Mid week this week, I got sent an article by Nishul Saperia - the ex-founder of IHS Markit, a now several billion pound revenue a year company, that according to WIkipedia employs 13,000! So first of all let me say - gulp, I’m probably punching above my weight, but also how wonderful it is that he is/was considering working on something so impactful. It convinces me that a revolution is a-coming!
Here is the article and what follows is my rebuttal/discussion around the various reasons he has raised as to why ‘The World Doesn’t Want a Carbon Footprint Tracker App’.
Also let me just say that having worked extensively with early stage products, I enjoyed his focus on customer discovery before building anything. But let me tell you why my conclusions from the research would be different.
His reasons are the section headers followed by my thoughts. And for the sake of the coherence of this article, I will come back to reason 1 later.
Agreed. Especially when you consider reasons 3 and 4 too. However, isn’t this the premise of many/most financial management tools? You don’t need to see the state of your investments or budgets everyday, but want to check in and make alterations as and when. With prudent day-to-day spending comes the ability to save and thus invest wisely.
So while your users may not want to or need to check in on a daily basis, perhaps it is a weekly or monthly thing? Not unlike checking one’s credit score too.
Nishul speaks to the fact that figuring out what people are doing and how that impacts their carbon footprint - in the background (as apps often do) - is hard. You could get data from banks, but it doesn’t have the specifics of what you bought, just how much you spent and (in most cases) where.
He mentions emails as a source of information about bigger purchases like flights etc. However emails could soon become a source of all sorts of shopping info if we move to more and more emailed receipts - one of the reasons your favourite retailer is now keen to email you a receipt is because once they tie the purchase to an email, they can stitch together more info about you and build a profile. So this is likely to increase in the future. Also, emails could provide a lot of implicit signals about a person’s lifestyle choices that could affect their footprint.
For the many who don’t feel comfortable with granting access to emails, the app might require people inputting data but this is where being clever with nudges and prompts comes in.
I am an avid fan of Google Map’s ability to turn all of us into data generators. When I see the following prompt, more and more my reaction is ‘sure thing Google’. It will only take a minute of my time and might be handy for several others.
Another way to incentivise this would be by gamifiying it. I use Strava, not because I want to keep track of every run I do, but because every now and then I like to see how others at my level are progressing on their recent activities. I like to learn about local routes etc.
So perhaps there is an equivalent here - “your carbon footprint is in the top 20% of your area” or “you have the lowest footprint of __ neighbours this week”. Something is bound to work and draw in users, repeatedly.
Yes, but so are most forms of attribution when you really get into it. I work in B2B sales & marketing and while it is nowhere near as important, we scratch our brains every month to categorize edge cases and take calls on causality to enable meaningful accounting of spend and outcomes. And we aren’t alone. I’m currently reading the Book of Why by Judea Pearl and the first two chapters are about how everything from medicine to epidemiology has suffered from not exploring causality from a mathematical standpoint.
Further, there are some very sharp minds who are thinking about this. Foremost, in my view, is the pragmatic and eminently likeable Mike Burners Lee. His book How Bad are Bananas requires an update, but it is the source of inspiration for this blog and has enabled us to create a number of analogies. And our hope is that these will lead to understanding and change where precision might be lacking.
Perhaps. But we need apps, and blogs, and videos, and a chorus of voices to generate more and more information, and ascend up the pyramid of wisdom - both ourselves individually and as a society.
The app’s initial raison d’etre could be to gather information and help people make comparisons, remind them of alternative options etc. Eventually it can start to have an impact on behaviour. And if ever there was a tool to create habits, it is apps. Just ask Nir Eyat.
Behaviour change is hard. Particularly when the impact is a) distant and b) somewhat intangible. But therein lies the product and leadership challenge.
I remember asking my local MP (a disappointingly un-inspiring person) at one discussion session she hosted, whether it is her role to just serve the people as an employee of the government (effectively) or to lead the people and shape and change their notions. Her answer was to walk away from the conversation!
So the long and short is that I believe those who are more advanced up the knowledge pyramid have to make it their business their stay aware of all the latest advice and research (conflicting and hard to parse as it might be), inform their peers (have the tough discussions) and help deliver tools and policies that will eventually drive change. In other words, be brave, put ourselves out there and create the change (and generate the demand). The alternative is that climate change hurts the poor and vulnerable so much so as to change society forever or worse, makes the comfortable lives we’ve gotten so used to untenable for all but a chosen few. And that is not the world I want to live in.
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