In starting this newsletter to explore whether sustainable business is really possible, those of you who know me might be wondering why I don't count my own business, Wholegrain Digital, as an example of a truly sustainable business. Well, I need to make a confession.
Vineeta and I created Wholegrain with an intention to make it sustainable by design, but in doing so, we cheated a little bit. In order to design a business that did not have a negative impact on the environment, we chose a business model that was inherently low impact. We both moved our careers away from the design and engineering of physical products into the virtual world of digital design.
We didn’t want to be designing products that would rely on cheap labour to produce, that had to be shipped across the world or that would end up in landfill. We wanted to avoid these problems altogether and we hoped that designing digital products and services would be something of a panacea. After all, digital things don’t really exist, right?
While we had high hopes for the potential of digital technology to dematerialize many physical services, we had underestimated the scale and impact of the physical electronic equipment that all digital services depend on. Contrary to our initial understanding, our business is reliant on a global network of high-tech systems made from electronic components that have a heavy social and environmental cost in their production and disposal, and which consume a lot of energy during their useful life. Our day to day work is also entirely reliant on computers and smart phones, which even if we buy second hand, still rely on other people buying new equipment in order for us to upgrade every few years.
It’s not just the electronic equipment either. We have dependencies on things that we can’t control. We are based in a fairly cold country and need to keep warm in winter, which is hugely energy intensive thanks to our country also having a history of not insulating buildings properly. We need to travel for work, which even if we don’t fly and we keep other travel to a minimum, still has a significant impact.
Even we, as a business designed to avoid negative impacts, struggle to avoid very real impacts. What about all the other businesses that didn’t take the easy road? We live in a physical world and most businesses cannot simply dematerialize things into software. We need food, clothes, transport, energy, furniture, homes, tools, and so much more. Most businesses have a far bigger challenge in terms of sustainability than companies like ours.
So the question is, what do we really mean when we say that a business or a product is sustainable?
Too often, I see definitions stating that a sustainable business is one that minimises its negative impact on the environment and society. To me though, that just sounds like a definition of a less harmful business. Sustainability on the other hand, inherently means that something is able to be sustained. It doesn’t mean that we do no harm, but at least that the harm we do is of a type and scale that can be absorbed by nature and society without causing long term decline.
So my own business definitely ticks the box of being a less harmful business, but even in our case there are some factors that mean that we can’t honestly say we are sustainable.
You might think that I’m being too much of a purist and that I’m splitting hairs, but this distinction is important. Being less harmful is an admirable and unquestionably good thing. But when it comes to the future health of our society, being less harmful doesn’t cut the mustard. Sustainability is not optional.
The challenge is that there are so many things that seem out of our control and I’m sure that most other businesses feel the same way. Perhaps we need to shift our perspective and make a clear distinction between sustainable business and responsible (aka less harmful) business. If we define a responsible business as one that is doing everything within its control to minimise negative environmental and social impact and to generate positive impact, then I think we would have a more honest definition.
A more honest definition would enable us to have more nuanced and meaningful conversations about where harm is created, the root causes of it and how to address it. Businesses would be able to focus their energy on the things within their control, while openly discussing and perhaps contributing to progress in areas where they don’t have direct control. This could mean lobbying government, campaigning for change in society or an industry, calling on supply chains to make changes, or simply educating people about challenges that seem to be unaddressed.
In this way, responsible businesses could help lead us towards a sustainable world, without creating the false impression that they already have all of the solutions. Responsible businesses could then go on a journey together to figure out how we can make the shift from being responsible, to actually being sustainable.
That’s the journey that I am on personally and that I am documenting and sharing here in my Oxymoron newsletter. I hope that you will join me, comment and subscribe, and together we can make progress.
As always, Tom, you are able to articulate really clearly a tough question I have also been grappling with!
One word that I've been using is 'regenerative'. A nice definition of regenerative farming is where the soil is left in a better state (instead of depleted). So I've started using this as the word to describe the (possibility impossible) long term aspiration for my business.
I find Carol Sanford's "Four Paradigm Framework" really useful when thinking about this. She presents a journey of moving through "self interest" to "do less harm" to "do good" and then to "regenerative" paradigms. Interestingly, one difference in her framework between "regenerative" and "do good" is who defines what 'good' means - in a regenerative paradigm we view things from other's perspective (where others might be people or planet for example). EG: there is a risk that "do good" results in things like white saviour complex.
Crucially, Carol talks about these four paradigms as be additive - ie we need to have enough "self interest" to enable us to put energy into the next level and we can't jump straight to a "regenerative" mindset without also having "do less harm" and "do good" in our world view. Thus we (mentally) move up and down these four levels depending on context and our current situations.
I mention all this because, for me, it is the start of a way to handle the overwhelming impossibility of a truly sustainable (regenerative in my words) business. The long term aspiration is there - but I give myself and my business permission sometimes be ambitious about regenerative goals and sometimes make more compromises.
Anyway, thanks for (once again) sharing so openly and helping the rest of us articulate and think about these things!
Thank you for this Tom. I have constantly stated that the use of the term "sustainable" is misleading. We are all on a journey that sometimes throws up different obstacles but at the very least, we are acknowledging that it is a struggle and that we are working hard to be responsible and hopefully that will lead to becoming truly sustainable.