Social media expert Mitch Joel recently spoke to a business lunch audience here in Burlington, and one big point he made may have burst a little bubble for many a company considering a jump onto Facebook or Twitter because “everyone’s doing it.” In fact, I’d argue strongly that the point Joel made in the form of a one-word question should also, and always, be applied to any discussion of sustainability as well.  That magic word is “why.”  And, what a telling starting point for any company’s sustainability commitment asking that question would be!

Back to the social media example for a minute: It’s pretty common for a brand to enter into it by sitting down with their marketing team and asking “What’s our Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn strategy?”   Think about it.  Especially when it should be about building strong, authentic relationships with consumers, shouldn’t the first discussion really answer this question instead: “Why be on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn?”  From there, Joel argues, and I agree, you can back up into your strategy and tactics.

In the same way, sustainability has a “why” problem.  Any marketing tactic that comes off as greenwash, for example, is likely something that started with, for very generalized example, the question: “what’s our sustainability strategy,” and not “why are we pursuing sustainability?”  Instead, think about some of the answers that might have come up if “why?” was asked first:

• Our particular customers expect it.
• Our facilities and fleet will function more efficiently and save us money.
• Our mission from the start has been to serve our local community responsibly.

Going backward from there, you might get to “how”/”what”answers like these:

• Let’s audit our processes and products, and start to communicate where we are on our sustainability path- and where we plan to go.
• Let’s audit our processes and reward stakeholders, employees included, for making suggestions we can use.
• Let’s form an advisory board of community members, even the ones who may not be our direct customers, and see what their concerns are and how our company can do a better job addressing them.

In the above examples, starting with “why” has helped keep sustainability front and center – as it should be.

So, here’s the thing: sustainability is an investment, not a quick-fix or sexy sound byte.  Asking “what’s our strategy?” before “why?” may well deliver that short-term, looks-good-on-paper ROI.  However, in order to deliver a return that endures, whether we’re talking about social media connections or sustainability interconnections, the “what” must be founded on “why.”

Image source: Benoît Stella alias BenduKiwi

I’m pretty sure Johnson & Johnson did not intend for their ad campaign to explain why people start to engage with sustainability, but I’m certainly using their tagline that way. “Having a Baby Changes Everything,” was by no means first coined by J&J’s ad team, but their great black and white television spots (remember the cute baby being washed in the sink?) made just about everyone stop and watch (parent or no, I suspect).  And, that tag phrase well represents the distinct line in the sand of life, where you think one way pre-first baby and about 180 degrees differently as soon as baby #1 arrives.  That’s why this particular life transition can be so crucial for sustainability engagement and behavior change in humans.

And, that’s why new research from EcoFocus Worldwide about EcoAware Dads is helpful.  Their recent study found:

Already, more than 1 in 2 Dads always or usually factor environmental considerations into their purchase decisions, and another 32% sometimes do so.  Almost 9 in 10 say it is important enough to change brands to make a more eco-friendly choice and more than 4 in 10 are prepared to pay more for environmentally friendly products that get it right.

But wait, there’s more.  3 out of 4 of the dads studied also agreed that : “with each step I take to make my home or lifestyle more eco-friendly, it gets easier to take the next step.”

What this all says to me, is that:

- What we see in moms with regard to their growing “green behavior” may be more a matter of parenthood than gender. So, when you see “green mom” research, replace “green parent” for “mom” in all that you read, and you may gain insight into a broader segment of your customer base.

- “Having a baby” is only the start of changing everything, but it can be a powerful launching off point. The opportunities for sustainable brands is to be there, just at that life transition point, to help newly super-environmentally conscious parents maintain their “green” living momentum and continue to take such responsible steps in child rearing and household management (and beyond!).

- Finally, segmenting market research into studies of moms, dads, aunts, chess players, bike riders, and so on, makes for much more sexy and exciting business news soundbytes.  However, as a seasoned and discerning marketing brain, your job is to think about how some findings may be very true across market segments – and then dig and combine to develop your own insights from there.

We can learn about sustainable consumer/citizen behavior by identifying and examining the same life stages, roles and influencers we’ve long known to affect buying decisions in general.  The subtleties and hidden gems of understanding come from taking into account what may be making consumers even casually consider “greening up” in the first place – and then serving that at its root.

Given that, “having a baby changes everything” may be a good phrase to just pin up on your bulletin board, right in front of your nose.

Photo credit: Paul

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Americans, with help from “the media,” tend to exaggerate problems due to a) tradition – such thinking is embedded in our DNA,  and/or; b) sexy “sound byte-itis” – such thinking makes for more exciting cable news watching.  Gender continues to be one of those hot topics, with women’s leadership strengths currently appearing front and center.  That’s why I so appreciated Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed, “Don’t Write Off Men Just Yet.” He’s read and respected by many, and he tells it like it is.  It’s almost as if each of his columns could start with: “Now, let’s step back a minute…”  A man after my own heart.

In this piece, he seems to be saying that while there are differences between the sexes in who pursues higher education, who does better in math versus writing, and how each sex tends to learn, the differences are not as great as they are made out to be. And, the point really is how it all balances out (a macro view vs. micro view).  It’s like the gender pendulum I’ve written about lately.  We may actually be heading toward the sweet spot in how various gender and individual strengths are sorting out and combining for more powerful and lasting positive outcomes all around.  As Kristof puts it:

My hunch is that we’re moving into greater gender balance, not a fundamentally new imbalance in the other direction. Don’t hold your breath for “the end of men.”

There is  great wisdom for businesses and organizational change therein.  The key lies in celebrating the fact that women are catching up, but not pushing to “surge ahead” of men and toward imbalance in the other direction.  We already know that a world where one gender is way ahead of the other in terms of education, leadership strengths or “power,” for example, doesn’t work.  It is neither productive nor sustainable.

To build an economy of thriving and interconnecting systems of people, planet and profit, we’ve got to allow for and nurture an organic organizational gender balance.  There is no one rule, number or linear path for how this “should” look in every case. That already shows that “women’s ways” of thinking are catching up with, and balancing out, traditional thinking.  Together, we are improving collective business wisdom every single day.

My latest HuffingtonPost piece reflects the coalescing of my consulting and master’s program work toward a new research focus.  How can we take what we know about how women think to both develop better sustainable organizations and to better serve consumers supporting those organizations?  As always, my intention is not to say that women are the greatest and the only gender to combine systems thinking with empathy.  Rather, the fact that women are good at a kind of thinking so important in sustainable business is a clue to the bigger picture.  If your organization is reviewing and developing its sustainability efforts, this clue should help you source those best suited for your team: systems thinkers that embrace and reflect an empathic perspective on life.

An excerpt from my piece:

Women have generations of practice using and developing their empathic skills. When you combine that with solid business smarts, you get a sustainability powerhouse. It’s probably safe to say that without empathy, no business leader — male or female — would come to believe in the “triple bottom line” or the “people, planet and profit” mission. It’s the empathy extra that brings people and planet anywhere near the profit.

For those of you working in or with already well-functioning sustainability efforts, let me know if the empathic systems thinker is well represented, and how/where you’ve put that sort of mind to work.

I spotted a New York Times article today* that speaks to the “women’s ways” or right-brain guided ways of thinking that sustainability seems to be ushering in for a lot of companies.  It is incredibly exciting to watch the likes of GE’s Jeff Immelt, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and executives from Xerox and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, as noted in the article, start to push for partnership on clean energy.  Of course, sometimes attempts at partnerships can come from a wrong-spirited place (BP and oil spill responsibility), but let’s focus on the positive here!

In the past month or so, I’ve heard about so many clever partnerships in the sustainability space that I am officially accepting the role of collaboration cheerleader!  Here’s one example that  John Viera, Ford’s Director of Sustainability and Environmental Policy, reminded me of when we talked at Sustainable Brands 2010.  Cars used to be manufactured in a very vertical, competitive and secretive way (look where that got us), but the lights are going on – thanks to sustainability pursuits -  and companies, exemplified by Ford’s partnership with Microsoft for electric car management software, are partnering with technology companies to improve their vehicles.  Another one of my collaboration cheers goes to the Organic Cotton exchange, for pulling together a rather odd assortment of corporations and doing very progressive things.

Brilliant examples.  Why’d it take so long for the smart people in so many companies to start seeing things this way?

Here’s my gender expert take:  To pursue sustainability you have to think holistically.  You have to step back and realize that you can’t get to the incredible and innovative future of your products without some collaboration.  I submit this is the right-brain (sometimes referred to as “women’s way”) thought process finally seeping through.  Where the more traditional, left-brained approach presents an immediate and linear picture: “We want to win, costs be damned!”  The longer term, more interconnected, systems-thinking based, right-brained approach is more like: “We want to succeed for a long time and not hurt the environment or our communities.”  One sounds like a warrior and the other sounds like mother nature.

According to the aforementioned NYT/Greenwire article by Michael Burnham, the clean energy industry, for one,  is now even trying to take the synergistic collaboration idea a step further and form a partnership with the government (!).  The idea is to form an “energy strategy board,” which would develop an “Energy Challenge Program” described this way:

The program should be structured as a joint venture between the federal government and the energy industry, according to a “business plan” the executives plan to hand policymakers today. The program — which should be co-funded by the public and private sectors at an initial level of $20 billion over a decade — should focus on the transition from pre-commercial, large-scale energy systems to integrated, full-size system tests.

Until now, sharing the work and sharing the benefits is a concept our business culture has seen as idealistic or childish.  Sustainability is what nudges the 180 degree turn toward exactly that idea – corporations functioning in community – bettering themselves and the broader world.  And this is just the way right-brain, holistic, interconnected systems-minded people think.

How about this for my new cheer? “Systems Thinkers U-n-i-t-e! UNITE for the susty fight!”

*Thanks to MaddockDouglas for tweeting the story.

Photo credit: roderiderob via Picassa

Social justice is the topic of this third, and final, installment on my experience at the Sustainable Brands 2010 conference.  While not a sexy thing to think about, social justice makes the interconnectedness of sustainability whole.  No business or community, for example, can proclaim their determined pursuit of sustainable development if they are oppressing a lower income or minority group along the way.  The white and privileged are far from alone on this planet.  To sustain our global and local economies, those of us interested in being change agents have to ensure everyone has access – or sustainability will not be sustainable.

Work and Community Resources for All:  Phil Berry, perhaps best known for his past work with Nike, is now designing sustainable factories in developing countries.  At the conference, he talked about how his work goes much beyond designing structure and is perhaps even more about proactively changing lives of people in extremely rural outposts who previously had little hope.  The big idea is that factories become way more than factories and serve as THE social change pivot and “place” for the communities around them.

Environmental Resources for All: Timberland’s Mike Harrison talked about one of that company’s initiatives  to help low income people globally buy nurturing social and environmental resources locally.  Their Horqin desert program began with a plan to plant 1 million trees  in Mongolia by 2010.  With the help of many Timberland employees using their volunteer time, the effort had achieved 700,000 plantings by the time Harrison spoke at SB2010.  The human/social effects of this project as presented in a YouTube video are incredibly moving.  Making sure stories like this get told at conferences like Sustainable Brands (and at conferences that aren’t about “sustainability” perhaps even more) will be key to furthering the awareness that helping people help themselves is good business.

Education for All: Finally, the GreenMyParents (GMP) program presented at SB2010 shows how sustainability can reach beyond specific neighborhoods or certain privileged populations.  Our world’s youth may be the key to bridging it all  (if co-presenter Jordan Howard is any indication, this will be exciting!).  GMP launched on Earth Day 2010 in communities around Los Angeles where people of a variety of income levels and ethnicities lived.  With GMP’s help, tween and teen kids bring energy efficiency challenges and the larger sustainability conversation into their homes, so EVERY household that participates can and should benefit greatly.  There is no outside “other” trying to persuade behavior change.  Making sure that more and more kids have access to this program will be important for ensuring ALL can get this education.

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My Re-cap Conclusion

Near the end of the conference one of the presenters made a resonant point that  seems to be a rule for overall perspective on sustainability efforts:  the idea is to work to amplify positive impact rather than just limit negative impact.  That seems akin to what Paul Hawken and other sustainability founding fathers have said about not just pursuing environmental efficiencies but going for full-on environmental restoration.  We can’t be satisfied doing the same old things in a more environmentally or socially aware way.  Rather, we should innovate what we do altogether, where possible, and, as Greg Unruh, business ethics expert put it at SB2010, make sustainability “foolproof.”

To continue with my thoughts, as inspired by Sustainable Brands 2010:

There’s something about the sustainability topic that helps align a businessperson’s personal/human and work values.   This point came up repeatedly in conference presentations and during my interviews with sustainability consultants and executives while in Monterey.  Though this human/work alignment can’t necessarily “sell” someone on sustainability, it is a “value add” or bonus that keeps people interested in finding more ways to integrate it into business practices.

Most compelling, for me, is the idea of the cross-generational bridging potential of sustainability.   Both in terms of corporate executives, for example, finding a sudden reconnection with their teenage kids, and in terms of corporations being able to attract and maintain younger generation employees.  It seems a universal truth that the potential for being thought “cool” to your tween or teenage kids is incredibly motivating.   From what I heard, sustainability or “green” efforts of any type (water or energy efficiency on down to social cause funding and products sold) are recognized by kids and inspire new levels of connection and conversation on the homefront.

GreenMyParents (GMP) is one organization that embodies this truth for their cause.  Jordan Howard, a teenage girl from the Los Angeles area who is a GMP program champion, made a great case at SB2010, as did the GMP video showing interviews with other kids and parents along the same lines.  The program inspires entire families toward energy efficiency and purchasing changes by way of pledges from both parents and kids working together.  In the process, the kids point out all the things their families can do to use less water, electricity, heating fuel and so on.  Not surprisingly, GMP is now developing its “Green My School” program.  The idea is powerfully simple for leveraging whole family participation in a fun/competitive way. (I am currently reviewing the Green My Parents book, so stay tuned.)

Another emerging trend at SB2010, and one that Will Sarni, CEO of DOMANI Sustainability Consulting, specifically mentioned when we talked, was that the basic business case for sustainability no longer needs the hard sell.   Corporations are on to the more sophisticated questions.  Yet, they still very much need guidance on the smartest and most effective ways for their businesses to expand their efforts.  (A just published Environmental Leader article about new research seems to confirm this).  Along the same lines, leading green business expert/author, Andrew Winston, noted that today’s businesses are no longer waiting for the local or federal governments to pressure them or their suppliers into sustainability.  They are seeing opportunity in compliance – which is a point also made very strongly by management academics/authors, Nidumolu, Prahalad and Rangaswami, in a September 2009 Harvard  Business Review article, “Why Sustainability is Now the Key Driver of Innovation.”

The Electronic Manufacturers Recycling Management Company (MRM), founded by Panasonic, Sharp and Toshiba in 2008 may be one good example of an industry seeing compliance as opportunity, and being proactive.  I had a great conversation with Panasonic executive David Thompson, who also serves as MRM’s president, about how a Minnesota law, specifically, inspired what is now a national recycling partnership.

Finally, social media was clearly key for many SB2010 representative corporations in how they are communicating with consumers and inspiring sustainability engagement.  It is apparent that “social media” is no longer a curiosity or a “for teens only” tool.  Consider Ford’s hugely successful Fiesta Movement or the way so many branded social cause efforts now revolve mainly around videos, blogs and Facebook or Twitter campaigns.    The effective use of social media seems to be yet another reflection on how sustainability bridges generations, both in terms of consumer connection and in how the younger generations are proving their value to sustainably operating businesses.

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Next up in my SB2010 Re-Cap: Social Justice.

Anyway…

As mentioned in Rahim’s article, the other three signs Cialdini’s team tested were, 1) saving energy for the environment’s sake, 2) doing it for the sake of future generations, and 3) the one most of us non-research types might suspect would be most effective: cash savings.  Isn’t this fascinating?  As I’ve mentioned in so many other blog posts by now, Cialdini’s “social proof” has two components: 1 – uncertainty about which behavior is appropriate (need to see others around you doing the behavior), and 2 – similarity, or the need to see that others, and preferably those very much like you, are behaving that way.

A few examples Cialdini gives from his now classic book, INFLUENCE: The Psychology of Persuasion, include: tip jars (bartenders “salt” them by putting in some bills before they set it out for customers),  “best-seller” of “fastest-selling” marketing messages (I don’t need to explain this for you, my very marketing-oriented readership), and – this is perhaps most compelling (and incredibly creepy), the methods by which Jim Jones’ teachings created a cult.  Powerful stuff, that social proof.

Those of us driven to “inspire” citizen behavior change toward sustainability may be a tad disappointed that “saving the environment” or “helping future generations” doesn’t really work – or work yet.  But, the point is to start where people are – to be pragmatic with persuasion methods.  Perhaps the most baseline guide for human decision-making is the quick look-around at others.  Social proof is a “method” that can be called on quickly and automatically.  Cialdini writes that social proof “provides a convenient shortcut for determining how to behave.”  That shortcut can be used for good, but can also be used for bad -  to leave people who use that shortcut “vulnerable to the attacks of profiteers,” as he reminds us.

But, if you are reading this, you are here to do some sustainability good.  So, how can we, in each of our various – but interconnected(!) – business ventures, put social proof to work?  We can communicate our sustainability stories better, and reflect the truth in just how many of our customers/members/employees are already demonstrating the behavior we’d like to promote (and – clearly – that means buying our more responsibly designed and produced products in a lot of cases).  Like the “beat the Jones’s” approach that Cialdini seems to be proving, we can also tap the competitive spirit that exists (whether we acknowledge it or not) among human beings.

The race to the top of energy efficiency and other sustainable living and business practice goals can be fun and social!  Let’s all learn more about, and use the concept of “social proof” to make participating in that race the only human option.

*Thanks to @Think_LED (on Twitter) for ensuring I noticed today’s NYT piece!

Consumer Engagement

I began the conference by attending John Marshall Roberts‘ “Worldview Learning” presentation.  Roberts is an applied research psychologist who delves deeply into the psychology of human behavior for the purposes of better communicating new messages.  He referred to psychologist Clare W. Graves and his “spiral dynamics” work, which lays out the nine different states of cognitive complexity in the ways humans think and process ideas.  According to Roberts, humans each have various combinations of the following “worldview” ingredients:  values lens, filtering style and social optimism.   Roberts’ work gives framework for helping marketers or corporate leaders understand where their audiences or workers are coming from – and how to reach them with new and perhaps uncomfortable ideas.

Within the nine different cognitive complexity states lie clues, for example, on how those with a more systemic type of thinking might communicate with and inspire those with a more individualistic thinking style or a patriotic/absolutist style. For instance, a lot of those who may need to be persuaded about sustainability in the corporate world may be of an individualistic mindset.  It takes finesse for sustainability proponents (like me) to turn what we feel is obvious and right into that which an individualistic thinker can believe and be inspired by.  Another point Roberts used was the image of “moving a rock uphill” in organizational change, in that we can conceive of moving a rock uphill by forcing it, persuading it or inspiring it.  Ideally, for the sustainability pursuit, it would be the latter.

Bruce McGregor of innovation consultancy, IDEO, reminded the SB2010 audience that change is (disappointingly!) only 10% successful.  But, to create change more successfully, he suggests we need to inspire joy, not fear; harness force with what we have already at our disposal; and “create the crowd” (which to me sounds a lot like psychologist Robert Cialdini’s concept of “social proof” – of which I am a big fan).

Other ideas about sustainability and change from the conference came in the example of Starbucks current pursuit of a recyclable cup solution.*  That brand’s sustainability team has found that sharing with and involving customers in the process of research and development, from the start, has been key to engagement and progress.  Customers gladly get involved in the challenge and now root for the company to find the solution.  Their involvement inspires them to stay loyal to the brand, which is seen as sincerely making an effort.  This serves Starbucks’ larger goal of attempting to make “bring your own cup” as popular and successful as “bring your own bag” seems to be becoming nationwide.

What that Starbucks cup research process demonstrates is something Earthsense/CRD Analytics research (also introduced at this conference) indicated and that panel member Maddock Douglas’s Marc Stoiber put so well: “the closer you (the brand) comes to the consumer with your green product or sustainability effort, the easier communicating it will be.” Starbucks is almost uniquely positioned to achieving this sort of engagement because their product is contained in a cup that millions of people handle daily – many of whom (we hope) are struggling about how to dispose of them.

*This just in – great article in Greenbiz.com about Starbucks cup initiatives.

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Stay tuned for Re-Cap, Part 2 – Sustainable Business Trends.

My latest HuffingtonPost piece considers extreme business culture pendulum swings and where things might soon settle – the sweet spot.  That’s where women and men, and traditional and sustainable businesses, get beyond extreme differences toward a more collaborative and productive place.

Here’s an excerpt:

Sustainability has a bad rap with some, for being overly emotional and other-focused. But instead, in a more sustainability-focused business, efficiency, quality and innovation are still “king.”  There’s just unimaginable added value to boot. In other words, sustainable business is not necessarily something new, it’s just the highest standard.

My recent experience at Sustainable Brands 2010 (SB2010) reflected the settling to center pendulum effect.  That event had the likes of Ford and Coca Cola sharing their sustainability-oriented developments.  Let’s remember that a few years ago that would have sounded like a dream.  To be clear, no one is saying that the big, traditional brands are fully into their likely very long sustainable journeys. However, these beginnings do reflect the pendulum heading toward center.  Alternatively, the many smaller, less “known” companies at SB2010, like H2O (boxed water) and Nature’s Path, are also doing amazing good by making sustainable steps more accessible to consumers. Such brands are by no means out in some sort of green la-la land (i.e. at an extreme pendulum swing).  Rather, they’ve figured out how to do business with the big boys, and are even teaching them a few things along the way.

Back to Rosin’s article, and one of her points: “A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge.” Similarly, I’d argue that both conventional and sustainable businesses have the core business part down, but the sustainable enterprises likely have an edge in understanding, and serving, the social side.  That’s the “people and planet” part.