Quick one before we get into this week’s Rabbit Holes issue:
My talented friend Florian Schleicher just launched the 4th edition of his Simple & Sustainable Marketing Academy andI highly recommend it! With his experience at Greenpeace and Too Good To Go, Florian is THE guy (!) when it comes to marrying new strategic marketing techniques with sustainability values. On top of that, he’s also one of the kindest and most comfortable to talk to person I know. 😊
The academy, which will kick off on February 13th, 2025, consists of 5 live-online-group sessions with a cohort of 20 participants over the course of 2-months. These sessions will focus on:
♟️ what makes a successful, sustainable marketing strategy, 🔎 how you can really understand your target groups, 📚 how you can use storytelling to tell your stories, 🎨 how content marketing helps you draw attention to your brand in the long term 💚 and a fifth session with the Global Head of Creative from Too Good To Go on strategies in practice.
The previous +80 participants from 11 countries include start-up founders, solopreneurs and marketing talents from companies like N26, Burger King, The Tomorrow University, Faircado, munch or Forest Gum.
You can find all information, many testimonials from previous participants and some impressions on the journey that waits for you here:
Ticket prices start at € 199 and will increase on December 1st. Creative Destruction readers can use the code RABBITHOLES to save 10%.
THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Accountability Sinks // Kama Muta // Productive Inefficiency
🌀 Re-Framings: Business-As-Un-Usual // Nature Is Home // Care, Not Control
🧬 Frameworks: The Be-Commoning Model
🎨 Works: The Shopping Conspiracy // Walkcast // Assemble
Reading time: 7 minutes
🖼️ Framings
Naming Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.
🚽 Accountability Sinks
I’ve only now come across Dan Davies and his book. In it, Dan tackles an often ignored (or rarely framed) problem at the core of what I think is a massive trend towards a loss of accountability, which in turn becomes a key driver of the polycrisis and a key reason for the decreasing trust in organizations and institutions. (This relates a lot to Returning to Human Scale)
“In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.”
“For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system.” – Dan Davies
“[…] the uncontrolled proliferation of accountability sinks is one of the central drivers of what historian Adam Tooze calls the “polycrisis” of the 21st century. Their influence reaches far beyond frustrated customers endlessly on hold to “computer says no” service departments. […]
The origin of the problem, Davies argues, is the managerial revolution that began after the second world war, abetted by the advent of cheap computing power and the diffusion of algorithmic decision-making into every sphere of life. These systems have ended up “acting like a car’s crumple-zone to shield any individual manager from a disastrous decision”, he writes. While attractive from the individual’s perspective, they scramble the feedback on which society as a whole depends.”
I have never heard anything about kama muta – which, btw, means “moved by love” in Sanskrit – but I can immediately relate to it. It’s like Alan Fiske, the psychological anthropologist who coined and researched the emotion, says: “I’ve never given a talk about this where people have said: ‘I don’t recognise what you’re talking about.’”
“We experience it at some of the most important events of our lives – births, weddings, and funerals – and it is commonly exploited by writers, directors and marketeers to enhance the emotional impact of their stories. […]
Kama muta, the researchers argued, is a brief and positive (or bittersweet) feeling that is often described with metaphors depicting motion such as being “moved” or “stirred”. It is accompanied by a warmth in the chest, goosebumps on the skin, chills down the neck and tears in the eyes, and occurs during the sudden intensification of “communal sharing relationships” – with friends, family, lovers or members of the same community.
The triggers may vary widely. […] It could be your elderly neighbour making you soup when you are ill. You might hear a poet describe hardships that you have experienced. Or you may be at a commemoration for military heroes and the sacrifices they have made for you and your country. In each case, the goosebumps and tears arise from the enhanced connection that you are either witnessing or experiencing for yourself.
Kama muta enhances our commitment to our relationships and encourages us to act with greater compassion and kindness, both towards the person or people that have provoked the feeling, and more generally. “It helps you appreciate the relationships that you have,” says Fiske. “The feeling may last only 30 seconds or a minute, but the motivation endures.””
A perfect example of something we all feel but rarely put a name to. We all have these days or weeks when loads of things get done but in a way that doesn’t feel hurried or stressful. Let’s try to be more productively inefficient! (This relates to my piece Aliveness: Reframing Productivity.)
“The most sustainable way of living, the one that won’t leave us sleepless and mentally wired, may be a kind of “productive inefficiency”.
When life is productively inefficient, things get done, and they get done well, yet we slow down enough during the day, and recover enough periods of stillness and quiet and “doing nothing”, that our mind knows how to slow down again and stop when it’s time to sleep. The productivity that’s “lost” due to inefficiency is offset by numerous small gains, like better sleep, lower stress, seeing problems from unfamiliar angles, and more attentiveness in our interactions with other people.
And we might recover something else, something almost spiritual: glimpses of the world through an unrippled mirror.”
A few short reframings that I’ve recently stumbled across:
👔 Business-As-Un-Usual
In case you missed the publication of my latest report, here is a quick teaser:
Does business feel increasingly soul-sucking, meaningless, stressful, and dehumanizing to you?
We are all these creative, innovative, impact-driven, caring, change-enthusiastic, creative minds, but in the current business system…we cannot be ourselves. Because this way of doing business, this system, incentivizes egoism, fitting in, being like everyone else, being manipulative, thinking along, playing zero-sum games, and exploiting others including the environment around us.
Here comes the positive news, though:There is a world of business out there that is different! I call it the Business-As-Un-Usual world.
“As author and environmentalist Gary Snyder wisely observed, “Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.” Home is much more than a physical structure; it’s a profound sense of belonging rooted in our shared ancestry. If we look at evolution, we share a common ancestor with the weeds, wildflowers, and every other plant, animal, fish, algae, and invertebrate. For me, it feels incredible to have such a large extended family and to be comfortable knowing that I am nature and that I belong here. By inviting readers to expand their concept of home to encompass the natural world, I hope to cultivate a deeper sense of belonging and responsibility for our planet.
When we embrace our animal nature, we reclaim our wholeness, tear down walls, and come home. Woven together in wild beauty, we belong here. We need not feel so lonely. We can create a future where humans and nature thrive together.”
“As I thought about what I’ve written over the last few weeks, I realized that much of it could be summed with a simple imperative:
Resist the temptation to confuse control for care.
Implicit in how digital technologies are often marketed is the promise of greater control as if it were equivalent to greater care.
I chose the word control because it captures a wide array of possible practices and technologies. The promise of control might be expressed, for example, through technologies that offer the possibility of improved data-gathering, planning, monitoring, calibration, customization, scheduling, outsourcing, security, or documentation. In each case, we are encouraged to reduce the skill of caring—either in the sense of taking an interest in or looking out for the welfare of another—to one of these various forms of technological mediation. Technologically mediated expressions of control also suggest relationships of distance and detachment rather than presence and involvement, which can in turn imply a certain evasion of the risk and obligations that care can entail.”
Kama Muta is an interesting concept, and it reminds me of the ancient Latin word: compatīre, and its Greek counterpart: pathos. It's the sharing of a feeling (usually sadness)
Kama Muta is an interesting concept, and it reminds me of the ancient Latin word: compatīre, and its Greek counterpart: pathos. It's the sharing of a feeling (usually sadness)