Humanity Driven Innovation
For when your business is making a better world
The big question about Humanity
What would the world look like, if every company had “making the people and planet better off” as the core of their business?
I don’t have an answer, I don’t think there is one answer, but I know that I’d like to live in that world. I and a growing number of others believe that it’s possible to run business with a match of purpose and profit.
So perhaps the real question is, “why don’t we do this already?”.
Until recently there were essentially two ways in which companies could create new products, services and businesses:
1) by destroying and/or consuming things the world has, or
2) by not destroying and/or consuming things the world has.
The work of making the world a better place was mostly left to individual people and/or charitable organisations. Making profit and doing good were, and often still are, seen as mutually exclusive activities. Some time around the 1960s the concept of corporate social responsibility started to arise, where companies decided to do spend a minor amount of their time and profits to do something which made them feel good — but likely wasn’t anything to do with their actual business.
In the last few years, a third option has started to become viable:
3) making the world a better place as the driving motivation for doing profitable business.
In 2014 two important books hit the market: Aaron Hurst has proposed that we’re moving into an era called The Purpose Economy. John Mackey and Raj Sisodia wrote about Conscious Capitalism. Both books refer to the ability to do business in ways that satisfy not only traditional stakeholders, but customers and the rest of the world as well.
Additionally pressure is mounting from the consumer. The 2016 Edelman Global Trust Barometer report shows an increasing number of consumers (now 80%) believe that “a company can take specific actions that both increase profits and improve the economic and social conditions in the community where it operates”.
How are we driven?
Relative to doing good, companies can be described as somewhere on a five point scale, where each point is defined as follows:
-2: A company is wilfully destructive in order to make profit and has no intention to change.
-1: A company is conscious of their destructivity and wishes to make positive change.
-0: A company causes no harm but doesn’t actively do better. A sustainable state of operation.
+1: A company has a net positive impact to the people and planet as an outcome of doing business.
+2: A company exists for the sole purpose of making the world a better place.
For ease of recognition, those in the negative end of the spectrum should be classed as socially irresponsible companies, those in the neutral zone deemed socially responsible and those in the positive end are the socially impactful.
Let’s all jump on the purpose wagon!
It’s all very well for us to say that companies should have purpose, and should be making the world better for both people and planet, but how can we make this a reality?
First we have to understand a little about what it takes to decide and become driven by purpose.
Entrepreneurs
For most entrepreneurs, taking the decision to be purpose driven is easy. Usually they only have to convince themselves and focus whilst sticking tightly to their core values and beliefs.
Startups
Where founders are in startup phase, the decision might be easy, but the ability to focus on doing good whilst in the unpredictable process of finding a market with a repeatable/scalable business model, under the pressure of time and likely negative cashflow makes for a lot of uncertainty.
Small / Medium enterprises
These sorts of companies may find it harder to make the change, as it will depend on convincing the family, shareholders, partners, and team. The cultural shift that will become necessary will likely be painful, need strong leadership prepared to endure the short term consequences of making difficult decisions. The less dependence on convincing others, the easier it could be.
Scaleups
If the startup has managed to find a market that supports a business model that does good, but needs to attract investors and other stakeholders in order to scale, finding and convincing the right people to join and remain true to the vision is a time consuming process that distracts the founders and team from focusing on doing the work.
Large enterprises
Where these companies tend to fall in the -2 and -1 categories, it might be an extremely difficult process to convince all senior management, boards, stakeholders, shareholders, employees and partners to make the move. It will require extreme long term focus and small short term steps and is always at risk of jeopardising the day to day operations which are still needed to keep the company alive.
Additionally, when you consider the amount of capital, research and development, smart people, technology, existing business and let’s not forget, customers, that these enterprises are in control of, it’s not difficult to understand that with few exceptions, the large companies that exist in the world today should be the best hope we have for a better world tomorrow.
Innovation
All companies need to innovate — it’s a fact of life. Companies which don’t, eventually die. The paradox is that innovation is harder than not innovating. Thus, if you have the determination and focus to innovate, innovating for good shouldn’t be that much harder, more a question of decision and focus.
However, making the world a better place is also a relative term. Scale, or, how much of the world you can impact, is one of the toughest challenges. Much of this depends on definitions, ambitions and of course, ability to deliver. Solo entrepreneurs will find it much harder to have a global impact, whereas a determined corporate CEO should naturally focus on having massive impact.
Achieving this will only be possible if the leaders actively choose to make it so, and companies will only choose to make it so if it can deliver the business results they need. This is not an unreasonable demand, but it’s here that we come to the crux of the matter. Assuming you are not Paul Polman of Unilever, how do you turn a massive commercial organisation into a force for good — whilst delivering business results, typically measured in monetary profit?
Humanity + Driven + Innovation
Recently I had an on stage discussion with Ben Cohen (Ben, from Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream), and he shared his belief that whereas the world used to be run by religion, and later politics, now, “business is a powerful force that can be used for good”. I’d like nothing more than to prove him right.
In September 2015, after several conversations with Stefan Wobben, Annemieke Verhoeff and Kees Klomp, I coined the term “Humanity Driven Innovation” as a way for people to think about innovation as a way to generate profit through being of service to society.
We wondered, what would it take for all companies to put humanity at the centre of their business, and how could we help this to become a reality.
Through our research and conversation, we’ve noticed something quite obvious, a lack of visibility of precedents, support, guidance, models and methodologies for successfully making the move.
That is our goal of creating the HDI movement, supporting companies to make the decision and transition into a company that will be profitable whilst being better for the world.
Follow me on Twitter for more insights: @clogish
