Triple Bottom Line
A Concept you should educate yourself about.
Most likely the upper illustration would make many people smile. We see several complex questions, that have been flying around for some time, neatly put in a short telling story.
We are stepping into the future every moment. With every single choice we make today, at this very precise moment, we are determining how our future will look like. We know this very basic fact. We tend to forget it.
And we tend to forget because our span of attention is shorter, and our memories are cluttered with the pieces of information, obvious and subliminal, that we consume around the clock.
In today’s article I intend to present a valuable concept that will hold the pieces together and help us deign our individual and collective futures with more ease, responsibility and joy. This concept help us see the wider picture with more clarity and link the pieces of the system in a more convenient and meaningful style. This should also help reduce certain unfavourable feelings of frustration and uncertainty emerging from specific tensions encountered everyday. The concept talks about tension and order amongst three universal constructs namely : Economy, ecological, and social. By talking about tension and order, you will realize how many questions will be clarified and we will be able to release a more beautiful picture things working in harmony. This will -hopefully- support us in making better, but equally important, easier decisions. The concept is: Triple bottom line or TBL or 3BL. Let us explore it together. We are talking about profit, planet and people, or if you prefer, technical, ecological and social.
Many of us do consciously try to relate these concepts to each others, we try to blend, match, fit them in a way or another. We try to get a better sense of how to prioritized. I am buying bio food but i am using my plastic credit card, issued by my bank which injects 80% of its investments in anti-ecological projects! I commune to educate and entertain children in my kindergarten using public transportation with all the CO2 emissions involved, and with all those plain faces -including mine- which do not greet the others despite the minimal space separating us. I am sociable, I want to meet more people, but then I end up consuming the most scarce resource ever: my limited life-time. I want to earn more money, by spending more time in offices with air-conditions, plastic cups and ending up with barely enough time to love, receive love and make love, just because I want to buy an environmentally friendly car, have a vacation in nature with my lover, and buy eco-friendly and ethical fashion. I want my children to be up-to-date, informed, educated citizens but i am aware to the associated costs and alternative opportunities lost with that screen time.
Those paradoxes are not new. They are there since the dawn of humanity. We need to make choices. The new is that the choices are more, they are more competitive (remember the consequences of free market competition) and many of them are radically unhealthy at the collective level although not necessarily obvious at the individual one. I am confused. Am I hypocrite? No. How can i balance things? I do not seem to be alone into this. I am individual. Companies, which are at the end of the day organic living collectives of humans, face the same questions. Neighbours, communities, states, continents have similar questions. Because? Because these are legitimate questions. Those are questions emerging and encountered with the daily-living choices we make.
A Lantern
In 1997 John Elkington coined the term Three Bottom Line which made many things look easier for both individuals and companies.
First he drew our attention to the fact that the last/bottom line in companies financial statements should not be one line of either profit or loss. He took us an extra mile to explain that it is not only our financial performance that we should be watching but also two other constructs. The first is the impact of our operations on environment and the other is on humans. Awareness, in itself is a bless. He then explained how the tension rises mainly between two constructs the social and ecological. The human and nature. We want to be socially sustainable within ecological constrains. Yes, we need to wear the fashion item we fancy but with consideration to how it’s raw materials were initially sourced and fabricated or how it was packaged and shipped. Replicate the example for any item we produce/consume and the tension is more obvious and intense.
Now if we want to consider environment then this is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, which basically occurs:
when a person holds contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, and is typically experienced as psychological stress when they participate in an action that goes against one or more of them
Tension entre belief/thinking & course of action creates stress if not well managed. Now, honestly, Elkington does not provide this psychological dimension explanation and/or any solution in that regard. Yet, his marvellous work in my opinion provides something relatively more valuable: presence of mind. Elkington brought to the table the three constructs and the particular tension amongst at least two of them and allowed us to see. Fair enough.
The Three Bottom Line also help to put things in order. The economic/profit dimension is placed in its normal position. The economic activity is a mean. It is not an ultimate objective. This in itself help release a lot of stress and allow people to live a more joyful and happy life. This discourse help us realize that we do strategic moves to earn more money from doing the right things because the economic activity is a mean to achieve social and ecological objectives rather than being an objective itself.
Last but not least, the book open doors wide for creativity. Because in that field of tension between the social and ecological are where creative solutions to be found.
This is where the role or creative strategy seems indispensable. How do we design products or services where 1-people will like them and 2-they will reduce the burden on natural environment. How do we design products and services that can attract future investments throughout the value chain.
I talk more about this particular process of creative strategy here.
John Elkington book on the Three Bottom Lines place sustainability at the heart where the economic, environmental and social overlap. That is where profit, planet, and people work in harmony.
Now you can add this beautiful book to your library by buying it here:
Enjoy…