“We’re not just doing something minor and iterative here. We’re trying to radically disrupt for the positive benefit of humankind.” — Paul Cubbon

What does change look like and what makes it possible? For leaders like Paul Cubbon who refuse to settle for the status quo, answering these questions are key to forging a path forward.

As the Assistant Dean of Innovation at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business and a leader within the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) in Vancouver, Paul works with talented, ambitious scientific inventors seeking to scale their societal impact, often in human or planetary health. Paul is also familiar to Destination Think as a business advisor. And in 2020, he and Destination Think CEO Rodney Payne became CDL colleagues, when Rodney joined as a Founding Partner of CDL Vancouver’s Climate stream. 

Paul is optimistic about the future. He believes that we have all the necessary elements and many of the required technologies to affect dramatic change, we just have to create the right conditions for them to succeed. He sees the main challenges as aligning priorities and eliminating frictions, and he calls for a “coalition of the willing” to allow innovations to thrive. Paul offers this compelling example: In 2019, the expected timeline to develop a vaccine was 20 years. Post-2020, it shrunk to 20 months. For Paul, this rapid change of pace proves that a unified focus on a shared issue can significantly accelerate progress.

At the same time, legacy processes and siloed industries often limit collaboration and the work that can be directed towards the real priorities. According to Paul, there’s a tendency to focus on the top-down influence of governments and policy decisions on innovation, but bottom-up efforts have the capacity to both drive change and catalyze movement from the top, within companies and communities. 

How can travel destinations chart a roadmap for change within the tourism economy? Follow Paul’s thought experiment. Without judging or committing to changes, generate possibilities and alternatives, think of the circumstances under which they can exist, and then assess the options and decide how to move forward. 

As he explains, “we can actually break these seemingly huge, huge and hard-to-imagine-how-to-solve problems down to component parts. And then I think they’re solvable. Not necessarily easily, but they are solvable.” 

This episode of Travel Beyond, Paul Cubbon talks about:

• Why the Rubik’s Cube helps him talk to communities about interconnectedness.
• The potential to combine change from the top-down and bottom-up.
• How pilot projects can accelerate change and enable evidence-based solutions for organizations.
• Why being involved with Queenstown Lakes’ goal to reach Carbon Zero by 2030 gave him goosebumps – twice.

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Show notes

Creative Destruction Lab — A global start-up program for seed-stage, science-based companies which tries to enable the innovations with the greatest potential for positive impact at scale to become viable businesses.

Queenstown Lakes — A district in the Otago Region of New Zealand with a goal to reach Carbon Zero by 2030. 

University of British Columbia — A global centre for research and teaching in Vancouver, Canada.

Episode transcript

Paul Cubbon: I think a lot of the technologies that we need already exist. Actually what’s needed is the coalition of the willing to actually deploy. And I think we can look at this from a top down point of view. We’re used to seeing governments make these decisions, and in many ways they’re enablers on policy. But what gets much less talked about is the bottom up abilities to actually drive change.

I don’t think it’s either or. My reason for optimism is I think it can be both, and I think the bottom up can become a catalyst for more movement from the top down.

David Archer: Hello and welcome to Travel Beyond, where we partner with leading destinations to explore the greatest challenges facing communities and the planet, surfacing their most inspiring solutions. I’m David Archer from Destination Think, and I’m recording from Haida Gwaii, the territory of the Haida Nation off the north coast of British Columbia in Canada.

On this show, we look at the role of travel and choose to highlight destinations that are global leaders. We talk to the changemakers who are addressing regenerative travel through action in their communities and often from the bottom up. Last episode, Dr. Susanne Becken from Griffith University told us about the need to accelerate climate solutions in the travel industry in light of current climate predictions.

And some of those solutions stem from incredible discoveries and innovations led by scientists and researchers across academia and universities everywhere. What’s the path between a discovery in a lab and an impact in the world? And that’s one place where business can play a role. One of the bridges between innovations and their application is an international program called the Creative Destruction Lab.

CDL, as it’s known, is a global startup program for seed stage, science based companies. The project is trying to enable the innovations with the greatest potential for positive impact at scale to become viable businesses. Here’s how I think about it sometimes and bear with me. If there was a reality TV version of CDL, it might be something like Dragon’s Den or Shark Tank.

Those are shows where entrepreneurs stand in front of a panel of savvy investors and the viewing audience and submit their work for judgment. And CDL is similar in the sense that startups need to apply to the program and demonstrate what they hope to achieve. A group of mentors then judges their work.

And that’s probably where the responsible comparisons stop, because unlike Dragon’s Den, CDL is a mentorship program where business leaders, economists, and scientists nurture and guide entrepreneurs through the early stages of their businesses. CDL began at the University of Toronto in 2012, and since then the program has expanded to 13 locations, including universities in Berlin, Estonia, Melbourne, Montreal, and Oxford.

There are numerous streams to the program too, which include a broad spectrum of fields like AI, biomedical engineering, climate, digital society, energy, health and wellness, and manufacturing, oceans, and supply chains, you know, some of the topics we’ve talked about on this podcast and CDL has a slogan, build something massive.

What does that look like in practice? Well, today’s guest will tell us. Paul Cubbon is the assistant Dean of innovation at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business. And he’s involved with CDL’s Vancouver chapter. He was the site lead here from its inception in 2016 until 2022. And today he continues to serve as the program session moderator.

He says the Vancouver program has made an impact in a variety of interrelated fields, affecting the health of humanity, the planet and economies. There’s a lot more to Paul’s resume. There’s a lot more I could say, and he’ll tell some of that story in this interview. The Destination Think team is familiar with Paul as a business advisor as well.

He’s worked with us on various projects over the years, including the Queenstown Lakes goal to reach carbon zero by 2030. Paul and Destination Think CEO Rodney Payne are also colleagues at CDL. Since 2020, Rodney has been a founding partner of the Climate Stream at CDL Vancouver. In this interview, Paul talks about the need for societal changes to happen both from the top down and the bottom up.

And to me, the projects at CDL seem to be able to affect both of those directions through its influence in the business world and its effect on startup founders and scientists. Here is Paul Cubbon speaking with Rodney Payne.

Paul Cubbon: Hello, my name is Paul Cubbon and I’m the Assistant Dean of Innovation at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia in beautiful Vancouver, Canada. 

Rodney Payne: How has travel changed your life? 

Paul Cubbon: Travel’s enriched my life, uh, immensely. Um, probably the most striking example is, uh, as a young Englishman, I met a young Canadian, um, in an elephant reserve in Zimbabwe, and, uh, we’ve been married now for 33 years, living in Vancouver.

Rodney Payne: Are you worried about climate change? 

Paul Cubbon: I worry about climate change. I’m not a natural worrier, but I think there’s, uh, a situation that if we don’t put significant effort into rectifying what’s going on, then our children and our children’s children are not going to have a livable planet. 

Rodney Payne: Can you tell me quickly about your journey to your current position at UBC?

Paul Cubbon: No. 

Rodney Payne: Can you tell me medium about your journey? 

Paul Cubbon: Yeah, it’s often said that it’s the journey, not the destination. And, you know, literally my life’s journey has been unpredictable, but the way I see things is, is, is that, um, if you’re looking for opportunity, then doors open. And so, uh, I’ve had several lives, I feel, and, uh, I’ve gone from, um, working in an advertising agency, uh, on kind of pharmaceutical drugs, computer software and candy bars before lunch.

Um, which is good for someone like me that doesn’t actually kind of, uh, focus very easily to kind of helping to set up a global innovation center, uh, in a large, uh, Fortune 500 company. And I think I’ve just always been curious about, uh, competition, uh, and about consumer psychology and about why people make the decisions they do.

And so, um, that’s kind of led me through different paths and I’ve been, I’ve been fortunate to work with great people. A research intensive university is full of amazing talent. Part of my opportunity is to help try to release it for the benefit of humankind. 

Rodney Payne: What do you find yourself spending most of your time on in the last few years?

Paul Cubbon: In the last few years, most of my time has been working to try and help talented, ambitious scientific inventors to have an impact on society, and that’s nearly always either around human health or planetary health. First time founders, the classic scientific inventor, don’t know how to build a business that can scale to have impact, and I do.

Rodney Payne: How would you simply explain the Creative Destruction Lab to someone who doesn’t know what it is. 

Paul Cubbon: The Creative Destruction Lab is a marketplace for judgment. The first time scientific founder is faced with a thousand competing decisions every day, and invariably they pick wrong and fail, or they try to boil the ocean and they fail.

Creative Destruction Lab is a marketplace that brings together seasoned and unseasoned. Experienced founders who have built, scaled significantly, and then exited off to multiple businesses to help first time founders prioritize what they should focus on to de risk their early stage businesses. 

Rodney Payne: I’m probably, you know, head of the fan club around CDL and I was a skeptic at first.

Give me the top line on what it’s achieved at CDL. Just the, the sort of data points that prove out how successful it is. 

Paul Cubbon: CDL first started by my friend and colleague, Professor Ajay Agrawal at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School, um, probably 12 years ago now. Um, and it’s now in 13 universities, uh, with multiple specialized streams.

So this year, uh, this month, October 2023, around the world, at 13 universities, there’s about 650 deep science tech startups that have entered their program. And around the world, the value created by the ventures that have gone through is roughly 20 billion across all of those universities thus far and growing.

Rodney Payne: That’s pretty phenomenal. What, can you color that with what types of things are people dreaming up and what sort of problems are people trying to solve? Like, give me the, give me the breadth. 

Paul Cubbon: I’d say we, we, we’ve got streams that are very focused on what I would call enabling technologies, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and you know, you can imagine the range of applications there to, uh, deployment areas, which might be in, uh, you know, uh, various medical fields like advanced therapeutics, biomedical engineering, devices, diagnostics, and so on.

So, you know, these are human health, so it’s either saving lives or improving longevity and quality of life, or, um, they’re around things like, um, energy, uh, climate, uh, supply chain. And really it’s kind of innovation to kind of dramatically improve those industries, uh, and targets, you know, our tagline and indeed, uh, North star, is build something massive. Now, if you think about creative destruction, you know, it’s an economist’s term you know, it is it was the Austrian economist Schumpeter who talked about creative destruction. And it’s the recognizing the recognition that you know, we’re not just doing something minor and iterative here, we’re trying to radically disrupt for the positive benefit of humankind. 

Rodney Payne: Why is something like CDL necessary?

Paul Cubbon: I think that the one of the challenges of many organizations as they grow, whether they are corporations or whether they are universities, hospitals, is despite the talented and hardworking people in them, as they get larger, there’s almost an inevitable move to a bureaucracy and a risk aversion. I think the thing about a startup for startups is that it gives you an ability to move fast, be agile, and, and to do things that wouldn’t otherwise be done in risk averse and optimizing organizations. 

Rodney Payne: The innovations that you’re helping to bring into the world are solving big problems. And I know you and I talk a lot about the interrelatedness of these different problems. How do you see those problems within our society and system? Like, are they interconnected? Are they natural? Are they? 

Paul Cubbon: Yeah. I mean, I, I see everything that I’m involved in working on across the university and beyond through, uh, the programs like Creative Destruction Lab and with my colleagues, uh, in different organizations, really falling into one of three interconnected areas, human health, planetary health, and economic health.

And, you know, we can be very clear about how we measure those as well. It’s lives saved or, or, or quality of, uh, the, the health of people’s lives. It’s the health of the planet, and we can measure it in greenhouse, uh, emission reductions, kind of temperature of the planet, you know, multiple ways, but we can quantify these things.

And then the economic health, it’s jobs and, and tax base, um, and they’re all very interconnected. If any one of them, uh, is severely out of kilter, then, uh, it, it upsets the whole, uh, society. 

Rodney Payne: When, when we talk about inequality and some of the layers below those three top line things, you know, inequality and affordability of housing and the cost of living, you know, the ecosystem degradation we’re seeing and our biosphere being impacted by the system that we’ve created.

You’ve got a really good analogy that we’ve been talking about a Rubik’s Cube. Can you, can you explain that to me? 

Paul Cubbon: So we use this Rubik’s Cube analogy for, I think, two reasons. First of all, recognizing that if you move one side of the cube, then you’re going to change, kind of, the combination of colors on the other side.

So, you know, they, they are, kind of, uh, uh, very much in, in tension together. But I think that, secondly, is, is it allows us a, a flexible mental model for how to go and connect with different stakeholders, different communities, communities. Um, what they want to lead on, what, uh, as they want to change their community for a, a, a better, a better place.

And it doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing they’ll do, it just means that that’s their way in. So if one community finds that housing affordability is their kind of priority, if they’re aware that it’s connected to all these other elements in the Rubik’s Cube, then they can use it almost as their beachhead or the tip of their arrow for change.

I think it’s a very powerful way to give people a sense that they’ve got some control of their own destiny while they’re going to eventually do everything. 

Rodney Payne: The news cycle is getting more and more depressing. Big problems, you know, there’s a lot of click bait, but I do think, you know, in data, things are on the wrong trajectory.

At the same time, you to a greater extent than me, but we both see amazing, smart, diverse founders working on all kinds of breakthrough technology. How do you reconcile that? And do you feel hopeful? 

Paul Cubbon: Yeah, I mean, I think on the one hand, access to information about what’s going on in the world is important.

We need to be informed. On the other hand, the nature of news and particularly, um, the bite sized news, uh, of the, the clickbait society online is, is, is that it, it can tend to go to extremes and often to talk about negative stories. I think we’ve got to kind of also then step back and say, are we going to be victims?

Or are we going to kind of try and try and take control of our destiny, both individually, but necessarily collectively. So I’m modestly hopeful. And you said it, can I reconcile the new technologies? I’m actually even more hopeful because I think a lot of the technologies that we need already exist.

Actually, what’s needed is the coalition of the willing to actually deploy. Um, I think we can do that. Look at this from a top down point of view. We’re used to seeing governments make these decisions, and in many ways they’re enablers on policy and, and, and, and tax, and, and tax, uh, incentives and so on.

But what gets much less talked about is the bottom up abilities to actually drive change. And I don’t think it’s either or. Uh, I guess my reason for optimism is I think it can be both. And I think the bottom up can become a catalyst for more movement from the top down. 

Rodney Payne: Do you think technologies and culture and government or people in general are moving quickly enough?

Paul Cubbon: Not consistently, but I think they can. And I think, strangely enough, I think there have been a number of silver linings from the, uh, the COVID pandemic. And I come back to that because I think that it shows that what happens when there’s a crisis and when people focus from government, through corporations, through financing, that’s what’s happening.

Through the organization across public health of, you know, billions of people, we can do remarkable things. I mean, I show I show a pair of slides to start up founders, which they find really, really annoying. And that causes me to keep showing it to them, because what it does is it’s the slide asks the following question.

The first slide says it’s 2019. How long does it take to develop a vaccine? And the answer is 20 years. And then the question is, it’s now 2020, 2021. How long does it take to develop a vaccine? And the answer is 20 months. And I said, what changed? Did we get smarter? Did we work harder? Maybe we worked a bit harder, but it was actually, we aligned and we focused on something that we really kind of was an existential threat to us all.

Rodney Payne: When it comes to this really exciting space around big ambition and possibility and rapid, disruptive innovation. When you look around the world at people and companies and countries, where do you find inspiration? Who gets you really excited? 

Paul Cubbon: I get excited when I see people doing dramatically different things on a dramatically different timeline.

And I’m pretty impatient when I’m told that things are going to take months or years, if I think they could take weeks or days. So I think there’s a big, there’s a big difference between the actual time needed to do something versus the elapsed time that is programmed into the way that people justify the processes that are going on.

And so, you know, if we actually took away the things that didn’t matter and just worked on kind of real priorities and we got rid of some of the bureaucracies and so on, then we could really move forward a lot faster. So the people that are. Um, there are lots of people working on exciting things, but what prevents them from moving forward is typically that there are lots of barriers or frictions in the way.

And so I, I, I’ve got a, I’ve got a big interest in removing frictions to deployment of exciting new technologies. And so if I can just add to that, I think that this is where trying to pull together the bottom up. Whether it’s at the community level pull for an interest in change or whether it’s a bottom up of a new exciting company, whether it is, you know, electric seaplanes or whether it is, uh, kind of some, some new kind of, um, you know, kind of drug, whatever it might be, is if we can actually find ways to reconcile that with top down changes from government, which actually remove barriers or incentivize adoption, then we really can actually move quite dramatically.

Rodney Payne: You’ve said that a lot of the solutions we need probably already exist at this point. Some of them may be early stage. You’ve said you get really excited about those types of dramatically different things on dramatically different timelines. And then the vaccine is a brilliant analogy. What’s really holding us back?

Paul Cubbon: What’s really holding us back on climate? 

Rodney Payne: And the rest of the Rubik’s Cube.. 

Paul Cubbon: I think very often in the past people have said, what’s holding us back is money. And it doesn’t take much prodding, uh, on the changes of the last few years to see that although it’s going to be expensive, money’s not the fundamental barrier anymore.

Getting the money to the right places at the right time is another matter. And I think aligning with policies that don’t waste that money is going to be important. So I think again, you know, I’ll repeat. I I think the the ingredients are largely there and there’s more coming online all the time in terms of technical capabilities, but the big challenge here is is around alignment and removal of frictions. 

Rodney Payne: And you mentioned policy. Do you think the right policy is to remove those frictions and create a really safe space to deploy innovation all in one place? Do you think that’s actually the opportunity to create that environment? 

Paul Cubbon: Yeah, um, I’m not a, I’m not a public policy expert. I’m an innovation person, but I can see the frictions where they come about.

Um, and my sense is, is I see multiple levels of government from, you know, municipal through province, provincial or state through national saying the right things about societal change to do with climate crisis and the related kind of knock on effects through society. And I, I think there’s a genuine, a genuine intent, much of the time for many of the people to move in that direction, but somehow they say there’s a, there’s a sending out of, of mixed messages.

From some of the policies through probably an attempt maybe to do too many things given, you know, competing objectives and stakeholders and so on. So I think that’s, um, one of the concerns. So what, how would I go about solving this? I’ve always been a big believer in running pilots, scrappy, fast, small to start with, because I, whether it’s been in, uh, large in the industry, corporations, or whether it’s been in a university or other organizations, change is difficult. People are scared and the status quo feels safe, even if it’s not. So asking people to commit wholesale to change, even if they like the idea of it, it’s, it’s easier to say no often or not now.

So how do we get, how do we initiate change? Running a pilot takes away some of the, the, the, the perceived risk and fear. It’s a kind of, it’s, it’s a, a pilot’s temporary. It’s discreet. It’s small. Often asking for modest resources. And then I come back one, three, six months later with data. And instead of this being an I think, you think argument that’s subjective, it becomes a, this was our hypothesis.

This is the experiment that we ran. And this is the data we’ve gathered, and as a result of this we now think we have an evidence based recommendation. And so I’ve unpacked what I mean by a pilot deliberately because I think the opportunity for us is to run a whole series of smaller pilots, community based, but not in opposition to levels of government, but with the government as partners, so that they can actually then unleash the scaling effects when they see the data.

Rodney Payne: Transportation of people and things is one of the most energy intensive things we can do. What do you think the role of travel and the travel industry is on a warming planet? 

Paul Cubbon: Travel necessarily means that people are going to move and then to support the people who are moving around there’s going to be stuff that’s getting moved as well.

Um, and so I think fighting it or, kind of, making the people who travel into kind of ogres, uh, bad people. I don’t think that’s helpful. Um, with any of these sorts of problems, I’d like to break them down to the component parts because there were sub elements. Clearly there’s the, there’s the short haul travel and long haul travel.

There’s short trips, uh, in terms of duration of stay and longer duration of stay there’s movement within the community. So I think, we have to unpack and say, what are the, what are the subcomponents of the, of the, of the, of what we mean by transporting people and things around, and then how can we tackle each of them?

So, for example, you know, there were some very exciting developments happening in moving, um, cargo ship transportation back to, uh, being, uh, uh, wind powered, um, which kind of sounds strange in a way, but is fascinating. Um, and. Um, you know, similarly, you know, I’ve got a lot of optimism about the fact that what didn’t exist at all a couple of years ago in terms of electric aviation is now kind of showing some progressive results.

And, you know, within a relatively short period of time, I think we’ll be taking, you know, at least medium haul flights with medium capacity planes that are electric. So, I think that we can actually break these seemingly kind of huge, huge and kind of, you know, hard to imagine how to solve problems down to component parts.

And then I think they’re solvable, not necessarily easily, but they are solvable. 

Rodney Payne: I like what you said about not villainizing travel. How do you think travelers and travel businesses and destinations that host travel can be part of the solution? 

Paul Cubbon: I think travel destinations have to become part of the solution.

Otherwise, I think that they risk just becoming, um, either ignored or ruined. I think it is one of these kind of pivotal moments where business as usual is just not acceptable, um, and, you know, time will, you know, we’ll look back over a relatively short period of time and we’ll see some losers. They were the people who, for whatever reason, paralyzed, didn’t know what to do.

Um, I think they’ll be losers. So I don’t think, I don’t think the status quo is an option. And so then the question is, is, well, how do you get started? What does change look like? What’s the right pathway? So I think communities need a roadmap for change, um, in the context of their, uh, tourist economy. And I say tourist economy because, you know, we know so many communities where, without tourists, economy shrinks, and then there are no resources for people to live, uh, or to pay for health systems, uh, or to do restoration work, uh, and so on.

So, we get back to our Rubik’s Cube analogy. It’s complex, uh, and it’s understandable that people feel a bit scared and certainly, uh, and certainly, uh, maybe unsure about how to get started. Uh, but I hope to be part of, uh, working on that to show people that we can be methodical. Um, and lay out a road map for positive change.

Rodney Payne: We’ve both sort of shared elements of the Queenstown story recently. Can you describe the week we spent together? What we did and sort of the journey we went on and how that, um, I think you had an H word that you used a little bit. Horripilation? 

Paul Cubbon: Oh yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure. I like understanding the origin of words and, uh, or, or, or phrases and particularly when they seem a little peculiar or strange.

And so when we talk about getting goose bumps, uh, you know, it’s, uh, typically either because one’s frightened or because one’s super excited. Uh, and I, I think for me, the, uh, as you look back to the, the, uh, Latin and Greek origins here and the word kind of for goosebumps is horripilation and horripilation horror.

Um, and so I think I’m both frightened and scared about what I see, but excited for the future. And Queenstown was that kind of, uh, the first time in a few years where I had horripilated. I had a, I had this goosebump feeling and it was this sudden realization that, well, what happened was as follows. We got off a long flight.

You and I, and we were picked up by Matt, CEO of, uh, the DMO. And, uh, within half an hour, we were in their office with their team and we were working through the basis of a plan for them. And before we can get to a roadmap, we have to have a North star. Once we talked about it, we started, remember, we’ve only been there half an hour, we start to talk about kind of an ambition for the future.

Decarbonizing, um, by the end of 2030. It’s the classic BHAG. It’s a big, hairy, audacious goal, but it’s something that can really galvanize and pull people together. And this is what gave us goosebumps in the room. Well, it gave, it gave Matt and his team goosebumps, and I got goosebumps because he said, yes, we’re doing it.

And half an hour later, we walked across the street into council, and we were given a green light to present exactly the same thing to council. And then, I don’t think I’ve ever had goosebumps twice in the same day, the mayor, who we’d never met before, said, too right, we’re doing it. And this was all on the public record.

So what I saw was a community that actually was talking big and looked like they were going to walk the talk. And what’s been exciting since is they are indeed walking that talk and we’re trying to walk hand in hand with them and to help them do difficult things. which will make an impact not only on their community, but will set a tone, an example for the world.

Rodney Payne: Do you think that bold ambition that, that gets to the level where it can cause goosebumps is at the intersection of what we’re starting to see in Queenstown versus other communities, but we see a lot in the startup community where there is that bravery or willing, willing to, to entertain the possibility of failure on something massive?

Paul Cubbon: Yeah, I think so. It’s, it’s, um, when I walk into a research scientist’s lab at the university, whether it’s in medicine or whether it’s in kind of environmental engineering, doesn’t matter across the range. If I say I’m from the business school, the first thing is, is they, they say, are you lost? Because like many organizations, universities are often siloed.

And it’s worth hanging on to that because in society, part of our challenge is we’re siloed. Um, and you can’t do as much if you’re siloed as if you’re together. And then the second thing is, is, is they say something often in less polite terms than this, go away, you nasty capitalist. Because they’ve got this stereotype of a business as being just profit making.

And so what I’ll do is, is I’ll ask them about what they’re doing. And it’s quite disarming because they’re proud and passionate about what they’re doing. And they’ve spent 10, 20, 30 years of their life doing what they’re doing. And so when you find out what they’re trying to do is this, they’re trying to cure a particular type of cancer so people don’t die.

Or they’re actually trying to do something about deforestation or about kind of, uh, kind of desert desertification or forest fires. So I’ll ask them how it’s going in the lab. And they’ll tell me about all the experiments they’ve done, and all of the proofs and evidence they’ve got. And then I’ll say, how many lives have you saved?

Or, you know, how much forest have you protected? And, it’s a simplification of the story, but basically, they’ll say, it’s really hard to make impact when you’re in the lab. And so my message to them is, is come this way. I don’t care if you make a lot of money, but money is oxygen for impact. And so, I give you that longer story because I get goosebumps pretty much every time I go into a research scientist lab because the ambition and commitment of what they’re trying to achieve is goosebump worthy, right?

But it kind of dies on the vine, uh, if it, um, doesn’t have a chance to go for impact. And so this is where we need to connect the different pieces. 

Rodney Payne: I see people getting tripped up all the time at the start of a concept on details or the human tendency to throw up roadblocks too soon. And there’s, I think a life, a life changing question that you’ve, you give me in almost every conversation we have under what circumstances would this be possible.

And when I look at startup world versus communities that are becoming more polarized and more bureaucratic, I think that that sentence, that question can be really powerful. Can you talk about how you use that, that line of thinking? 

Paul Cubbon: Yeah, I mean I think the, the thing is, is there are lots of situations where things are working and therefore status quo makes sense.

And so there are lots of people who are good at repeat maintenance operations. Um, and that can be useful. You want, you don’t want change. It’s disruptive. And so, I use this as a thought experiment. This, this idea of under what circumstances. It’s, we’re not saying we will change, but let’s consider possibilities.

So, it becomes a very important, if we’re having a conversation like this, to have some rules of engagement and some trust in a process. We have to separate out the stage which says, let’s try and generate possible alternatives as a thought experiment without judging them. Later, we’ll assess them against criteria, and then we’ll make a decision about what’s attractive.

So again, it’s a logic process that’s disciplined, and it’s giving people permission not to just throw stones, often out of fear or lack of understanding. 

Rodney Payne: What do you want the world to look like when your kids are your age? 

Paul Cubbon: I suppose, in the first instance, I’d like it to be a bit more peaceful. Now, if I look back over decades, you know, you know, in my youth, the world, there was still a Cold War and, you know, lots of tensions, and then, you know, when the Berlin wall came down, there was a kind of a real sense of hope.

And, uh, the, so I’d like it to be more peaceful, I think more tolerant as well, because, uh, things have become a lot more aggressively polarized, uh, in views. And I think if the world is at war. And it’s polarized into extreme, um, views, where people, you know, kind of have the, if you’re not with us, you’re against us mentality.

Then it’s really hard to have the collaborative and cooperative dialogues, uh, that will lead to the sorts of positive change that we need. 

Rodney Payne: Okay, last question. What are the things in your life that bring you the most joy? 

Paul Cubbon: Hm. What brings me the most joy? It’s typically, I think quite simple things around friends and family, um, around sunrises, walks on the beach, being able to go into fresh snow in the, in the mountains, um, and then link to that things that I’ve been able to take for granted, but don’t do so much now, uh, because they’ve been challenged.

Fresh air. Clear water. 

David Archer: This has been Travel Beyond presented by Destination Think, and you just heard from Paul Cubbon, Assistant Dean of Innovation at the Sauter School of Business, University of British Columbia. We’ll include links to more resources on the blog for this episode at DestinationThink.com. This episode has been produced and has theme music composed by me, David Archer. Sarah Raymond de Booy is my co producer. Lindsay Payne and Corey Price provided production support. You can help more people find the show by subscribing to future episodes and by leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

We’ll see you next time!