It’s time for mission-led business to step up — with people, not for them
Participation is the next frontier for purpose-driven enterprises
By Oliver Holtaway, Senior Strategist at New Citizenship Project.
Purpose-led companies, including our fellow B Corps, have made tremendous strides over the past decade in challenging “business as usual”, inventing new social impact business models and delivering tangible change. But fiendishly complex economic, social and environmental problems continue to mount. We’re now facing our own moment of reckoning, a challenge to “good-business-as-usual”. It’s time for the mission-driven business movement to step up and find an extra gear.
We believe that extra gear is participation.
As purposeful brands, we limit our potential impact when we confine ourselves to delivering positive change on behalf of our customers and supporters. This happens when we let the product or business model do all the work, and where people just have to tap their card to receive a warm glow. This is a very welcome change to what went before! But we sense a vast missed opportunity.
Our core belief at New Citizenship Project is that we are leaving the era of the Consumer and entering the emerging era of the Citizen. Everywhere you look, people are increasingly searching for agency over what matters to them, as well as opportunities to create, connect, belong and participate with those who feel the same way. Our work is rooted in the insight that organisations become more impactful when they open themselves up to this shift and engage with people as citizens rather than consumers.
What does this mean for mission-driven business? In short, we see an opportunity to take the movement to the next level. By shifting our collective thinking about the relationships between citizens and businesses, we can build commercial enterprises into platforms for participatory purpose, above and beyond the act of consumption. Embracing this approach will supercharge both social impact and commercial performance.
This involves three radical shifts, that we invite you to explore with us.
#1 Set Your Purpose Free
Reinventing business for the greater good is a truly heroic act. But it can be a creative and eye-opening shift to think of your organisation’s purpose less as a heroic statement of intent, and more as a shared challenge or burning question to be held with others. Embracing participatory purpose means adding a dash of humility to the mix and recognising that you face a challenge that is so big that you have no choice but to work with and through people in order to deliver meaningfully.
This shift in mindset can be profoundly liberating — and crucially, it will allow your purpose to make space for participation. Freeing your purpose from its C-suite constraints will lead you to invite more people alongside you to explore how you can make the most meaningful direct contribution to a wider ultimate impact and purpose that many share and are working towards — including acting as a catalyst and signal-booster of other people’s initiatives. (And by the way, that includes your employees.)
This doesn’t mean rewriting your purpose or letting go of your North Star. Indeed, our thinking here is still very much rooted in Simon Sinek’s “Golden Circle” of the why, how and what that underpins any organisation. However, we lean towards interpreting the “why” as our core belief about the world (rather than fixed organisational mission per se), the “how” as the unique role that we have and unique contribution we have to make, and the “what” as the activities that flow from that.
This (we hope!) keeps us grounded and focused while remaining conscious, curious and responsive to how the world is changing around us and how we might flexibly adapt our role and work to better support our core belief: that people can and will, given the opportunity, shape their society for the better.
#2 Here Comes the New Citizen
Many ethical brands appeal to our desires as citizens, not simply our narrow “consumer” interests. That’s an important breakthrough — but we think the movement’s dominant conception of the citizen is well overdue a “system update”.
The classic interpretation of the “citizen” is all about behaving responsibly as an individual, avoiding harm to others and fulfilling one’s civic obligations. This version is well-served by purpose-led brands, which offer people an array of products and services that allow for more responsible individual consumption.
The problem is that citizenship has moved on. Today’s citizen — the New Citizen — is an altogether richer concept, built around a creative and involved citizen who craves agency, authorship and opportunities for authentic participation with others. Rather than simply “doing” the right thing, these citizens engage with each other to understand, define, decide and shape what the right thing is, and collaborate on new structures and norms to support it as a collective.
We see strong evidence that contemporary practices of citizenship are rapidly shifting from the former interpretation to the latter — and that the mission-led business movement, while making huge progress on other fronts, has not quite grasped this shift.
Too often, businesses offer a flattened, outdated version of citizenship, selling it off-the-shelf. To fully tap into this shift, enterprises can instead explore ways to build new commercial relationships that cultivate agency, belonging, engagement, collaboration and co-operation among citizens.
#3 From Consumer Products to Citizen Platforms
How, then, can mission-led businesses use purpose to open up space for participation?
We’re not talking about ripping up your business model or losing even an iota of focus on creating excellent products and services that make a difference. After all, this is precisely the unique contribution that ‘business as a force for good’ can make to the world. And citizens still consume: it’s not an either/or relationship.
Rather, we’re inviting you to see the relationships you’ve built around your products and services as the foundation of something bigger and more far-reaching. Because when you ask how you can deliver more impact by harnessing the energy and skills of your supporters, not just their money, you will likely get more of both.
The most eye-catching example of this is perhaps the classic brand activism of companies like Patagonia, who have repeatedly mobilised customers and supporters to lobby elected representatives on key environmental and conservation issues. But authentic participation doesn’t have to be so sweepingly ambitious and large-scale.
It can also be about creating space for simple, everyday forms of participation: for example, telling stories about what your mission means to them, learning skills related to the issue or cause, or giving time. (In fact, we worked with the co-operative movement to develop seven modes of everyday participation that mission-led businesses can use to start opening up space for participation around purpose.)
In other words, it means thinking about how your commercial relationships can become a platform for wider collective action. This means rethinking how your organisation’s internal context, assumptions, spaces for dialogue, structures, tools, processes, practices and roles currently open up or close down space for participatory possibilities, and reimagining them as necessary.
Again, this doesn’t mean throwing open every corner of your business to all-comers and letting them run riot. Some things are set in stone, and for good reason. But there will almost certainly be areas of your operations, social impact, R&D, communications and so on that would benefit from authentic participation.
At the simplest level, this might involve inviting people to co-create products and services. This is not a new concept in the business world: brands like BrewDog, Xiaomi and GiffGaff have already discovered that customers will pay more (and be more loyal) if they have had a hand in creating or influencing products and services. This is what Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans call the “participation premium” in their book New Power (to which we contributed much of the research).
Mission-led brands have the potential to take this even further, given that their customers feel attachment not just to their products but also to what they stand for.
So if you are feeling bolder, you can invite people to help shape, articulate and co-define how you bring your purpose to life. Bringing in richer and more diverse perspectives may help you frame the problem you are trying to solve better, sharpen your theory of change and hone your sense of your unique and direct impact, all while remaining faithful to your North Star.
As an example, earlier this year, upstart craft beer brand BrewDog launched BrewDog Tomorrow, a strategy for combating climate change. In doing so, however, the brewery was clear that “we don’t have all the answers… we believe the best solutions will come through transparency, collaboration and sharing every aspect of our business to accelerate change in our industry.” The totemic example of this will be “BrewDog Freehouse”, which will make all of its beer knowledge and impact knowledge available and open source.
You can also invite people to help you develop your measures of success through frank and transparent dialogue with customers, partners and beneficiaries. This can complement, or indeed leverage existing assessment models like the B Corp Impact Assessment, so that your impact feels co-owned with the people with whom you are working to deliver it.
An Invitation: Let’s Get Started
There’s no one-size-fits-all way of building a participatory platform, and it doesn’t have to involve a grand plan or an overnight revolution: in our experience, it’s often better to start small with experiments and prototypes.
But it must start by recognising that how you share, interpret and bring your purpose to life is crucial. It also requires bravery: a willingness to open up some of the workings of your business, such as data, information, plans and targets, and so on. This in turn must be rooted in relationships based on trust, transparency and collaboration.
This will seem radical and even scary to some. As above, it flies in the face of the dominant story of the “heroic entrepreneur”, who single-handedly combines inspiration and perspiration to disrupt the market with a game-changing product. But we are hitting the limits of what can be achieved through the “hero” approach.
For that reason, we predict that the most successful, most impactful and most loved purpose-driven brands of the future will be the ones that are humble, transparent and participatory. These will be the businesses that admit that they do not have all the answers, and invite in their customers and supporters to help them solve problems around a shared purpose. By doing so, they will both achieve more and sell more.
In that vein, let us make it very clear that we do not claim to know exactly what form this new “extra gear” of participatory purpose can or should take. Instead, this is a question, or set of questions, that we invite our friends and colleagues in the mission-led business movement to explore with us.
For example, what would a “Participatory Purpose Accelerator for Mission-led Business” programme look like? How might we develop a canvas tool for participatory business models? How can we use metrics like B Corp’s impact assessment framework as a stimulus for conversation and participation, rather than merely as a reporting tool?
To explore these questions and unlock the power of participation for mission-led business with us, get in touch at @NewCitProj or info@newcitizenship.org.uk.
New Citizenship Project is an innovation consultancy that is working to build a more participatory economy, society and politics by shifting the way we think about people from Consumers to Citizens.
