The roof is on fire: Brands should be fired up about change

Fire on our continent is nothing new; but our reaction is.

Our response used to connect us, but now it divides; polarising those who focus on a fire management problem and those who focus on climate change. In chemistry, polarity is achieved through the breaking apart of an electric charge leading to a negative and a positive pole. These forces then push against one another but never come together. One repels, one attracts, but they never join back together. I believe this is becoming the mode of our society as a whole. We are being pushed to polarities.

But there is a middle way. A conversation about both fire management and climate change. With a growing population, pressure to maintain the little virgin forest we have left, drought conditions and increasing frequency and intensity of the fires themselves, this middle ground is all we have. Unfortunately, this is not the discourse we are having – from the local cafe to the halls of Canberra – never mind the echo chambers of unsocial media. It is one or the other. And we are not alone.

In Indonesia the blame is either on the Palm Oil and Pulpwood firms clearing forest through fire or the drought that has gripped the region since 2015. In California, as hot winds from north and south blow down across a landscape dried out from the summer heat, but not yet wetted by winter rains, people are polarised between a warming Pacific Ocean or Pacific Gas & Electric (their local electricity provider).

To have the middle-ground conversations we need to have, we are going to have to overcome our hardwiring for polarisation.

Were we born to blame?

There is a great HBS article from 2018 on organisational culture that is a favourite of mine. It examines the ways in which we are hardwired, arguing that you can take the person out of the Stone Age, but you can’t take the Stone Age out of the person.

Human beings are all hardwired for a few key things that drove our rise as a species. We gossip (trade information); we contest and display (define winners and losers); we are emotional (often called instinct but not often rational); we avert loss (we like what we have and will only reassess it when we are threatened); and we are confident with no good reason to be (it’s better to back yourself when you don’t know what will happen). Our hardwiring has not evolved in the millennia since but during this time our world has gone from cool grassy plains inhabited by small groups to a connected society on a planet housing 8 billion souls that is getting warmer.

As our environment changes, can we?

Can we change our individual hardwiring to drive action? I would say no, but there is another side to us, the end result of this, that can and is driving the change required. We form into groups.

Rather than fight in the noise, organisations and their brands are choosing to focus on driving change through forming groups, because as individuals we have a scale problem. As individuals, we often cannot see beyond our polarities; but as groups we are better able to find middle ground and be pulled away from extremities.

If you look hard you can already see the green shoots of some of these efforts, but these grass roots approaches are not coming from our leaders or large-scale structures. At the moment, the response is found in organisations and brands who are building the tribe of action against an issue they can do something about. They are using brand not to shape differentiation but to shape collectivism.

Our tribalism might just save us.

Good different

In most places big enough to drive change but small enough to create connection you can see this. You see this in cities like Melbourne and forty other global cities through the pioneering C40 program. They understand that the Paris Agreement is unlikely to hold so why not start doing something in Paris. You see it in organisations across Australia acting on a changing climate through Climate Active. I see it in challenger brands of all descriptions from household staples like Thank You to ride shares like Greenfleet that take accountability with their tribes for delivering better outcomes. I feel it in organisations from large corporates like Coles to small NFP’s like Launch Housing who have made celebrating inclusion and diversity the basis of their tribe. You see it in the big steps of states such as South Australia going renewable only, and the smaller steps of community groups pushing their communities to embrace our unique country.

The structure of accountability is shifting from our old pre-internet construct of national policy from national government to localised policy working on solving big problems in their local context. Next time you feel the need to shout at the trees stop and think simply this. What can I do to find or create my tribe? It might be in our DNA to pick a side, but it is also in our DNA to do something together.

Be better to each other.