Did I tell you about the time Steve Jobs responded to us?
It was 2007. I was writing strongly worded green design blog posts, going after greenwashing claims from the designer of the Swiffer, the CEO of SIGG water bottles, and the entire electronics industry. It was the earliest days of the internet-to-corporate-response. People were not yet used to being called out.
I wrote a post on the green design blog Inhabitat calling on Apple to green its supply chain, phase out the toxins, and disclose the chemicals in its products. Greenpeace picked it up as the closing salvo in a physical book they’d produced using Apple’s own iPhoto software, printed from Apple’s own hardware, through Apple’s printing service, and sent to Steve Jobs.
In a surprise move, Jobs issued a public response.* He’d never responded to activists before. Commitments were made. Arsenic, PVC, and brominated flame retardants. Timelines set for elimination.
It worked. I felt like it worked.
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Three years later, I was on the other side.
I was managing some of the earliest brand pages on Facebook. (It was a low moment in my career). One of those brands was from the Nestlé family of brands. And Greenpeace showed up again. They made a video. Someone opens a Kit Kat bar, and it’s an orangutan finger, bleeding. Exquisite. The internet lost its mind.
The communications team responded with a takedown order to YouTube, to get rid of the Greenpeace-created genius videos. The move had backfired. Greenpeace dressed as orangutans and shut down an investor meeting.
In trying to sort out the aftermath, I asked if they knew about the supply chain horror they were accused of – a supplier in what we’d now call a scope 3 subcontractor, accused of malpractices, deforesting the habitats of orangutans in Indonesia.
The corporate communicator said, “Why would we know this?”
I said: You can’t know. Not from this moment forward. Not anymore. You need to know the answer before you say anything.
Because someone just publicly accused you of being complicit in deforestation, and you literally cannot confirm or deny it.
They didn’t know because the job was not designed to know. The supply chain was built for cost and efficiency, not visibility. Nobody upstream needed to know where the palm oil came from because nobody downstream was asking. Until the crisis hit, and suddenly everyone needed an answer, the entire system was structured not to have one.
That question has stayed with me. Not the crisis. The question underneath it.
Why would we know this?
I’ve heard versions of it in every sector since. An impact investor funding yet another chronic disease telehealth platform, one of dozens, that will only reach the worried well, because the reimbursement codes don’t cover the people who actually need care. A hospital system trying to address gaps in maternal mortality that has no way to follow up after discharge. A program officer who knows the grant template keeps civic society organizations from building reserves. A procurement official writing an RFP that encodes assumptions nobody in the room chose, but will keep local community businesses out of the process.
Why would we know this? is not ignorance, but it is structure. What you operate within determines what you can see. What you can’t see, you can’t act on.
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Nestlé responded with a lasting commitment to certified sustainable palm oil. The industry built traceability systems, multi-stakeholder standards, and audit processes. Years later, supply chains are fifteen layers more visible. That is not nothing, and it is not enough. I’ve been thinking about why. Not why the companies failed. Many genuinely tried, and are still trying. Why the logic itself fails.
The logic is moral exclusion. Phase out the bad chemical. Drop the bad supplier. Divest from the bad asset. Push it away. The deforesting supplier sells to a buyer with less scrutiny. The oil wells get sold to a private company that will not be subject to shareholder resolutions. The anchor institution farms out the food services contract to a giant company that trucks in processed meals from three states away, while the local restaurant down the block and the regenerative farm 40 miles away can’t meet the insurance minimums in the RFP.
The thing you excluded didn’t disappear. It moved outside the gaze of the actors who were most accountable, most visible, most subject to pressure. You cleaned your position. The system kept its structure.
This is the limit of moral pressure as a theory of change. Not that it’s wrong. It forces commitments that would never come voluntarily. But exclusion works on the object and ignores the relationship. Drop the supplier, but don’t ask what happens to the community that depended on them. End the grant, but don’t ask about the infrastructure that was supposed to persist after you left.
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I’ve been on both sides. The person demanding the commitment and the person scrambling to on the other side to encourage a response. What I know now that I didn’t know in 2007, or 2010, is that both positions share an assumption: that you can fix a system by changing what’s inside the boundary you can see.
But the boundary is the design choice.
What’s included in the RFP. What the reimbursement code covers. What the grant template measures. What the fund screens for. These are not natural categories. They were designed by people in positions like yours. Every one of them is a moment when someone decides, without quite seeing it as a decision, what the system can know and what it can’t.
The comms team asked: why would we know this?
Years later, I’m less interested in the question than in the one that follows it: how do we build so that the next person in that seat doesn’t have to ask?
The grant template could be written to let organizations build reserves. The RFP could be scoped to allow local businesses to bid. The state could fund the hospital to fund the follow-up care, not just the discharge. None of these are technical problems. They are design choices that haven’t been made yet, by people in positions to make them.
What design choice is hiding inside the next RFP you write? The next grant you issue? The next fund you structure? The next budget you approve? The next contract you sign?