I ask myself this when I see that companies again and again prioritize what the company wants out of customers in order to make a profit -- to the customers’ detriment -- rather than creating a system that helps customers be more in tune with what they want.
If you don't understand the essence of why something is bad, it's easy to make millions of different excuses when you face the pressure to make a profit. And that pressure hits every day, regardless of what scale you're operating at. Even I feel this pressure as a solopreneur.
Dark patterns disconnect people from doing what’s best for themselves, and exploits people for the sake of a larger system.
What a customer wants can be shaped by systems, by the user experience and design, and by many other different tactics, but a company has a responsibility to consider what it can do to help the customer clearly keep sight of what is in their best interest.
But I think that even my own explanation here is still too surface level. When doing business, it is often easy to justify various deceptions: strategies that may try to underhandedly sabotage competitors, rather than simply making the best product that you can, or even trying to pay employees of other companies to maybe share some confidential information. That is also deception.
This world and the way our systems run is dominated by not really being current about the best interests of each individual, but by systems that look at individuals and wonder: how can we extract the most labor possible from them? How can we control people and extract as much value to serve those in power? How can we make as much money from each person at all times as possible, with little to no regard to their well-being?
Companies can, on the surface, act like they are in compliance with various laws, but the reality of actually using their products reveals how much they respect and honor the humanity of each customer. This is not just about providing a smooth experience or uptime.
There must be more thought or ethical framework embedded into the core of a company’s strategies based on how a product or service affects users in the long term. If the company does not even care about that, then at the end of the day it is just another business that prioritizes short-term profit over people's well-being. Then congratulations! Your business is like 99% of all others in the world and in history (this is not a statistical figure, merely my impression). Sometimes I do make dry comments.
I want to create companies that really respect all life and human life first. The wording can change over time, but what does that mean? What does “respect” even mean?
This is in the context of building a society in which each and every individual can really prosper and be happy, because they have not only what they need -- they have environments and systems in their day-to-day lives that really help them grow and be their best and true selves.
It’s the fusion of the individual’s happiness and prosperity, with the society’s prosperity. Let's look at how our countries are run today. A country's prosperity is very often focused on GDP or other financial metrics, while people in any country regardless of the nation’s overall wealth are continuously suffering from their basic needs not being met, poor healthcare, discriminatory systems, and conflict based on toxic belief systems.
There are already frameworks for measuring a country’s prosperity in better ways, like happiness indices. Look up the World Happiness Report.
Now, a company is much simpler than a country. Surely, there should be holistic frameworks that defines a company's prosperity beyond just its revenue, that a board of directors and shareholders can also hold them accountable to:
- How happy are its employees, based on completely and genuinely anonymous surveys? Employees can basically flame their managers as much as they want and say if their managers are working harder or less hard than themselves, etc.
- (Inspired by what I recall about Applied Intuition’s internal surveys. If it’s not an accurate representation? That's on me)
- How happy are their customers?
- What are the feedback that people give regarding the company and its employees in the supply chain or those that help maintain the physical premises of the workplace?
- Does everyone feel like customers’ real, true desires in their best interests are being honored?
- What are other metrics that we can look at, such as not just diversity, but who is getting promoted year by year and how?
- What metrics are revealed in a company's hiring?
- The kinds of benefits that it gives to employees that might need maternity leave or paternity leave?
- How does a company respond when an employee has health challenge come up that makes them leave work for a long time?
- How much time off can employees take based on any other challenging life events like grief?
- How much are employees expected to work each week?
- Do they feel that they have a good work-life balance, which is definitely something that should be an important thing to index and report on for any company?
The Middle Way (from Buddhism) applied to society is not a sad compromise between policies/attitudes of different factions, but rather always focusing on what would actually help the people, what would relieve their suffering, what would actually be best for them. It is a collaborative, always dynamic process of improving society for the common people, based on dialogue.
To me, it means that the company really needs to respect each individual that is part of its supply chain, that is working for the company, as well as the customers. To help each individual get what they need and help them in their goals.
At a very granular level, a company cannot predict every single customer's reasons or goals for using a product. That's just impossible. What they can do is at least not muddy up the individual's decision-making process and design their systems in a way where the user is still grounded in their own thoughts and desires.
At this point, it may be easy to throw up my hands and say, "Oh, that's too hard to do." But actually, there's a great deal of scholarly research. There's a great deal of discussion on the Internet that already shows companies how to do it. Customers are already complaining a bunch too. And rightly so. We can just.. listen to them.
To do this work of “operating better”, I think it requires a consistent, powerful conviction from every individual from the CEO to the board of directors, to any employee -- to honor all people. It takes the conviction to treasure everyone, and recognize that they too have infinite potential that we must not squander by exploiting them, no matter how convenient or brief or automated it may be. It takes the conviction to treasure not only the people in front of you, not only your family and loved ones, but everyone affected by what you make. And frankly, everyone in the world. But that’s another topic.
Yes, we do need to be practical about this. There’s supply chain realities: the things that we wear, the computers that we're able to buy, the way most things are made, is based on very unfair labor.
We don't need to demand perfection from ourselves. What really matters and is most practical at the end of the day is: have we done our best? Have we tried to improve the ways that we do things, every day, week, month, quarter and year? That is the day-to-day reality that is necessary to build a so-called better world, rather than building things that simply feed into this cycle of disrespectful conflict and unhappiness that humanity is stuck in.
Another question I've asked myself before is: what does what I do at work have anything to do with the rest of my life? Well, if you read Atomic Habits, every action that you take is a vote for who you become. Life and everything we make operate together in a very complex web of causes and effects. If you have one bad habit in your life, that can spread across your whole life. Even if you tried to be a better person in other areas, if you make a habit out of not doing your best in one area, or being kinda disrespectful or inconsiderate to folks downstream of your work, that attitude subconsciously spreads, and affects who you are.
How do you want to show up in the world?