New article for Sublime

Kindness, Social Networks and the Making the Most

Over the years that I’ve been writing these columns for Sublime I have been quietly beavering in the background on a social venture called Ecoinomy. (Not so quietly now; there is an article elsewhere in this Maximising issue that explains how Ecoinomy aims to make the most of using less). As a short summary we have built a workplace scheme which specifies and tracks eco savings to be made by employees by reducing travel, waste, energy… and allocates a share of the money saved to community causes chosen by self organizing groups of the employees. Which is of course why they are motivated to make the savings in the first place. As one client put it it’s a “win:win:win:win:win” – benefiting the environment, local community, profits, internal engagement and external reputation.

The core principle behind the scheme is as old as humanity. You could call it goodwill, altruism, the gift society, co-operation, mitzvah, potlach and many other names. The idea is that there is a just-out-of-reach revolutionary potential in human beings and their societies – whereby people could deal with each other out of some primary love and generosity of spirit, not just for family, friends and communities but even enemies. The idea took root, for instance, in a sect called Christianity that appeared to take off in the free fall collapse of the third century crisis of the Roman empire; when Christian welfarism became a kind of safety net that helped society to catch itself in the midst of economic collapse, invasions, civil war, plagues, famines and all sorts of natural disasters. That might be its relevance today too – its potential to help us catch ourselves in the decades ahead.

We have - you could argue - abundant resources, even for the billions alive today, if we were able to avoid the colossal waste inherent in individualistic societies based on the security, recognition and status that derives from hoarding. If we could design an economy based truly maximizing human wellbeing, it would likely be based upon just such a transformational increase in goodwill and social participation. It would not be about settling for less but the potential to become so much more as a truly human society. This many of us feel is what society hungers for, even if it currently expresses its frustrated desires in other far more selfish and destructive forms. That the spontaneous generosity of the cleanup after the UK riots was a natural counterpart; and that both sides point to the untenability of a society based on anything but generosity. The idea is also expressed for instance in the recent bestseller “The Power of Half” by a family in Atlanta Georgia, persuaded by their teenage daughter to sell their house and buy a smaller one, giving half of the original value to The Hunger Project who work in developing countries on bottom-up ways to end hunger through self-reliance.

What is new in our scheme and what connects to a topical trend is the social network. We explicitly set out to find a way of using social networks to create a step change in sustainability. We explored various ways you could do this such as sharing, pooling, peer to peer rental libraries. The system we hit upon with Ecoinomy first of all made basic economic sense; each party experiences a positive gain (including us, as we met organisations willing to pay for such a service). But what convinced more was that it made emotional sense. As our chairman and investor Deborah Meaden said when she first saw the system “you can see employees doing that”. And it’s no longer just an idea. As we have started to deploy the system in workplace tests and have been holding workshops with employees and we have come to realize that the scheme is 90% goodwill and 10% technology. But still the precise social network nature of the technology is important. And not just because it makes all this convenient, or visible. There is something deeply social in social networks – one that seems to favour a kind of systemic altruism that exceeds its previous framing as a personal moral choice. The key feature of working with such systems being how you structure the goodwill and participation, to make it catching.

Recent research by Fowler and Christakis (authors of other seminal research on the role of networks in obesity, optimism, loneliness and giving up smoking) found that generosity is contagious. Specifically what their public goods game experiment showed was that one participant’s experience of kindness creates a cascade of onwards acts of kindness that exceed any effect that can be explained by self interest (for instance by reciprocal kindness with known people; expecting some return from mutual obligation or reputation). The effect of one individual act of kindness was on average tripled by the onwards imitation or ‘paying it forward’ by a network of strangers. The researchers described this as the network acting as a “matching grant”. And they came to quite a radical conclusion about what this simple result means when writ large across the current global social networks and indeed their evolutionary precedents: "Our work over the past few years, examining the function of human social networks and their genetic origins, has led us to conclude that there is a deep and fundamental connection between social networks and goodness. The flow of good and desirable properties like ideas, love and kindness is required for human social networks to endure, and, in turn, networks are required for such properties to spread. Humans form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs."

The implications of this research, if we take it to heart, are profound. It offers the potential for a new kind of culture to “spring up” rapidly. It has everything to do with gaining maximum wellbeing from the least resources. It also hints at a new sort of economy, and newer freeform kinds of charity (where the social nature of generosity is reinstituted). We are aware that our own scheme is one small manifestation of this potential (and indeed that it may still turn out to be flawed in its current design). But it’s a fascinating, sweeping and wholly heartening trend to be part of.