Tag Archive for holistic

The Clean and Green Club, December 2021

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: December 2021

Find the Beautiful Symmetry: Are You Properly Closing Your Loops?

Holistic thinking works in circles, not straight lines. In nature, waste products of one species are inputs for another. Animals breathe oxygen in and breathe out carbon dioxide, which plants breathe in and convert back to oxygen. Each needs the other, and the process is circular. We can learn from watching and emulating nature, as Biomimicry guru Janine Benyus consistently points out.

Most of the loops have more than two steps: A bird eats an insect, and is in turn eaten by a coyote, which, when it dies, decomposes and attracts insects. Or water evaporates into a cloud, which releases water in the form of rain, which allows plants to grow, and the water evaporates again. Some loops might have many more steps than that.

In my most recent book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, I cite a number of examples of humans mimicking nature and creating similar looped systems. For example, The Intervale, an industrial park where brewery waste grows mushrooms, the mushroom waste supports tilapia, and the fish waste fertilizes grain for the brewery—and in the process, this integrated agricultural loop anchor an enjoyable downtown biopark.

In other words, a green or socially conscious business can benefit by thinking holistically.

Unfortunately. far too many businesses take a step in the direction of the better world we all want and then leave it hanging. Think about a coffee shop that uses compostable single-use cups, lids, and cutlery—but fails to separate them in the trash and sends them into the landfill. There’s no benefit to the earth in that, just an unnecessary extra cost (last time I priced them, compostable cups ran about 25 cents apiece versus five cents for landfill-designated cups).

What other loops should be closed? Here are a few to get you started (some about going green, some about social justice or employee empowerment):

  • What happens to your waste? Is it something to dispose of, or something you can reuse or even sell?
  • Are there energy, materials, or water supplies being squandered in leaks or inefficient processes? If so, how can you fix them?
  • Do you have convenient collection stations for reusable or recyclable packaging and products? Are the collected materials successfully reused or recycled?
  • Is your DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) commitment successful? Are you reaching out to the target populations in hiring (including execs and senior management, not just line employees) AND in your user base? Are you letting the target communities know what you’re doing? And are you actively partnering with organizations that serve these communities to spread the word, identify candidates, coordinate services (e.g., sign language interpretation at an event)
  • Have you set up feedback systems to early-alert any HR problems, evaluate and (when appropriate) implement employee suggestions and potentially reward those suggesting, and monitor their effects? How else is innovation rewarded and soul-killing bureaucracy discouraged?
  • How are customer and vendor complaints handled?
  • Do you cross-train employees and otherwise prepare them for advancement?
  • Do they have a way to notify friends and family of appropriate vacancies?

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.

View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

Collective Visioning

Collective Visioning: How Groups Can Work Together for a Just and Sustainable Future, by Linda StoutWhether you’re in business or activism, you probably have a lot of meetings to go to. And while there are plenty of books on running effective meetings, I’m not aware of many that focus on the meeting as a form of empowerment. Stout brings years of organizing successful cross-racial, cross-cultural, cross-class community organizations and coalitions that built on her experience as a working-class rural white woman working mostly in the Deep South, who never thought, growing up, that she could be a leader.

Yet, she’s led several organizations, including at least one national group. And her engagement of working class people and those of color long predates the current embrace of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in both the business and social change worlds; her book has a 2011 copyright and draws on work she’s done for decades.

For Stout, organizations work best when they create a process to collectively create a vision, not just for a particular organization or campaign but for society as a whole—and then figuring out how to implement that vision. One of her most powerful case studies describes school children in post-Katrina New Orleans who designed a whole new model of education (pp. 22, 27) and got big pieces of it adopted by the school system (though some parts were casualties of other factors like the crashing economy of 2007-09).

In today’s walking-on-eggshells time when many on the left are super-worried about offending people from various historically oppressed groups, Stout offers an example of a white group that hosted an event in a church known to have KKK connections and then wondered why their outreach to communities of color didn’t bring turnout (p. 48). But she says even an event in very white places like Iowa can attract participants of color, if organizers thoroughly understand not just their messaging but how it’s received in targeted communities. [This is true in the business world, too. Chevrolet brought the Nova to Latin America without noticing that the name translates as “doesn’t go”—and then wondered why sales were terrible.] You may have to work at inclusion. If you want young moms to attend, you’ll need childcare and perhaps transportation; if you want people with physical disabilities, meet in a barrier-free space. And if you hire an ASL interpreter, reach out ahead of time to deaf communities and let them know (p. 47). And even a space with a problematic history can be used if the history is acknowledged in the right way (p. 49).

Meetings accomplish more, Stout says, if they reach agreement on process and behavior right from the beginning and to accept that others in the room have good intentions, even if that takes some time (pp. 54-55).

While she loves the group visioning process, Stout recognizes that not all gatherings are ready to plunge in. Particularly if your attendees are feeling hopeless and powerless, some personal visioning (pp. 69-86) might need to happen before the group brainstorms a collective vision.

Once the collective vision is in place, the work is far from done. Pages 107-115 address the challenge of agreeing on strategies for action and implementation. One way is phrase goals positively (pp. 127-129). Another is to have participants look back to the present as “ambassadors from the future” from a time down the road when the goals have been met or exceeded (p. 131). And another is to make a point of celebrating even small victories (p. 135). She mentions several others. One I particularly like is a set of strategies for involving the whole community (not just the organization’s members and activists) to accomplish goals like closing a prison or challenging segregationism in local media and government at the same time (pp. 155-165). It isn’t easy, but she reminds us that repression and censorship are signs the other side thinks you’re winning, that languaging and messaging are really important, and that the culture can be changed.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription for, too.

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