Public-Private Partnerships for a Sustainable Future with Stephen Jordan

Hello and welcome to this episode of Conscious Design. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and author of the Conscious Design book. And today I'm excited to have Stephen Jordan. He's the CEO of Institute for Sustainable Development, been in that role for the last 5 or so years. And we actually met while you were moderating a panel for sustainable packaging and recycling in DC, which is a super interesting topic. Everybody thinks about packaging, but you've been working in the sustainability space since I think 2013. I'm really excited to dive into what you're doing now, and I'm sure we'll touch on business and the ROI of sustainability, but welcome to the show.

Well, thank you very much for having me, Ian, and it's a pleasure to be here.

All right, well, let's step back a little bit. Everybody loves a good origin story unless you do it too much like Marvel has. But let's take a step back. What got you into this space? ESG's a large, heavy topic, a lot to do in that space. How did you end up here?

Well, honestly, it was a long time ago. I think the first glimmer that I might be getting interested in some of these things is that I have a master's in political theory. Very few people who get a master's in political theory, then go on to get an MBA. It's just—

That is a pretty combo.

Not normal. But so one of the things that was interesting was that I would take corporate representatives, lobbyists up to Capitol Hill. We'd have these conversations about international trade. And what was fascinating was that none of the members of Congress ever had any problems with the economics of what they were talking about. Nobody said to any of the lobbyists, look, lowering tariff barriers doesn't make economic sense. They're all like, of course, the economics of international trade is pretty darn clear, especially when it's not necessarily a level playing field with the countries in question. But their objections were all about this. Okay, if we open borders and we expand international trade, What does that mean for the environment? What does that mean for labor? What does that mean for displacing communities? And a lot of questions like that. And I knew that companies were doing something in that space, but no one had really pulled it together. Up until that point, corporate social responsibility had been really focused on what's wrong with business. And I came at it with, okay, everybody is critical. How can we be constructive? How can we solve problems? And I developed the Center for Corporate Citizenship at the US Chamber of Commerce a month after, no, actually a month before the UN Global Compact was established. So I was part of the entire second generation of CSR and corporate citizenship. As a result of what I did and how I positioned it as really trying to understand and research how business contributes to society, I think that that went a long way towards mainstreaming the positive reaction that businesses have towards really engaging with nonprofits and government agencies. So I'll stop there in terms of the origin story, but when I started, there were like 18 companies Maybe that did sustainability reports. There was like, there was nobody really in this space. I launched the Corporate Citizenship Awards and when I launched them that first year, there were 90 people present.

Wow.

It was amazing how within like 3 years it became over 350 and we had minor celebrities and CEOs and all of that. But The first year was like crickets. It's funny.

That's crazy to think of that being 90 people for the first time. I mean, it makes sense, right? You got to start somewhere, but it is crazy to think about that it was so small. It's so small now. You could have a sustainability event and I don't know, I could probably get in a small community like 20, 30, 40 people to show up. Just on a whim almost, I feel like. So that's, we've come a long ways from that.

We really have. I mean, when you think of it, I did, we teamed up with the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, like in 2004 to do the first State of Corporate Citizenship surveys. We were the first. Up until that, no one was actually asking companies. Well, what are you doing in healthcare? What are you doing in education? What are you doing in the environment? I mean, it's such a huge industry now, right?

Right.

But it's, when you reflect back on it, it's kind of amazing how recent actually all of this has emerged.

It feels like it's been a long time for people that are in it, right? We've put time towards it, we've spent time, we've seen it grow, but realistically, like over lifespan, right, of typical things, it's actually a very short amount of time relatively, and with such huge change. I love that you pointed it out. I agree with you. ESG kind of started out as this, you've been bad kind of mentality of let's see how bad you are, and really wasn't creating this idea of how do we get better from it. It was just this, you're on Santa's naughty list. Like, you're— that's it. Just how bad have you been? So seeing— it's good to see that it's morphing and changing and that you've been really looking at how do we make this a— how do we create positive change? We gotta point out the bad, but then we gotta do something about it. That can't end with just pointing out what's bad.

Yeah, exactly. You know, it's like, that's the management thing. Don't come to me with just a problem. If you're going to come to me with a problem, give me an idea about how you're going to fix it too. And I think that developing those strategies to affect those externalities is super important.

Well, that's awesome. Let's jump to what you do now, right? Institute for Sustainable Development. nonprofit, just for everyone listening who has no idea what that is and what you do today. And I know you're in the middle, you're in the middle of raising, it's the end of the year, you're getting all the money in right now. But just as a little recap, what is your goal? What are you guys working on right now?

So in a nutshell, our mission is to catalyze resilience so that communities can thrive long-term. What does that mean? Well, true sustainability has to focus on really containing the risks first, the downside risks of what's going on. And that kind of leads into, well, what are those risks? And it can be natural disasters, climate change, earthquakes, volcanoes, fentanyl, community blight. There's all kinds of things that are really like we can see that current strategies aren't working very well. So our focus is at the community level and we build public-private partnerships to solve problems that really no single, whether it's the government, business, or nonprofits can solve on their own. And so we've developed a public-private partnership in Los Angeles with the city and the county and some of the leading economic and business support organizations there to help promote small business resilience and small business disaster recovery. I do a lot of work actually with people that are very, very low on the income scale. Los Angeles is 49% Hispanic. One of the most frequent things that we get actually are questions from recent immigrants about how to get a street vendor permit, very humble things. And we work with CDFIs and we work with financial institutions and to basically try and get information into the community, especially businesses that are operating in the lowest income neighborhoods to be able to continue to survive, whether it's COVID, or whatever it is. And the reason why I think the partners in Together for LA decided to do this is that when you think about a community, it's not just residential. Community is really anchored by its small businesses, its nonprofits, its churches. You can imagine how important a daycare center is, especially for zip codes where there's 60, 70% single, single-parent households led by women. You can just imagine. So if we're able to save that daycare center or we're able to save that independent gas station or pharmacy or little supermarket, that's the difference between a food desert maybe and people being able to have something next door.

Right.

So we look at what we do as kind of you know, the next step up from individual businesses working with individual partners. We're looking at it as how do you deal with the community level? But, you know, you get to thinking about resilience and these threats. And one of the things that you start to realize is that you've really got to build a sense of community and you really have to innovate if things aren't going the right way. So one of the key elements for us is really trying to replicate this model of public-private partnerships in other cities to really try and work with lower-income neighborhoods and attack and create multiple interventions to help them out. And then on the innovation side, I'm sorry, but I'm a deep pessimist that current climate strategies are working. I think that we had And check me if I'm wrong, but like 120 days this past year where we exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius.

I think we did. Yeah. Yeah, we're not on track by any means.

Right. And the IPCC is saying that we're very likely to do this before 2030 to breach that threshold.

Yep. They're starting to run numbers now for what a 3-degree is as an actual potential even at our current trajectory.

Right. So, so we did a deep dive this past year looking at green and blue innovation. What's holding us back? How do we accelerate the innovation pipeline? So we did a Shark Tank with a number of really cool businesses that were innovating kind of in the, in the blue economy, kind of water-based solutions. I'm just amazed at the ingenuity of people, 3D printing, solutions for seawalls and shoring up coral reefs, seaweed harvesting in to support a low-income community off the coast of Jamaica.

That was amazing.

The stuff that people are doing, different kinds of electric boats, vehicles, people are trying to reimagine deep-sea mining. And you look at it in terms of geoengineering and desalination and recycling. We've been fortunate to work with some of the best companies on the planet on some of these issues. So it's been very rewarding. And as a result of that, well, I'll stop there if you have any questions.

I've definitely seen quite a bit of innovation in the ocean world, just in like transportation. There's a number of companies that are Looking at how to use sails now. How do we take advantage of the winds that go around our oceans pretty much nonstop and save on fuel and save on these other costs? We've, you know, we just shove a ship across an ocean rather than taking advantage of those trade winds, which worked before. That's how we even got here and built trade originally on On an intercontinental basis. So there is so much innovation and it's great that you guys ran a Shark Tank because I'm a firm believer that we have all the solutions right now. It's finding the people that have 'em and giving them the right support and the ability to act on the solutions that they have. And I, we can solve, we can, like, I think that's, I always point to, you know, we The world stopped when COVID hit. And briefly, very briefly, everybody from politicians, well, most people, from politicians to individuals, governments, right? Every level was able to lockstep, go through a process and achieve a goal. We can do it. We just proved that we can do it. Now it's figuring out how do we facilitate and repeat that? Now let's take that same capability we know we all have, And now let's apply it to the environment and sustainability. And I think that's, that just is always in my head of like, we globally somehow stopped everything else, solved a problem, but then we forgot. We just went back to business as usual.

One of the great sayings that I love is William Gibson's quote, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. I love that. And it's one of the reasons why I became so interested in Scandinavia. Believe it or not, Sweden may rank as like the top green economy in the world. They're also like 3rd or 4th in ranking in the world in innovation. So I went to Sweden to go find out what they were doing. I met— there is no other company, I assure you, because landfill is too cheap. There is no other company on the planet that has cracked that kind of a code. And I just give 'em a hard time about the other 4%. I became friends with Nizar Kamouri, who is the CEO of Saudi Water Company, Sawaco. They are getting more water out of brine, so out of a particular unit of water, seawater, than ever before. And they're constantly on the hunt for great innovators. And I thought that that was super cool. The reason why I think that current climate change strategies are doomed to fail is because they're really trying to tackle a problem that's like a giant tragedy of the commons. No one owns the atmosphere, right? No one owns nature. No one owns the ocean. So a lot of times with that, people feel like that they can take and take and take from it, and there's no obligation or responsibility to do anything to curate it, to make it better. But that's not the only problem. The other thing is, is that climate change has disparate impacts on different countries and even within a country on different regions. So people are talking about more arable land in Canada. The Russians are thrilled to think that there might be a Northwest Passage. The Chinese aren't going to stop their industrialization and emit more gases until 2030. The Indians aren't going to stop adding new coal-fired generators. The Nigerians, like, there's so many different interests. One of the elements that we have to think about is how can we develop innovations for each habitat if we can't really tackle this globally in terms of a concerted alliance? And so that led me to another investigation. Have you heard of Biosphere 2? Well, it's amazing. So originally it was built in the 1980s for NASA, and we're going to send astronauts through it to figure out how to build environments that, so that they could sustainable development on the moon or on Mars. One of the things that they realized is that the scale and complexity of the challenges of having sustainable communities in these hardship habitats Is enormous. It's going to be enormous, right? And that's a huge problem with Mars given the orbit that it has. They've converted into being the largest controlled environmental research center on the planet. And what they did of, like, for example, they had Columbia University go in there and Columbia University basically studied their ocean habitat. Biosphere 2 has like 7 habitats. They have a tropical jungle in the middle of the arid desert. They have an ocean reef, they have a mangrove, they have like 3 other different habitats that people are super interested in studying in a controlled way. You wouldn't necessarily want to pump a ton of carbon dioxide into a living coral reef, but here they just went wild. And it was their research that really showed the physical effects of CO2 on coral reef bleaching, on the acidification of the oceans. So they also did the research on what would happen if you have a change in the atmosphere chemistry on the tropical rainforest. They basically tried to kill every habitat that was in there at one point or another. But it turns out that there are these kind of habitat research centers all over the world.

Right.

The Thomas Lovejoy Center in Brazil, right? There's one in Israel and in the South. There's the Svalbard Seed Trust in Norway. And I was talking to these guys and I said, is this kind of like the astronomers where they have an observatory in South Africa and one in Chile and one in Hawaii, and they all compare notes and collaborate with each other? And they were looking at each other and says, No, but that's a great idea. And so now we're trying to create a public-private partnership for green innovation. For how do you strengthen the innovation pipeline? How do you connect researchers, basic researchers like the folks at Biosphere 2 or the French Center for National Scientific Research with entrepreneurs and innovators and people who are interested in biomimicry? How do you cross the chasm, as they call it? between R&D, basic R&D, and applied research? And then how do you cross that second chasm from great ideas to going to market and going to innovation and scale?

Those are all deep chasms.

They really are. It's just a different way of thinking about this idea that if we can't develop a global strategy, how can we make 1,000 flowers bloom? Pardon the pun, but, right. But you know what I mean? It's like, how do we get all of these environmental research centers working together, potentially accessing more resources? I mean, the amount of R&D for pure environmental research is less than $100 billion worldwide.

Oh wow. Worldwide.

Worldwide. So if you were thinking, yeah, they must have a Manhattan Project for the environment because of all of the things everybody's talking about in terms of global climate catastrophe and things like that? Not really.

No, that's a globally, that's not a very large budget to operate on.

By comparison, it's like 5% of total global R&D. So we spend $100 billion on the environment. We spend $2 trillion or $1.99 trillion on everything else.

Wow.

95%.

I can see why we don't have really good solutions right now. Those are not, that's not very much attention, right? Yeah. Your kid would be very unhappy if you only gave 5%, right? Everybody feels ignored at 5%. That's low, right?

I was shocked about it. And I think that in terms of a foundational strategy, like really understanding the R&D, the chemistry, the impacts on different habitat. You would think that folks would've been prioritizing that for a while, especially because it's so situational. You can't— what's going on in one part of actually Half Moon Bay out in the Bay Area is going to be different than another part. In some cases, they'll have subsidence. In Louisiana, they've got challenges where they've got this plume of freshwater coming out of the Mississippi into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. And simultaneously, they got a ton of saltwater coming into the freshwater fisheries. So many like individual challenges here.

Right. I think this is kind of a similar, and this is where I'm working in and part of why I was there with Nexus Council actually is in DC is there's people like to try to go, oh well, it's one planet, so one solution, right? They're like, oh well, it's just a planet. It's just, and nobody really pays attention to the fact that, or, or, you know, people have the ideas around, oh, I want circular economy or I want all of these things.

So Ian, let, let me ask you a question. When it comes to design, a lot of the folks that you're working with, they're really kind of adapting Natural principles to new products, right?

It's a blend, honestly. So there's kind of 2 approaches to designing a product that's going to be sustainable. So like if we were to broad categorize it, right? One is to go down a true biomimicry standpoint where you're really, you really are trying to mimic nature even to the core of the function. of the product. So things like they made swimsuits that actually looked like shark skin because if you look at the textural nature of shark skin, it's not perfectly smooth, but it makes the shark go through water very nicely, right? So there's that kind of approach of where you really, you're trying to solve a problem like how can I swim faster in the water or how can I have something go through the water faster? And then you find something in nature that goes really fast. That's one kind of approach. The other is really taking what I try to get people to look at, and you can do both, is really looking at circularity is, all right, what is the actual lifespan of the product? And so a lot of times, even now, even, you know, big companies, small companies, it's everyone, they look at end of life As going in the trash. And they don't, they'll maybe think about how can you separate it out or is it recyclable? But oftentimes people are looking, they look at the component level. So they go, oh well, you could pull the battery out and be recyclable. This is technically recyclable plastic, but they don't necessarily look at the whole system. And so there's, we end up getting partway through a circular economy or being able to really utilize that materials again. Or one of the big things that people are like from the consumer end is, oh, this is biodegradable. And so there's a lot of products out there where from a design standpoint, you kind of get the directive a lot of times, oh, well, the customer, we want to do something biodegradable. Like, okay, great. Well, here's a biodegradable material. We can do that. But they don't always take that extra step to go, oh, this is industrial biodegradable only, meaning there's like a handful of facilities in the entire US that can even process this. And if you don't put it in that specific recycling biodegradation facility, it doesn't— it's going to take 40 years, 50 years, not the 18 months we think that it should in the right facility. So when you're approaching design, it's one way is that true copy, but you can also go in and really look at, if you look at nature as a system, right? Something is grown, something, right? In nature, it's plant grows, plant seeds, plant dies, turns into mulch, feeds the next plant. It is a circle. There's no wasted material in nature. Not really. So That approach is harder. It takes a lot more work to get there, but that's where a lot of companies are trying to figure out, okay, how, how do we actually create something that doesn't just dead end in a landfill? How do we make something that can actually be recycled? How do we make products that if they're made out of recycled parts, recyclable materials, they can actually be separated? It's a big thing to tackle and it, that's where people, that's where a lot of the innovation is really Headed towards is materials. We do actually have the capability to recycle most materials, even plastics. There's a lot there. But, and one of the things that I'm trying to spend a little, focusing a little more time on and seeing what can be done is there's not always the facility or the resource to recycle. So you probably know that when you put all this stuff in your recycling bin, only a percentage of it actually gets recycled, not because it can't be, but because there isn't a facility that's able to take on the amount that's being generated, or it's just not profitable enough. And so the infrastructure is a kind of a missing piece to that side of designing products.

Right. I think I can see from like a small or mid-sized company that all of this just seems too much.

Oh, it seems expensive. It just, it just looks expensive.

Yeah. The capital investment on some of this stuff must just be incredible. They're always, because that's all the money that they have to invest, they're always looking at it in terms of ROI. Do you think that some of these innovations in lifecycle research are going to be profitable and will they be open to small and medium-sized businesses?

Yeah, I think there's a couple Sticking points that make it really hard. If I'm Nike, right? You know, and I think even Nike, Adidas, a couple of them, they have like, oh, here's a shoe, we can take it back. We'll fully re— like they can create their own circle, right? Where the raw, that material comes back and they can process it because they have a billion, they can throw a billion dollars at a new recycling facility and just make it appear, right? There's kind of 2 blockers. One is making sure this could be policy, but also really infrastructure, making sure there's actually the facility, the recycling partner, the biodegrading, whatever that technology is to recover the material properly, making sure that there's a distributed network just as easily as trash. Because if you look at consumer behavior, right, none of us want to do too much extra To throw our stuff away. We just want to, we just want to get rid of it once it's dead and useless to us. We want to move on. So making some way to close that loop, adding an extra step, allowing, you know, making it easier for sorting to happen. Something that would allow that raw, that used material, right? If I throw my wallet away, be able to capture that and recycle it in some way. Right? So having that infrastructure there. Other piece that I think is really important is a lot of businesses that I talk to, small, medium, they look at it, they're kind of afraid for 2 reasons. One, they're afraid that there's going to be too large of an investment just in design hours, retooling, right? All the costs that come in with developing a new product or redeveloping a product. With that, they're concerned they're not going to get their money back. from it. And obviously you have to, right? As you said, when you're a business, you have your budget. That is what you have.

That's all you got.

That's all you got. You got your little pot and if you invested in the wrong thing and get none of it back, you're out. You could be gone. It could kill you, right? You can't invest in 40 different ideas and hope one works. It's, you maybe do 2 and one has to hit it out of the park. Which I think is really fueled because a lot of the conversations, people are trying to bite off more than they can chew. The way of thinking that you talked about from an environmental standpoint, it trickles all the way down to businesses where I'll talk to a business, they go, oh, we want to be sustainable. And then they'll give me a list and they're like, oh, we want to check all of these boxes off on day 1. I'm like, you can't do that. That's like solving our global warming in one day. Like, no, no, you can't. You can't do that. And so there's this kind of split, and I think it's because we've, back to the ESG being initially this, you're bad kind of mentality. We have that ingrained. So people are trying to jump fully out of the way. They're like, oh, we need to be 100% sustainable, zero emissions, zero, right? They just want to instantly get there instead of looking at, well, what's going to be most cost effective right now and what's going to make the biggest impact for my dollar? Because when you do that, now your investment all of a sudden goes from this crazy amount to, oh, well, let's take steps. We're going to take the biggest impact step that's going to have the best return based on what do consumers care about now. You always get good customer feedback if the packaging is, you know, if you can recycle it, right? There's, so looking at those steps and breaking it down and realizing what's good for this company, may not actually be good for the next company, right? They may come with the same list, like, oh, we want to check all these things off. But what's going to be best for them may be different. And realizing that this, you can't one size fits all, do everything all at once. It's impossible for a small business, really hard for medium, and it doesn't always work out for enterprise either.

Yeah, exactly. I think that at a certain point in, especially in the beginning, of all of this, there was this idea that everything had to be a success, right? Invest in anything that you do with sustainability or invest in anything that you do with CSR or ESG or whatever the acronym is you want to use, it's going to be good for you. And the truth is, is that life is messy and, you know, it took Thomas Edison 100 experiments to figure out the light bulb finally, you know, If you're batting .300 in baseball, you're an all-star. So I think that that's one of the messages that really needs to get out there is you have to experiment, you have to configure things so that they're right for you. But one of the reasons why I raised biomimetics is that I do think that the ESG aspirations of a lot of folks are going to start converging. One of my favorite stories on this, I think it was, which is the one, polystyrene, the one that people use, used to use a lot in packing.

Oh, styrene. Styrene. All the little foam balls.

Peanuts. Yeah.

Yeah. That stuff's bad.

So a couple of guys who were studying, I think it was at Rochester Institute of Technology, or it could have been Rensselaer. I forget which one. We're sitting there kind of looking at those things. And I don't know why, but for some reason they started thinking about mushrooms. And so they— That's a leap, right?

Right.

And they started growing mushrooms in their dorm room. And what they found is the chitin inside the mushrooms had the same kind of spongy effect as those polystyrene peanuts or whatever they were called.

Right.

Did in the packaging. And that's how Ecovative got its start. And they've been at the forefront of substituting for some of these plastics, more naturally organic and more naturally biodegradable. So I think that you can integrate it into your business plan and make a ton of money. But I also think that there's actually a lot of cases where it doesn't make sense. And I think that, yeah, that in some ways the hurrah Do whatever you're going to do, you know, do it all and everything. That kind of cheerleading discredits, discredits the whole thing. I think if folks were more modest about it and kind of took more of your approach, that, that there'd be more uptick, more buy-in.

Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on Conscious Design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book, We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. It's a classic, right? If you sit there and try to take one giant leap, you may not make it. You haven't, right? You don't know. But if you take just one little baby step every single day, Then there's progress. I think it's what you mentioned is I would love to see more of that is if everybody took a baby step together, I think we see a lot more movement than we've seen since we've been trying to do this realistically is there's this pressure, oh, you have to be super sustainable. You have to meet all these ESG Items all at once today. That pressure of somehow being instantly perfect at everything, which no one ever is—it's just just not a thing. I think it kills a lot of innovation because we're closing the door to all other possibilities other than the perfect solution. And for anybody that's ever R&D'd a new product or a new technology. You never, never, well, I will tell you one time in my entire career, I have built a prototype and it worked as it needed to. Once. Been doing this 20 years. This is not a thing like this. This whole idea of like perfection day one is not even achievable with the smartest people in the world. We could never guarantee that that would happen. It's iterative.

It was that kind of thinking that got me like to really start going deeper on the subject of public-private partnerships. This idea that no single organization is going to have universal competency, right? Right. And there's this famous law, Metcalfe's Law, which talks about that the power of a network rises exponentially with each new addition to the network. And the problem is though, is we, a lot of times we don't have flow, right? The information stops in a certain place. So like we were talking about with the academics and researchers and the scientists, the flow to commercialization, there's a lot of friction along the way. So one of the things that I think that we have to do more of is simply connect the dots. And help people build trust with each other.

Right.

I think it, like, I have seen firsthand, not just with these 2 partnerships that we're developing right now, but kind of in my entire career, I've seen firsthand how building trusted relationships can cause people that you would never think could get together to work, to have, and it has kind of a synergistic effect. It's like engineers and marketers teaming up.

Whoa. Amazing thing happens. A great point. One of the big things that I'm a huge proponent of, and I, in my design firm, I do this with my teams, is whenever I can, I'll bring in somebody that's worked in an area completely unrelated, right? If you came to me and were like, Ian, I want your firm to design a new car, I'd be like, okay, cool. I'm also going to hire a baby toy designer. We're going to bring in somebody from industrial, or we're going to bring in some people that They've never even thought about cars because I want to hear their thoughts. And when their thoughts are combined with your thoughts, like, I don't want to lose your, the industrial, you know, the industry experience, right? We've already built that. It failed. But what's going to happen when I pull in, we start to pull in and build this little network of not just more people with the same background and the same thinking process, but really specifically pull in these new ideas, these new ways of thinking, that's where you're going to spark, you know, you got to build the trust. Like you say, you got to build the trust so they actually open up and they communicate those ideas because they're going to be off the wall in some cases. But eventually you're going to come up with something that no one has ever thought of because there's so much. And we could have a whole other conversation about this. Silos. Silos.

Yeah.

We're the beginning, the end, everything.

The bane of my existence.

I hate silos. I've done my time in the cubes. I've worked at HP. I've sat in those cubes. I worked at Nike. I worked at, you know, other companies. Silos, they kill everything. Every, like, it's a miracle businesses are able to produce the products they do with the structure that we've had. And I am just, anytime I can break a silo for someone, that is a personal goal of mine because there's so much innovation, there's so much you can do with it. And there's these chasms like you talked about between R&D and applied research and then commercial. I think they shouldn't be. There should be so many bridges between those 2 things that we don't even remember it's a chasm like that.

Yeah. That's— there's—

Anything I can do to do that. That needs to happen.

There's not enough flow.

Exactly.

There's not enough. And I think that this has actually been one of the themes of this conversation is there hasn't been enough analytics of the process. Because like, just as we were talking about a few minutes ago about the lifecycle process, the innovation process, we really need to think through how do we get the most out of everybody's different competencies? I think lateral thinking is the wave of the future. I think the ability to identify interdependencies, the ability to find interesting analogies in different fields of study is one of the ways that we're going to break through. You know that experiment where they give you a box and it's like full of nails and cards and Balls and tacks and different things. And you're supposed to look through it and organize it, you know, and like, what, how do you organize it? And for some people, all they do is they see the balls. For other people, they see the nails. It's like the pattern recognition. Our system like makes people focus in on a deep expertise on one thing. You know, you become very linear, very focused on a thing. So all you do is you pick out one of those things in the drawer. But the reason that they're all in the same drawer is there's a logic for it, right? And by bringing together with the aquarium manager, like all of that kind of stuff is, will help to identify analogies and breakthroughs that just staying in your deep focus won't. Don't get me wrong. I mean, the deep focus is I mean, there's just 6 feet of huge knowledge behind every single thing at the top, but I think lateral thinking is part of the way of the future.

Yeah, it's a, this has been, I'm actually working on the background. I'll tell you after the episode what I'm working on, but it's all around this idea. And this has been something that I've thought about almost 10 years now. is, you know, polymath, right? Somebody who understands more than just one thing. And that, I had a great interview, oh, a few months ago with this lady that she wrote a book and it's all, and her focus is on systems. And we couldn't think of any design or career where you really get to learn and focus on systems And this, or this idea of polymath where you're, right, if you go to college, it's okay, well, what kind of, you know, oh, I want to be an engineer. Great. Oh, what kind? Pick between mechanical, electrical, right? Civil. Oh, you're mechanical. Great. Now, do you want to specialize in robotics? Do you want to specialize in pneumatics? Do you want to specialize in vac? You're like, all right, okay, cool. Now, do you want to add in— how many more layers would you like to specialize in? Which is great. I mean, that's how you have— Brain surgeons, right? We need those. We gotta have somebody who knows how to do brain surgery, but we couldn't find a path. We don't have a path of creating this polymath or this way of thinking, right? Where you're actually bridging across multiple ideas or really at the system level. Like there are system engineers, but I'll tell you right now, system engineers, when you get into the degree, is actually how to build a factory floor. When you think, you know, if you just throw that name out there, people are like, oh, systems. Okay. All kind. No, no. They're usually very specific on, I build systems for a factory floor that's going to make Intel wafer chips.

That's why I'm concerned AI is going to eat our lunch down the road because it's actually not artificial intelligence. That's really kind of a misnomer of what it is. It's exponentially better pattern recognition. than former versions of machine learning, right? But it's that pattern, it's that ability to have complex and lateral pattern recognition that's going to lead to just an exponential increase in innovations. You know, some folks, I think it was Ray Kurzweil, wants to live to 2030 because he thinks that that's when computing power is going to exceed human brain power and the singularity will begin.

I don't know. I don't, I'm, I'm not convinced.

No, but there's some folks, oh, technologically positive future, Ray Kurzweil types that we're going to upload ourselves and live forever. And then there's the, we're all going to die camp, you know, Guy Debord, Kurt Vonnegut, you know, all of that. And then I think I'm in the middle camp where I think that in some areas like medicine, We're going to have amazing breakthroughs and we still may kill ourselves because we've unleashed some ungodly new virus on Earth, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. It's just another tool that's really like, I know there's a lot of people that are afraid like, oh, it's going to take all of our jobs. And they're like, well, is it going to take all the jobs you don't want? I always love bringing up, I don't know if you may have heard this, the Luddites. Have you ever heard of Saran Wrap?

Absolutely. And we have—

The loom. The loom.

We have so many Luddites now.

And it will never stop, right? It's every technology, every new thing, the invention of the car, discovery of electricity, computer, the first computers, right? The internet. There was still, I think I saw recently, there was like an article in the 2000s that was still like, the internet may still be a fad. Like, it's just, it's so much, right? And so, you know, go out of the Luddites, you know, for everyone who doesn't know that, look it up. But they were afraid of the loom. They rioted, they started it. The British military had to become— had to be brought in because they were burning everything because they didn't want looms to take all their jobs. Right now, it takes effort to find somebody with a loom. Like, it's a very crafty, like, there's people that do it. That's great. But they are rare. And far between. And I see AI as the same. It's a tool. And I think that we can, to what you say, we can use it to absolute amazing ends. There's, I keep seeing multiple times where people have put in research papers, medical research papers, and they go, here's all the top research papers for these 5 years. And then AI filters through it. It goes through and goes, well, here's 15 discoveries you guys overlooked. Here's 15 things you actually already discovered. You just didn't recognize because you didn't cross-reference in the right way. Like potential, and we can harm ourselves. What? Both are possible.

You know, Ian, there's a really interesting book called What Does Technology Want? And I think it was written by the executive editor of Wired Magazine, if I'm not mistaken. And it's this idea that every kind of industry has its own Logic, right? I can't imagine, like for the horse and buggy folks, how many of them were put out of work because of the car, because it had the horse and buggy system had created its own, all of its own unique specialties. And that, that kind of, kind of brings me back again to the lifecycle discussion that we were having. You know, there's this economist named Ronald Coase, Coase theory. Why do people form organizations instead of everybody being their own? autonomous person agent. He came up with a good theory of the firm for that, that kind of added on to Adam Smith's idea of the pin factory. And he also came up with the idea that every industry, every economy could be structured. It's one of the things actually that the folks who are trying to decarbonize the US economy based their theory on.

Was his work. Interesting. Okay.

But one of the things that where policymakers might want to think about is can they create new industries that create kind of a natural logic, right? Instead of adding windshield wipers and bumpers, you're adding, oh, another biologic component and another biologic component and another. That way you're getting to a true circular, more approximation towards a circular economy in a way.

Right. I'm going to be thinking about that. That was interesting because I feel like there's, it goes back to the, I think it goes back to the silos, right? Each industry is very much siloed, but if you could create your own in a new industry, you could also help input those factors, right?

It'd be able to What is, what is guiding, what are the natural things that come out of the, that are in the DNA of the new industry?

Right. I think it's, you know, it's interesting you bring that up because, right, every industry we have right now, even computers, even AI, right, is all very, very siloed. I feel like they've all just kind of come about Haphazard might be a little bit mean, but haphazardly, like no one has really, like the car wasn't invented and then we all got together and said, okay, well how do we want this new industry to exist? It was, oh, well this person's building a car now, this person is now, and slowly, you know, they all start to standardize in some ways, but also have their very different ways of doing things. Each company, each new player, you know, adds their little bit. There's no conscious at the beginning of it.

Yeah.

Right? Going, here's the industry, this is what we want out of the industry, this is how we want to innovate the industry. Make sure, like, nobody sat down and created the culture of the industry. It just happened. So the idea that you're mentioning of, well, how do we, could we create one? It opens up the possibility of us also going, this is exactly how we want it to operate. This is how we want to think about things. These are the inputs. This is the culture. How do we guide innovation, right, in an industry which, that sounds really unique. Like, no, I don't think that we have really, it's always been after the fact where we're like, all right, the industry's been around, even AI, right? It's now, it's going, okay, well now what new government regulations are going to come in to start shaping it? But it's already started. It's already, we're already past inception. It's— It's like it's born and alive and doing things.

Yeah. I mean, Ian, if you look at it like every industry is like a game. When you play Monopoly, right? You've designed a game where if you own Park Place, you make bank, right?

Yeah. But we all agreed to the rules. We all sat down and said, we are going to play Monopoly rules.

And I think that going forward, there's going to be a lot of thought about Not necessarily the regulations because I think regulations are backwards looking usually. Right. And a lot of times they're overcome by events. Right. And so, but it's more like, how do you get like the constitution of an industry? Right.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

I like that. You know, rather than the laws or the rules or the regulations things, there's going to be some dialogues about industry structures that could be really interesting down the road. I think we're at a point where we're making a lot of decisions that we don't actually know are very critical because every decision that we're making, like George Washington deciding when to step down after 2 terms became this huge pattern for the United States, right? We're doing things that we don't even know what kind of precedents that we're setting. And I think that industry design itself could be its own discipline. Industry—

Yeah. Have you ever heard of— it was like a short paper or something, but it basically says the width of 2 horses' asses has determined the size of the spaceship shuttle booster. And if you look through like history, it's true. So you go through this tracing back and go, okay, well, Why is the shuttle booster, space shuttle's booster, the size it is? Well, it needs to go on a railcar. Well, how did we determine the width of a rail in the US? Well, we copied the rails in the UK. Well, why did they pick that width? Well, it's about the size of a wagon width. How did that get chosen? Oh, well, there's roads. Okay, why is that road important? Well, that happens to be the Romans built most of Europe's roads. They built the first You know, highway system. They got worn down really bad, right? Over 1,000 years worn down. Well, you can't make a wagon that doesn't fit into the ruts because otherwise you're going to be weaving all over the place sideways, right? No good. So then you trace back, okay, well, how did the Romans decide the size of a road? Well, it turns out that they decided it based on their chariot and their chariot was width was determined to hold 2 people and fit behind 2 horses. Meaning we traced it all back. The width of 2 horse asses is how we have the width of our rails. And today we went to space confined by a dimension accidentally set over 1,000 years ago by Romans. Like that's—

Yeah, you see those things.

We get there.

You see the butterfly effect or path dependency in so many different ways. Like our borders were determined by drunk 18th century surveyors, right? You know, if you were going to design Northern Virginia today, it might not be Northern Virginia, it might be its own metropolis, right? Instead of being derivative of DC. If you, I mean, it affects urban planning, It affects regional responses, watershed management. There's so many applications about what you're talking about.

Yeah. Oh, I love that one too. I'm going to use that one as well. It's true though. It's such a, you know, people, we just don't often very really sit down and go, what? And it's actually part of the reason why I wrote my book is because we have more control than we give ourselves credit. We just don't think about what the impact of our decisions really are down the road.

So, oh yeah, you're triggering a whole other line of conversation here, which is around how far ahead do we think?

I mean, and that's not, that's, I mean, that's not really the answer.

I think that's not really the biggest questions. No, but that's actually one of the biggest questions for folks that are interested in sustainability is how far ahead am I thinking? With all of this. And it just turns out that most people are going to delay gratification for different periods of time, maybe a day, maybe 3 months, maybe a year. When it becomes sustainable development is when you delay gratification. You feel like you've done a good job after 40 years, after 80 years. This is one of the biggest topics in defining what sustainable development really is.

Yeah, that's a really good point. It's I don't know. I mean, the standard business plan is 3 to 5 years. That's it. You don't project past 5 years. Maybe you'll have a random person go, oh, well, let's look at a 10-year plan briefly, and then we'll ignore it for the next decade while we work on 5-year plans. And I feel like that systemically, right, that's what we aim for because that's what we look at, right? And even I would say, you know, unintended or maybe intended, but generally probably not intended is, right? We look at what makes it important, right? The reason why we have quarterly reports is because the stock market wants to know how you're doing. So now you have, right? You have companies, you have CEOs, CFOs that are, they can't even think 5 years because they're not judged at 5 years. They're judged every 3 months. Every quarter, the end of quarter, that is, it is not even, you know, random. It's, well, the end of March, the end of, or, you know, if you shift your, whatever you decide your quarters are, right? The end of that month, that last month of the last quarter, in that quarter, that day, that is the day you are working towards, which means you have 90 days. All is right. If you think about what are the constraints of your decisions, well, it's going to be all about 90-day. There's not very much. There's maybe this 10%, maybe, probably 5, probably 5 that's sitting there that you can put effort towards of going, oh, what's our long-term strategy? But if everybody judges you at day 90, that's your, all of your decisions, right? That's how you keep your job. It's how you, right? That it's all tied to that cycle, which is super short. Right? If we're talking about sustainability in like 80 years, that's, what is that, 240 quarters from now? That's a lot of quarters.

But you know what's funny is that this conversation has had a way of circling back on itself. You know, when we were talking about linear thinking versus lateral thinking and the idea that maybe what we need to do is have kind of an incremental step forwards. They say that, how do you climb a mountain? One step at a time. I think that we do need to have kind of a better long-term vision about what we're doing. And then we have a midterm game and a short-term game.

I agree.

And so that each step, each step is going towards what that long, longer-term vision should look like. And I think that that's actually another part of the problem that we have right now is that we have really diverse Like we're not unified in terms of what the long-term vision should be for things. And then to complicate it all even more, innovation happens all the time. We may not need high-speed rail if we have automated cars that can link together on the current highways.

Right.

Right. Yep. We may need to reinvent how we build houses because of drones landing, you know, drone delivery on the second floor maybe. We also, in addition to having kind of that long-term vision, we also need to have the humility of thinking through how can we use the assets that we currently have and transform them.

Well, I think it's this balance, right? And I feel like right, and just my opinion looking at things right now is we have huge bias towards the quarterly goal, but I think if we were not to lose it, right? So what you say, like, Tomorrow some company may come out and go, oh, we've figured out how to make this new technology. It's, it will deliver it in 12 months and it's going to change everything. Well, great. But I think that we hide away from long-term planning because of that. Or, oh, well, something could come by, so let's ignore long-term. And I think there should be more of a balance in going, We're going to have this long-term. So we have a goal, we have an actual goal to aim towards that's far enough away we can actually build to it. Bigger goals, right? Not just make more profit right now. What is some bigger goal, right? And then also realize that, I think it's this quote sticks, always sticks in my mind from when I was a kid. It was General Patton. No plan survives contact with the enemy. And it sums up so much, right? It's let's build it, but let's also recognize that tomorrow a new technology may come out. COVID may happen. Like, we have zero control about tomorrow. Let's plan because if we don't plan, we have no structure, we have no goal. It's very hard to keep moving forward. But let's also very much live today and know that tomorrow we may rewrite. We have an 80-year plan. It may be totally rewritten tomorrow, and that's okay. I think we're being okay with that. And I think that goes back, we're going to loop and make another loop here, is going back to this idea of perfection. Like people think that if I write a 5-year business plan, it's got to happen exactly as a plan. Like, no, it's a plan. And when reality hits that plan, it's going to change. There's very few companies that Write a 5-year plan and it magically, every single thing happens on the date. Like you're gonna put some target dates on there, but it's gonna change. Like it's okay. And I think having that bit, the business end be okay with that, with that life is messy. Nothing, the little boxes isn't reality. It's, you know, looks good on paper, but it's not reality. I think That should also be really brought into this planning part and going, yeah, we're going to make a plan and tomorrow's a new day. We'll all wake up together tomorrow and see what our, if our plan is still feasible or not.

I think that that is a very wise approach. It's just very realistic. But I also think that you can say, okay, I'm a product manufacturer and right now the lifecycle of my product is 90 years. Or 10,000 years or whatever. We can also just say, okay, as I'm redesigning it for this next iteration, let's try and shorten the lifecycle a year. We can also kind of do that kind of aspiration where it's not, okay, let's do everything in one fell swoop. Let's just create a culture of continuous improvement.

Right. That is the key, right? I think it's not trying to be perfect, On day one and knowing that really it's knowing that perfection, I don't know if it's ever actually achievable, but always striving to make improvement. And I think that's the difference is we like to go, let's make something perfect instead of let's improve, let's take a step. And then when we take our next step, make it a better step. It doesn't have to be a perfect step. It's just got to Be a better step. It works. It works when you apply it.

Very cool.

Perfect. Well, this has been amazing and wonderful being able to talk to you, Stephen. This is— I enjoyed this conversation very much. I feel like we could probably extend this a lot longer, but we've already had a long episode. So before we part ways, for anybody that's interested in working with you or connecting with you, I'll say you're great at running a panel. So if anybody wants to have you run another panel, reach out. What's going to be the best way to find you, reach out to you, LinkedIn or website? What's the best way?

Yeah, our website is www.isdus.org and I'm on LinkedIn, always happy to connect and to talk about these issues and figure out how we can help people just a little bit more each day.

Perfect. Well, thank you so much. Pleasure having you on the, on the show.

Thank you. I enjoyed it. Hey there.

Thanks for joining us for this episode. I hope that you're enjoying the content we're putting out. If you're looking for more ways to learn about this, to get involved, create your own consciously designed products, there's a couple of ways that you can do that. First is our book, Conscious Design, which you'll find a link to in the description of this episode. Please check that out. Go over quite a bit of information, what the process is, how I've applied it to product design, and some really great examples of companies out there that are doing really great work, some of whom you have seen on this podcast. The other way is our course, Four Weeks to Launch, where I peel back the curtain on how to develop a products start to finish in a way that can create positive impact rather than any negative ones. So please check that out. That's a great resource that will also be linked in the description as well. And see you in the next one.