobody has thought to use. That’s the Gender Atlas move, and it is cheap, fast, and disproportionately revealing.

Do the two column sort, in a room, out loud. Physics on the left, convention on the right. Do it with your team rather than alone, because a convention is precisely the thing an individual cannot see unaided that’s what makes it collective. The argument about which column an item belongs in is the exercise.

Maps have one great pedagogical advantage: because they are graphic, the bias is visible. You can point at it. Most of the conventions running your sector have no such tell they are made of language, habit, and org charts, which is why they survive so comfortably.

The work is to make them visible enough to point at. Everything else follows from that.

That is the wide angle. That is the view leaders need now.

📣 Share Wide Angle

If Wide Angle adds value to your week, forward it to one colleague or friend in sustainability, climate, strategy, or leadership. Every new reader helps grow this community of big picture thinkers.

→ Share

II. THREE SIGNALS YOU SHOULDN’T MISS THIS WEEK

Three stories from three different worlds ocean policy, global finance, and geopolitics. Each one is a convention being contested, or quietly hardening into fact.

WRI published its assessment of the Our Ocean Conference this month, and the headline figure is enormous: over twelve years, the conference has produced more than 3,000 commitments worth over $175 billion in pledged finance. Here is the figure that matters more: 41% of those commitments have actually been completed a proportion essentially unchanged from last year, indicating no meaningful acceleration in delivery.

The convention at work: in ocean diplomacy, the pledge is the achievement. It’s what gets announced, reported, and counted. Delivery is a separate, quieter, largely unmeasured activity. WRI’s contribution here isn’t new data collection it’s the decision to add up what was promised and compare it against what arrived. That’s the Gender Atlas move, applied to ocean finance. The 2026 edition also marked the first time the conference was held in Africa, with African commitments totalling $14.3 billion pledged since 2014, of which $5.7 billion has been fully delivered.

→ Read the WRI assessment

2. Finance: a continent decides its own credit score is a convention, not a fact

When a country borrows money, the interest rate it pays depends on one thing above all: whether lenders believe it will pay them back. And that belief is set largely by three private firms, Moody's, S&P, and Fitch, which assign every country a score and together control roughly 95% of the global ratings market. A high score means cheap borrowing. A low score means expensive borrowing. The score looks like a fact, like a temperature reading. Nobody argues with it.

But here is the evidence that it isn't a neutral fact. Take countries with the same score, equal risk on paper, and compare what they actually pay. African countries pay between 1 and 2.6 percentage points more than their equally rated peers elsewhere. Same score, higher price. Something beyond measured risk is inflating the cost, and UNDP estimates this "perception premium" drains the continent of around $75 billion a year. In concrete terms: African governments paid roughly 9% to borrow in dollars in 2024, against about 4.7% for emerging Asia.

The reason is buried in how the scores are built, and it is the whole argument of this issue compressed into one institution. The models behind the Big Three's ratings were designed for wealthy economies. They reward long runs of historical data and deep financial markets, and they penalise exactly the kind of long term developmental investment that a growing economy depends on. That is not a neutral measurement of risk. It is a set of choices, made by particular people for a particular kind of economy, then applied to the whole world as though it simply described reality.

So the African Union decided to draw a second map. The Africa Credit Rating Agency (AfCRA), based in Mauritius and privately led, was due to issue its first ratings around mid 2026, using African data and starting with debt in local currencies. Whether it earns real credibility is an open question: sceptics worry it will just tilt the bias the other way, and its scores will only matter once investors in New York and London recognise them. But the attempt itself is the signal. Somebody finally said, out loud, that's not a fact, it's a model, and we can build another one.

→ Read Chatham House’s report on AfCRA

3. Geopolitics: the rules-based trading system is quietly becoming something else

UNCTAD, the UN body that monitors global trade, published its June 2026 trade update on critical minerals, and it contains a number worth sitting with. These are the minerals the energy transition runs on: the lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare earths inside every battery, wind turbine, and electric motor. Since 2020, close to 100 new government measures restricting the export of these minerals have been introduced worldwide: 37 licensing requirements, 31 export taxes, 29 outright export bans, and one quota. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has introduced the most, followed by China and Indonesia. Separately, there are now 73 bilateral agreements between individual countries to secure supply of these minerals, 58 of them signed since 2022.

Read those two figures together and you see a convention dissolving in real time. For thirty years, the working assumption of global trade has been that it runs on universal, non discriminatory rules that apply to everyone equally, and that private deals between two countries are the exception. That assumption is no longer describing the world. It is being replaced, one agreement at a time, by a patchwork of bespoke country to country arrangements built on strategic alliance rather than shared rules. UNCTAD's own warning is that without stronger coordination, trade in these minerals risks fragmenting into rival blocs.

Here is what makes this a collective bias rather than a policy debate. Most organisations still model their supply chain risk, their procurement, and their exposure to individual countries on the assumption that the open, rules based system holds. That assumption is rarely examined at board level. It is the floor the whole analysis stands on. And the floor is moving.

If your business depends on any of those minerals, which it does if you are in automotive, energy, or manufacturing, this is the convention most worth interrogating this quarter.

→ Read the UNCTAD update

I keep a limited number of engagements per year, by design.

- Signature Keynote: a 90-minute talk built around "How to Turn Chaos into Opportunity," for organisations that need their leadership to think differently about resilience before the next disruption arrives.

- Signature Workshop: a half-day working session for teams that need to leave with an actual plan, not just a framework: who owns what, which channel to use, how the coalition survives past launch.

- Bespoke Programme (custom): for organisations going deeper, over multiple modules.

Available in English and French. International.

Write to me [email protected]

or

Why this matters: we are moving into a world where climate, geopolitics, energy, and natural resources are no longer separate topics. They are one system. My work is to help people read that system more clearly and make better decisions inside it.

I am also board and advisory-board member.

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like to have me onboard!

You are not many to click on these, so let me know if you want me to keep the job board or not (it’s a lot of work for me to source all these jobs).

A tighter list this week: fewer roles, each one checked.

🎒 Director, Private Sector Engagement
Environmental Defense Fund · United Kingdom · Hybrid/Remote

🎒 Consulting Director, Sustainable Product & Supply Chain
Environmental Resources Management · Frankfurt, Germany · Hybrid

🎒 Senior Director of Federal Affairs
Mainspring Energy · Washington, DC, US · Remote

🎒 Director, Commercial Origination & Business Development
AMP Robotics · US · Remote

🎒 Corporate Strategy Director
Environmental Resources Management · Mumbai, India · In-person

If you are only looking for remote jobs in sustainability, subscribe to Sofia's newsletter here!

That's it for today!

And a personal note:

If you are interested in energy, join the early readers' list for my upcoming book on energy explained from A to Z in a fun way!

→ Join Early Readers' Community

See you next week!

Alix

♻️ Share this to inspire your network.