Global meltdown: time to rethink the fundamentals
Business in Vancouver Issue 992, October 2008
It was an impossible question. Ridiculous! Naïve.
Someone at the Board of Trade luncheon had just asked an eminent speaker to “sum up sustainability in just one word.”
I rolled my eyes.
The speaker was John Elkington, founder of the London think tank SustainAbility, coiner of the term “triple bottom line,” author of a number of critical books, great granddaddy of sustainability thinking.
He paused, thoughtful, for just one beat.
His answer: “Trust.”
I stopped rolling my eyes. It was three years ago and I’ve been pondering Elkington’s answer ever since.
It’s hard to disagree that a lack of trust undermines sustainability. The financial meltdown of the past weeks (and year) has seriously shaken the sense of well-being and momentum that usually allows our economies to function. What, after all, is consumer confidence, if not trust? Trust that your job is safe, trust that contracts will be honoured, trust that currency holds the value you believe it holds.
So we see the strange scenarios of leaders assuring us that things will be fine, when we know they will only be fine if we believe they will be fine. Which makes it hard to believe what they say. Trust, once broken, is slow to rebuild.
The trouble with financial markets is that they do a poor job of measuring social value, such as the health of people or communities; the equitable distribution of well-being or access to opportunities; the long-term stability of relationships; the ability of a society to keep peace. Nor do they recognize true environmental costs, as we have seen watching global GDP boom while polar icecaps shrink. (What kind of cockamamie measure takes no account of its own future?)
Markets really only function well with things that can be commodified. Unfortunately, most of what makes life worth living doesn’t fit that frame. Until now though, for all of us who have had enough, it has been convenient to overlook this.
The market adjustment may be the beginning of a much larger adaptation of our economic system to one that more closely measures investments that lead to happiness, security and well-being, for more people, over longer terms. And this is where the bigger picture lies closer to Elkington’s one word answer than the prolix assurances of those who are deeply implicated in the system that was. Trust, says Wikipedia, is a relationship of reliance. If sustainability is trust, it is fundamentally a recognition of mutual reliance. But this is not what we have aimed for or measured. Leave it to others to assess the reasons for the crumbling of our economic system – but certainly, many see simple greed as a basic driver.
Our own visionaries already know this, and are adjusting their actions to suit. At a recent Metro Vancouver Sustainability Summit, Milton Wong described a series of epiphanies that led him to rethink a successful investment career that was based on the idea of unlimited growth. “It turns out you can’t have limitless growth without burning through all the resources on the earth,” he said. “There is no such thing as growth. Our earth is finite. What we use excessively here, we take from over there.”
This thinking had led him to a new focus, sustainability: “We owe it to one another to take care of our earth and of one another.” Wong is focusing his energy now on rejuvenating Vancouver’s downtown eastside. Similarly, this month’s summit on corporate responsibility hosted by the Business Council of BC heard stories of leading companies increasingly involved in building social value instead of providing old-fashioned cash handouts. Building solid relationships, it was stated more than once, is where building value lies.
What does it mean for you and your business? If you want to be around for the long term, ask yourself, are you sustainable? And try out this version: is your company worthy of trust? Does it think long term? Consider future impacts? Act as an honest broker? Build value for everyone involved? Trust, after all, is likely what will sustain you when times are tough. In that way, it really is money in the bank, a currency we need to generate more of if true well-being – not just material wealth – is our goal.
It’s not the question anymore that deserves rolled eyes, but rather, how long we take – at what cost – to get to the answer. ***
Nina Winham (nina@newclimate.ca) is principal of New Climate Strategies, a company specializing in helping clients build value through a shift to sustainability.
