Stakeholders can have all sorts of impact and exert considerable influence in remarkable ways.
Of course, no company or designer can include all of these stakeholders in all of its decisions, nor would this be appropriate. But, often, a particular stakeholder group can exert unexpected and significant power on a company due to its behavior and offerings. (Think of citizen action groups thwarting plans for a new dump in their neighborhood.) Stakeholders can have all sorts of impact and exert considerable influence in remarkable ways. They can form coalitions with each other to increase their influence, like when one labor union joins with another or when an NGO teams up with a trade association. While most of these stakeholders don’t have direct corporate influence (such as voting on corporate decisions), they can exercise their power via the courts, government lobbying, economic activities, and social activities, such as boycotts, protests, and creating awareness in the media and public.
Smart companies keep an eye on as many stakeholders and their concerns as possible and manage company activities and policy accordingly to reduce the need to respond to unexpected stakeholder involvement. Designers, too, need to be aware of the range of stakeholders and their concerns if they hope to create sustainable solutions that improve conditions across environmental, social, and financial challenges.
A Careful Balance
Lastly, no decision is perfect or comes without consequences. Design requires decisions that narrow possibilities, ultimately until there is one solution. Designing more sustainable offerings may require you to balance inputs and outcomes and, often, compromise. It’s rare, in fact, that you’ll achieve everything that you want.
For example, some recycled materials have lower strength, higher weight, or less perfect consistency. This may require your product to have thicker construction or lower tolerances. Parts may need to be larger or heavier. These outcomes may be the result of necessary dematerialization or sourcing materials from a source with better environmental or social behavior. Other factors may require you to choose between a longer or shorter product life, increased or decreased carbon footprint or recyclability, or less efficient energy use. Mobile products, especially, might cause you to choose more expensive, lighter, and more durable materials since these products need to be as small, light, and robust as possible, or they don’t get purchased. But these may also limit longevity or recyclability. In addition, more sustainable materials may be more expensive than less sustainable ones, driving up the total product cost.
Designing more sustainable offerings may require you to balance inputs and outcomes and, often, compromise.
You may not be able to educate your customers enough for them to appreciate or expect your new approach or solution to compete with those they already know and trust. For this reason alone, an optimized solution, from a sustainability perspective, may not be successful. Getting too far
in front of customers or the market can be more disastrous than being too far behind (since it often results in disastrous sales and failure of products, services, and companies).
As I wrote in the “Introduction,” there’s no perfect solution. There are only choices balancing results that, hopefully, lead to a product, service, or experience with better performance of some kind.
“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” —Henry David Thoreau in a letter to Harrison Blake (20 May 1860); published in Familiar Letters (1865)
CHAPTER 2
How Is Sustainability Measured?
You Get What You Measure
This is the reality of most of the world—and especially the business world. Measures are seductive. Attaching a score or value to something often makes it seem more legitimate, accurate, and valid. Even if the measurement or scoring system is hopelessly flawed or the things being measured are fundamentally so qualitative that they resist quantitative measurement—scores, ratings, and numbers make us more comfortable, and often influence decisions more than any other issue. If there is a number, for example, we can track its rise or fall and compare it to similar numbers for related solutions.
Unfortunately, this means that things that can’t be measured easily because they’re so abstract or too big to measure (like happiness or environmental impact) often get ignored in decision making. At first, we may try to keep in mind their value alongside more quantitative measures, but after a while we forget to include them, and they disappear from not only our consciousness, but also our development criteria and management procedures. Throughout history, many of the benefits that design can bring have been difficult to measure, especially the ones that are projected into the future. This inability to project has made it difficult for designers to convince all manner of people, from managers to business leaders, to investors, to educators, and even to government officials the value that specific solutions and the design process itself can add.
This, too, is what has happened with social and environmental issues in business. There have been recent attempts to measure the financial value of social and environmental issues, and these are important steps. For example, if you can show the financial savings in energy efficiency for a skyscraper, especially as compared to the nominal differences in construction costs, you’ve got a great justification for building a more “green” building. Likewise, if you can show that your publicity solution will likely cause one million people to replace two standard incandescent light bulbs with LED bulbs a year, saving electricity in a municipal power system and preventing tons of carbon and sulfur from being released into the atmosphere, then you’ve got a great case for social venture investment.
Social Measures
But how does one value social issues? How do you measure the financial benefit of saving a life or not causing pain to an animal? And should you? Even in purely financial terms (such as calculating the lifetime earning capacity for a Nigerian child saved from a disease), these approaches ignore the emotional, ethical, and meaning value of saving or improving a life. There have been no measures, to date, capable of tallying the social benefits of most social and environmental issues. In a 1997 article in Nature magazine, 13 experts from a variety of institutes and organizations calculated the total value of ecosystem services to be between $16 and $54 trillion. The average, which is on the conservative side, is $33T. This represents the value that nature provides to us (individuals, businesses, governments, and organizations alike).
In a 1997 article in Nature magazine, 13 experts from a variety of institutes and organizations calculated the total value of ecosystem services to be between $16 and $54 trillion.
Ecosystem