OgEvolves - Charting the next revolution

Seth Godin writes:

“I wonder…if ‘good enough’ might be the next big idea. Audio players, cars, dryers, accounting… not the best ever made, not the most complicated and certainly not the most energy-consuming. Just good enough.

“For some people, a clean towel is a clean towel.”

Barry Schwartz, a family friend, all-around mensch, and author of The Paradox of Choice, calls this “satisficing”; in other words, “good enough is good enough.” True indeed. In a variety of everyday situations, the marginal utility of that 19,999th choice has a converse relationship to well-being. Clothing, electronic equipment, towels. Even some life choices.

So let me propose a “yes, and” here:

I am beginning to think that satisficing, or “good enough-ing,” works primarily at what I call the horizontal transactional layer (bear with me; it’s a nascent model). Broadly speaking, the horizontal transactional layer includes purchasing decisions that have a relative equivalence in social value: which vintage Cabernet I should buy for a family get-together, whether I should buy Polo or Banana Republic, whether I should go to Harvard or Yale law school, whether the APR rate of VISA or Mastercard will save me a few more bucks, whether I should get the Audio A4 or the Volkswagen Passat.

Most choices at the horizontal transactional layer are, in the developed world, cogitated ad nauseum.

But here is where I make a distinction between horizontality and verticality as they relate to values systems: certain decisions have vastly differentiated social equivalence, such as: Should I buy brands who support a cradle-to-cradle ecological standard? Which companies espouse socially responsible values? Which shampoo should I buy, the one with or without parabens?

Anyone who saw An Inconvenient Truth knows the importance of informed, socially conscious decision-making. This can, indeed, produce a “cognitive dissonance” that creates tension within the individual psyche. But tension is often what produces positive behavioral change (notice how the Civil Rights Movement demanded equality, not a “good enough” separate but equal policy, and this only came through social dissonance and often violent dialectic).

So if we introduce verticality into the decision-making calculus, tension, which can manifest as anxiety, is often good. The CEO who has to make a fundamental decision about emissions would have a simpler life if he could focus on shareholder return alone. Same with the individual who is confronted with a choice: buy Product A, contribute to ecological and human degradation, or buy Product B, and make a difference. That “difference” is the vertical transactional layer: when the individual is confronted with a natural hierarchy of transactional decisions — BP versus Exxon, say — she will experience tension, which is how evolution occurs (tension, differentiation, growth, integration).

And then there is Tom Munnecke’s transformational layer: Should Nike build a plant that outputs environmentally “good enough” materials, or should they revolutionize the eco-effectiveness of the shoe industry? (And yes, for all the anti-should-ers, I am using the word consciously. Verticality re-introduces “should” in the context of social responsibility.) How can we transform our accounting system so that we eradicate poverty? The transformational layer exists at the revolutionary edge of social consciousness, and revolution cannot occur as long as everyone attempts to maximize personal utility, with one “util” equaling one unit of “happiness” (a wholly outdated calculus based on a false assumption of equilibrium in economic systems).

If we want to make a difference, then we have to realize that “differences” — or value hierarchies — do exist. Of course, flattening out our social landscape makes “happiness,” as narrowly defined by the utilitarians (whose beliefs we continue to naively adopt as tacit reality), a much simpler goal to attain. And “good enough” is a means to happiness at the horizontal transactional layer. But once we acknowledge the vertical transactional layer, and especially the transformational layer at the revolutionary edge, then our concepts of “good enough” may not apply.