FUTURE OF SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLES
It’s 2020…
and we can now say with some confidence that over the last 3 years we have seen a definite shift in patterns of consumption.
Sustainable Lifestyles 2050
For decades there was a dramatically increasing upward trend in consumption levels, first in what was then called the ‘developed’ world, and then in the ‘emerging’ markets. For a time it appeared that there was no stopping it, but we finally managed to find ways to create sustainable alternatives that didn’t feel like lesser options; to find early signs of a real shift in values; and to find the right ways of communicating both of these trends to build civic will. Our organization was active in each of these areas, through our aligned work with partners, and our understanding of consumers. It all began when we partnered with Collective Invention to create a deeply immersive futures experience called Sustainable Lifestyles 2050.
IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
We used to talk about the future in dry analytical reports, that were only accessible to a small group of experts. Everything changed when we began using immersive experiences of the future, generated from and supported by a rich world of data – news stories from the future to set context and introduce wild cards; advertisements for products and services to set tone and possibility, or explore a competitive landscape; and data extrapolated to identify macro trends in health, environmental, or socio-economic indices. Through these experiences we could suspend disbelief, and fully engage with the issues under exploration.
BACKED BY REAL DATA
All the personas and scenarios we used were grounded in research, which helped to allay our fears about this new way of working. The basis for the original segmentation behind the personas was a small global research project, exploring values, needs, motivations and aspirations about the ‘good life’ in general, and sustainability in particular. These elements were extrapolated forward in time to create psychologically and sociologically relevant personas. The initial project findings were vetted and refined through further projects over the years. And as our work gains traction and we begin to persuade consumers and producers to factor sustainability and true cost accounting into their decisions we need to keep up with this changing landscape of consumption and change our work accordingly.
EMPATHY
When we thought about influencing people to make more environmentally friendly choices we used to spend time segmenting markets and consumers, trying to figure out how many people there were in different groups. We hoped that knowing whether consumers were increasingly becoming ‘green’ would help us to understand what we had to do. However, we tended to stop there, and were frequently disillusioned by the thought of those people who didn’t seem interested, or were even anti-green. In the futures experiences we engaged with the world from the perspectives of consumers. Taking on these roles encouraged us to explore needs, aspirations and constraints in a very grounded and immediate way. We gained an empathic appreciation of the consumers’ worlds. This allowed us to understand why people made certain kinds of choices, and we realized that we all have a little bit of each type of consumer in us. Collective Invention’s principle of meeting consumers where they are, also helped us to see some of our unhelpful judgments and so break down barriers. From this we very often gained extreme clarity about decisions and actions. By taking on the roles of others we were really able to get out of our own way.
BUILDING ALIGNMENT
The remarkable thing about the future process was that we were able to develop more constructive dialogues with consumers and so create more productive communications. We were also able to attract partners because we now had a clear and positive path forward in terms of message and action, vetted by the people we were trying to reach. Although partners came in with their own particular frameworks and focuses, as our discussions were reflected back to us we were able to see the real areas of intersection. We used a mix of in-person exercises and online tools to see which path to the future everyone was really willing to put time and money into realizing. The result was a shared vision of the future that we were headed to and a widespread sense of ownership about how we would get there.
OUTCOMES
The strategic pathways that we rolled out in 2013 were a great, tangible, first outcome of our work with Collective Invention. Once we’d identified the primary area of opportunity our coalition jumped into an intense innovation process, mocking up prototypes in different regions across the world, and building systems to test them. As consumers began to join us in this process we began to see real and permanent change happening in behavior, without the need for sanctions or stigma.