LCAs: Empowering a Bigger View

Environmental progress demands our diligent loyalty to The Possible, which by its very hope-filled nature, is not already achieved and catalogued.

Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) can be dangerous things. Not in a bullet-hurling-Aston-Martin-versus-bad-guy kind of way, but in the sedative consequences of having “checked something off.” 

In a world where the dynamics of business are anything but static, my challenge with LCAs is their perceived definitude. We treat them more like a fixed noun than an active verb. “We created a fantastic LCA, and now have The Answer,” we might proudly share among ourselves and congratulatory stakeholders. And so, confidence-boosted by our robust analysis, we move away from the practice of conscious re-questioning. But environmental progress demands our diligent loyalty to The Possible, which by its very hope-filled definition is not something already achieved and catalogued.

Life-cycling taught me this from the very beginning. With one of my first clients, a startup, we were struggling to reduce the overall environmental impact of the product, a reflective coating for textiles. We poked at it from every angle, believing we’d reached the limits of our footprint-mitigating efforts. Then we stood back and asked, “What else? What assumptions have we locked into our LCA that aren’t necessarily true, or don’t have to continue to be true?” 

“What else? What assumptions have we locked into our LCA that aren’t necessarily true, or don’t have to continue to be true?” 

By re-inquiring and re-framing, to our great surprise, we realized we could switch out our process’ toxic solvent to water. Yes, water. Having moved beyond “the facts,” we discovered the industry standard was, well, substandard relative to broader, more eco-friendly thinking. However, before questioning what we already “knew,” our brains had automatically assumed we could not switch to an alternative so inexpensive, readily available, liability-free, simple, and so very, very environmentally compatible. 

...our brains had automatically assumed we could not switch to an alternative so inexpensive, readily available, liability-free, simple, and so very, very environmentally compatible. 

In psychology, inattentional blindness is defined as “the failure to notice a fully-visible, but unexpected object because attention was engaged on another task, event, or object.” We well-intentioned humans do it all the time without the slightest awareness of it. It isn’t unusual then, that we inadvertently embed our LCAs with inattentional blindness.

To help people understand this, I usually begin trainings with a straightforward inattentional blindness exercise. It is a remarkably surprising, jaw-dropping experience for most participants because they had never realized just how much they couldn’t “see.” (And interestingly, the more educated the subjects, the less well they perform on the “test.” Among PhDs, brilliant Oxford educated corporate leaders, and convicted felons with whom I’ve shared such exercises, the prisoners have fared MUCH better.) Acknowledging there is so much more to notice than our brain-eye collaboration has permitted is the first step to upgrading LCAs and the process of creating them.

To be clear, I am very much pro-LCA. Attempting to quantify products’ environmental impact is imperative for resuscitating the planet.  I love a good LCA and seem to create them unconsciously all the time (I found myself calculating a cursory LCA during the latest James Bond movie…007 had an IMMENSE carbon footprint). 

My hope is that we can increasingly use LCAs as tools not just for quantifying, but for expanding our perspective. And rather than locking us into rigid thinking, employ them to propel our intentioned net-neutrality to heights we hadn’t been able to imagine before.