I've long held the view that success in my own life would be achieved if the world was better off as a result of me having been born. That might sound a bit lofty at first, but if you think about it, it's actually a pretty low bar that I think most people would want to be true about themselves. I’ve always thought that the same should also be true of companies, that they should be considered successful if the world is better off as a result of their existence.
Recently I’ve been doing some work on our company carbon footprint calculations at Wholegrain Digital, and helping my team with our annual impact report. This year, just like every year that went before it, I can't help but feel that our data doesn't tell the full story. In fact, I feel that anything that gets formally reported is really the tip of the iceberg - the bit we can see.
On some level this is due to the challenge of putting systems in place for good data collection, but on a deeper level, I feel that data collection is actually a part of the problem. Whether it’s share prices, GDP, carbon emissions or school grades, our focus tends to toward the things on the charts. In a world increasingly obsessed with hard data, I feel that we're losing sight of the bigger truth - that many of the things that truly matter in life are immeasurable. Data collection can be really useful, but it can also narrow our attention to the things that we can track and distract us from seeing the bigger, more meaningful picture.
Just as we might completely miss the point standing too close to an oil painting, our data led impact reports can give us interesting insights about brush strokes, textures and colours, but are unlikely to truly tell us the meaning of our impacts. If we want to know whether the world is actually better off as a result of our company existing, we need to zoom out.
Are we missing the shadow?
Emma Pattee is a writer from Portland covering topics related to feminism, climate change, and mortality. A couple of years ago she wrote a brilliant article highlighting that personal carbon footprinting only represents our direct climate impacts and ignores our indirect impacts that might actually be more significant. She coined the term Climate Shadow to represent this bigger impact that falls behind us and which is very hard to quantify, explaining it as follows:
“Think of your climate shadow as a dark shape stretching out behind you. Everywhere you go, it goes too, tallying not just your air conditioning use and the gas mileage of your car, but also how you vote, how many children you choose to have, where you work, how you invest your money, how much you talk about climate change, and whether your words amplify urgency, apathy, or denial.”
She gives the example of how someone who flies for work would appear to have a much higher carbon footprint than a person who doesn’t fly much and works from home. However, if the person who flies a lot is a climate scientist helping to raise awareness and develop solutions, while the other is working from home producing an ad campaign for a fossil fuel company, their true environmental impacts would be very different from what the numbers portray.
The same is true of businesses, that the numbers reported for social and environmental impact are unlikely to tell the full story. The full story is nuanced, contextual and often invisible. It can never be accurately distilled to a number.
I feel this in my own work at Wholegrain Digital, where we never really know what our true impact has been. Yes, we try our best to minimise the negative environmental impact of our company operations and create low energy, low carbon websites. However, I believe our biggest impact is in the stuff we can’t measure, such as the influence we have on other companies and among the people whose lives we touch, for good or bad. This is why it's so important to me that we share our knowledge, ideas and experiences as openly as possible in order to maximise this ripple effect.
For example, my colleague Tommy traveled to a conference in Athens this year by train and boat instead of flying. This saved a considerable amount of CO2 compared to taking the plane, but that’s only a part of the impact. I believe the bigger impact comes from the thoughts and conversations stimulated as a result of this unconventional action. It’s a real life story about weighing up the options and choosing a different path that might inspire people to think, feel and act differently in ways that we will probably never know.
Stepping out of the shadows
I like the concept of Emma Pattee’s climate shadow in representing a wider view of our impacts and I think the concept applies to every type of impact that we have, not just climate. However, I worry that the image of a shadow is one more drop in the ocean of negative climate communication that we're currently drowning in.
What we really need is positivity to inspire us, give us hope and motivate us to move towards something better. But if we turn around, we find a beautiful polarity hidden within the climate shadow - that there can be no shadows without light.
We all have shadows, climate and otherwise, but we also all bring goodness. Just as our climate shadows incorporate a more holistic and complete view of our true impact as humans and organisations, so too the light we shine will go far beyond what we can see. We will never be able to reliably measure this but that doesn't make it any less worthwhile. If we focus more of our effort on doing what we believe is right and less on what makes our our company reports look good, we’ll accelerate progress in ways that will be far more impactful, even if we never know how.
Big thanks to my colleague Marketa for inspiring this weeks post and being a source of immeasurable positive ripples. I’d love to hear your stories of positive impact beyond the pie charts, so do drop me a note or share on LinkedIn, or share your story here in the comments below.
Your impact through Wholegrain Digital has been incredible. You were the first person I heard from about Digital Sustainability. Following Green I/O, now I keep hearing that's the same case for many other folks. Many of who amplify the message further through books, blogs, podcasts and their daily jobs. It's like a virus, but a good one (there should be a name for such thing). That's certainly is an immeasurable impact.
One thing is measurable, tho - the optimization and compression possible on the image with long shadows under the railway bridge 😄 I could squoosh it to 178 KB after resizing down to max container width which is 728 px. Sorry, I've really gotten obsessed with seeking images that can be optimized 🙈
Love this. In what I try to do directly with my sustainability initiatives related to my website and business, as well as personally are all well and good, but I always wondered if my activities related to promoting sustainable motorsport and transportation were of any consequence. Now I am understanding how they are part of my climate shadow that is hopefully shining a light on opportunities and challenges facing a sport that I love dearly and inspiring others. Wonderful article Tom.