When it comes to reputation, perception is everything, and my home state of Vermont certainly has the art down to a science. In the popular imagination, it’s a semi-mystical rural realm where idyllic agrarian landscapes nestle in perfect balance amidst untouched natural wonder, a modern day Shangri-La saved from 21st century hurly burly by earnest homesteaders whose progressive values have forged new harmonies between neighbors and nature.
That may be dangerously oversimplified postcard romanticism, but it has its roots in an inescapable truth: Vermont is an intimate place where simpler is indeed the rule. Within our borders, you’ll find none of the “supersizing” associated with much of the rest of the country. No huge cities. No sprawling suburbs. Few industrial facilities. No giant malls or superhighways. There aren’t even any billboards. In their place are small towns, family farms, and largely local businesses, all usually somewhat removed from one another by fortuitous cruelties of geography that have conspired to discourage anything more.
We are, for the most part, the boondocks epitomized. But where outsiders see isolation, Vermonters themselves experience quite the opposite. Our human scale of life has allowed many things to flourish that have gone missing where things got big. Our rates of civic participation run high. Connections between neighbors are typically strong. Access to government is great. We enjoy a thriving cultural scene and burgeoning local food system. And most of these things happen for one overriding reason: There just aren’t very of us here.
Vermont’s relatively remote location, its mountainous terrain, lackluster job market, and forbidding climate conspire to keep the numbers low. With so few people involved in any given endeavor, it’s a lot easier to forge connections to institutions and each other. Whether it’s a friend, a business, or a government agency, we generally don’t have to compete much for attention.
This helps get things done. If an issue arises, an encounter between citizenry and government official in the local general store may solve it. Someone might host a potluck dinner with neighbors to discuss matters. If more is required, we gather in the school gym to hash things out or take it to the statehouse where a part-time citizen legislature is all ears.
Elsewhere things are not as easy. In a community of countless thousands, the ever-growing multiplicity of people and places makes it geometrically more difficult to create progress. One probably won’t be bumping into the governor at the coffee shop or their senator on the street. There are too many shops and too many streets. Venues large enough to hold all the opinions in town can be hard to come by and the hectic pace of life leaves few with the time to participate.
These are decision-making, action-taking challenges Vermont generally doesn’t have. Instead our size encourages forward motion by making issues and solutions easier to identify, seize, and act upon individually and together.
Vermonters are, for example, rallying quite effectively around the issue of climate change. We are reducing carbon footprints, retrofitting public buildings, rethinking transportation systems, and launching localvore initiatives because we can. The lesser scales in which we operate create an inherent manageability that facilitates healthy momentum.
At the same time, it’s clear that solutions to crises like global warming depend on humanity’s ability to engineer them on a mass scale. Small may be beautiful, but successfully addressing big problems means deploying equally outsized responses, and we must scale up to achieve the critical mass civilization now required. And scaling up will depend on local communities acting in a globally orchestrated manner.
Yet when human systems get bigger, they get more complicated and more difficult to operate. With each added systemic dimension, alienation grows, apathy rises, disengagement increases. Make the system large enough, and it becomes its own worst enemy.
The challenge is to ensure that as a system expands, it doesn’t lose touch with the whole of itself so that actions and priorities remain focused on what’s in the best interests of all rather than on things that benefit only a few. When there are lots of players involved, individuals and teams can easily find themselves at odds with each other and incentivized to maximize their own performance at the expense of the greater community’s.
At Seventh Generation, we’ve seen these perils firsthand. In the mid 90s, our company shed its mail-order business and our employee count fell off a cliff into single digits. While there was more work for everyone and the tasks were challenging, their actual interoffice execution was free of logistical complication—it was easier to get things done because the sum total of our internal resources was never more than a few feet away. We had achieved the ease of system operation that small provides.
Today, our company is 20 times larger than it was in the catalog days, and employees across four time zones corral a network of suppliers, manufacturing facilities, distributors, and customers from coast to coast. Our scale is much larger and has to be, for our existence is predicated on the advantages that growth’s economies of scale provide. Without them, our goods would be prohibitively expensive, our ability to compete would be crippled, and our overriding corporate mission to create a safer, healthier world would likely be far less impactful.
Our challenge has been much the same as humanity’s: to engineer survival in a sustainable way. Our conundrum has also been nearly identical: how can we get big while maintaining those synergies and passions that come from staying fundamentally small? How do we grow yet stay true to our entrepreneurial spirit? How might we transfer our original small-scale ability to get things done to a larger stage?
Our breakthrough was to realize that we don’t have to forgo one for the other—and shouldn’t.
As a culture, we tend to celebrate big and view small as simply its stepping stone. The qualities of small are too often seen not as virtues but as impediments, and we frequently fail to appreciate the fact that small does many things that big cannot. This gap in our understanding leads us to build large systems (think multinational companies with hundreds of thousands of employees and supply chains so long that no one can see from one end to the other) without incorporating any of the smaller operational scales that bring a host of otherwise precluded benefits to the table, gains which often mean the difference between failure and success.
Instead, no matter what cause we wish to advance, we must learn how to place the small within the large in order to perpetuate our systems and their outcomes. Nature does this magnificently; it combines small local ecosystems into bioregions that form a global system. In humanity’s case, we must learn how to connect individuals to many others to create an energy that’s greater than the sum of its parts while ensuring that what results doesn’t drain this vast collective power of its potential by destroying the very spirits of which it’s composed.
A Seventh Generation initiative called Tampontification shows what happens when we do. Intended to get women talking about the safety of feminine care products, the program was designed to draw large numbers of people into an online conversation. To prevent that experience from becoming impersonal, each visitor was linked to their nearest woman’s shelter and given the opportunity to make a company-sponsored donation. The result was catastrophic success: In one week alone 500,000 people participated, and the program had to be suspended before financial damage ensued.
Tampontification successfully faced the core systems challenge: Maintaining a sense of small community scale no matter how big the community in question actually gets so that the people involved remain moved by causes larger than themselves, bound by a shared vision, and willing to ask “what we can accomplish together” rather than “what’s in it for me?”
In my new book, The Responsibility Revolution, I look at the ways Seventh Generation has learned to bring the qualities of small to larger endeavors that desperately need them:
1) Understand that purpose matters. Find a vision that animates everything it touches and inspires an energized effort to always do more. Then make sure this purpose is never subsumed by the immediate demands of the system created to support it. A lofty sense of purpose stretches people’s ambition and drive, but in a big system it’s often replaced by the task at hand. People’s focus tends to slowly drift from the overarching goal to their own responsibility for their particular cog in the machine. Always keep this work connected to the greater common cause. At Seventh Generation, for example, we consciously strive to bring the meaning of our Native American name (which is derived from our tagline “in our every deliberation we will consider the impacts of our decisions on the next seven generations”) to every project. It’s a unifier that everyone shares no matter what their work involves. It reinforces our common purpose and intimately keeps each person focused on the same big picture.
2) Encourage transparency. Putting everyone’s actions and decisions from the top down on the record forces individuals to answer to their peers and strive for their best. When all contributions are completely visible, a community is created in which everybody is a somebody and every somebody is accountable. Everyone sees who’s doing well and who needs help. At Seventh Generation, we share that and more in our corporate responsibility report, which discloses the good, the bad and the downright ugly. It’s a pure expression of something we call “radical transparency,” and it keeps everyone feeling part of the team.
3) Decentralize decision-making and push it to the front lines, where it will have the greatest impact. When those at the top of a system or organization have the selflessness to replace hierarchy with humanity and humility, and the wisdom to get out of the way, everyone else begins to make optimal small choices that make the larger system function better. Give people their wings, and they’ll take you to new heights. Clip those wings, and entropy will follow. Susan Johnson, Seventh Generation’s top sales manager demonstrates the power of this idea. Several years ago, she announced that she wanted to devote all her time to educating our retail partners. Though most felt the idea had questionable value, we gave her a trial period, which we were sure would validate our ample skepticism. Today the program Susan founded generates contributions to our bottom line greater than any she made in sales revenue.
4) Give everyone the freedom to design their own roles. In a large system, people give their diligence and, ideally, their intellect to projects that are assigned to them. But in a small system, people volunteer their higher-order capabilities—passion and creativity—to projects of their own choosing. Allowing individuals to do the work that personally matters most provides rewards that are more emotional, which in turn evokes greater individual contributions. At Seventh Generation, we underscore this self-determination by letting our staff choose their own titles. For example, I’m the Chief Inspired Protagonist. Our director of public relations is the company Conversationista, and instead of a brand manager we have a Brand Mother. It’s a simple thing that sets everyone free on their own path.
5) Start small and gradually scale up with care. Only when you’ve seen what works and what doesn’t are you ready to grow. The idea is to prevent excess baggage and unnecessary distractions from accumulating to toxic levels. Rather than force new growth under the existing organizational umbrella, duplicate small successes by independently replicating them elsewhere. Think fiefdoms not kingdoms as in the example set by WAGES, an organization that establishes small, cooperatively-owned green cleaning businesses for low income women. Rather than take its success national with a branch-offices, WAGES has yet to expand beyond San Francisco, and each WAGES co-op is an independent entity.
6) Cede navigational authority. Every large-scale system needs to successfully fulfill specified goals. But its individual components are in the best position to decide for themselves how to get there. Vermont’s efforts to combat climate change work because individual communities are determining their own best routes to success. One-size-fits-all orders from on high would divert much of this productive energy to argument, resistance, and political maneuvering. By breaking its system (the state) into individual self-guided parts (its towns), Vermont is able to function on both ends of the scale.
Through steps like these, we can scale down our environmental efforts even as we scale them up to the sizes they need in order to succeed. But there’s more to it than that because when we apply to larger systems the freedom, accountability, participative decision-making , and sense of purpose that characterize smaller efforts, we’re providing the very elements those systems need to survive over time and provide a more sustained source of progress. Small makes sure big stays in it for the long haul. And that’s the only way we’re going to finally take our world where it needs to go.