We Need Moonshots

Compliance isn’t a strategy. The built environment industry should continue to lead with sustainability.

The built environment industry pioneered sustainability standards that other industries now benchmark against — LEED, BIFMA Level, and others didn’t come from regulation; they came from manufacturers who chose to lead. That legacy matters now more than ever.

Climate change is a slow-moving crisis with feedback loops too distant to feel urgent, which makes it easy to treat compliance as the finish line. It shouldn’t be. Keeping up with rising standards is survival, not strategy.

What the industry needs are moonshots: bold, audacious goals that reframe sustainability from a burden into a source of competitive identity and genuine leadership. The built environment has done it before. The question is whether it has the ambition to do it again.

The built environment industry has led before. LEED and BIFMA Level didn’t emerge from regulation; they emerged from built environment manufacturers who saw an opportunity to define the standard rather than chase it. Herman Miller, Steelcase, Haworth, Knoll, Teknion, and others pioneered sustainability standards that other industries now benchmark against. That kind of leadership is rare in a mature industry. It’s also exactly what’s required now.

Saving Ourselves

Climate change is undeniable at this point. Even if climate science is a work in progress, human population growth, combined with industrial processes, has worldwide second-order effects. We find coastlines changing, microplastics in the soil, polar ice caps shrinking, and more wildfires, droughts, and storms. These processes accelerate as our technology and resource needs increase. People need and want more power, more internet, more temperature-controlled spaces, more houses, more cars, concrete, and clothes. More fresh food. More of that supercomputer in your pocket, now featuring AI. While it can be difficult to understand the nuance, there is too much evidence to ignore that we’re on a path of reshaping the planet in our image.

Some don’t buy it. Perhaps we don’t fully understand what’s happening, that these changes are happening anyway, or that it’s too hard a problem to contemplate. Or that it’s become overly politicized, eroding credibility in solutions. Even if you could be persuaded, it can be hard to know what to do. Does our small part in a vast world have any real effect? How do you prioritize this when you are protecting a shrinking bottom line?

We live in complicated times. For the first time in human history, our connected world gives us continuous, real-time access to things happening across the globe, from wars to babies hearing for the first time. It feels like our reach exceeds our agency to effect change. People often talk about saving the planet. If you’ve spent time in remote places, you can see time expressed by tree rings and layers of sedimentary rock. Oceans, mountains, rivers, valleys. Whatever you think about environmentalism, what is abundantly clear is that while we think of sustainability as being about the planet, it’s really about us. The planet will be fine. We should worry about the people.

Crisis Management

The built environment industry itself is in a kind of crisis. Whether you see climate change as a driving force or an outlier, the industry is mature and entering a new era. Driven by climate, technology, or marketplace behavior, we know things are changing.

Andy Grove, the third employee and eventual third CEO of Intel, noted that “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.

Climate change is a crisis in slow motion. Consider these five stages of crisis management: signal detection to identify warning signs; preparation, planning, and prevention; containment to control the crisis; recovery to restore operations; and learning to improve future resilience. The trouble with climate change is that the causes and effects are spread too thin for us to notice.

We do a lot of planning and are trying to contain the problem as we see it, but we don’t see immediate effects. There’s nothing tangible to recover from, to be restored, or to be learned. We go through the motions because we believe it’s the right thing to do, or because we feel pressured by peers or industry influencers to meet standards to avoid elimination from an RFP.

Slow feedback loops don’t drive change. If only we could feel the pain of exercise right when we reach for that piece of cake, or the sting of paying the credit card bill at the moment we’re buying that new toy, we’d be more likely to hesitate. When the distance between the cause and effect is too great, we don’t see the connection.

We can’t be in crisis mode all the time anyway. A crisis causes stress, anxiety, and exhaustion. Too few signals and too much noise cause confusion. We need a more durable way forward.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a prioritization method comparing urgency and importance. We are encouraged to do the things that are both urgent and important immediately, schedule the things that are not urgent but important, delegate the things that are urgent but not important, and eliminate the things that are neither urgent nor important. In the largest sense, second-order climate change effects don’t feel all that urgent, but they are very important. We need a schedule.

We need to focus on what’s important. We need to act with confidence, grounded in a clear vision of the future.

Change Management

A more proactive approach is to understand how we are changing, and why, rather than focusing on the crisis itself. Change management stages include: creating urgency, building a coalition, forming a vision and strategy, communicating the vision, empowering action, creating short-term wins, sustaining acceleration, and anchoring change in the culture.

Unlike if a meteor were hurdling toward the earth that we could all see, a slow-moving crisis doesn’t feel urgent, making it hard to build a coalition. Even putting sustainability aside, many leaders wrestle with forming a vision and strategy, let alone communication and empowerment.

As with other slow-moving crises driving change, like industry consolidation and technological disruption, it can be hard to create a sense of urgency. What’s the driving force?

Creating urgency and building coalitions can emerge from crises, but also from a compelling vision. A successful strategic vision relies on a shared hypothesis of the future. What might happen in the world? How are we going to fit into what it becomes? As business thinker Roger Martin puts it: Where are we going to play? How are we going to win?

Managing change starts with knowing where you are headed. You need a clear North Star to get everyone on board and steer the ship. It’s not just about managing today, but imagining tomorrow.

Take the Win

As challenging and frustrating as sustainability may seem, the Built Environments industry is already a leader in the space. The LEED standard largely emerged from the office furniture industry. Herman Miller, Steelcase, Haworth, Knoll, Teknion, and others played an early role in developing a pioneering sustainability standard, which, in part, led to BIFMA’s Level standard.

Even more significant is how the LEED itself has become a standard that others have benchmarked against. Other industries have developed, or aim to develop, LEED-like standards for their own sectors. The BE industry is ahead of many others – a fact we should celebrate and promote more.

The collective action demonstrated by LEED, Level, and other initiatives can be more than merely meeting new requirements from A&D or end users; it should be part of an industry-level story about rising tides lifting all boats. How the industry as a whole innovates.

Moonshots

Sustainability standards are realities in the marketplace, driven by regulation and compliance. Keeping up with everyone else is understandable and important. These standards are like a water line that keeps rising over time, which feels like pressure. It’s a challenge for organizations to decide what to do next and implement logistical changes. It seems like a burden or a tax.

Compliance is just surviving, but survival alone shouldn't be the goal. An organization doesn’t exist merely to keep up. It must have a larger aspiration.

The industry needs bold, seemingly impossible goals. Author and business thinker Jim Collins calls them BHAGs: Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals. Incrementalism works well in a growth market, but one that’s pivoting toward an uncertain future requires a more audacious vision.

A “moonshot” refers to the United States’ ambitious effort in the 1960s to land humans on the Moon. President Kennedy announced that the U.S. would “land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth” before the end of the decade, launching the Apollo program. It was an unrealistic goal at the time. After the success of the Apollo missions, “moonshot” became a metaphor for any ambitious initiative aiming to overcome enormous obstacles through breakthrough innovation.

Beyond standards, PR, and RFPs, as an industry, we need moonshots. Rethinking furniture as systems and seating as ergonomic machines were new ideas. As a mature industry on the tipping point of change, sustainability can be a moonshot, too. Charles Eames, celebrated designer of the famous lounge chair sold by Herman Miller that bears his name, famously said that design is about constraints. With the right constraints, today’s improbable becomes tomorrow’s reality.

The Artemis II mission launched on April first of this year. By the time this article is live, we will know the fate of this latest actual moonshot. We hope for the astronauts’ safe return, but whatever the outcome, they inspire us to reach for the stars.

Viewing Earth from space is said to cause a profound cognitive shift and emotional experience, known as the Overview Effect. With the right perspective, our sustainability goals don’t have to be about politics, crisis management, or competition.

It can be about leading.