Lessons of Abundance, True Profit & Metis Practices

One of the lessons that stood out to me was shifting from a mindset of scarcity to abundance. A friend had recently shared an anecdote about her experience with these two ideas. She had a moment when life put her in a

financial rut out of nowhere, for something she felt was of no fault of her own. In that initial moment she wanted to react as she had in the past. From a place of fear and anxiety which may had led her to make poor choices and easily resulted in negative outcome. Instead, she decided to continue her day living in abundance only keeping a few things in mind: gratitude for the resources she DID have and that everything has a solution. A solution that she could get to by staying calm and making wise choices instead of rash ones. Sure enough the issue was eventually solved and she was released from that financial burden. She attributed the positive outcome to keeping the mindset of abundance. Taking a step back from the situation and looking at it in a multidimensional way, working in community and staying open to an opportunity to solve the problem. This same thing can be applied to everything in life, including a more sustainable way of living, designing, producing, etc. Cradle to Cradle speaks of “eco-efficiency” as a reactionary method stemming from fear and guilt that calls for minimalism, sacrifice, and reduction. Eco-effiency’s goal is, “…zero: zero waste, zero emissions, zero ecological footprint.” The International Style of architecture teaches us that in minimizing, we lose value such as culture, nature, energy, and material flow. Things become stark and depressing. So instead of striving for scarcity (LESS bad), we should operate in abundance (100% good).

The second lesson that stuck out to me is the idea of “profit” and the truth behind it. Income minus expenses equals profit. But are we really including ALL expenses and costs of producing a product or service when calculating what we have gained from it? Are we including the sacrifices and poor quality of life underpaid workers have to endure? Are we including the diseases we and future generations will face from interacting with the harmful chemicals used? Are we including the negative effects our methods of production have on our environment and the cost of climate change they impose? When we think about profit in this way, most operations are in a deficit. This reminds me of when I owned and operated my own business. A vegan bakeshop using only organic,

Fairtrade ingredients and “eco-friendly” packaging. I did everything myself because I didn’t want to hire someone unless I could pay them a fair wage. Owning a bakery had always been a dream of mine but I told myself I would only do it if I could do it in a right, fair way. Eliminating any gaps of injustice from my business model. Without having read this idea of true profitability, I was unknowingly striving for exactly that. Innocently, I was hoping to break even to start and eventually get to earning a monetary profit from this operation. Instead, I was met with a whole lot of hardship, debt, and eventually a “failed” business. Don’t get me wrong, in my efforts to avoid intangible/non-monetary expenses, I fostered beautiful friendships, inspired justice, and felt pride in what I was doing. I had made intangible/non-monetary income but at the end of the day I could not pay my bills and in fact, I dug myself in a hole of debt. So, if I was doing everything “right,” what went wrong?

The current culture of consuming inexpensive, low-quality items that carry other un-intended additives (expenses) was a problem. Customers would pass up buying one of my desserts because it was too expensive. They did not understand the value of organically grown, humanely harvested ingredients. They didn’t know the hours of labor I put into operating all aspects of my business, or the price of using only “eco-friendly” packaging and materials. Even then, I tried my best to make my goods as financially accessible as possible. Alas, my sustainable business proved to not be sustainable for me anymore. In hindsight, I understand that I was working with the mindset of scarcity. Avoiding things instead of finding opportunities and being resourceful, using what was accessible to me. I was working alone instead of in community; I was so overwhelmed and not taking a step back to think multidimensionally. Lastly, I was working within a badly designed system that rewards cutting corners and ignores unethical expenses. I sometimes entertain the idea of how “profitable” I could have been by using what McDonogh and Braungart (Cradle to Cradle) refer to as brute force. In this case, brute force would have been using non-organic, non-Fairtrade, low-quality ingredients, hired one or two assistants at an incredibly low wage, used virgin plastic or Styrofoam packaging, etc. Instead I stuck to my promise of ethics before false profit. I decided I needed to gain more wisdom before attempting to design another truly sustainable business/service/product.

The last lesson that stuck with me is designing based on the metis and techne methods coined by James Scott in his work, “Seeing like a State.” Scott explains that metis practices and experiences are, “almost always local”, and “applicable to similar but never identical situations”. This reminds me of the 9th

century Subak irrigation system specific to the paddy fields of Bali considering particular interconnected components (nature, culture, religion) of the region. While this democratic, spiritual and sustainable method worked for the ancient Balinese, it may not work as well somewhere else that has different variables to consider. Though regional terrain and natural resources were important to the Subak irrigation model, I think it is interesting to note how crucial to the design the cultural behavior component was as well. Social system analysis must always be an axis on our multidimensional systems thinking plane. This approach coined by anthropologist, Dr. Thomas Wright, “analyzes sociocultural contexts and identifies problems within a social system”. Maybe my vegan bakery business would have been more successful somewhere like California where the general culture values healthier foods and more ethical/eco-friendly practices? I hadn’t quite analyzed that Miami’s inherent culture might be different. Perhaps, the Subak water irrigation system would not be successful in Europe where they mainly believe in one god, not many gods (including the goddess of water). Much like the dynamic of metis and techne methods, social system analysis is a qualitative approach that frames and supports the quantitative data of other axes within our multidimensional plane that is systems thinking.

Bibliography:

Braungart, M., & McDonough, W. (2009). A Question of Design. In Cradle to cradle. book.

Braungart, M., & McDonough, W. (2009). Why Being “Less Bad” is No Good. In Cradle to cradle. book.

Scott, J. C. (2020). Conclusion. In Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. essay, Yale University Press.

Wright, T. (2020, November 24). Social system analysis - an approach to design insights at scale. Medium. https://uxdesign.cc/social-system-analysis-an-interdisciplinary-approach-to-design-insights-at-scale-c9c3ee60212d.