Impact Unmasked: How B. Lorraine Smith Challenges the System to Inspire Real Change
What would an economy that works in the service of life be like?
What if your work in impact is actually part of the problem? Are you willing to step away from the job if it does?
That’s exactly what B. Lorraine Smith – professional troublemaker and Industrial Healer – did in 2021.
Now she’s putting “reality” in her open-source “Matereality Assessments.” She has deep expertise in reading and explaining what’s really going on financially and otherwise with global companies. She’s a coach, a speaker, and an advisor.
Her invitation, “try on a dream of what it’s like when the economy serves life and ask what’s different? What changed? What is one thing I can do now to actually live that change, to wear it all day long?“
See more of her work and premium content (and the most badass portrait in impact) at her website: BLorraineSmith.com
Ignite meaningful change in your work – schedule a group Practice-Change call: https://lnkd.in/g7buBMer
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: [00:00:00] Welcome to Impact Stories. I’m here with Lorraine Smith. Why don’t you introduce yourself?
Lorraine: Thanks for having me, Jacob. I’m Lorraine. I’m coming to you live from Montreal. I’m an advisor, a coach, a speaker. You might just say I’m an industrial healer.
Jacob: That sounds like a whole can of worms. What’s the shorthand of what an industrial healer is?
Lorraine: I work towards a vision of an economy that serves life, that creates the conditions for life to thrive. After more than 20 years working in mainstream corporate sustainability and discovering that sustainability is really part of the problem, and by part of the problem, I mean, causing harm. I seek to bring about that change and it’s a sort of industrial-level healing.
Jacob: Tell me, what led you to this point?
Lorraine: I’ve always been minded towards loving the natural world. My first job out of school, I worked at World Wildlife Fund, a widely recognized environmental NGO, and skipped through a number of career moves over the years trying to find something where I really felt alive and well and doing work that I could believe in. And in [00:01:00] 2003, I sort of accidentally stumbled into a role in corporate sustainability. Initially that felt like, ah, this is where I’m meant to be finally a place where it’s not just working for the man, it’s business aiming to be a force for good.
It was sort of early days in the mainstreaming of corporate responsibility and for about 20 years, that’s what I did. A few different permutations I’ll skip over, but working first in my home city of Toronto, Canada, and then moved to New York City. Really leaning into corporate strategy, stakeholder engagement, executive engagement, transparency, and disclosure, in particular with investors; believing that if we could just be more strategically sustainable within the corporate context, we could move forward, solve, or at least address some of these really big systemic challenges we’re seeing. However, I realized that the harder I tried, the more I found myself embedded in the problem itself. I didn’t want to believe that, it’s not a very comfortable thing. So finally, the lesson became undeniably clear in October, [00:02:00] 2021 I went on a very long run for about five days, 158 miles or 255 kilometers, and that was a sort of long-distance running project, realizing a dream, but I was holding a question as I went.
When I came out on the other side, I realized I needed to stop accepting work and getting paid to be part of the problem and make space for something else without knowing what it was. And so that’s what I did and now some 3 years later, I’ve been working on and developed and put out into the world some things that I think are more aligned with what is needed in order for the economy to serve life. Drawing on my consulting skills and relationships, but really going into a much more untethered zone.
Jacob: How have you reconciled that as far as how do you actually fix the problem if it’s not from within? How do these things that you’ve created, or your approach, how is it any different?
Lorraine: One thing I do my best to do is recognize I can’t fix the problem. Yet, I do have agency and influence to a degree and I can imagine and consciously hold a vision that feels better to me.
I [00:03:00] begin with a vision. What would an economy that works in service of life be like? It does not involve hoarding wealth. It does not involve private capital, it doesn’t even really involve borders. I think we have some rethinking to do in terms of what we’ve incentivized and what we consider so-called normal. I put everything on the table and ask myself what feels good, what belongs, where do I see things working? Where do I see mutually beneficial self-reinforcing structures of wellness? Those are some very philosophical terms, but to be very practical, one thing I do is I take my kind of nerdy skills in ESG and sustainability and I look at corporate purpose as it’s stated.
So for example, Google. It’s one of the largest companies in the world. It’s publicly listed, they make a lot of their disclosures public, including their financial and ESG disclosures. Their purpose as stated is something along the lines of to make all the world’s data accessible to everyone, everywhere. I come to think that’s actually quite a beautiful purpose. However, when we take a lens of systems thinking, we realize [00:04:00] that the purpose of a system is not what it says, it’s what it does.
So what does Google do in order to generate revenue? Well, most of their revenue comes from advertising and that isn’t mutually exclusive from the purpose of making data accessible to everyone everywhere, but it’s not the same. This is not a headline that corporate purpose as stated is different than what companies actually do, but when you look closely at corporate disclosures and you compare what they say they do to what they actually do, new and exciting pictures emerge about how and if the company is serving life, or perhaps undermining those conditions. So I take my skills as an ESG consultant and advisor and I turn them on their head a little bit in service of life to produce assessments.
I call them materiality assessments, but tweaking and putting reality for anybody who’s familiar with ESG materiality and I conduct these assessments some of them are open source. The methodology is free, I put it out there, and anyone can download it. And then I do some more deep-dive writing and consulting where the future I want, the economy that serves life is my client. I produce [00:05:00] things on behalf of that economy, and I make some of that available and folks who want to join me can take a closer look. Some of it is premium content, you might say. And I bring those challenges and questions forward, not to fix, not to dictate, but rather to invite alternative ways of understanding our current circumstances, in service of a transformative, healed industrial economy.
Jacob: Who is an ideal client for you? What do they engage you to do and what do you give them in return?
Lorraine: One way is I follow my nose, do these research assessments, put them out into the community, and invite folks in the sustainability, ESG, impact investing, corporate responsibility, community, and I invite them to check it out to take it and run with it. The methodology is open source, people can use it, and do as they like. That’s probably the main way that I engage, is I do these things in service of life, put them out there, and let people enjoy them.
To pay the bills I have a few different ways that folks can engage me. One is actually paying for that premium content, those assessments that are online. I do some one on [00:06:00] one coaching. I have a few methodologies that I practice and I invite folks to join me. So that’s been really fun practicing change alongside and getting some great feedback. And then I also speak and I advise teams as well.
A lot of What I’m saying is old news, frankly. I’m just slightly crazier than some, maybe a little bit sooner than some to say it out loud off paycheck. But I get a lot of feedback from folks within corporate sustainability teams saying, yeah, we’ve kind of been sensing this too, but we’re not sure what to do. So one of my favorite things is to spar and engage with those folks to really empower them to put courage and technique together. To look at what they can do differently from within to be part of this real transformation.
Jacob: Any case studies come to mind as far as a changing together kind of situation where you saw something transform or there was an impact from point A to point B with an organization or individual?
Lorraine: The honest truth is at an organizational level, no. Organizationally, what I experienced now is the [00:07:00] following. Yeah, this makes so much sense and we totally get it and these insights are profound and it’s true. And it’s not a tweak and there’s just no way we’re going to stop being exactly how we are right now. We are just not wired to function that way. So, at the corporate organizational level, what I hear is kind of an immune response that says our immune system within the corporate governance universe we inhabit now is designed to repel these ideas we cannot take them in; it would require our destruction. Or, our massive reconstruction, our composting and re-emergence to which I go, yeah, that’s the thing we’re inviting.
On an individual level, I hear something much more compelling. I have seen in a number of cases folks I’d say ranging from best-selling authors to folks in much more kind of grassroots really kind of emergent almost spiritual guidance. What I see with them when we’ve done some work together is an incredibly powerful embracing of [00:08:00] living into the change they seek. Not just to make strategic planning decisions, but to really try on, yeah, what is that change I’m living into? And then what are the very tactical next steps that I can do to live that change?
I’ve been very empowered and encouraged to see folks stepping into courageous, dramatically different states than when they showed up in the kind of “supposed to’s” and “shoulda’s”, you know? Where I’m really encouraged is what I see with artists. And I believe art is where they change lives. An author that comes to mind for me right now is Becky Chambers. I just read her Psalms for the Wild-Built, and I got goosebumps reading what she was able to bring into our imaginations. I think artists are expressers of our possible lives, both as warnings and as invitations and so I think there’s great power happening there.
Jacob: What are you most looking for right now?
Lorraine: I’m definitely on a path. Industrial healing is a journey, it’s definitely not a destination. I have deep expertise [00:09:00] in reading and explaining what’s really going on financially and otherwise with global companies. That could come in the form of digesting my research and telling me what you think, what would be more helpful, or invitations to guide and support as a presenter, as a workshop host, or some other way to share my expertise and enthusiasm.
Jacob: Do we open the can of worms of polarization? Like, how does polarization relate to systems change? Why is that a relevant topic for you now?
Lorraine: I signal the importance of noticing and doing what we can to kind of massage the knot out of polarization. Let’s pick an easy topic like climate change. It’s very easy to do a lot of us and theming with climate change. Climate deniers, the folks, putting up smoke screens and paying the bad guys and lobbying for all the wrong stuff versus those of us doubling down on emissions reductions and investing in clean technologies and making sure we employ the most powerful nature-based solutions. Those [00:10:00] polls are rife and present. I think those polls are distractions. I think they’re based both on a lot of misguided narratives. I’ll cast aspersions on both. I think folks who are called climate deniers are often actually making really important commentary on under-discussed dialogue. I would not say they’re denying climate change, I would say they’re denying the mainstream corporate climate narrative and trying to get some common sense into the mix. And it’s very awkward because immediately knee-jerk reactions, censorship, all kinds of stuff comes up and really shuts down meaningful discourse. That’s dangerous.
On the other side where we have people ramping up, we have to do everything. We have to be super ambitious. I believe there are real problems there too. I think they’re tripling down on an accounting system that is fictitious and not connected to the real world. And that’s why we have this energy transition that’s causing more harm through mining, causing wider lanes of traffic, more cars on the road, and aggregation of wealth in the highly technical and very expensive world [00:11:00] of energy versus really empowering and energizing those who are already living a very low impact way of life. The carbon accounting universe is fraught with narrative and rhetoric and very rarely tied to real impacts on the ground that enable you and I and everyone we know and love to be healthier in a world with more profound ecological integrity.
And I’ve just pulled on climate change. I could pull on an issue and we bump into similar distractions. We create these camps and divisions that go into massive churn on proving and sending links and research and reports and battling one another instead of standing back and saying, wait a minute, what’s with this GDP-driven system?
What’s with these incentives that are telling all of those camps to make more money, hoard more wealth, own more property, flow more capital towards themselves without really pausing and recognizing: what do we need in order for life to thrive? I found [00:12:00] that those who are willing to take a deep breath and stay in a space of generative creativity, want life to thrive. So polarization is a place to go towards and take a really honest look at what are we fighting about, why are we fighting, who set us up for that fight, and what can we do to step outside of it for real, positive, genuinely life-affirming impact for self, others, and the world that keeps us alive.
Jacob: How can the community learn more about what you’re doing or more about the initiatives you’re advancing?
Lorraine: My website is the best spot it’s BLorrainesmith.com. There you can sign up for my free weekly letter. I send out thoughts about what I’m thinking and keep folks in the loop about things that are inspiring me. Also at BLorrainesmith.com, there’s an events and downloads page where folks can sign up for things that are happening or get some of that premium content, those assessments that I mentioned, and I have a free blog as well. And there are also practice change calls. It’s actually in the footer of the website where folks can sign up for those calls on Monday, two different time zones to join in the methodology of practicing [00:13:00] change and those have been really fun to host and connect.
Jacob: If you had one parting wish for somebody listening to this, what’s one thing you’d want to leave them with?
Lorraine: I would like to invite your listeners to try on a dream of what it’s like when the economy serves life and ask what’s different. What changed? Do I already recognize elements of it happening around me? And then, what is one thing I can do now to actually live that change, to wear it all day long? And just sit with that and see what comes up. It can be a very powerful experience.
Jacob: Thank you. I appreciate you sharing your expertise and applaud you with the work you’re doing and wish you all the success in the world.
Lorraine: Thank you, Jacob. I really appreciate the conversation. And thanks for all you’re doing with the great stories that you’re putting out there. Really appreciate it.
Jacob: Thank you.
Learn more about ISSIMO Story Agency Here