Building benevolent businesses

Is it good? Is it right? Is it even possible? Let's begin the exploration together

I’ve had a pretty diverse career. I’ve worked across more contexts than I seem to be able to store in working memory. But the theme has remained consistent. I’ve now spent thousands upon thousands of hours exploring, experimenting with, and evolving my approach to building (or rather, contributing to the process of building) trustworthy organisations.

I’ve covered definitions, scope etc. in the past. So for today, when I say ‘trustworthy organisation’, what I mean is an organisation that consistently exhibits the qualities of trustworthiness (sometimes referred to as trust antecedents); benevolence, integrity and competence.

Benevolence is the (actual) intent to act in the public’s (and planet’s) best interest.

Integrity is acting in alignment to promises, values and principles, regardless of whether the spotlight is on or not.

And competence means consistently delivering value promises, in alignment to relevant expectations.

The reality, given various system dynamics, is that your average organisation pretty much fails at all three a lot of the time.

Benevolence is almost a non starter, because the purpose of a corporation is to deliver value to its owners (we can argue that there ought to be an alignment between some broader stakeholder group and owners, but in reality this very rarely plays out, especially if we operate beyond the usual narrow value system). Some institutions are, of course, supposed to explicitly exist in service of public or planetary interests, but we should be pretty darn sceptical of this given various empirical observations and deeper patterns (does your government really act in your interests? Or is the picture a tad more nuanced…?). Public benefits, if realised, are often a little more like side benefits.

Integrity is one of those things many organisations talk about, but when we empirically scrutinise organisations, we tend to see that there’s pretty much no relationship between published value statements and corporate culture.

Of the three, competence tends to get the most attention and investment, mostly because of the fact that some level of competence is required to attract, convert, retain and grow a customer base. This is of course relative, factoring in switching costs, lock in effects and a bunch of other phenomena.

But why does this matter? Isn’t business in the business of business?

This is one potential interpretation. But it fails to account for the total ecosystem of all global crises and the common underlying dynamics that generate catastrophic and existential risks. In this way such an interpretation would be ‘metacrisis unaware’, failing to account for what really seems to be going on, and especially failing to account for the seeming causal role (especially ‘big’) business plays in this.

I’d like to argue that a different interpretation is possible and preferable. I’ve argued this many times before. I intend to continue doing so.

Let’s briefly explore.

Is it good?

I’m not going to get into the nuances of axiology (effectively the study of value, which relates to our beliefs about what is good) today. When I say good I mean the things we might strive for or seek to protect.

So, what is it that we strive for or seek to protect?

Well, this is a can of worms. But we can comfortably suggest inalienable human rights. These are things we strive for and seek to protect. We can comfortably suggest something like planetary stability. By this I mean the earth systems we rely upon for the process of life itself. These are something we might seek to protect. We might also suggest something like biopsychosocial wellbeing, some of which is covered by inalienable human rights, all of which relates to planetary stability, but this also has its nuances. We can think of things like strength and mobility. We can think of things like cardiovascular or metabolic function. We can think of our Happy CAMPER (competence, autonomy, meaning, positive emotions, engagement and relatedness) status. All of which contribute to our health span, within a broader environmental context. All of which are interrelated and interdependent.

A benevolent business (or organisation of any kind), would therefore be a business that strives for, and seeks to protect, that which we collectively believe to be good (also recognising the unavoidable plurality of such an endeavour. Another can for another time). That would be its purpose for existence (legally encoded, operationally and technically instantiated, genuinely accountable etc. etc.).

Is this the case today? No.

Ought it be the case? Yes.

Therefore benevolent business is ‘good’.

Moving on.

Is it right?

When I say right I mean morally right. As in, it’s “the right thing to do” because it is the best expression of our value system (whatever that may be), relative to the many alternatives (ethics always assumes there is choice, which is a can of worms we will not open up today).

If our value system is therefore informed why what we believe to be good, we need to ask whether the current purpose and everyday actions of businesses are the ‘best expression’ of said value system…

Clearly they are not (importantly noting they are a darn good expression of a very different value system, one that effectively suggests that the purpose of life is to be wealthy and powerful. As I’ve covered before, this is a core tenet of the story of separation).

But should things be different? Should businesses and institutions of all kinds explicitly exist in service of people and planet? I strongly believe the answer to be yes, recognising the unavoidable nuances (something I’m happy to get into conversationally), such as how ‘value’ is distributed, what value actually is, how it is measured, accounted for etc. etc.

Therefore the pursuit of benevolent business is ‘right’ (in effect, the best of available options).

Is it possible?

I’m going to say yes, if… we transcend the paradigm.

Seriously.

I’m not sure anything short of this will really get us there.

Imagine with me for a moment.

Imagine that we collectively agree, through various genuinely participatory processes (I’m not gonna get into all the failures of modern democracy today either…), that we want to build organising structures that help raise social foundations, bring life back within planetary boundaries, and give us and future generations real active hope.

Imagine it. Feel it. Sit with it.

What has to be true to take such an intention and make it ‘real’? Probably a heck of a lot of stuff, but let’s focus on one and build through conversation from there.

We’d likely need to get rid of profit mandates / motives (we could of course rethink what profit means, casting a much wider circumference of care etc. but for the sake of brevity let’s stick with this statement. There’s substantive reason for me to suggest this, which is empirically backed up by the latest review of ‘sufficient absolute decoupling’. I don’t have the time to get into this one today). As a result of this, good business looks very different. Good business has a much wider mandate, is measured in different ways, is actually focused on humanity’s biggest challenges, embeds biophysical, ecological and relational literacy into its organising principles / structure, engages in trust cost / value accounting, and is fundamentally better at distributing the benefits of coordinated collaboration (there are lots of practical ways this might be done).

Now, for those of you out there about to fall off of your seat, I get it. You believe there are only two ways to organise society… Capitalism (or rather, a specific version of it) and Communism (again, a specific version of it).

This is a failure of imagination. It’s also a failure to understand human history.

Humanity has tried and tested many different forms of social organisation over the years (‘The dawn of everything’ is a useful read in this context). Just because a specific instantiation (lots of self interest with little enlightenment for all the Smith fans out there) of Capitalism has reigned supreme doesn’t means it’s the best or all options, let alone the only. Just because a version of Communism ‘failed miserably’ in certain instances doesn’t mean the whole thing is utter shite.

I believe that a binary such as this, something we see exhibited across far too many human contexts today, serves us poorly. I believe that we have the capacity to actually reason from something like first principles here, engaging in a process that enables us to design new social, political and economic structures. I believe that such a process might enables us to bring the best of what we’ve already learned together with the best of our collective imagination. I believe that such a process of inquiry, discovery, experimentation and refinement could lead us through some of the systemic challenges we face today. I believe that benevolent business, or rather, benevolent human organisation (coordinated collaboration) is both possible and preferable.

Much stands in our way. But at our best, as I’ve said again and again, we are nothing short of inspirationally beautiful.

So let’s get out of our own way a little. Let’s be open to biodegrading the harmful, imaging the helpful, and working together to make a wholesome, healthy existence a possibility for all.

With love as always.