Learning from leaders - Franny Armstrong
Franny Armstrong leads the 10:10 campaign. She's not particularly charismatic, and she has had no experience of leading a big organisation – her career to date has been as a drummer in a rock band and a film maker. So what makes her a great leader?
She's passionate about what she does. Great leaders are driven by a sense of purpose. As Dave Packard, co-founder of IT giant Hewlett Packard, put it back in the sixties, great organisations don't exist to make money; they exist to achieve some worthwhile purpose that can't be achieved by one person alone.
She has a vision – a very clear goal: in this case, to get people to commit to a 10% reduction in carbon emissions by 2010. Because the future is complex and long term, leaders articulate a vision that is simple and credible.
She knows that the best way to communicate is with stories. Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth makes a powerful case for taking climate change seriously – and is well worth rewatching if you haven't seen it recently. But it is essentially a lecture – albeit a very well presented lecture. Armstrong's film, The Age of Stupid, tells a story. It stars Pete Postlethwaite as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn't we stop climate change when we had the chance? Stories make an emotional connection that lectures can never do. As The Sun newspaper commented about the Age of Stupid: it slaps you around the face then punches you in the stomach.
Watch this short video clip of Franny Armstrong