Article 12
Collective action step 2 - Mitigating the societal harm
2-3 minute read
CAPSULE SUMMARY – For Collective Action to be effective, it needs a working group that is independent, funded, collaborative, and transparent--and where the involved companies are truly committed to change.
12.1 Given the unique dynamics of every business and industry, it would be impossible to detail all the different ways a collective group of companies might come together to solve a given social issue or harm.
12.2 At the same time, simply giving you a challenge to “go build a collective and solve a really thorny shared problem” also falls woefully short. I can provide, however, a set of operating principles that should bind any Collective together to maximize its chance of affecting real change.
12.3 You need a dedicated independent working group – Whether you brand that group as a working group, a coalition, an association, or a S.W.A.T. team doesn’t matter. What does matter is that a focused team is decked against the issue that can perform truly objective root-cause analysis and define actionable steps to rectify the problem. The members of that group could be employees of the various companies involved, new employees hired specifically for the Collective, consultants, independent research firms, or some mix of the above.
12.4 You need a commitment to fund the working group – The working group itself generally will not require massive funding relative to the societal harm being generated. The specific funding dynamics will vary on a situation-by-situation basis, and different companies will have different abilities to contribute. The important thing is that sufficient resources are given to the working organization to fund the necessary research and deep analysis to identify root-cause. A great model (a la the MPA example) can be to create a focused and more enduring Association that can deal with and handle multiple issues not just reactively, but proactively.
12.5 The collective needs to truly collaborate and share data, potentially between competitors – This is critical. Any complex societal impact will require data not just from one company but from multiple providers. Companies must be willing to give up that data to help feed the analysis. Although some companies may be concerned about privacy issues, this can be done in a way that doesn’t disclose confidential or personally identifiable information between competitors. A well-defined and independent working group can easily hold sensitive data across companies without giving up specific competitive insight.
12.6 The collective needs to be transparent with society – We’ll discuss this more in the papers around social input and transparency, but all key findings (whether good or bad) should be made public to the key stakeholder: society. This isn’t about putting lipstick on a pig and it’s not about trying to make companies look better--it’s about trying to legitimately reduce societal harm. That requires objective analysis, a willingness to receive societal input and feedback, and a commitment to act on that analysis.
12.7 The involved organizations need to commit to changing behaviors as a group based on the working group findings – Collective Action ultimately requires action (as the name implies), not just analysis. Without a commitment to act, the problem will ultimately fall back to government regulation. With joint commitment, we will have moved significantly closer to a system where companies become self-policing and self-regulating—where Second-order smoke is attacked and addressed before it becomes a burning and unavoidable issue.
Companies that jointly create Second-order impacts need to jointly commit to mitigating those impacts.
12.8 The single biggest gating factor to action from any Collective will be delivering on this commitment to act and overcoming the trade-off between the 1st and 4th Stakeholders. The financial cost of action (whether from reduced revenue or increased cost) will have to be weighed against the fractional societal benefit gained—and this is where current ROI-based approaches to prioritizing ‘social good’ completely fail. We will tackle this thorny topic next in the third set of papers around ROI and Big Swings.
END OF PART 2