Breaking the Binary: Reflections on Intention, Leadership, and Engaging as Humans

A key call to action from a forthcoming Transformers Foundation report (out 11 November) is to engage with each other as human beings, not just as professionals representing our respective organizations. The report is about how suppliers are excluded from fashion’s multi stakeholder initiatives, authored by Elizabeth Cline .?

On the eve of the US elections, in an increasingly polarized world, one of my fears is that this forthcoming report will further alienate and polarize people. The impulse on some sides of the aisle will be to pick it up with glee. “Finally, those guys have been called out!”, they will say. Meanwhile, the impulse on the other side of the aisle will be to dismiss, discredit, and defend – if there’s even engagement at all.?

This is not what I want. In fact, it’s the opposite of what I want.?

People may wonder how on earth I think it’s possible that such a pointed piece of work could result in anything other than polarization.

This article is both my answer to that question and an attempt to walk the talk – to engage with you, my colleagues on both sides of FOB and the likely readers of this forthcoming report – as a human being.?

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Unusually, the human being in me is not sure what I want to say.?

Unusually, the thing the human being in me wants to communicate is a feeling, not a logical argument. I’m not even sure what the feeling is.?

I suppose I want you, my reader, and the readers of this forthcoming report, to know that I empathize with you.? Just because the work I’m part of - to borrow from Edward Said’s language - disturbs the status quo and speaks truth to power, doesn’t mean I think ill of people upholding the status quo.? Like most human beings, I don’t like it when people, even those in positions of power, feel attacked as a result of my work. As a change-maker, I also don’t think it’s useful: when people feel attacked, they’re even less likely to engage.

In fact, I don’t even believe in villains or bad guys at all, and want desperately to break out of good versus evil binaries – for my sake, for your sake, for our collective sake.? Binaries of good guys versus bad guys, of rebel activists versus defenders of the status quo, pain me - both intellectually, and as a human being.?

I know the only antidote to these binaries is vulnerability, and so here I am staring at a blank page, trying to figure out how to present both myself, and this report, as fully human.?

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Let me start there, with me, Kim, the human being. I’m exhausted, and sad. Like so many of my fellow human beings, I am sad about the world my almost three-year-old and seven-month-old are inheriting, a world simultaneously full of so much stuff but devoid of so much life.?

I want to be seen. Not in the megaphone kind of way, but in the human being kind of way. Like you, I don’t want to be caricatured, or misunderstood.? The last few months - years, really - have been hard. I have, at times, felt bullied by powerful people, scared, and unprotected.? Behind the provocative words and the smiles (the warm kind, the kind intended to disarm you), is a vulnerable freelancer whose family and livelihood feels like they’re on the line every time I enter the crossfire. I feel like I’m attempting - with mixed results - an impossibly high and precarious tightrope, also known as speaking? truth to power without pissing people off too much.?

At my lowest moments I wonder why I’m even on that tightrope. Maybe I just don’t have the guts to really commit to upsetting people? Or maybe I care too much about being liked. Or maybe I’m not a good feminist, unable to shake off the patriarchy, unable to let go of the deeply held belief that, as a woman, it’s important to be liked.? Or maybe I’m just not tough enough.

But here’s the thing: in my more cerebral moments, I understand that we can, and we must, speak truth to power without villainizing one another. I understand that the reason I stay on the tightrope, the reason I try to maintain this exhausting balancing act between telling it like it is but also not appearing too threatening is because to give up would mean giving up any hope of transformation.?

There’s a quote in Leadership on the Line by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky that sums this up better than I ever could:?

"The hope of leadership lies in the capacity to deliver disturbing news and raise difficult questions in a way that people can absorb, prodding them to take up the message rather than ignore it or kill the messenger.”

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So how do we do it? How do we speak truth to power without relying on binaries of good people and bad people? How do we disturb the status quo without provoking caricatured and less than fully human representations of the other?

Well, let’s start with the facts. Despite our status as professional do-gooders, we all do things everyday that lead to collective outcomes that none of us wants. Myself included. Sure, some of us do better than others, but if we’re really being honest with ourselves, none of us, no matter how hard we try or how good our intentions, can fully opt out of behavior that leads to suboptimal collective outcomes.?

Does that make all of us bad people? I don’t think so. To borrow from a poem by Walt Whitman, it means that, as human beings, we are large, and contain multitudes. We are simultaneously good and bad, cheap and generous, victims and perpetrators, ethical and unethical, kind and mean, the problem and the solution.

Collectively, as an industry, we don’t talk about this. We don’t acknowledge it. Binaries of us versus them, good versus bad, are easier, more palatable.? I hear it from brands, I hear it from manufacturers, I hear it from activists, I hear it from NGOs, I hear it from policy makers.

Indeed, as an industry we have come up with an approach to sustainability so inextricably linked to these binaries that it’s hard to imagine what an alternative would look like. Every - and I mean every - solution in our sustainability toolbox suggests that with the right accountability and oversight, we can correct for bad intentions.?

This applies to the evil brand trope — whose intentions are questioned to the extent that they are unwilling or unable to use their power to whip other less powerful entities into shape. It also applies to evil factory owner tropes — whose intentions (or, if we’re being only slightly more generous, inadequate capacity) are presumed to be taking advantage of this lack of oversight to cheat, cut corners, and put profit above all else. (Important sidebar: these tropes are not created equal).?

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These binaries, tropes of good versus evil, are pervasive. As recently as last month, my former self, the manager of a garment factory in Cambodia, was called a cheater three times in one week – by some of fashion’s most senior and influential sustainability leaders no less. The people who said it didn’t even realize what they’d said, and when I called them out for it, they more-or-less said:

?“Of course you’re not a cheater Kim. You were one of the good factory managers. It’s those other manufacturers that are the problem.”

Though intended as a compliment, it’s dehumanizing – even for a past self.

But I have a confession: although my current self finds this response deeply depressing, my past self would have embraced it.

The manufacturer I worked for was doing good things. The owners had built an extraordinarily green and lush factory, filled with natural light. They had invested in cooling systems, on-site nurseries, and canteens serving healthy food. They did abide by the Cambodian labor law. The list could go on.

Not all factory owners do this. I felt, and still feel, a responsibility to honor my former bosses’ work – their efforts are Sisyphean! Herculean! You pick your hero. My point is they’ve done impressive stuff, especially when the odds were stacked against them.

But how do I celebrate them without suggesting that, if my former bosses could do it, all other manufacturing companies can do it too?

I’m transported back to my 32-year-old self. I’m in Cambodia, towards the end of my time as a factory manager. I hear the sewing machines humming away behind me. The colleague I’m walking with makes a careless comment about “the pig styes in [insert name of competing apparel-producing country]”. For a split second, my stomach sinks, a visceral discomfort. Intuitively, I know it’s not an okay thing to say, but I was squinting into the sun, and we were preoccupied with the fact that all of our fabric suppliers in China had just shut down, not for Chinese New Year, but because it was January 2020. The conversation moved on.?

Over the years I’ve come back to that fleeting visceral gut punch, mulling it over, grabbing it for such an up close and personal view that my eyes start to cross, releasing it again, pulling it apart, putting it back together, and digesting it, until, like compost, it became fertile ground for something new.?

The thing is: for all the celebration and recognition my bosses deserve, to say that we did not contribute to collective outcomes that none of us wanted also would have been a lie.? But isn’t this true of every single actor along the value chain? Or, for that matter, of every single human being on this planet??

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In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the Good Samaritan experiment. Conducted in 1973 by psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson at Princeton Theological Seminary, the experiment tested whether seminarians’ likelihood of helping a stranger (someone in distress) would be affected by situational factors.

Participants were asked to prepare a talk. Some of them were asked to speak about the Good Samaritan parable, some were given other topics.? They were placed in varying conditions of time pressure. Some were told they were running late, while others were given ample time to reach their destination. On their way to their talk, each participant encountered a person who appeared to be in need of help. The findings revealed that those who were in a hurry were far less likely to stop and offer help, regardless of their presentation topic or intentions as future clergy.

Gladwell uses this experiment to argue that individual character traits are less predictive of behavior than immediate context and situational pressures. He says: "We like to think of ourselves as conscious and deliberate and in control of our inner states. But this is an illusion. In reality, our inner states are the result of...context".

When my nine-year-old self read the book Number the Stars – a book about the escape of a family of Jews from Denmark during the Holocaust – I vividly remember wondering whether I would have had the courage to help Jews escape concentration camps like some of the characters in the book. I was sure that I would have.

Although I can barely bring myself to say it aloud, my current self is less sure.?

I consider myself strong willed. I consider myself principled. I consider myself to be someone with integrity. But where I used to think that these qualities were intrinsic to me, some kind of absolute essence without which I could not possibly be myself, my current self is increasingly open to the possibility that these qualities are contextually manifested.?

This makes me uncomfortable. To suggest that the world around me is more responsible for making me “me” than I am feels hard to stomach. Indeed, it would require telling my nine-year-old self that, under the right circumstances, I too, could have been a Holocaust enabler.??

Fast forward: I’m 23 years old, in London, in a cylindrically shaped library with a big oversized white spiral staircase at its center, reading Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who fled the Holocaust for the United States, is covering the Eichmann trial in the newly formed state of Israel for the New Yorker. Eichmann is a Nazi war criminal. In Eichmann, she expected to find a monster. Someone full of ideological hatred. Instead, she found someone seemingly normal, someone who justified mass atrocity under the guise of “doing their job.” In that book, she coined the term “the banality of evil.”

When you are doing a Master’s in human rights, as my 23-year-old self was, one of the questions you reckon with is how mass atrocities and crimes against humanity happen in the first place. Hannah Arendt’s work is uncomfortable because it suggests that, under the right circumstances, we’re all capable of evil.?

So there it is. Me, Kim, the human being, doesn’t believe in good people and bad people, in villains and heroes. I believe most of us have good intentions. And yet, everyday, we all do things that lead to collective outcomes that none of us wants. Myself included.?

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I want to rewind to September 2023. It’s the eve of my 36th birthday. I’m large; daughter number two is a couple of months away from making her grand entry.? I’ve written an opinion essay, which, like this forthcoming report, makes reference to suppliers feeling excluded from setting the sustainability agenda. Some people are upset. We get on a call.?

But we are working so hard to engage manufacturers, they tell me. Excluding suppliers is not at all our intention, they tell me.

I know, I say. And I mean it. Truly.?

When I say that we all contribute to collective outcomes that none of us wants, what I am also saying is that focusing on intention misses the point. Sure, some of us might do better than others. But to focus on intention would be to miss the much more powerful driver of behavior: context.? The most powerful antidote to the industry’s pervasive sustainability problem would be to let go of the – often implicit – belief that intention is what drives behavior.??

When I say that I feel tired, part of what I mean is that I have, at times, been unable to get people to let go of the binaries they use to make sense of the world,? or, at a personal level, to make sense of me. I have failed to get people to understand that when I speak truth to power, I am not attacking them as human beings. I am not questioning their moral character. I do not think they are bad people. Instead, what I am saying is that the context in which they operate has led to blindspots which make it impossible for them, despite their good intentions, to see the specific ways in which their work is part of the problem.?

In Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald explore the concept of implicit biases—automatic, often unconscious associations and stereotypes people hold that can influence their behavior without conscious awareness. Banaji and Greenwald suggest that even well-intentioned individuals may unknowingly hold prejudices that affect their perceptions and actions.? Banaji and Greenwald emphasize that implicit biases are a natural part of how human brains categorize information, but they also stress that individuals can become aware of and work to counter these biases.?

So to you, the readers of this article, and the readers of this forthcoming report: we must accept that we are all, irrespective of intention, complicit, and that context, not intention, is what drives behavior.? My hope is that if we all take our own complicity as our collective starting point, we will be able to embrace the idea that speaking truth to power is not an attack, but an act of love.?

On stage at a Cascale event last month my dear friend Dr. Vidhura Ralapanawe shared a quote by Lilla Watson that bears repeating:?

“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

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I want to close with another quote from Leadership on the Line by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky:

“People do not resist change, per se. People resist loss. You appear dangerous to people when you question their values, beliefs, or habits of a lifetime. You place yourself on the line when you tell people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear.”

When we disturb or threaten the status quo, what is it that we’re losing??

Maybe, as professional do-gooders, it’s our identities. Letting go of intention as the driver of undesirable collective outcomes means implicating ourselves. It means asking a group of people whose life’s work has been driven by good intentions to acknowledge the ways in which they - despite those good intentions - are part of the problem.?

Or maybe it’s security. When we engage with vulnerability, when we admit uncertainty, when we put aside our company hats, we risk our careers and our livelihoods.?

Or maybe it’s a care-free and convenient way of life.

These are not small things. But as Heifetz and Linsky ask:

“Of all that we value, what’s really most precious and what’s expendable?”?

To that I would add: how can we help each other begin to imagine what we stand to gain?

I’ll be stepping back from Transformers Foundation once this report launches on November 11th. I have so much gratitude, love, and affection for Transformers Foundation, which has given me a rare amount of trust, freedom, and latitude. I have benefitted immensely from the Transformers platform and community, and am sure that our shared commitment to amplifying perspectives from the supply chain means that we’ll continue to be in one another’s lives in some way, shape, or form.?

But equally, it’s become clear to me that the ability to engage with the world as myself, Kim, the human being and aspiring storyteller, rather than as a professional representative, is one of the things most precious to me.? Practically, I’m not entirely sure what that will look like yet, but I know that I’m surrounded by a great community of human beings whose collective vision for how to fix this industry is worth trying to bring to life.