And here are a few questions you can start to ask about all the small things you buy:
Where is it made?
Where is most of it actually made (before the label’s added)?
Who by?
How is it made?
Where do the inputs come from? How are they produced?
Where do the outputs go? How are they made harmless?
What alternatives are there?
It’s not too late to take meaningful action to save our future on the planet.
Before you can act, you need to be informed. The market won’t do this. Especially when it isn’t working properly and a few mega-companies control huge swathes of production.
We have to inform ourselves. Then tell our friends.
I learned about these egg producers through ‘The Daily Difference‘ from The Carbon Almanac. Why not sign up yourself?
Contrary to what we’re told, it’s not too late, provided we all take action.
“What AI is interesting for at the moment is to generate starting points for your own creativity.“
Clink.
The pieces in my kaleidoscope shifted slightly.
We see the world through the lenses of what we know, what we believe and what we feel. We can’t help that.
So it is lovely to have someone nudge the kaleidoscope occasionally, and give us a change of view. Especially when that view is of something you are slightly fearful of.
That thing you’re worried about for your business? Have a conversation with an enthusiast, and see what happens to your kaleidoscope.
It can’t hurt. It might help. It will definitely change your view.
Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.
We want to be citizens. Collaborating with purpose on something bigger than ourselves.
What if, instead of building our businesses to sell stuff – that might create a fleeting sensation of one or more of these things, we built them as a means to enable people to genuinely achieve these things?
We could repair and enrich our world instead of impoverishing it.
It’s not too late for Disicpline to make Daring possible.
If humans are naturally empathetic, flexible and co-operative, how come it feels like we’ve lost that?
Because we fall for stories. Stories where our empathy and flexibility can be used against us.
I’m into the last of my 4 new books: ‘Citizens‘ by Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad, and I’m so glad I’m reading it after Sarah Hrdy’s one.
According to Jon and Ariane, we’ve trapped ourselves in certain stories – stories that we didn’t create, but which had enough advantages for us in them to be accepted.
The first is the Subject story – one man at the top of our tribe has the right to tell everyone else what to do. The rest of us are subject to his will, whether we like it or not. The deal is meant to be that in return, the man at the top will take care of us, make sure we are fed and housed and can live our little lives. The downside of this story is that there’s not much room for movement. Your place is fixed and you know it. The upside is that you can sneak in quite a private life on the side. For an interesting exploration on how this story might have come about, I recommend ‘On Kings‘ by David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins.
The second is the Consumer story – we are not a subject, we are a free person! Free, that is, to choose between whatever options are given. The deal here is that we can be whoever we want to be, as long as it involves buying stuff. The more, the better. We aren’t encouraged to think about how that stuff is made, by whom, or what effect it might be having on other people and the planet. We aren’t encouraged to think at all. Our job is simply to consume. The Consumer story likes community, likes tribes. Tribes encourage people to compete with each other in buying stuff. The upside of this story is that as a Consumer we can fully express our indivduality in a myriad of ways. The downside of this story is that we feel disconnected, lonely, unfulfilled somehow, and there’s only so much stuff you can fit into one lifetime.
The third story is the Citizen story. In this story we are empathetic, co-operative, flexible. We recognise that we are part of something more than a community or a tribe, that we are individuals who are also part of a society. A society we make, and could just as easily make differently. In this story we make and re-make society from the bottom up, collaboratively, deliberately, consciously. The downside of this story is that it takes a lot of effort, it means taking responsibility not just for ourselves, but for others, and it means participating with others in a messy process. The upside is that this is our natural story, and the more we practice it, the better we get at it.
How do these stories play out in your business?
Are your clients or customers simply Consumers? Or are they Citizens, helping to shape the little society that is your business?
Are your people Subjects? Knowing their place. Living their ‘real life’ outside the workplace, doing just enough to keep you happy? Or are they Citizens, helping to shape the little society that is your business?
And you? Are you a King, worrying about who’s after the top spot? Or are you a Citizen, building a little society that will both outlast you and remember you as its founder?
Back in 1978, me and my family were entranced by this BBC series in which James Burke explained how rather than being a simple forward march of progress towards some future pinnacle, history was actually a web of connected accidents. People built new ideas and inventions on the ideas and inventions of others, who had created these things for completely different reasons. Connections made that were never ‘meant’ to be made leading to new connections, and new inventions. Often with what seemed like spookily appropriate timing.
Fast forward 50 years, and I’m enticed into a little online group called ‘Connect the Carbon Dots’ by a mention of this TV series.
In our group, we’re taking the facts, issues and solutions in the soon to be released Carbon Almanac, and connecting them to each other, in a visual, interactive web. So that someone interested in ‘how to store carbon in soil’ for example can see why that’s a good thing for global warming AND how it also impacts food security, erosion, and pollution.
Looking back, that documentary may have been the start of my life’s work!
Everything’s connected. Everyone is connected. Everything’s a process.
You never know what’s going to happen next, but there’ll be an interesting thread to follow.
And life is actually more joyful when you look at it that way.
We’re often told that left in a ‘state of nature’, humans would end up fighting a ‘war of all against all’, leaving life ‘nasty, brutish and short’.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen any evidence of that, not even in the dodgiest part of Manchester in the high-unemployment, welfare-cut-ridden 1980s.
This story is used (has been used for millenia) to justify hierarchy. ‘Someone needs to be in charge, because otherwise everying will go to pot.‘ And with hierarchy comes inequality. ‘I’m at the top, so I deserve more‘.
As I’m working through Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s ‘Mothers and Others‘, it’s becoming clear that flexibility, empathy, mutual care and co-operation aren’t just useful human traits, they are literally the traits that made us human. These behaviours evolved before our bigger brains, before language. They made our bigger brains possible. Without these behaviours, we would still be great apes, or extinct.
So a flexible, co-operative mindset based on empathy and care for others, including those currently ‘unproductive’ comes naturally to us. Anything else goes against the grain.
Suppressing our nature isn’t just bad for people’s mental health, it’s bad for business, and right now it’s sending us down the road to extinction.
We’ll need to mobilise all our natual proclivities for teamwork, ingenuity and mutual aid to prevent this.
And we’re out of practice.
That’s where small businesses come in.
Where better to get practicing empathy, co-operation and mutual support than a business that already feels more like a family than a corporation?
Who better to kick off this transition in the UK than the 1.2 million ‘bosses’ of family-sized businesses?
When better to start than now, when it’s not too late?
And why not, when you can grow your business with the grain instead of against it? Giving your business an evolutionary advantage, enabling scale without adding overhead or stress or losing what makes it unique?
If you’ve read Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the chasm” (and I recommend it), you’ll be familiar with this diagram:
But what does it practically mean for you?
If you are a business offering something new and different from what has gone before, something that could potentially disrupt the status quo, you need to understand this curve.
As an example, here’s what it means for me.
In the UK, there are around 1,018,220 businesses that employ between 3 and 10 people, including the owner. These are my overall ‘market’, the people I want to serve.
I offer a service that’s new and potentially disruptive to the status quo, so however I niche down into that market, by industry say, or geography, or business life stage, this curve comes into play. It adds another dimension to the psychographic of the people I can help most, that I have to consider when designing, marketing and delivering my service.
Here’s how it splits:
25,455 of them are Innovators. They love trying new things, what matters to them is that things are new and better than the current best option. They’ll want to know how it works (and they’ll take it apart to find out). They’re not worried about support, or infrastructure, they’re just happy to have the latest cool thing to play with. These are great people to test really new ideas on. Until they get bored and move on to the next cool new thing.
137,460 of them are Visionaries. They are interested in getting ahead, and if they can see how a thing will get them ahead of their competitors faster, they’ll go for it. They don’t mind if it’s not all there, or if there is no support. They will happily support themselves. They will ask for your thing to be redesigned to suit them though, so be prepared to maintain several versions of your thing.
346,195 of them are Pragmatists, and much more demanding. They want to know whether a thing solves their problem better than the current market leader, for less than the cost of the problem. They want to know that you are a safe company to work with; that there is support, and maintenance and spare parts. As long as these things are in place they don’t care who does it, which means you can still be a small business, collaborating with other small businesses to provide a complete service. Pragmatists will only use a new thing if they believe that there are enough people like them already using it. They don’t trust Visionaries (‘flying by the seat of their pants’) and they trust Innovators even less. That gap between Pragmatists and Visionaries is The Chasm.
The same number of businesses (346,195 of them) are Conservatives. I think of these people as the ones who say ‘nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM‘. For them what matter is whether a thing solves their problem better than the current market leader, for less money. They want everyone else to be using your thing before they do. They want you to be not just safe, but respected in the marketplace. They also expect you to provide everything yourself – support, maintenance, spare parts. In other words, you have to be a big company like them. Or at least look like it.
Finally, there the 152,733 who are Skeptics. As you might imagine from their position on the distribution curve, they are the last to adopt new things, sticking stubbornly to whatever has served them well up to now, even if the new thing would serve them better.
I’m an Innovator looking to serve Visionaries.
What side of the Chasm are you on? More importantly, where are the people you seek to serve?
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” David Graeber.
For many of us, this is exactly why we start a business. To build our own little utopia, where we make the rules, and get to decide how our world within a world should work.
But if we want to make a bigger impact, our model of how the world should work has to catch on. With clients, with team members, with suppliers, investors, our families and friends, our competitors.
That can only happen once the model is outside of our heads.
The good news is that getting it out of your head makes it easier for it to catch on.
“This is not a democracy, it’s a benevolent dictatorship.”
As kids we occasionally questioned the benevolence. My mother must have questioned the dictatorship. Often.
Because more often than we sullenly submitted to some arbitrary (to us) command, we found ways to do exactly what we wanted. Mostly by simply doing them out of sight.
Looking back, its clear that much of this dictatorship came from inability, not unwillingness. We simply couldn’t afford stuff. But talking about this would have meant explaining why we couldn’t afford it, which in a nutshell was because there were too many of us for the income. And my parents never wanted any of us to feel unwanted or unloved.
Still, a bit of participatory democracy might have made things easier. We could have come up with ideas for saving money and priorities for spending it that we all agreed on.
It’s often said that small businesses are like families. And as ‘The Boss’, it seems easiest to run things as a ‘benevolent dictatorship’. But how much is going on out of your sight? How many good ideas are you losing? How much help are you missing out on?
Dictatorships, no matter how benevolent, aren’t just unfair. They’re inefficient and fragile. And in the long run, unsustainable.
