Sustainability is a Joke
Family holidays lead to family in-jokes and the most repeated gag on this one comes from my second son, Jimmy winding up older members of the family:
Jimmy: I can jump higher than a house!
Relative: Can you really?
Jimmy: Yes, look! (jumps 3 inches into the air)
Relative: But you didn’t jump higher than a house
Jimmy: Yes I did, houses can’t jump!
The reason the joke works is framing. When Jimmy makes his initial claim, we make all sorts of assumptions about what he means (the familiar frame), when he means something quite different (another, slightly absurd, frame).
I often get asked “When you say business sustainability, do you mean helping the business survive financially or all that environmental stuff?” The true answer is both, of course, but people see it as an ‘or’ and are not quite sure which of their narrow frames I mean. Frames determine how we see the world and should never be discounted.
Great comedians, along with other artists, help us look at the world from a different perspective. This is the task we have as sustainability professionals, to get people looking at the economy through a different frame – one where it is an integral part of the society and the natural environment and not floating in its own little bubble. And like a comedian, or Jimmy, we have to engage people before hitting them with the punchline.
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