What is it we do? Over the last 6 months, I have been integrating into a new country, learning a new language and exploring new professional contexts. I am also reflecting on what we do as humanity in our relationship with each other and all life on this planet. In this first post on this question, I want to set a general tone as an introduction to a further exploration of the Swedish context.

I start with Yuval Noah Harari’s reflection that humanity collected god-like powers in its relationship with life on this planet. And the flesh and bodily beings we are today might in the relative future (historically speaking) be overpowered by new forms of upgraded organic and/or a totally new form of non-organic life. Humanity has been shaping itself via storytelling, and the humanist story has relatively liberated us from what flesh and bodily beings suffer most, namely, disease, war, and hunger. This statement must be seen with global-historic relativity and should not be used as a prerequisite to downplay the suffering of those around us and that that is still playing within ourselves. Science has disillusioned religions, and the humanist revolution replaced all previous belief systems. In former systems, fixed stories centred around external god figures structured societies. Instead, meaning has to be found inside the human by listening to oneself, following one’s heart, being truthful to oneself, and doing what feels right… And so, most of us no longer find meaning in going to fight others because a god is asking us, and we no longer accept that the reasons for our illness or hunger are punishments from a god. This is because the humanist story is no longer fixed to predefined outcomes. We are our own actors in an open play. We have a choice and can make things better by choosing peace and creating a paradise of health and nourishment in the here and now instead of in the afterlife. But for this play to get started, we needed knowledge, resources, and trust. Trust that investing in these will bring us further in the play. So, from the start, credit was vital in this new play. And via the promise of interest rates, the drum of growth should not be stopped. And so, humanism could also be seen as humanity grappling with its illusion of growth, including colonialism and the socialist- and evolutionary-humanism experiments of the last century resulting in the tragic loss of millions of lives. And the only really remaining form of humanism is liberal humanism. Characterised by democracies and a culture where individual human feelings, wishes and experiences are unprecedentedly valued… It leaves enormous questions about the planet’s carrying capacity and probably the erosion of humanity’s autonomy. 

Sustainable development attempts to address these questions, at least the first one of the planet’s capacity. As a sustainability professional with a background in design and innovation, I have been helping corporations, entrepreneurs, students, networks, and individuals take roles in this agenda. But what is it we do? Many colleges will sum up a list of services, ideas, or plans. And almost across the board is the willingness to make an impact. But what does that mean? And what is our role in the story of humanism? 

EY tried to answer the last question in the corporate context but quickly acknowledged that sustainability professionals find themselves working on incremental change of the current model as long as there is no alternative to the growth model. Sustainability teams are too often disproportionately limited to the scale of the problems they want to address, and most of their effort goes to re-committing the management teams to take on a more active role in sustainability. So, they spend most of their time reporting the past and re-selling the agenda to changing management teams. It is a pity because these professionals have the capacities most needed to address the questions about the carrying capacity of this planet, namely resilience and adaptability. So why don’t corporations see themselves taking on a more proactive role? Reasons could be found in the way corporations function. Most corporations are managed like machines, in isolation from their surroundings. This practice gives a sense of being under control, and it needs performance data for this. If it looks outside the ‘machine’, it only looks at other ‘machines’. So, a corporation’s performance to the larger sustainability agenda is measured by comparison to one another instead of its relationship to the planet’s carrying capacity. And because the focus is on what is under its own control, taking up a role in redrawing anything out of its own boundaries becomes daunting. In my view, another reason corporations are only implementing incremental contributions to sustainability could be found in their submergence in humanistic values. Corporations have been a giant servant in giving humans power over their lives. And, in the last decades, humans have mainly been concerned with safety, autonomy, comfort, and rights; why should the servant serve something other than the master’s interest? 

Let’s make this tangible with an intuitive example. If corporate sustainability was the norm 20 years ago, car manufacturers would look at their collective contribution to climate change and would have set targets to reduce the overall impact, with factor 10 or even more. And they might have reshaped their business models from manufacturers to mobility providers instead. So today, we would see various types of personal vehicles running in the street on less than 1l/100km, combined with other more collective vehicles, resulting in a dramatic joint reduction in carbon emissions. However, car manufacturers have focused on making cars more fuel-efficient over the last decade. But they mainly concentrate on adding value in other ways like safety, comfort, and intelligent driver support. This movement happened not only in the segments of exclusive brands but also in overall market levels. The result is that today, we drive bigger and heavier cars that consequently need more fuel. But because of incremental efficiency gains, the net result is that our cars still run on 5-10l/100km, and the car brand will say that these models are ‘eco’. In addition, due to the added value, we persistently find ourselves choosing the car as the most viable option for our mobility and freedom needs. Am I the only one who feels like even more cars are moving around and occupying our public space compared to a decade ago? 

So, what does ‘impact’ mean? I see it all around me: Impact Week, Impact Job, Impact Fair, Impact House, Impact Programme, Impact Company, Impact Story… The word in these examples is a little confusing because impact is a noun or verb. If we talk about the adjective ‘impactful’, I can assume that these examples describe the quality of the places, time or activities. When engaging with these, I observe that the meaning of this quality is different for people and that it can be found somewhere on a spectrum, going from a deep feeling of being benign on one hand to a figure on a spreadsheet on the other. But since we use it so often, I wonder what the quest or urge for impact means? I start my exploration here by assuming that humans can organise themselves by the capacity to tell inspiring stories. So, although other animals are far superior in different abilities (smell, speed, vision,…), they can’t organise themselves in groups larger than their direct and present peers because they lack the storytelling capacity. Stories on stories have been built by our ancestors. And maybe even more those that didn’t get offspring. I am thinking here of the stories around compassion Jesus started or the one of superiority Hitler began. I believe stories live in our collective because they change every time they are told. Changes can go from small details over new characters to plot twists. And I believe stories live beyond words because they evoke an interplay between body sensations and emotions. However, I am unsure how far this assumption is already backed up by science. For example, one might feel tension in their arms when hearing about a story where a perpetrator is abusing an innocent. Next, one will classify this as an emotion of anger. And over time, a particular personality gets attached to these emotions. So, in most stories, we might feel fear for the villain, sympathy for the tortured, attraction to the prince or princes, and gratitude to the hero.

Now, where I want to take you with this is both a concern and a wonder. I have a sense that the quest to make an impact might be linked with a bodily desire to receive praise for taking on the hero or sympathy for the martyr’s role. So, while one’s shout for impact is a clear call for a plot twist in our collective story, it might simultaneously express a craving to meet one’s unfulfilled needs. My concern here is that this makes the plot twist more ambiguous, and the accumulation of reactions by other actors might instead make it into a soap opera. I am also concerned that this desire to take on a hero role comes with a desire to upgrade oneself. And that the subsequent race for technologies, services, and products might distract us from cooperating to address common concerns and create new groups of winners and losers. 

But besides the characters, our stories also carry knowledge, imagination and values. The three horizons framework by Bill Sharpe helps us see how these elements contribute to changing our stories. He speaks about patterns instead of stories and a horizon to indicate a new story. The video below might explain the model better than I could. But to summarise, the dominating patterns of the present are visible within the (first) horizon. Only when we reach the third horizon, and the first horizon is out of sight, will we realise that a new set of patterns has become dominant. And we will realise that qualities of that third horizon were already present as aspirations and experiments in the present we live in today. The second horizon is a mess of transitional paths where it is unclear if the way leads to the third horizon (Horizon 2+) or extends the domination of the first horizon (Horizon 2-). 

As a human being and an innovative professional, I wonder what weak signals of knowledge, imagination, and values to reciprocate? Which can make it into a story that goes beyond the interest-based growth model? The model that drives us toward ecological collapse and the proliferation of novel non-organic life forms that lack any muscle to form morality yet modulates itself on humans’ flaws and frauds? I wonder this now from a time and space we still can because, in stressful conditions, we might be more drawn to stories built on flawed knowledge, the imagination of magical or malignant powers, and values of superiority (of being) or purity (of thought). Decoding the gurus is an excellent initiative of an anthropologist and a psychologist highlighting how these (often charming) storytellers -under the appearance of being rational and with the help of modern technologies- cultivate irrational and often dangerous belief systems amongst a large group of followers. 

In my next post, I explore the Swedish context and pose a third horizon that can act as an entrepreneurial attractor…