A hundred years ago, a person could shop without looking at the ingredients, ignore their diet, never go to the gym, and still avoid most toxins, maintain a healthy weight, and get good exercise. The farm-to-table food system, social conventions, and the built environment conspired to help people be healthy without really trying. Of course, they were more likely to die of the flu, infections, or childbirth complications, but for many adults, it was quite possible to be accidentally healthy.
No longer.
Now, modern commercial agriculture, ubiquitous cheap processed food, and suburban sprawl make it harder than ever to be healthy. And at this time when it's harder than ever for an individual to maintain good health, a constant stream of messages tells us that each individual must "take responsibility" for their own health.
I see a similar dynamic playing out in the defining, existential, challenge of our time: climate change. Before the industrial revolution, an individual could accidentally have a negligible carbon footprint.
No longer.
Some of the same forces that make accidental health impossible in industrially developed societies also make accidental environmental responsibility impossible. The food available to me, the expectations my neighbors and employer place on me, and the built environment conspire to make my individual carbon foot print a substantive contributor to global catastrophe.
And now that it's extremely difficult for me to have a low carbon footprint, a constant stream of messages tells me I need to change my personal consumption patterns and my transportation habits in order to fulfill my personal responsibility to the planet.
One more parallel, this time from the perspective of an employee in a large company. If I worked in a small, pre-industrial job of some kind--small family farmer, carpenter, baker, and I wanted to be more productive, I could generally become more productive by working harder, longer, and smarter. I could improve my own performance and productivity in some pretty straight-forward ways.
No longer.
Now, even though I am held personally accountable for my performance at work, it can be difficult or impossible for me to produce improved results on my own. The corporate structure, processes, and norms conspire to prevent me from producing results on my own. One group ignores me; another constrains me; another shuts down my progress entirely. And yet, now that it's harder than ever for me to improve, I'm held accountable for my personal performance--my personal success or failure to produce tangible outcomes.
In all three examples--health, climate change, employment, I am told to take personal responsibility for results in an environment that overwhelmingly impedes my ability to produce those results.
This leaves me three choice, in ascending order of impact:
1. Abdicate responsibility. It's too hard to change myself, and it's impossible to change the world, so I'll just blame it all on the world around me and go on my merry way. This is the easy, "accidental" approach.
It's too hard to make myself healthy, and we're all going to die eventually anyway, so hand me the remote control and a frozen pizza. Someday someone will invent better medications to keep me healthy, Congress or scientists will solve climate change, and the leaders at my company will finally see the light and make things better--I just need to hold on until retirement and hope things are better for my children and grandchildren.
Impact of this approach on my health, the health of my planet, and the health of my company: zero to negative. But it's easy and often less stressful, particularly if I can really convince myself to ignore the scary parts.
2. Take personal responsibility for my own behaviors. I can't change the world, but I can change me. I'm going to check ingredients, grow a garden, bike to work, replace my incandescent light bulbs, install solar panels, and produce stellar deliverables at work that often don't produce the desired results because of the failure of the rest of the organization, but at least I did my part.
Impact of this approach on my health is probably pretty good, provided I can sustain it over the long haul, though most likely I'll do this for a while and then my discipline will falter and I'll be back where I was (welcome to yo yo dieting and failed New Year's resolutions).
Impact on the health of the planet: Negligible if I'm the only one doing it. If many, many others do the same, the impact is powerful and an important contributor to turning things around and saving the planet. And if hundreds of millions of individuals do this, starting now, the earth will still warm enough to cause cataclysmic changes.
3. Take personal responsibility to change us--to change society, our infrastructure, our politics, our built environment, and our future together. If I can afford it, buying organic food and green power decreases the cost of both for others and contributes momentum to new infrastructures and economies. These are doable ways to take personal responsibility to change the underlying root causes--to make it easier for others to be accidentally healthy, green, and productive.
More examples:
Electoral politics: Voting is a way to take individual responsibility for changing the world. Even more powerfully, I can take personal responsibility to knock on doors, pressure my representatives, support progressive candidates, etc. These are individual actions aimed at change much larger than my own individual sphere.
Corporate culture: How might I take personal responsibility to change the culture of a multi-billion dollar organization? It's not easy, but it's possible. Corporate culture is big, amorphous, hard to change directly. But corporate culture is a function of corporate climate, and I can impact the climate in which I work. This may mean taking personal responsibility to do my part to create a climate of inclusion and equity--paying attention, speaking up, being an ally.
And I can change corporate culture by changing my definition of what it means to improve performance. Rather than simply trying to work differently myself, I can find ways to work together differently with those on my team, and even more powerfully, work together differently with people in other parts of the organization, so that together we envision the future, solve problems, and create meaningful outcomes for our customers and ourselves.
Impact on my own health, climate change, and the success of my company: short term it's negligible; long term it's a game changer, a world changer, the only way we will all get through this current mess to create a world in which our grandchildren have a chance of being healthy, safe, and productive, accidentally or not.
So here's where I'm landing on personal responsibility:
Taking personal responsibility for my own actions within my own sphere is:
Difficult--the world around me makes it impossible to be accidentally healthy, green, and productive
Helpful--there are things I can change about myself, within my own sphere, that are meaningful
Insufficient--Ultimately, the world is bigger than me. Lots of individuals making positive changes will move the dial meaningfully but won't get us where we need to be.
My personal responsibility is to take care of my own stuff, and to find ways to impact the big stuff. Community/societal/corporate change is where the power is. How might I take personal responsibility to contribute to, and change, the big stuff? The bad news is, there's no one easy answer. The good news is, there are many good answers, and when we as individuals do things together to change the big stuff, that's how big change happens.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead
"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." --Barack Obama
"Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world." --Malala Yousafzai
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