“Tell me, and I will Forget. Show me, and I may Remember. Involve me, and I will Understand.” -Chinese Proverb

Belief and trust is of growing importance in the world of business. Authenticity and transparency are key drivers in client development. Long gone are the days of nickel and diming, as well as developing client reliance on your services or maximizing profit through unethical economics. In an era of social purpose and social enterprise, transparency and activism have combined to create a business equation around fulfillment. Fulfillment happens through meaningful work, striving toward betterment for others, and true generosity. Taking this approach to business and to clients is driving industries to change how they do business; whether through corporate social responsibility, social enterprise, or ethical consumerism, decision-making based on ethical economics is here to stay.

A large part of this equation is comprised of trust; trusting a company, trusting your collaborators, trusting the supply chain, etc. But the question is: How to develop that trust? How to get your clients, collaborators, team mates, to see you are authentic and ultimately trustworthy?

Most of it revolves around actually being authentic…

Sounds like a conundrum right?

In a product-based company, most of this can be accomplished through transparency and third party validators. Either utilizing or even creating a validation process that certifies a product is made in an ethical fashion, (GoodWeave is a great example), or that a product is even recycled/destroyed in an ethical fashion, (ex: e-Stewards for the Electronics Recycling industry). Based in transparency and stringent documentation, third party validators bring credibility, trust, and authenticity to a product and therefore helping to bring those characteristics to a company manufacturing, producing, selling, or recycling a product.

Service based industries have a more difficult time….

Developing trust with other people who are paying for your time, paying for your service or opinion, entrusting their business with you can be difficult. We are human after all and our first response isn’t to always be trustful with others, especially when it comes to something as dear as our own business.

As an individual and a business owner, it is important to me to empower my clients and to educate them, not just on the services I provide, but how we do what we do; giving them the tools we use. I want them to fully understand our process, learning along the way, developing the trust needed so that they feel confident in executing after we are gone. This doesn’t mean they don’t return as clients, it means that they trust us even more with new projects, knowing we will take a special focus to teach them more along the new path. It also means that along the way, we develop a belief system founded on trust. We don’t just get them to believe by showing them, we develop trust by including them in our process, just like they include us in theirs.

Take Jean Francois Gravelet also known as “Charles Blondin,” for example.

A French tightrope walker who is best known for his numerous breathtaking tightrope walks above Niagara Falls. His most notable performances included crossing the tightrope with his eyes blindfolded, crossing on stilts and once he even had stopped halfway to cook and eat an omelet.

In one of his Niagara Falls exhibitions he decided to push a wheelbarrow over the tightrope, he performed it over the eyes of more than a thousand petrified individuals and like all the other previous treks, the wheelbarrow crossing was successful and greatly applauded.

After the feat, he told the crowd “I will cross again going to the other side, but this time I will carry a man on the wheelbarrow”. He then asks them, “Who among you believe I can do it?!!”

The crowd shouted and cheered affirmations.

They all believed in him.

Then Blondin said “Now, if you believe I can do it, who among you will volunteer to ride the wheelbarrow. Anyone please raise your hand?”

Everyone was silent; nobody among the thousands who believed raised their hand.

The difference between the crowd and the one who rides the wheelbarrow is the difference between belief and trust. Cheering with the crowd is believing, while riding in the wheelbarrow is trusting. 

It is also the man in the wheelbarrow who is included in the process…granted we try to get those individuals involved before we even attempt to tightrope walk with them, but the moral is still the same.

Inclusion is not just a token of diversity and acceptance, as how it is often portrayed to us; inclusion also builds trust, belief, and understanding among parties, business or otherwise. There is value in inclusion, value built around a process.

Diversity and Dialogue – Humanity's Guarantee for a Mutually Enriching and Sustainable Future.

 In 2002, a jointly held UNESCO and UNEP high-level Roundtable report proclaimed cultural diversity

“as a source of innovation, creativity and exchange—is humanity's guarantee for a mutually enriching and sustainable future.” 

This proclamation was made against the backdrop of the then perceived environmental issue: cultural diversity is linked to biodiversity, in a defense against modern developments and indigenous acculturation, leading to rapid decline of knowledge and relationship with their natural environments.

“It is within this background that Indigenous communities have been described as, at one and the same time, victims of environmental degradation and protectors of vulnerable ecosystems (UN 1991: Para. 23).”

In the last decade, others have explored this proclamation in the two other categorical contexts of sustainability, seeing it as

(1) a social justice issue: culturally diverse populations, and often lower incomed, are often at the frontlines of environmental degradations absorbing the impacts, and

(2) an economic bottomline issue: corporate diversity initiatives leading to increased economic performance and profitability. 

But rarely do pundits and academics see the dialogue as a completed circular one. Most are set on seeing this linearly and discretely—contextually independent. Within these independent categorical contexts of sustainability and dialogue, professionals and mangers often take one of two different approaches to sustainability: (1) that organizations have an obligation to do something progressive to address the challenges, or (2) that organizations have the opportunity to change internally and improve to maximize value creation. Not surprisingly, most for-profit organizations took the second path and have developed a body of knowledge around what we refer to today as corporate social responsibility—in a dimensional limit of Me, Me, Me!

But if our Constitutional state is a permissive one, which implies a certain sense of social obligation from private entities, and if corporations are to be treated equally as individuals before the law under the protections of afforded rights, then, not only do the corporations have opportunities to make internal performance improvements within the context of sustainability, but they also have the obligation to facilitate a reciprocal relationship between diversity and dialogue in their communities, marketplaces, and the greater communities in which they thrive to foster sustainable developments for others.

Cultural diversity is a dynamic process and for the corporate sector, it is a entrepreneurial and innovative process. It is not a stagnate deposit of cultural relics to distil best practices. It is an emerging global economic identity still discovering adolescence in the age of We, of Us.

It is in a sense a “reciprocal” relationship (between diversity and dialogue in sustainability), and the “causal link that binds them cannot be severed without jeopardising development’s sustainability.” 

The key to this reciprocal relationship and dialogue is in the investigation of things and in the knowledge exchange—a “continuously flowing and unifying dialogue open to each and every expression of identity.” In the Us context, only in this act of learning and applying can we find cultural diversity really translates to value for sustainability.

“Cultural diversity is more than the fact of cultural difference. It is a value which recognizes that differences in human societies are parts of systems and relationships. Cultural diversity is the value through which differences are mutually related and reciprocally supportive.” 

But the end objective remains an active and communal transition towards positively empowered sustainability.

Something to sit on so to speak.

Process Innovation and Sustainability

The European Union Official Journal stated in 2006 that promoting research, development and innovation “(R&D&I)” is an important objective to its common interest. Research and Development (R&D) has long been a familiar notion in the market process, but Innovation in particular is a recent phenomenon taking on new meanings.

These days, Innovation is often cited to bridge between scientific discoveries and development of services or products with market success. On one end is the field of diverse knowledge, ranging from the precise motions of a sloth to the possibilities of harnessing anti-matter, put together by clever people who see ways to combine discoveries into a unique pattern resulting in useful products and services; on the other end is the market place of consumers buying up whatever it is that they need or want to perpetuate their beautiful lives. In between is this bridge—Innovation, a long and arduous journey starting from creating market ideas, refining the ideas based on market research, raising capital, getting to market, competing and establishing a new value proposition (or improve on an existing value proposition) to the consumers, and then surviving the consumer trends.

A man can get lost on this bridge. It's a big bridge, and neither end has calm waters. Research dollars are ever shrinking driven by market demands that make no sense. The market place continues to be influenced by the media frenzy for narcissistic attentions. Sharks swarm in both ends and currents are unpredictable. Let's face it, Innovation is no vacation. Take health care for example, once a profession that is purposed to heal the wounded and cure the sick, now reduced to a model of innovation for shareholder value, prolonging diseases, or worse creating new ones. To help mitigate our vulnerabilities when sick or injured, policy makers put regulations in place. But the pharma regulatory environment does little to actually incentivize new and improved cures. Instead, it is focused on fierce competitions, development silos, and contributes more to indirect costs on layers of bureaucratic fat making drugs more expensive and less accessible.

So it is a good thing that we are starting to pay attention to the Innovation process, if our goal is to figure out market improvements towards sustainable goals. In all of our current market madness, there is opportunity to improve our existing market infrastructure and the innovation process to change market and human conditions for the better. In fact, talking Process and Innovation in a single context is putting capitalism to the test and incorporating proper balanced social and environmental mechanisms to strive for sustainable outcomes. Here's our common ground: that we are all after the same thing—a better way of getting science to market with a sense of responsible market choices driving forward R&D and impacting our societies for the sustainable better future, together.

Innovation in this sense is all about process improvement, isn't it? In fact, almost every sovereign nation recognizes this for its people. China for example, is in its New Normal of slower economy (down from the double digits to around 5-6%) hoping to achieve some sort of maturity and deliberation in its new market. It is focused on intellectual capital, service based economy, and Innovation. Here at home, the United States is also seeing a new wave of incubators and accelerators and business, college, and private sector alliances to jump start our local economies focused on Innovation. Worldwide, we are seeing alternative funding mechanisms (e.g., crowdfunding, digital currency, etc) and more transactions driven by the new possibilities of technologies and collaborative efforts to bridge R&D with Innovation. A 2006 EU official journal article defines Innovation as “a process connecting knowledge and technology” exploiting market opportunities for new or improved products and services. Like the EU, other parts of the global community recognizes the importance of a process based approach taking on not just economic bottom lines, but also taking on environmental issues, and social justice issues, to Innovate. In this context, risk is a significant factor to consider when identifying market opportunities. Opportunities not just found in the global climate changes that risk the entire earth's ecosystem, but also in the global social changes that risk the stabilities of global economic and governance developments. If we fail to recognize these risks, we would not identify the opportunities where Process Innovation can make an impact to clean the air and water, eliminate global poverty, and deliver sensible health care solutions. But to recognize those risks means we have to put Research, Development, and Innovation together in a context of sustainable developments (focused on environmental, social, and economic risk mitigations).

Process Innovation and Sustainability are therefore one of the same thing. The former is the infrastructure and the latter its substantive content to a path forward. This is a game where we the players can change the way we play for the better. Innovation is not about the cliché game changers.

Innovation is about the people who would want to change the game – ready players.

Leading The E-Waste Industry (Cincinnati Health Care Driving the Sustainability Change)

E-waste is discarded electronics – the latest and greatest of technology just a few years into their life cycle doomed by the newest upgrades. Our narcissistic need for trendy gadgets has increased the demand and reliance on raw materials, rare earth and precious metals. But our material supply is limited and much of the electronics currently in circulation are not being recycled. The depletion of natural resources itself is bad enough, but the vast amount of e-waste in landfills is also polluting at their worst.

In 2014, one study estimated 41.8 million metric tons of e-waste was generated – “an amount that would fill 1.15 million 18-wheel trucks. Lined up, those trucks would stretch from New York to Tokyo and back.” E-waste is the fastest growing municipal waste in the United States. Globally, the volume of e-waste was expected to rise by 33% between 2012 and 2017. The problem is amplified by illegal dumping into developing countries like China, India, and African countries. E-waste buyers in those places are often unregulated despite stringent laws in place. They extract commodities from e-waste using the most horrendous methods. Their people pay the price with their health and safety, but the world suffers from their poor environmental and social practices.

Enter the responsible e-waste recyclers. Domestic players who process e-waste locally and creating jobs, putting value back into commerce. But the US e-waste industry is no rose garden either. A recent HuffPost article pointed out that industry workers in the U.S. have been documented to have “taken home” contaminants (e.g., lead) to cause health problems in children exposed to the contaminant particles. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) does require e-waste recycling facilities to provide protective clothing and respirators to their employees. But the lack of proper training among other things have attributed to detectable health effects. Or, the current protective standards are not sufficient and we need to improve those and reflect the changes in our policies and regulations.

The HuffPost article named a Cincinnati resident impacted by this “take-home” contaminant problem. Cincinnati Children's Hospital made the medical discovery. There are other e-waste recyclers in Cincinnati who are part of the responsible business community and are more than happy to hear medical data is now available to help improve our standards and hold accountable our performances. This may very well effect policy changes and put Cincinnati on the map for being the e-waste expert. Cincinnati's health care industry also can lead the world in medical research on this topic, further strengthening Cincinnati's credentials.


Remember: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Did you know Americans dump over $60 million in gold/silver every year in just cell phones. For every 1 million cell phones, 35,274 lbs of copper, 772 lbs of silver, 75 lbs of gold, and 33 lbs of palladium can be recovered. 

One estimated the value of e-waste to be worth $52 billion in 2014.

Hiring!

HIRING: CANVASSING MANAGER WITH FIELD MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCES. 

Cincinnati Recycles (the “Campaign”) is a data driven social change campaign to increase recycling participation, waste diversion, and improving the recycling service infrastructure to Cincinnati city residents.

The Campaign spent the past 18 months in different Cincinnati neighborhoods engaging individuals about their recycling habits, barriers, and what we can do to make recycling easier for them. The Campaign follows a process based approach and focuses on serving the needs of our audience. It establishes baselines to measure impacts on social change. Our previous reported analyses and improvement recommendations are available on request under Creative Commons Share-Alike license.

We are looking for motivated individuals with canvassing experiences and leadership skills to help us in our 2016 campaigns. 

The campaigns are seasonal. Ideal candidates should be familiar with basic process improvement methods, have a background in psychology, marketing, or other related fields. Previous experiences in similar capacities are considered.

Job Responsibilities:

• Manage a team of individuals and door-to-door canvassing activities 
• nstruct, demonstrate, observe, and motivate team using program methodology 
• Work closing with team members to improve efficient and effectiveness 
• Canvass-in-field and manage training when needed 
• Manage paper work and data collection for every shift Perform other tasks as assigned 

This is a temporary/seasonal employment on contracted basis. Pay depends on experience and is negotiable. Campaign pays a living wage above minimum wage standards to all our canvassers.

Qualifications:

• Strong communication and motivational skills, work ethic, and desire to better the community are essential. 
• Candidates must be able to work within a diverse team, have proven leadership ability, and excellent time management skills. 
• Organizational skills and the ability to take initiative are also good qualifications. 
• Previous successful field or canvassing experience is a requirement for this position. 
• Candidate must have own transportation and valid driver’s license and may be required to submit background screening and employability verifications. 

If interested, please submit resume and a cover letter to info@brainbox.ninja.

Dear "Mr. Macy" - A Challenge

Someone asked me the other day: How does a corporation stay authentic in an ever more green-washed market place?

Fair question. My immediate response is to say: don't market anything. Because that's not what we do. Marketing intrinsically means selling something your customers don't need. That's why people are inherently suspicious of marketing regardless of how true the content may be. But the big open secret is that customers will indeed buy based on marketing, so it is easy to get tempted. Some corporations try to use the sustainability movement as a marketing opportunity, ruining the playing field for the rest of us.

So, how a corporation approaches their marketing (philosophically, fundamentally, and responsibly) is very important. In this way, corporate social responsibility achieves authenticity and not mere window dressing.

Recently the movie “Miracle on 34th Street” has been on TV. It is a movie about Macy's with all advertising pointing to the other scheduled show times, sponsored by Macy's.

Fair enough, it's a good movie; but one scene struck me in particular: there was an 'apparent angry' customer stopping Shellhammer to rant about Kris Kringle (“Santa”) directing Macy's customers to other stores. Shellhammer was shocked to find out the customer wasn't angry at all but praised Macy for the Christmas spirit to do the good deed. The dramatic dialogue ended with this customer pledging to be a loyal returning customer and Mr. Macy's advent approval to extend the practice beyond just Christmas.

And there you have it, an authentic moment on the silver screen.

Being the ever optimist, I assume a corporation sells widgets or services that customers actually need. But that's the hard part, isn't it? Corporations are so focused on selling more that they forget there is more than one way to sustain a brand and a business. So when competition gets fierce, corporations think they will have to race to the bottom. A tragedy of the commons.

But the simpler truth and escape is just as Mr. Macy (in the movie) pointed out: something authentic must be authentic. You can't fake it because it will never make it.

So I stand by my recommendation then and now: the right path is to look at this as an exercise of actual engagement. Yes, you the corporation must engage your stakeholders.

Get to know them, understand them within the framework of sustainability. What are their social and environmental problems? What are their goals? What can they do to contribute? What are the barriers to change and what are the benefits to change? How do you initiate change? How do you test and measure for improvements?

From there, the engagement then becomes a community based action. Based on the maximum effective solution possible and stakeholder engagement, a corporation can find a new path to create new models of doing business. This is the only way to make the business responsible and sustainable to its community. This is also the only way to authentically continue your corporate brand.

As I've said before, this process based approach is slow and painful. It is incremental. It requires trust and collaboration which we Americans seem to lack these days. I therefore remain doubtful that any corporation is willing to embrace the challenge.

Or perhaps this is my challenge to all the corporations: MAKE A CHANGE. STOP MARKETING AND START CARING.


Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

- jin [Challenge issued to "Mr. Macy" in particular. Cheers.]

What Is Process Innovation Anyway?

It struck me today that not many people know what process innovation really is. No wonder when I tell people about my company, the raised eyebrows signal many suspicions that I’m simply selling snake oil.

But rest assured that process innovation is a real thing. It's also a very productive and useful thing. It’s very different from the dominant form of product-based business innovations (*ah hem, Apple*) that drive transactions we know today. Process based innovation is not well studied; it is more complex, slow to be seen because it attempts holistic results, and it does not attract capital attention because it is not solely focused on capital returns.

Only mature firms currently apply process based approach to refine their product based businesses staying current with market trends (Toyota - Six Sigma - set off a whole wave of this in may industry and sectors). Smaller firms do not have the patience nor do they see the value in the process based approach yet. This is because we still have some very antiquated worldviews about how the market innovates, creates value, and how we make productive gains in our global economies.

There is no time like the present to challenge the status quo, is there? First, understand that process based ventures mean the focus is on the existence of the market as an ecosystem. The market is presumed important. The default method calls for defining the market, then measuring and analyzing to design market strategies. Process based approach also involves ongoing updates of variability to control for market improvements. Process based ventures therefore adopt the deliberate slow approach to solving uniquely localized problems with ongoing "agile" improvement efforts.

Product based ventures on the other hand focus on the level of demand and profitability, rather than the existence of the market. The market is not presumed to be all too important. Innovation is therefore for the pure sake of innovation anew - hence our patent laws have to define novelty and usefulness criteria to award these nonsensical IP exclusivity rights. Ranting aside, it is important to recognize product based ventures, by default, are preoccupied with disguising the "product" and ignore the market. While process based ventures are generally tailored and localized to market and solution needs, product based ventures standardize components to incumbent products and enter multiple markets in plug-n-play manner. The goal is not the ecosystem, but of the successful product itself.

So who is really selling snake oil here?

Process based innovation ventures are not popular because they have traditionally been linked to long learning curves, painful consensus building exercises, tedious documentations for measuring impacts, and ongoing management of data validation to control for condition variability and need for new evolution of products in place. The process approach is also riddled with uncertainties based on the ongoing efforts of controlling variability of the system. But of course, venture capitalists do not like uncertainties nor are they known for their patience. Which is another reason why process based ventures are not popular among aspiring social entrepreneurs. These days, we find many of our peers thinking of the next great gadget the consumers will never want. Few are applying a process to seek localized product solutions that are needed. 

We began our social company from the opposite direction. We've been referred to as a unicorn of sort but I don’t believe in unicorns. So, we hope you walk away a little enlightened about process based ventures and why we believe in the business model. However, all things are about a balance. We caution that even the process must also be balanced against product market trends. To quote someone famous, one must be like water to move like water. So, we believe successful process ventures will exploit the generic nature of open technologies, will position themselves in upstream or midstream target markets to effect change from stakeholder upstream and return on investment downstream, and they will participate in both the market for sharing knowledge (licensing) and making products (generics). Product based ventures have had a narrower market focus historically which has given us an unsustainable consumer pattern. They have traditionally positioned downstream or midstream in their target markets for the product’s sake. Although they choose target markets with less uncertainty and assure capital investments with greater confidence, it is important to recognize that confidence is built on an incomplete understanding of the value creation and impacts the ecosystem where they presume the market is secondary to the product. So don't be fooled by the magic of products alone. Know the process and why we are making products. Be not afraid of the magic in process innovations.

The Story of (dot) Us

Recently, I started down a path to get a better understanding of open source culture. I wanted to see if the principles can be cross applied to other industries other than IT. Even more interesting of an inquiry is how “open” might fit our sustainability goals. My intuition was red hot on that trail and I was sure I’d find something there. What I’ve found was much more. What I found is a global happening. It was enough for Lauren and me to together take a closer look.

We are still very much on this journey, but the more we learned, the more we realize something very fundamental is shifting. The world around us is transforming. Scientific and industrial revolutions have enabled humankind to look beyond the functional appeals of our environment as we experience the information revolution. We are now looking for better ways together. Our common human experience in civil society has been elevated by the motions of defined, refined, and controlled social improvements. Globally, we have now put in place many process-centric evident-based global civil communities together via the Internet. (For example, Doing Development Differently is carrying on a core principal work doing exactly this with governance. Lauren and I became signatories to their efforts when they launched. Another example is the Open Knowledge Foundation's recent establishment of Open Sustainability - a network to open knowledge and source sustainable developments.)

Our collective consciousness is shifting from assets to knowledge, from scarcity to abundance, from hierarchy to network. We are connecting the dots and drawing up nodes on maps of our human capacity as a whole. This shift from the traditional functional, hierarchical orientation to a process-centric orientation is driven by a demand for efficiency and effectiveness. A primary target of opportunity is to increase information access and transparency. As our collective human experience transitions from hierarchies to networks and from disconnected functional decisions to process-centric development models, we are seeing a reinvention in institutional philanthropy and an emergence of distributed and disruptive social enterprises; both are measurable impact driven. A new generation of free society netizens began to see the world not for its scarcity of resources but for its abundance of knowledge and human capacity to make a difference. They are entering the shared information economy and the global community is beginning to understand the whole is in fact greater than the sum of its parts.

Under pressure, our old market competition model, based in the tragedy of the commons, is being transformed into a new way of strategic positioning to maximize our mutual advantage towards common goals. Put it simply, we are shifting from a labor-based economy to a knowledge-centric global free-marketplace. This has been fueled by the Internet and web 3.0 (collaborative) technologies. It will soon reach a tipping point where even censorship cannot prevent the cascading effects.

I’ve been feeling hopelessly lost for a while now, but the surest way to find a path is to create one. I recently realized that Lauren and I had been trying to create this path with our pathfinder company (BrainBox) that was founded just a year ago. Since then, we’ve applied the process based thinking, impact measuring methodologies, and open source methods, and executed a scaled research study into recycling habits and fostering sustainable behaviors with the City of Cincinnati.

From here, more work is to be done. There is much we want to accomplish. Lauren and I have been working on developing a learning schedule to get to know more about distributed masses' collaborative capacity to solve our sustainability problems, openly.

So. the Story of (dot) Us is only beginning.

/Stay Tuned/

__________________________________

BrainBox Completes its First Milestone

We started this little company in November of last year. Our hope was to incorporate process thinking with sustainable behavior science to help promote sustainability generally.

Our first project is for Rumpke Recycling to test mailer types in two hypotheses. We just completed the final write up of this project. A copy of our final analysis report is available under Creative Commons Attribution license "CC BY" by request to info@brainbox.ninja.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

"Trickle-Down Techonomics"

To truly improve the process of human development, we really have to think about inclusion in a new light. The old "trickle down" inclusion effect is not working. In fact, it has been used to keep people from accessing the resources they need to be full participants in the development process.

That's why a process improvement for anything, a problem or a company's operations, require stakeholder involvement and empowerment. A conversation has to be created with the lowest cost to the primary stakeholders. The solution has to come from the people participating in the process, not enforced upon them. 

Ford Foundation on Program Related Investments (PRI)

Ah yes, wisdom.

I think we found our new company model.

East Price Hill Recycles

BrainBox is excited to share our most recent project: "East Price Hill Recycles" Campaign.

The City of Cincinnati, in partnership with Rumpke Recycling, Green Umbrella, Keep Cincinnati Beautiful, and Metro is launching an integrated recycling campaign in the neighborhood of East Price Hill in Cincinnati. The campaign will begin on March 16th. We will be canvassing the 4,000 or so residential homes in Cincinnati's East Price Hill (EPH). Businesses, schools, and community organizations will also be targeted for support for a fully integrated approach.

Our primary goal is to increase and sustain curbside recycling participation in EPH. Our secondary goals are (1) identify barriers and benefits of recycling for the EPH community, (2) test the idea that the availability of interior bin for a household resolves a major barrier for sustained recycling behavior, and (3) raise awareness of recycling in general and specific challenges Rumpke Recycling faces and the community can assist. (For example, plastic bags can't be recycled because they jam a $32 million dollar Rumpke recycling operation. However, other entities, such as Kroger, will take plastic bags and recycle them.)

Cincinnati's current curbside recycling participation rate averages 70%, making it a leader in the Mid-West. The City has a goal of becoming a national leader. It plans to target all 50 neighborhoods over the next 10-15 years. We hope to continue to gather important recycling data along the way helping the City succeed.

While the commitment to sustainability and curbside recycling is very common in other cities, very few have the infrastructure necessary to measure the impact of such an undertaking. The City of Cincinnati has incorporated Radio Frequency Identification Tags (RFID Tags) on all Rumpke recycling trucks. All recycling carts are given a specific Tag Identification Number. This allows the City to track every cart and to know when each specific cart is tipped by the recycling truck. This type of infrastructure is new in the world of curbside recycling and Cincinnati is one of the few cities in the country that has it giving the City the measurement tools necessary to track its progress in increasing recycling rates. BrainBox is excited to be able to facilitate this process and help the City continuously improve its recycling campaign initiatives.

BrainBox ltd is a social purpose company dedicated to serving other social purpose companies and projects through our process management abilities and our understanding of social impact and collective actions and behavioral changes for the better.

“Tacit Knowledge” – What is it?

When I first learned how to drive in Cincinnati, there were no gadget gizmos like Google Map or OnStar. This was back in the mid-1990s’ and if you wanted to get somewhere unknown, you had to plot it on a map—which I found on the back of a phone book—and figure out the major streets and a sense of direction. From there, you just have to get on the road, and test it out. Cincinnati is also a bit strange. Streets will cut off in one part of the city and pick up in another. Most often, streets will change names as you proceed through from one part of the city to another. This made driving fun and difficult, but it forced me to learn landmarks and develop a topographic understanding of the city’s throughways.

More than ten years later, my wife and I moved back to Cincinnati and now it’s her turn to figure out the streets. She, of course, has the handy-dandy smart phone with the not so helpful Siri. She also has OnStar and those people will bend over backwards to do your bidding. My wife heavily relies on the technology and plotted routs. I get very frustrated when I try to tell her not to go a certain way because instinctively I knew that would be a bad way to go. She often refuses to listen and trusts the formal institutional knowledge Google and OnStar has put together on their servers. Sure, my brain may have less memory and horse-power; but I am much better at predicting the traffic flow and knowing just how long it will take the car to get from point A to point B. My wife, on the other hand, refuses to acknowledge my intimate familiarity with this city’s landscape.

What I have in my brain about the city’s driving ecosystem is a sort of “tacit knowledge” It’s earned through driving countless times and being lost in the city’s maze . . . again, and again, and again. It’s tacit in the sense that I don’t know the street names or which street connects to which. Instead, I know the feel of the neighborhoods, the old buildings that has been there for decades, the empty parking lot that once was a dwindling shopping center. This is not really knowledge in a formal sense since I don’t categorize it by north vs. south, left-turns vs. right turns. Instead, I rely on a judgment on how far I’ve gone in which direction and what’s around that seems right and what seems wrong. The details are voluminous and often mundane; I taken them for granted.

This phenomenon also occurs in organizations and companies. Often referred to as “organizational knowledge”, most people think it can be categorized and transferred. But in part I believe it should not if the objective is organizational growth. Instead of transferring it, your organization or company should really think about permeating it into your organizational culture and innovate with it.

Think about it, "tacit knowledge" resides with the people who live and breathe your organization or company. They are information or practices that would make a difference in an stakeholder collaborative innovation process because they give you a sense or feel of what’s right and what’s wrong. That’s why when companies innovate, they should rarely rely on outsiders to do the job. Leave to strangers to create means leaving them with a map and letting them find the formal path that you would’ve found anyway if you weren’t so lazy. Internal innovation means stakeholders involved and getting comfortable with the way things will come together in a group setting. When tacit knowledge of a group of internal stakeholders is put together, you will find they inherently find a pattern and a path forward.

This is an intuitive way of moving forward. It's much better than the institutionalized methods of paying for a boxed thinking. Out of the box I say.

the 3D Manifesto

I followed a cookie trail today to PDIA (Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation). At its core, it’s a process based governance development theory that’s also focused on engagement and influence. Intrinsically it recognizes the bifurcation between people and society, the fact that complexity demands systematically factored and analyzed steps or iterations, and encourages learning from positive deviance or good disruptive thinking in an attempt to get people to think and “do development differently.”

It is the exact same thing my wife and I have been doing for a while now. We just don’t have the fancy acronyms and the prestige of “Harvard” to stand behind. We call our little project “BrainBox.”Although our work is slow to gain traction, but at this exciting discovery of the 3D Manifesto we are validated. Yup, that makes a pretty good day


The DDD Manifesto – the BrainBox abridged version.

“Ask, think, create and do; with your ecosystem of empowered stakeholders.” 

 Developments with real results usually involve many players – governments, civil society, international agencies and the private sector – working together to deliver real progress in complex situations and despite strong resistance. In practice, successful initiatives reflect common principles. 

 • They focus on solving local problems that are debated, defined and refined by local people in an ongoing process. 

• They are legitimised at all levels (political, managerial and social), building ownership and momentum throughout the process to be ‘locally owned’ in reality (not just on paper).

• They work through local conveners who mobilise all those with a stake in progress (in both formal and informal coalitions and teams) to tackle common problems and introduce relevant change.

• They blend design and implementation through rapid cycles of planning, action, reflection and revision (drawing on local knowledge, feedback and energy) to foster learning from both success and failure.

• They manage risks by making ‘small bets’: pursuing activities with promise and dropping others.

• They foster real results – real solutions to real problems that have real impact: they build trust, empower people and promote sustainability. 

You can look at the 3D Manifesto here.There’s a pretty impressive list of people who have signed on to the Manifesto and as of today, we have also signed.

Sustainability Index for Non-profits.

A little company in town called P&G recently updated its Sustainability Guidelines. It sent a reminder to its external business partners and their suppliers to comply with its Sustainability Guideline or face audits and possible discontinuation of future businesses for failure of compliance. P&G’s Sustainability Guidelines is an impressive list of actionable items including strict legal compliance, respecting human rights, respecting child labor and anti-force labor standards, health and safety, wage and hours standards, anti-discrimination practices, environmental standards, collective bargaining standards, anti-corruption standards, privacy standards, and personnel security standards.

 P&G’s Sustainability Guidelines seem to be directed at for-profit entities primarily doing business in other countries but for a non-profit local to P&G’s footprint and receiving annual grants from P&G’s philanthropy efforts, it is worthwhile to think how this will impact the value proposition during the annual grant writing process. Intrinsically, the question of whether the non-profit can measure its own sustainability index and performance intrigued me. Naturally, when the question was presented to me by a non-profit’s board member I jumped at the change to think this one through.

First, you have to define the measuring criteria in each of the three (3) sustainability categories – social, environmental and economical performance. P&G has done this with its own operations and ecosystem of stakeholders in mind. Their Guidelines are unique to P&G, but the premise is replicable. You just have to follow a process of define, measure, analyze and improve for the relevant factors identified in each of the three categories. It's a bit of work, but it's nothing too complicated.

I.     Social Performance.

The social performance of non-profits is often neglected because most non-profits are mission driven. They are already socially orientated so its leadership and those evaluating these non-profits aren’t looking outside the mission box. But sustainability is more than that, and stopping at the non-profit’s social mission neglects the wider ecosystem in which the non-profit exist. Can the non-profit do more? Can it easily cooperate with another and find synergy? These are often questions not asked. Interestingly, this mentality sets in at later stages of a non-profit’s operation when it has paid staff who are very silo-ed and have accustomed to the “it’s not my job” mentality. For the younger and budding non-profits, this isn’t so much of a problem and I find some of the less established non-profits are more flexible in their ability to collaborate and there are less barriers since they are not so much economically incentivized.

This adaptability often yields interesting results in new venture formations.

So how do you measure a non-profit’s mission in the context of sustainability? Well, you have to look at what that mission is and if it is a durable or an end-goal mission. For example, a charity for curing cancer will cease to exist (likely) when cancer is cured; but a charity that is focused on leadership development will never have an expiration date on its operations. So long as there are people, leaders are to be developed.

You also have to look at its flexibility, in terms of adaptability not only in budgeting but also with respect to innovation—does the non-profit have a process for creating value out of its original ideas and not just fundraising efforts? I find a non-profit with older constituents and larger operation size are less flexible and a non-profit with younger constituents and small operation size are more flexible and tends to be more creative. They ca capture new value and can grow very quickly. However, the x-factor in this analysis is whether the non-profit has heart. How passionate is its stakeholders? I find that a lot of passion will transform perceived demographic barriers and make older people creative and adaptable.

Another way to look at a non-profit is through its focus on diversity and inclusion. There are many ways to define diversity and inclusion, but I believe it’s more about diversity of experiences and thoughts, and giving that diversity a voice that really creates value for any organization. Of course skin color or cultural differences naturally manifest into diversity of thoughts and experience, but the really good organizations look beyond skin deep and try to do something about empowering its minority and often neglected constituents.

It is also a good idea to look out for the lack of diversity and inclusiveness that manifest in unexpected ways. Take organizational structure for example. Most organizations love org-charts and love to tell its staff where they fit-in in the grand scheme of things. This leads to exclusion of thoughts in the same way discrimination works against skin color or gender or cultural background. Think about it, your idea is not valued simply because you are working as an administrative assistance and everyone assume you have nothing to contribute to the new fund raising campaign initiative even though they are targeting exactly your demographic. How does that make you feel?

So there are a number of questions a non-profit, or any organization, can ask: is it diverse and inclusive not just for the sake of appearances, but because the organization really values what everyone has to contribute? Is it putting this to practice and really allow opportunities for the diverse and often minority voice? And finally is it implicitly exclusive (for example, is its mission to serve a particular political party)?

Finally, you can also measure the social performance of a non-profit by the educational impact it has on its stakeholders. Here, you want to examine whether the organization is systematically following a script (donate to disabled veterans) and not really inspiring its stakeholders to be creative and really think of solutions to the social problems it is trying to address; or is it finding a new way of looking at the root problems and finding holistic sensible solutions to really alleviate the problem? Here, you have to think a bit counterintuitively. If you are really just raising funds, then you want the problem to exist so you can sustain your fundraising campaigns. On the other hand, if you are really looking at how to solve a problem then you should be working yourself out of a job. Because by the end of the day, you have solved the problem and your charitable work is no longer needed. But this is only applicable to those non-profits without a durable pro-active mission. A non-durable passive mission is one that aims to solve a problem. Once the problem goes away, then the mission is no longer applicable. It is reactionary. It’s good that we are solving problems, but sustainability is more about anticipating what’s ahead. A durable active mission is one that aims to empower a particular good thing in society. The arts for example; or developing today’s leaders and tomorrow’s communities as one non-profits has it. After all, you will probably never run out of good leaders to develop and good communities to build; I hope we never run out of good art to promote. 

To recap, the social performance of a non-profit can be evaluated by its mission and purpose, by its adaptability and innovative capacity, by its diversity and inclusion, and by its educational and inspirational impact. Under each of the four factors, benefits and barriers can be assigned scores based on subjectivity and although not an entirely accurate science, it does provide a good gauge of how well the non-profit is performing beyond just a mere assessment of its ability to perform its mission.

II.     Environmental Performance.

Following a lazy-man’s assessment, our non-profit isn’t about the environment so this is not applicable to us. Right? Or, we aren’t subject to any environmental laws, so we don’t have to be assessed in this category. Okay? No. Everyone has an environmental impact and any organization can do something about it.

To start, there are three categories under environmental performance we can use to assess a non-profit’s environmental performance standard: conservation, protection, and impact. First, conservation is about reduce, reuse, up-cycle and recycle. All organizations can be mindful of how they are reusing their material, how they are reducing their carbon footprint, and how they are creatively recycling things they were throwing away. How well does your non-profit manage its resources? How well does your organization communicate needs and surplus?

Protection is about being mindful of making the right choices. If you can order 100 t-shirts from a company overseas (high transportation cost and carbon footprint) and that company uses environmentally unfriendly processes (using harsh chemicals to dye), then do you really need to save that five dollars per t-shirt? A even better question, why are you buying the t-shirt in the first place? Is it because your constituents really need it or is it because that’s just what everyone else is doing?

Finally, let’s talk about impact. Your non-profit has a lot of brand power for your own advocacy work. But are you leveraging that brand power to co-brand environmental initiatives? Are you making the connection of your brand recognition with any environmental problems that you’ve turned a blind eye? For example, if your mission is to alleviate poverty are you also looking at how the poorest are often living next to the most polluted places and have higher health care costs because of this? After you have connected the dots and recognized how closely connected you are to the environmental impact you can make, are you leveraging your organization’s social diffusion power to really make a stink about your new found knowledge?

III.     Economic Performance.

This is a small category because non-profits by definition are not focused on just making the single profitable bottom line. Non-profits are mission driven to begin with and is at a lower risk level for lack of good governance and corporate social responsibility.

What does need to be addressed with non-profits are often their cost of inefficiencies both in terms of its operations and its administrations. It’s also important to look at its budgeting (how good is the organization at predicting fluctuations in its revenue cycles and how good is it at reducing ineffective cost items and protocols). Additionally, it’s important to examine whether the non-profit is looking at opportunities and stakeholder involvement. Is it getting its constituents involved in the innovation process to capture new value that has otherwise been neglected?



These are just the starting points. I can go on for days. . .

The Value of Conservation - benefit that flows from nature to us.

Fairness is a fundamental component of a well functioning economy. Buyer and seller have to believe the transaction is fair in order for the transaction to work. But in the early years of our industrial process, the buyers did not understand the economics of nature being transformed for the sake of human consumption. We did not realize the cost of a new shiny cell phone meant labor disputes, social unrest, environmental pollution, climate change, and so on. But today's market place is much smarter than before. Stakeholders have the knowledge and they are incrementally measuring and demanding back the cost that was previously uncaptured. They still want their new shiny cell phone, but they want to know it's made sensibly and in the best way possible. The crowd is also more connected than ever and their reinforcing the good ideas and collectively rejecting the bad ones.   

If economics is really the currency of policy, this new demand of economic accountancy for natural resources and social and environmental impacts should shape policies around the world. But the changes are already happening. We are already seeing more stringent social and environmental standards and reporting requirements. We are also seeing the connected web becoming more exposed and responsive to any violations.    


Well, that's the price you pay for playing this game, right?

The Creative Collective

Big Data is all the rage these days. It’s probably the first time in human history that we have gathered so much information about our individual and collective habits that we can actually do something meaningful with the information. Many marketers jump to the chance to better segment demographics and develop archetypical consumption habits to encourage selling more junk we don’t need.

Yes, let’s all catch the mad gold rush to Mt. Spendmore.

But there are better ways to use big data, isn’t there? Many industries are challenged to enhance reliability, reduce costs, and stimulate revenue while using materials and energy more efficiently with big data. This is a step in the right direction, but often overlooked is the ability for these industries to embrace information technology even further to leverage dynamic real-time demand response to optimize process—the whole process of consumption from producers to consumers. While some are using big data this way in small increments, they have not yet fully actualized the social tech’s offering of multi-stakeholder collaboration; and by definition they neglect the bigger picture of why it is important to achieve efficiency, reduce cost, and promote reliability. In my opinion, the end goal is to work our way to less dependency on the more scarce resources and turn our attention to utilizing more of the abundance we already have through collective efforts (trash recycling anyone?).

 So while the smart industries are sorting through mountains of information to figure out just how to be more efficient, they are turning a blind eye to combining information to form a dynamic communication method for a new way of thinking about the economy. This I find troubling. Perhaps it’s a mere symptom of linear static thinking that is prevalent in western metaphysics—where Americans seem to believe things are penultimate of the Monadology, Eastern thoughts often resolve to know things are in constant flux, that perfection is impossible because there is always room for improvement; and therefore, things are not as what they seem.

Where does this leave us in terms of innovation? If you really think about creativity and innovation, the components include originality and value creation. But to limit creativity and innovation to individuals is short changing the human race. While a degree of freedom is necessary for the exercise of creativity and innovation, but collective mentality and innovation are not mutually exclusive. I like to think we are somewhat capable of collaborating and creating common core solutions that are, well, ORIGINAL. So when we begin to think of the constant flux of things and the potential that big data offers us in terms of running into the next new big thing (Google for example), we see that the conundrum isn’t in why we can’t think in better ways. Rather it’s more about why we have not yet picked the better pack to believe in better outcomes.

This Is About Philosophy and Culture

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a simple and contagious idea, but its operation is extremely complex. It involves both technical factors relevant to your business operation and human factors of your stakeholders. It is one thing to improve your technical process efficiency, but it is entirely another to encourage your people to make the right decisions and be empowered to fully incorporate sustainability into their routines.

You can probably hire process improvement consultants to help you find more efficient equipment and protocols, but how do you inject the right kind of company culture and philosophy to prevent the kind of greenwashing that will end up costing you in the long run?

I will venture to bet that any consultant will not know your organizational core better than you do, better than your stakeholders do. Then why would you hire someone else to come in and help you “brand” and market that brand? That’s nonsense.

What you need is someone to come in and help you map your existing ecosystem of stakeholders and better define their core value to discover your existing brand. You need a restatement of your company philosophy and you need to empower your constituents to actively change your corporate culture to become more sustainable. Your consultants should provide you with sustainability index and guidelines to rail that process to success. If you come across a consultant that offers to design a sustainability program for your company, our advice is RUN!

You want your consultant to tell you that they know how to educate and empower your human factor and coincide that with a technical process improvement to be more sustainable. At the same time, we remind you that this is easily done via social media technology and you can easily capture some marketing opportunities if you allow the organic process of empowering your stakeholders.

Of course we run into naysayers who will allege these lofty thoughts are too high-level and not practical. what would you have us do? continue without a set of good sustainable principles? Keep going without a culture that matters and a philosophy that makes sense? 

Use your available resources to make a sustainable transition. This is about innovation from the depth of your own corporate philosophy. Anything else is simply uncivilized.

Remember: “ask, think, create, and do.”

Outside the Box Content Marketing Solutions

- by Lauren Campbell-Kong


We are all aware of the issues with content marketing (especially in the B2B realm). Here are the reported 2014/2015 top 3:

• Producing Engaging Content
• Producing Content Consistently
• Measuring Content Effectiveness

In my last post I addressed the lack of outside the box thinking with these problems; how most content marketing strategists use the metaphorical  "social media blanket" to throw your company and process underneath in hopes for a decent outcome.

Here at BrainBox, we strive to change the "throw shit against the wall and see what sticks" mentality. And I'm going to offer up some outside the box thinking solutions to your problems.

I'm going to start with Producing Content Consistently because it seems the most straight forward.

Yes, it is important to produce content and to do so consistently, but publishing content for the sake of publishing is a big no no. In the world of digital media and social media interaction, individuals recognize when you are not whole-heartedly committed to something, whether that with engagement or content,  and it will affect your credibility in the sphere of the interwebs (the Millennials love transparency after all). Social media cred is just as important as street cred these days and once you've lost it, it is almost impossible to get back. So before you hit 'publish' on your company blog, make sure that the writers had real purpose for why they wrote it. This is where the 'why' part of content is crucial and must be answered prior to hitting that button; are you providing solutions to answers; are you sharing your outside the box thinking of mainstream ideas (we do that here a lot, it's our M.O.); are you sharing something expressive to your employees and your audience?

This brings me to my next topic: Producing Engaging Content.

Engaging with an audience, developing a following, having brand champions are all the by-product of  high quality and engaging content (even saying this is like beating my head against a wall). However, most content marketing consultants will tell you to only publish content that means something to your audience. Then they reference the almighty 'funnel' through which you should pull your potential clients down so that once they're at the bottom they will purchase something; it's actually really messed up to think of social interaction this way. That type of thinking is where issues begin. What about content you think is meaningful or content your employees want to share? To have the expectation that every time you put something out on the web it is supposed to only benefit potential leads, you are missing out on many other opportunities. Showing people that you care about more than what is only happening in your industry, gives insight into your 'humaness,' if you will. It sheds light on what you're passionate about, not only your business, but other aspects.

This is where I begin advocating for allowing your employees to share things that are meaningful to them; building a rapport with the audience along the way. Allowing your employees' different personalities shine through is the best way to get them, not only committed to your company, but committed to you. Through high engagement on topics outside of your company, you build trust and credibility; engaging on a human level is imperative though.

It is common practice these days for companies and organizations to set up a social media engagement outline for employees to follow; to ensure uniformity throughout the different platforms. But what if someone in your audience doesn't like the way you interact, doesn't like the personality you've put forth? That means you've lost a potential champion for your cause. Personalities are different, people are different, and allowing your employees' personalities to shine through helps create a diverse internet presence, providing connection opportunities exponentially greater than if you went the 'single personality' route. Not to mention that different social platforms have different engagement expectations and online cultures; but I will get back to that.


In addition to utilizing employee differences and personality types, it is important to utilize outside organizations, companies, and brands. This issue is more apparent in the for-profit sector. Non-profits tend to work with other organizations, companies, and educational systems and utilize the networking opportunity to give recognition and appreciation to all parties involved, especially through social media; working with lower budgets and needing as much free advertising as possible. For-profit entities tend to only promote non-profits they work with, typically just 1 or 2 and rarely promote other businesses; but I'm sure would appreciate free advertising too! Positively encourage and lift other businesses around you, it doesn't have to be a direct competitor by any means, but when you champion for other entities and lift them up, then you get to begin moving away from that 'dragging someone down a tunnel' model.

Through the practice of embracing other entities you will begin to see your online interaction increase. It is important to note that this is no easy feat and will not happen over night. Once this model is adopted, you must begin thinking of your process as a cultural one, and any anthropologist will tell you changing culture does not happen overnight (well, unless there is immediate and impending doom but this is not that). This is why it is important to recognize the time that will be needed to dedicate to this and the empowerment that you must grow in  your employees. Companies like Infusionsoft and Hubspot help you streamline this process and while what they do helps a small few, this isn't a process that should be streamlined for long-term use and for the largest ROI.

Measuring Content Effectiveness is directly related to ROI; that after all is how businesses measure themselves right? The problem with this thought process is the necessity to put quantifiable constraints on a qualifiable measurement. I know that you can measure the ROI of content marketing: Google Analytics, Hubspot, AdWords, Marketo, are all programs that help do that, but what about when a non-profit thanks you for the work you did for free? How do you measure the ROI of that? Or when an employee connects with someone over a cat video and that person decides to donate money to a feline cause in your name?  Or when a local coffee shop sees you promoting their coffee and decides to give you a free coffee the next time you come in?

These aren't the easiest numbers to quantify and assign a profit or loss to, but they're helping you in the long-run and hopefully you're helping someone else in the process.

These 'outside the box' points will hopefully help many of you begin to stop drinking the kool-aid if you will and start empowering you to think for yourselves.