We are all more effective when we have a way to understand the world and our place in it. Ideologies and religions that helped people make sense of their lives as well as provide practical things to do on a daily basis grew and shaped cultures around the world.
Enduring faith systems and ideologies provide people a focus on a higher purpose and ways to behave in their daily lives that line up with that higher purpose. While some faith systems and ideologies struggle to keep pace, the hunger for purpose and practical ways to engage persists.
Today we have higher purpose in front of us all the time. The opportunities before us to make a difference don’t really need our personal imagination or creativity to design. Environmental and social challenges stand obvious before us at any turn. These realities provide a pre-structured and compelling cause to which we can all rally.
How to act in the face of this growing unrest with the current state of things? As individuals we do what we can in our personal lives. Yet, how many of us wonder if this is enough and long for some greater combined movement to make a difference?
How do we organize to move things along?
Social business might provide that framework for action. Business has its systems, its disciplines, and is designed for financial sustainability. Business designed with social and environmental goals as its purpose may give us a new, practical way of life.
In a world increasingly filled with such businesses we could find ourselves working in organizations driven by missions we can believe in because they connect us to a higher cause. We will find ourselves in financially sustainable efforts. We will be creating products and markets centred on building a better world.
There are natural elements of being in business that discipline human effort. If that human effort becomes focussed on solving social and environmental problems, those disciplines will help us know how to practically collaborate with others, as well as receive feedback from the market about our results.
Today is being celebrated for the first time as Social Business Day. There are a couple different definitions of social business out there for us to choose from suggesting the movement has room to grow. In the meantime, we also see growing movement toward employee ownership, workplace democracy and strengths-based organization development as ways to do business. In some circles there is even talk of 500-year plans where the future is as much the mission as today.
It is possible that as these movements grow and integrate that we can form a new, relevant-to-the-times framework of action that serves the social good, provides individuals with meaningful work, and restructures the flow of economy.
In that way we could have right before us all the ingredients for one of the most important movements of our time.
