Who are the companies we think of when it comes to being green? It’s likely they’re those mid-size to small, facile companies (Patagonia, Seventh Generation, etc.), many of which were conceived as green and socially conscious enterprises to begin with. It’s not easy being green, as Kermit famously said, not if you’re honestly trying to create a sustainable company. But it’s far easier to start a sustainable company from scratch than it is, for example, to transform a multibillion-dollar global organization founded in 1837, when green was nothing more than the color of money.

With that in mind, I was interested to learn what role, from a client’s perspective, designers can play in such challenging transformations.

ISLAND ENCOUNTER
The sun was setting over Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. Claudia Kotchka, vice president of Design, Innovation and Strategy for Procter & Gamble, and I were watching the gorgeous red sky from the moon deck of the boat on which we were touring these magical islands. That morning we had experienced a transformative walk among sea lions nursing their pups, blue-footed boobies, Galapagos finches, pink flamingos and Sally Lightfoot crabs, in one of the most extraordinary natural environments left on the planet, almost unchanged since it inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. All in all, it was a fitting place to talk to Kotchka about the changes taking place at Procter & Gamble and the role the designers who work for the company play in them.

Three billion people all over the world use P&G products every day. At almost $57 billion in sales, that’s well over a billion dollars a week in beauty, family health, household care and Gillette products. Multiply that by the materials used to make these products, packaging and transporting, and the resources used in consuming and using them, and you begin to have a sense of the social and environmental impact that just one company can have on the world.

Proctor & Gamble’s mission is “to improve the lives of consumers everywhere,” and at the scale at which they operate, even minor improvements in products and processes can make a huge difference in people’s lives. While the company’s mission statement was not originally written with sustainability in mind, that’s changing. The designers Kotchka works with take their opportunity to make an impact very seriously. In fact, she says, “I have never met a designer who doesn’t have sustainability in their blood.”

The company prints fewer annual reports than it used to, and its sustainability reports are now all online. But those are small potatoes compared to the innovations designers are working on for products and packaging. Bill McDonough, author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, has been engaged by the company—a sign of much bigger things to come. And as far as McDonough is concerned, “Design is the first sign of human intention.”

AREAS OF EMPHASIS
Developing countries, which represent markets with significant growth potential, have always been of particular interest to P&G, and that focus is only increasing. These countries are also the places with the greatest humanitarian needs. Working with the World Health Organization, P&G has focused what Kotchka calls “a huge effort” on the availability of pure water in the developing world. The company is also turning its attention to eco-sustainability. By developing products and processes that require less energy or are simply more environmentally friendly, P&G can make a big difference. As Kotchka says, “It’s amazing what an impact switching to cold-water Tide can make.”

DESIGN OPTIONS
The Design department at P&G has grown from 27 to more than 200 people. Yet 90 percent of its work is still outsourced to outside design firms—to the point where much of the internal staff’s time is spent managing projects consultant firms are doing. This arrangement is driven not only by the volume of work, but also by a desire to see fresh ideas from many different resources.

For Kotchka, designers bring different voices and are “really good at finding options” and solutions that don’t represent compromises—either to design solutions or to the sustainability of products. She observes that if Option A and Option B are on the table and it’s an either-or situation, designers are the people on the team who come up with Option C—the one that solves the problem in a new and unexpected way.

One of the design firms that most inspires Kotchka and P&G is Ideo, with whom Kotchka’s team has developed a shared statement of principles. It came about because she was so impressed with the mission Ideo had written for itself that she asked the firm to help P&G designers develop a similar mission and template of their own.

Tim Brown, president and CEO of Ideo Product Development, agrees that designers bring an important and unusual perspective to the process, but puts a different slant on it. He credits scientists and engineers—the members of the development team responsible for R&D—for innovative and uncompromising solutions in the form of new materials and processes. Brown believes it is these breakthroughs in technology and materials that make possible so much of the product innovation that finds its way to market.

The unique element designers bring, Brown says, is the human component, because “they look at innovation in human terms”—at issues such as how a product gets used, how much and what kind of resources are consumed or wasted, how frequently it’s used. When the perspective is based on how people live with and use a design, and the focus is broader than the design itself, it becomes possible to view it as part of a larger system—of individuals, families, communities and cultures. Then, designers can uncover ways in which the design is or is not sustainable that are not evident when attention is limited to the product alone.

CHALLENGES AND VALUES
To be honest, not all designers are good at this, and some are not even interested in anything beyond the thing they’re designing. Even when designers are interested and able, they are often brought into the design process too late to have a broader impact. At P&G, Kotchka and her team are working hard to bring designers into the process early enough to contribute as fully as possible. And whether it’s her appreciation for the commitment to sustainability and innovation, or the human and social perspective that designers can bring to the critical issues involved in making a positive impact on the world, it’s clear that design is valued highly at Proctor & Gamble.

What’s interesting about all of this, of course, is the opportunity it illuminates. It’s one more piece of evidence that the more we include the world around us in our design thinking, the greater the impact we can have on it. Stepping back to see the bigger picture increases the magnitude of the opportunities we will find and the contribution we can make.