Most people desire freedom. The freedom to create new products, innovate, build conscious brands, and be true to our mission.
Even conscious businesses can fall into the trap of arguing for freedom—the freedom to define our own standards, set our own pace of change and determine what “ethical” means for us.
Our actions, though, have consequences. Those plant-based alternatives might be palm oil, which affects rainforests. Your packaging choices affect waste streams. Your compromises for scale might not align with the impact you promised to create.
The temptation is to deny these externalities or minimize their impact, to argue that our good intentions outweigh the consequences we decided to ignore, that being “better than traditional options” is good enough.
However, it’s far more useful and productive to do precisely the opposite.
The best way to achieve freedom as conscious brands is to take responsibility and accountability for all our impacts. And the best way to be clear that we’re taking responsibility is to highlight our externalities and address them.
When we acknowledge what our community can easily see, it’s much easier for them to trust us. We’re better off listing the consequences of our choices – from design to end-of-life impact – and then showing how we plan to address them.
Freedom is about earning the right to create change through radical transparency.