The question from this Stella Marrs postcard keeps tumbling around my mind, like a lone pair of jeans in a dryer. The thoughts that resonate:
You know your company is a trail blazer. You know your service is making your customers happy. You know that what you’re doing is very important. You know that you’re the best at what you do. You just know. But what if…
You measure the success or failure of your actions with the yardstick of your industry, company, or other group. But what if the yardsticks are faulty? You play your sustainable business leader role, recycle everything in sight, speak the language. But what if you’re regurgitating what everyone else is saying?
Armchair sociologists Justin Kownacki and Steve Spalding recently deconstructed the lack of heretical thinking and true thought leadership in social media. They both bemoan social media’s echo chamber nature and the tendency among practitioners to follow trends. If you want to ensure your ideas spread and achieve influence, you will conform to the consensus – the mob mentality or group think preclude truly independent, out-of-the-box thinking.
On days like today – Portland’s finest, with heavy rain followed by heavy sunshine, followed by gathering clouds – I wonder if the same goes for sustainability. What if every field, industry, or discipline is just high school all over again?
I recently lost a subscriber to this blog, whose feedback was simple and straightforward: the blog has no environmental content. A perfectly legitimate concern, but it did confirm for me sustainability movement’s bias toward the Planet bottom line.
An attendee at the inaugural Beyond2020 sustainability unconference shared this thought: we were all preaching to the choir. I agreed, and not just because nodding makes us humans feel good. Recycling at your business is no longer an issue, just like your LEED certification is no longer news. Are we, in the sustainability industry, talking amongst ourselves? Are we all hung up on being “like minded”?
Speaking of high school, I had a classmate who found fault with everything others said. That she always criticized and questioned other people’s ideas was sometimes annoying, but I appreciated hearing a contrarian perspective. Nonetheless, the classmate consistently failed to offer constructive alternatives of her own.
If there’s one maxim in marketing, it’s that you must learn the needs of your customers and then satisfy them. Do purveyors of disruptive technologies follow the needs of mainstream customers?
Amy Pearl at Springboard Innovation pointed me to this definition of a social entrepreneur: The job of a social entrepreneur isn’t to give people fish or teach them how to fish, it’s to reinvent and transform the entire fishing industry for the better.
Critical thinking isn’t the same as doubt. Constructive criticism isn’t the same as rejection. Thought leadership isn’t the same as nay-saying. Question your assumptions. Question the yardsticks. Question everything.
So what’s this have to do with benefiting human kind or creating killer content? Listen to the tumble dryer.
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Image credit: StellaMarrs.com
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I think you’re close: every field or industry isn’t high school all over again; it’s college. Instead of petty cliques, you have proactive rivalries among self-contained choirs.
In all fields, you need divergent opinions in order to propel the conversation — and the resulting actions — forward. But because social media is such a homogeneous group from end to end (minus the MLM crowd), it’s hard to generate the kind of productive discourse that leads opposing sides of the same issue to generate enough velocity via action to prove their points. Instead, too many practitioners attempt to please (and agree with) the hierarchy, in the hopes that trickle-down popularity — rather than separatist opinions — will make them successful.
Question everything? Sure. But sooner or later, you need to convert your questions into a line of action, and hope that at least some of the old choir (but not all of them) follows.
Great post. I am trying to build a practice of strategic CSR consulting and it’s really difficult to fight the mob mentality of sustainability. To me, sustainability means a lot more than impact but that’s definitely not commonplace. It’s not business vs. the environment in a cage match; they must work together. CSR should be strategic for brands to follow it in the long-term beyond any flash-in-the-pan, non-strategic, purely reputational benefits.
Anyways, nice post.
I think the term “sustainability” has become synonymous with “minimizing environmental impact.” Lost in the equation is the pert where the venture itself needs to be sustainable, and that involves countless variables that have nothing to do with the literal size of one’s ecological impact. The trick is in getting people to look beyond the entry point of a complex concept and helping them to understand the entirety of what that concept entails. And in this bite-sized attention span economy, you have your work cut out for you.
@Justin: I have been unsubscribing from social media blogs for some time now. After a while, the discourse turned out to be and very much admiring its own reflection in a pool. The few that remain in my Reader represent as wide a spectrum as it gets, as narrow as it may be overall…
Action must, indeed, follow the questioning process. Words without follow through are just rambling. Those jeans must come out of the dryer some time!
Re sustainability: Like a vessel that you fill, the meaning and application of every concept relies on human interpretation. It behooves those who see beyond environmental sustainability to contribute to the record.
@Matt: “Mob mentality of sustainability” – nice! I, too, see business put in the bad guys corner when it comes to advancing sustainability. However, I believe business has a central and strategic role to play in the big scheme of things; without business, sustainability will be just a movement.