Is incrementalism enough in a systems-change world?

Here’s a question that’s been keeping me up at night: Are sustainability professionals — all of us, individually and collectively — working at the wrong level? That is, are we making incremental changes inside a shareholder-primacy system that isn’t going to fundamentally shift on any timeline that matters, while the actual root causes sit outside our job descriptions entirely?

That’s the juicy topic that Solitaire Townsend and I tackled in this week’s episode of our “Two Steps Forward” podcast. Fortunately, my co-host had a lot to say on the topic. I think I came away from the conversation able to sleep a bit better.

The random acts of greenness problem

Most of the work we do exists in the middle of a bell curve — the big, fat hump between the incremental (“first, do no harm”) and the consequential (“transform the entire system”) — what I’ve taken to calling “random acts of greenness”: real work that doesn’t necessarily add up to a coherent theory of transformation. Some product changes here, some supply-chain work there. Facilities, employee engagement, philanthropy — disconnected dots that don’t necessarily move the needle in today’s capitalism, where shareholder returns can trump sustainability professionals’ purpose and passion.

For many, sustainability can feel like a Sisyphean task.

Townsend’s advice isn’t to feel bad about that. It’s to stop expecting external validation for it. Reducing emissions and building resilience won’t likely vindicate any of us within our own professional timelines, she said: “We will work our entire careers for a world we don’t get to live in” — the same, she noted, as the suffragettes who never got to vote or the civil rights leaders who didn’t live to see the country’s first Black president.

Narrative identity

Her counter to despair is a framework called narrative identity: treating the current moment — the self-doubt, the sense that you’re not doing enough — as the “cave” stage of a hero’s journey, a test where the only failure is quitting.

I pushed back: A hero’s journey is a personal tale, and this fight is a collective one where none of us is the hero. We’re bit players in a collective drama.

But we landed in a similar place from different directions: The point isn’t whether any individual effort is sufficient, but rather whether you keep going.

Filling in the boxes

The best evidence either of us has that incremental work eventually adds up: renewable energy. Townsend grew up in coal-heated government housing; she now lives in a solar-powered home (as do I) — a complete energy transformation within a single generation.

I had my own version of this story: research that a group of us did 25 years ago into what it would take to make solar cheap, ubiquitous and dominant. Our work produced a 3×3, nine-box roadmap — technology, policy and finance crossed-referenced with standardization, education and aggregation — that we envisioned would take a Herculean effort and decades to bear fruit.

But solar now costs as little as 30 cents an installed watt, well below the $1-per-watt target that once felt like a moonshot. Getting there involved naming the goal and plotting a path. We just kept filling in those nine boxes without much evidence along the way that the approach was working. Until it did.

Beyond incrementalism

This isn’t to argue that a plodding incremental approach by itself is sufficient — at least not without one or more moonshot goals. It’s an argument for separating the question of whether your work matters from the question of whether it feels like it’s making a difference. Those turn out to be different questions.

We also got an update on a topic we’ve covered before on this podcast: Townsend’s “spheres of influence” framework — developed by her firm, Futerra, in partnership with Oxford Net Zero — which would enable companies to claim credit for climate influence beyond their own emissions. Think: product impact, investment influence, policy advocacy and other things. “Spheres” has now been adopted by ISO for its forthcoming net-zero standard, ISO/DIS 14060, currently open for public consultation. Suggested KPIs will be forthcoming at Climate Week NYC in September.

Two Steps Forward is available wherever you get podcasts, including on Trellis.net. Find past episodes at twostepsforwardpodcast.com.