Certified Obsolete
Businesses that do less bad just aren’t good enough anymore.
Looking for root causes, to weed out problems at their source, sometimes unearths a complex web of troubles bigger than originally anticipated. You might know the feeling.
Similarly, for people or organizations trying to make change there often comes a time when otherwise unconnected problems are revealed to be just symptoms of the world’s deeper challenges — challenges that are systemic in nature.
We can go on treating the symptoms — that’s important — but at some point we have to ask ourselves if a more fundamental change is called for.
I don’t think there are any silver bullets for affecting radical transformations and solving systemic problems, but Bucky Fuller’s philosophy offers a pretty inspiring golden rule.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
- R. Buckminister Fuller
The model I’m most interested in making obsolete these days is the one that rewards businesses for degrading nature and undermining people’s ability to meet their basic human needs now and in the future. I know I’m not alone on this.
Fortunately there are a few notable initiatives working to supplant the status quo.
is a non-profit redefining what success in business means by certifying corporations to a relatively high standard of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.The certification allows a company to carry the title of a Benefit Corporation (B-Corp), and already Italy and most US states formally recognize this new type of for-profit enterprise that includes positive impacts on society and the environment in its legally defined goals. This means B-Corp directors and officers are legally empowered to make decisions based on ethics over profits when necessary, without fear of reprimand from shareholders.
Another aspiring game changer is the Future-Fit Business Benchmark co-led by the Natural Step, a non-profit that works to incorporate science-based conditions of sustainability into organizational planning and operations. The Future-Fit Goals are open source and layout 28 ambitious targets such as net zero greenhouse gas emissions and a guaranteed living wage for all employees.
What makes Future-Fit unique is that instead of rating performance based on arbitrary baselines, short-term goals, or peer standards — metrics which promote incremental change rather than fundamental change — it defines an ideal and then reflects back from there to gauge how far a company needs to go to become truly regenerative. Future-Fit likens their benchmark to a North Star for companies, designed to inspire completely new ways of doing business.
And it would be remiss of me to leave out the original regenerative standard — Cradle to Cradle.
Also an open source framework administered by a non-profit, Cradle to Cradle models industrial processes on natural processes. The aim is to transform all manufacturing materials into healthy ‘nutrients’ and all manufacturing cycles into safe ‘metabolisms’.
No more industrial pollution, only organic byproducts or biological nutrients that can decompose safely back into the environment and inorganic or technical nutrients that are non-toxic, non-harmful, and infinitely recyclable. Like the other standards, the focus here is not on businesses just doing less bad, but rather more good for the world.
These elite certification mechanisms are important contributors to systemic change and we’ll see them grow as old ways of doing business become more and more obsolete. And while we’re dreaming, hopefully these standards become obsolete themselves one day because ultimately that’s the goal — to make today’s high standards tomorrow’s convention.
In a future where the baseline for business has shifted so fundamentally that society looks back on this era with the same dismay that we now look back on so many past injustices, there will surely still be problems to fix. We earn the right to work on those next challenges by solving the systemic problems of today.
