Speeding up understanding of social and environmental issues is going to be pretty hard if all the good info is imprisoned in tables. The three trends of data being more open, everything being more visual and life being on-demand/always-on should mean that numbers are no longer just for the analysts and ratings agencies.

This is a chance for companies to build trust and gain relevance to peoples lives (in an increasingly sceptical world) using information they already have. It may also help in answering the question ’why sustainability branding sucks?’, by providing information – i.e. non-financial data that is central to business operations – with an outlet fit for the 21st century. All this fits into the idea of enabling people to live better lives (for which you may be thanked with their custom) against the backdrop of the big technological, social, economic and environmental shifts going on.

Below i’ve outlined three areas where data visualization can help make sustainability fit for the new operating environment.

1. Risks – outline what the problems are

Your business is exposed to social and environmental risks. It’s likely that your stakeholders are too. It’s also likely that your stakeholders  - lets call them people – don’t spend their free time working out how much water is embedded in their evening meal and what the implications of this are.

from Linda Yuki Nakashini click to visit her site

2. Opportunities – how to do things better

Creating tools for people to understand that by changing their behaviour they can be healthier, use less energy etc. You could write this but again, people don’t generally spend their free time looking up corporate websites. If you make an enabling tool like this one from GE and Pentagram, you become relevant to peoples lives and more likely to engage around issues that matter.



3. Performance – data is not just for the analysts

Potentially the most exciting part. Lets think of a corporate responsibility report  - a catch all document that comes out once a year meant to serve lots of different stakeholders. Performance data on water and energy use, emissions and other stuff goes at the back. The work that goes into hitting targets on reducing these impacts condensed to once-a-year numbers at the back of a report -(granted explained in the body of the document).
Now, Imagine a live visualization that expands or contracts as new data is fed into it – as explained in the talk above – on a quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily(!) basis. This gives you the chance to demonstrate the efforts you make everyday to reduce your impacts.

It’s expected, it’s easy

In a increasingly visual, on-demand and open world, companies are lagging behind. It in someways mirrors the ground lost to NGOs who harnessed low-cost social media platforms to engage with people long before companies got a sniff. More data is being made available to people to use for themselves. There are also more and more APIs out there to help people use data and other tools to create something relevant to their lives – see this video of live tube map of London created with live tube time data and google maps. Add a bit of  cognitive surplus idea to this-  people spending more of their own free time creating stuff (for free) – and getting your data out there is required if you want permission to engage.

The good news is you are almost doing this stuff already. The numbers (and comparative data) exist. As a company you can move away from trying to position yourself as sustainable – an increasingly futile exercise in a highly (rightly) sceptical world – to sharing info on risks, helping people live better and demonstrating that you are on the case.

For more see Information is Beautiful , Visualising Complexity, Good,Infosthetics or this post from Inspired Magazine

Related posts:

Sweat the small stuff: No more generic sustainability branding

Rebuilding blocks: sustainability, economics, design

From thought leadership to mass collaboration

Clay Shirky: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (for everyone?)

How to: Futuregazing, sustainability and creative content

Thanks for reading. Do tweet if you like or share your thoughts in the comments.

fires underway all over this vast country

Here is an audio report I’ve put together looking at the fires that are happening all over Brazil at the moment.

I explore:

• the spread of the fires
• the climatic conditons
• how environmental goods and services are the new oil and minerals
• the use of twitter to mobilize and engage the country (and it’s presidential hopefuls) in debate w/ the #chegadequeimadas hashtag
• the need to shift of the discussion away from 20th century enviro-fundamentalist vs industrialist/agriculturalist to one that is more considered, inclusive and reponsive to 21st century challenges.

Do tweet this and include the hashtag #chegadequeimadas (stop the fires) to keep the campaign alive (60 ooo tweets of this tag and counting!)

related posts

• This is not normal: (Isso não é normal), nor is Bhutan

Beyond the glass doors of the boardroom, ethics and ‘eco’ fit the green consumer well. The rise of ethical consumption has, to a certain extent, raised all boats. For example, the mainstreaming of certification standards has been helped by the push of retailers to use these standards on their own branded goods.

Collaborative consumption has a huge role to play in shifting attitudes to owning more ‘stuff’ and showing up those who talk about sustainable consumption and shifting more units in the same breath.

Corporate efforts so far have mainly dealt with work around reducing waste, reducing resource use in production, raising labour standards, promoting certification standards and adding socioeconomic benefits to products and services. All good but, at its heart sustainable consumption must mean buy/use less stuff.

In the context of big global shifts and the rise of the new middle classes, the big sustainability question is consumption. The world is about to experience more demand for prosperity-generating stuff than it ever has and, unless things change, it will attempt to deliver this with a system which we know isn’t cut out to do the job.

I’m really excited to be speaking at the EABIS 2010 event. My topic: Prosperity and Brazil’s new middle classes. The basic premise is that if we foist a high consumption lifestyle on all the new consumers these markets will very quickly pop.

new middle classes consumption route

I’m looking at  how sustainability, the experience of citizenship, service design, co-creation and the digital world demand new techniques and strategies from companies. These will enable them to build new relationships with these new consumers and redefine what it means to live well.

Collaborative consumption makes up part of solving the puzzle. I have been looking into in more detail thanks to the work done by Rachel Alstrom and Roo Rogers (great site here + TEDxSydney talk here). Boiled down: access is more important than ownership. Rent don’t buy.

Access not ownership

This rethinking of use and how we define are ourselves – not with what we possess but what we have access to and what we experience – will help a lot of pre-crisis relics readjust to new realities. Currently, few companies will feel they are in position to grasp the idea. They are still firefighting as we go through this volatile rebalancing where tried and tested assumptions fail to get any purchase.

Collaborative consumption fits into other ideas that are gaining momentum as we shift from away the hyperconsumption model. For example, building stuff that lasts (and kickstarting export industries) ties into lots of different strands of thinking about how destructive  the ‘pile ‘em high sell ‘em cheap’ ethos has been.

Product cycles have squeezed build quality (and manufacturing wages) to create a system that is at breaking point. This system, also recognised as contributing to imbalances in the global economy, is feigning inability to right itself against a backdrop of a jobs and growth discussion that leaves little room for qualitative debate.

Collaborative means community

Modularity, upcycling and reconditioning all branch off co-consumption as do other ideas around sharing (e.g. jobsharing, land/office sharing) A lot of these concepts come with communities built around them.  These communities help to generate meaning and value around the shared experiences of making and using these products and services.

This all feeds into redefining prosperity and making consumption fit into the world that we are moving into. Forget high income countries, the consumer power of the world’s new middle classes, and how business and government interact with them, will decide what happens to this century.

Selling less, selling better

Companies in this consumer space need to get on with adjusting to this rebalancing environment and work on:

• Getting as tight as possible on lifecycle by squeezing as much water, energy and materials out of the production process.
• Designing products and services that fit the social,economic and environmental lives of their new customers (start talking with new consumers)
• Reconfiguring their approach to making things so that access not ownership is their customer proposition.

Measuring value

This brings us back to the metrics/measurement question of wealth and happiness. A neat little example emerged the other day of why the game is up for GDP when a senior doctor advised that statins be handed out with Big Macs.  We don’t live in such a zero sum world do we?

Collaborative consumption is a central part of this sustainable consumption puzzle. So yes, let’s make coke bottles thinner and use organic cotton, add social benefits to products and build hybrid cars. But anyone who says we don’t need to buy less is going to struggle to build successful long-term relationships with new (and old) consumers.

Check out/add to the #collcons hashtag for great examples of collaborative consumption.

Also see:

From thought leadership to mass collaboration

Rebuilding blocks: sustainability, economics, design

Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (for everyone?)

Thanks for reading. Please tweet if you like or share your thoughts in the comments below

Leaders say the funniest things – these days it’s only worth listening if it’s funny.

Before the internet went social and we still lived in an age of push, companies that wanted to engage with big issues through their CR programme would pump out mega treatises on their approach to dealing with their social, economic and environmental issues.

Focused on their business risks and their impacts, these papers, reports, campaigns and eventually microsites (!) were consistent with their way of doing business. For although stakeholders were involved in producing the stuff, end results quickly lost relevance.  The debates and issues evolved as the thought leadership stood still, stacked in piles in a back office or hiding out at a lonely url that no-one knew about.

Thankfully this walled garden approach is no longer consistent with a new operating environment that requires collaboration, openness and new types of engagement with new consumers.

Embedding sustainability + deepening partnerships

As these things have evolved, companies have learnt to deal with the wider issues that effect the sector that are not only material to their business but also have a wider impact. For example for SABMiller, taking on water use is helping them become an effective partner in water stressed regions where they operate.

Deeper partnerships with civil society and the growing strength of industry initiatives such as the FSC, the Equator Principles, the IBLF and the ICMM, to name a few, have helped wage a more united front in response to big issues. But in a constant effort to outdo each other, companies are still hooked on the need to demonstrate leadership. Collaboration too, has to be set within a few walls and have clear benefits.

How mass collaboration  (and crises) changes everything

The financial and environmental crises have shown up weaknesses in the structural inability of companies to help us get sustainable. And now that everyone can all talk feely and cheaply and cut out the marketing, people don’t need to trust companies.

Now that no-one is listening, companies need to move from thought leadership to creating the enabling environments and help people come together to tackle big issues. This is about facing the big challenges with mass collaboration.

This type of facilitation is ably demonstrated by Openideo (in partnership with Sony and WWF don’t you know). Openideo is an online platform for people to come together to work on solutions to big social and environmental challenges, such as:

From behind the walled garden you may be wondering why anyone would contribute their time to this –they aren’t getting paid so the quality will be rubbish etcetcr. Watch the video to see how it works:

Why does it work:

1. v low/no cost to entry. The concept takes design thinking of Ideo and funnels the wisdom of the crowd to find the most effective solution.
2. Thanks to the platform all ideas are shareable, remixable and open meaning there is plenty of scope for refinement and repurposing.
3. People contribute/self-select because they are passionate
4. People are rewarded with kudos and a type of ranking (called a design quotient). This ranking may help them in other things they do.
5. People gather from all parts of the world with a variety of skills and life experiences (rethink who your stakeholders are).
6. It is constantly evolving, changing and adapting… and its fun.

Creating enabling environments

I’ve posted before about mass collaboration (here and here) and remember Clay Shirky being asked in his talk where should a company go to tap into mass collaboration. His response was to sit on the sidelines and be humble as people work together (without you) to create new things.

This is the natural evolution of thought leadership and companies should be happy about this. By curating and ‘taking the friction out’ of helping people collaborate, you can help speed up the search for solutions to big challenges and build new conversational relationships.

So if this suits you, don’t feel you need to build a massive platform – go and find one and help them do more. Sit back and watch it work. If you want to go a step further release some data sets or patents. It might actually help to shift other parts of your organisation to explore ideas of open innovation and co-creation and help you realign the rest of your business to a rebalancing world. It also means that you don’t need to say something funny just to get heard.

Related posts:

Rebuilding blocks: sustainability, economics, design

Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (for everyone?)

RSA: Animate -What motivates us

How to: Futuregazing, sustainability and creative content

There is no contest in a footrace between a well-oiled, just-in-time-schooled car maker, looking to shift as many units as possible in a new market, and a decision-by-committee megacity administration trying to put in place an urban infrastructure fit for the 21st century. Handily, the auto maker also gets to socialise the losses (more gridlocked roads, fuel dependency, air pollution, deterioration of public space etc) and move on.

One of the big challenges I’m exploring at the moment is how do we redefine prosperity for the huge new group of global consumers (for lack of a better definition the new global middle classes) . They now have the means to buy the goods and service they need (great) but live in a public infrastructure constrained environment (bad) with a differentiated experience of citizenship and, more worryingly, are only being offered a high income country version of consumption (v bad).

If you consider the size and scale of demands from the new middle classes (for instance have a look at this GS note on BRIC consumer trends) I’m fairly certain these markets will disintegrate pretty rapidly. So the risk is there for the companies, the question is whether they care about getting back to business as usual or want to establish deeper long-term relationships with lots of new consumers.

The first path is pretty easy but a dead end. Hopefully the rebuilding blocks (in the slides above) point to a simple route to a smarter road ahead.

I’m speaking in September at the Eabis Annual Colloquium in St Petersburg whose theme for this year is Corporate Responsibility and Emerging markets. My topic is Prosperity and Brazil’s New Middle Classes which goes into these themes of service design, co-creation and sustainability in more detail. I’ll post more about that soon

For a bit more on socialising the losses and how we fail to account for environmental goods and services, this video of Pavan Sukhdev, Head of UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative is very good

My stuff about global economic shifts and the impact of a new global middle class on EVERYTHING  has been helped a great deal by this post from Umair Haque which introduced me to thinking from The Power of Pull (great downloads at link) and The Shift Index from the Deloitte Centre for Edge from John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison and Richard Florida’s The Great Reset I’ve also been inspired by listening Paul Seabright, author of The Company of Strangers, on how we are collaborative not competitive by design, The Future of Competition and platforms such as openideo.

The above slides (PDF here) attempt to explain how some big trends should be the foundations for rethinking how to build a business fit for a rebalancing world. They are part of a full deck that has got plenty of examples and more depth about how to map these blocks onto your organisation’s footprint.

Get in touch or DM me if you want to see the whole deck or to talk some more about these ideas.

Have you seen the app which takes your photo and makes it look like you’re really fat? Yes. And the game where you land all the planes on the runway? Yes, that too. Hey, how about this thing with the funny red monster that repeats everything you say? Please leave me. Please just leave me here to die. (C Brooker)

The above clip from Futurama and the article by Charlie Brooker in today’s Guardian, add a dimension to the e-waste/toxic mineral/assembly line debate which I think points to a smarter future for the consumer electronics industry. If you add together conflict minerals, e-waste, toxic chemicals used in production, and the now well-documented unrest among Chinese assembly line workers, the satisfaction footprint of our gadgets is miniscule.

Conflict minerals break cover

There has been plenty of noise recently about conflict minerals,not least coming out of the financial regulation bill recently put through the US congress. Brought to light by the Enough Project, whose recent spoof of an Apple commercial highlighted the use of conflict minerals in our much cherished gadgets, the bill’s provision was a welcome recognition of the issue.

Steve Job’s even put himself out there, as has now become customary, exchanging emails with a concerned  customer about the issue. Here is what was said (via wired):

Hi Steve,

I’d planned to buy a new iPhone tomorrow – my first upgrade since buying the very first version on the first day of its release – but I’m hesitant without knowing Apple’s position on sourcing the minerals in its products.

Are you currently making any effort to source conflict-free minerals? In particular, I’m concerned that Apple is getting tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold from Eastern Congo through its suppliers.

Looking forward to your response,
Derick

Jobs’ reply:

Yes. We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict few materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.

Sent from my iPhone

A bit of honesty (good) but detail-lite (customary/fail). Other manufacturers (sadly not CEOs) have also got their acts together in terms of having a response to the question as can be seen here.

Drowning under Ataris

Added to conflict minerals is e-waste. A recent UN report stated that e-waste is growing by 40m tonnes a year. Phones generally end up being recycled in the developing world and ‘remined’ for their precious minerals in horrid conditions.

Some manufacturers are doing better than others at eliminating BFRs, pthalatates and PVC plastics out of their products  - if you add in conflict minerals and dodgy recycling practices and you can see the scale of the headache.

Pre-crisis relic

These are huge international issues, involving diffuse supply chains, unstable governments, antiquated legislation and a seemingly insatiable desire for gizmos . The industry is a classic pre-crisis relic. It is wholly unsustainable, in overreach and heading for a fall. There are 2 strands to a solution.

One path is a coordinated international response where stakeholders can sort out some commitments and organisations such as Gesi can get the industry to pool its resources,  and try and coordinate an serious international shift in policies etc.

While we wait for that to paper over the cracks, a big chance lies in trying to get everyone to take a break from the satisfaction-negative hype machine.

Post-sweat shop scandal era

We have moved into a post-sweat shop scandal era. Corporate reputation damage alone is not enough of a disincentive. These days, a Sunday supplement feature can be drowned out by millions of media channels churning press release friendly stories. Futurama and Charlie Brooker are onto something far more powerful which can work in tandem with an achingly slow legislative approach.  I’ve spoken about measuring happiness before and how at a national level it doesn’t quite stack up.

I do think, however, that a product satisfaction footprint for the consumer electronics industry is workable. If you took all the people involved in the lifecycle of a product and gave it a (human) satisfaction rating, you may end up with consumers moving away from making purchases burdened with misery as they wont want to add to their own increasing dissatisfaction with a range of (unsustainable) facts of modern life. This might help to slow down the wholly unsustainable consumer electronic product cycle  and help the industry realign towards a smarter future that involves:

• less, better products
• more focus on ugradability/upcycling / modularity (e.g. replaceable battery please!)
• stronger commitments to each step of the lifecycle
• more honesty and input into social utility of products (realignment of advertising, support for more Ushahidi-type initiatives)
• less dependence on Asian export-led economic growth model which is about to pop.

Anyone think this is workable? Or, are we destined to to be submerged by Ataris and Gameboys? I’d be really keen to hear anyone’s thoughts on this.

Related posts -

1. Clay Shirky: Creativity and generosity in a connect age (for everyone?)
2. This is not normal, nor is Bhutan
3. Back to the Future: Samsung environmental competitiveness and revenue growth

Did you like this post? If so. click this to share shortened url instantly on twitter.

The wonderful site from this Sao Paulo group combines good storytelling with loads of info and a simple idea to inspire people to make (mega)city life more liveable.The above video – ilogical city looks at the now-asphalted rivers of Sao Paulo, the mega growth of the city and its chaotic love affair with the car. Take a look at this slider reveal graphic as well which looks at a few neighborhoods and the now-disappeared rivers.

A proposed solution: uncover the rivers which cause chaos when they overflow and think about using them as the new expressways.

- Jardim metro station underwater ealier this year…

This is not normal is a great question/statement for exploring urban issues that drive us all crazy (and ill). Maybe if we used a bit of the time we spend tying to coin money everyday into making life more liveable, we might have a more coronary-free existence.

All this ties into the latest  Quality of living survey from Mercer. Despite the near funereal tone, there is some good detail in the various releases.

Top 5 cities worldwide

The theme is quite clear. You either need to be cold or inaccessible, or both. Most of the world’s biggest cities, that hold the keys to a sustainable future, are  hot, easy to get to and replete with social, economic and environmental extremes.

A most liveable megacities index would be a useful benchmarking and info sharing exercise which might inspire some competition, pride etc amongst participants. The growthmongers are always going to be out there, along with people who think that gross national happiness of Bhutan -the country that got rid of its only traffic light-is a more relevant measure. I think we should sweat the small stuff and do more to inspire people, a la isso nao e normal, into making cities more liveable. The only solutions left are the sustainable ones.

tweet button to share shortened url instantly on twitter.

Off to see Clay Shirky talk tonight about his new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Lots of ideas about human potential in the 21st Century and living in a world that is moving to being less about consuming and more about doing.

I’ll be intrigued to find out how far down this road he thinks we are. Does the Foxxcon assembly line worker in Shenzen or the Mcjobber in the suburbs of Sao Paulo get to be part of this creative rebalancing? Or are they just allowed to be the last targets for growth hungry legacy companies of the 20th Century and an easily forgotten part of our own personal supply chains?

create or consume?

To me, we need to move faster with footprinting and lifecycle education and also think that the person on the assembly line has just as much right to be part of this creative, collaborative world. They also may just turn out to have more creative juices in them than the person who purchased the product on the other side of the world.

This from the Enough Project highlighting conflict minerals in consumer electronics is good on getting footprinting out there… and this response email from Steve Jobs, himself responding yo a customer who had seen N Kristoff’s NY Times Op-ed Death by Gadget, is an impressive example on new skool pr in action.

The world’s new middle classes need to be part of this new reorganising of priorities. At the moment, access for the largest segment of the world’s population is blocked. This means that whatever comes out, regardless of the merits of its creative output, it wont be representative and wont help in tackling the urgent social and environmental challenges we face.

UPDATE: Just back from Clay Shirky talk which was great (mp3 here). He went into detail on squeezing social capital out of our networked world. For him 3 types of networks exist:

• communal ones that dont break out or perform much civic purpose like lolcats
  

  funny but...

• wikipedia ones that are great big public libraries.
• civic ones which change the playing field for everyone and contribute in a meaningful way to solutions to big challenges like Ushahidi

And… he was big on mobile phones and simple networking solutions for driving mass participation in the developing world.

share shortened url instantly on twitter.