Commercializing Sustainability with Phil White of Grounded World

In this episode of Decarbonizing Commerce, host Keith Anderson welcomes Phil White, co-founder of Grounded, a boutique agency and B Corp focused on embedding sustainability into business models. Phil discusses how Grounded helps both large and emerging brands integrate sustainability into areas like product design, packaging innovation, and retail activation. By connecting purpose to profit, Grounded aims to close the gap between sustainability intentions and commercial actions. Phil shares insights into their innovative approach, including case studies on transforming consumer behaviors towards more sustainable practices and the importance of commercial value in driving retailer support for sustainability initiatives. This episode highlights the critical steps and collaborative efforts required to make sustainability a core business driver.

Learn more about Decarbonizing Commerce at decarbonize.co

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Keith Anderson: Welcome to Decarbonizing Commerce, where we explore what's new, interesting, and actionable at the intersection of climate innovation and commerce. I'm your host, Keith Anderson, and together we'll meet entrepreneurs and innovators reinventing retail, e-commerce, and consumer products through the lenses of low carbon and commercial viability. 

Welcome to Decarbonizing Commerce. I'm Keith Anderson. I'm really excited about this week's episode because when I started Decarbonize.co, my core thesis was that many retailers and brands struggle to embed sustainability commercially. That is, adapt their business models and integrate sustainability objectives into the way that they do what they do.

And our guest this week is Phil White, who along with his partner and wife, Heidi, is co founder of Grounded, a boutique agency and B Corp that helps both large, established, and emerging retailers and brands make progress in what I call commercial sustainability. That is, embedding sustainability as a discipline in areas like product design, packaging innovation, retail activation, and much more that you'll hear about from Phil during this week's episode.

But, when I met Phil a few months ago and learned about the work that he and Heidi are doing, I wanted to continue the conversation and be sure that you all could listen in because I think it really represents a lot of what we as an industry are going to have to focus on over the next decade or so.

And I saw firsthand through other industry transitions, like the growth of digital commerce, just how much effort and coordination it takes to, make a shift like this across different functions. So I'm very excited to introduce you to Phil White of Grounded.

Phil, good to see you. Welcome to the Decarbonizing Commerce podcast. Thanks for having me. Well, I thought to kick us off, maybe you could tell us a bit about the business that you and your partner, Heidi, run, Grounded, and how you came to start that particular venture. 

Phil White: Sure. With pleasure. So, so grounded. So grounded, I guess the way we describe ourselves is a social innovation and brand activation agency. And the reason we chose those two terms was kind of quite specific because, particularly in the world of brand purpose and sustainability, we realize the existential challenge that most companies and brands and actually non profits face, frankly, is the ability to connect the why of purpose to the way of doing business.

Or sometimes we say the way of profit, obviously we can't say that for non profits because it's a bit contradictory, but it's the way that you connect your purpose to

Keith Anderson: Getting things done.

Phil White: getting things done. And the more we kind of got into that, the more we heard that this was the existential challenge faced by most businesses, particularly today, the more we realized that the way to solve that was to kind of figure out what the gap between intention and action actually is, or in other words, purpose and profit.

Same difference, just to kind of level deeper. And therefore, that's why we focus on innovation because innovation is obviously setting the intention in terms of what you want to sell, produce, deliver in order to add value to the consumer and drive some kind of revenue. And then action is actually what you're going to do to unlock that revenue and sell stuff, right?

How are you going to change behavior and get people to buy it? So, that's why we kind of Focus on those two areas. And that's why a lot of the work we do is more upstream innovation focused in terms of coming up with kind of positioning and propositions and go to market strategies and ideas and platforms and sometimes products and packaging and innovation.

And the other part then is often focuses on retail, because obviously that's where the rubber hits the road, right? To figure out how are we going to get people to actually believe that this is worth buying versus their competitors in the category, wherever it might be, and actually figure out where the intention action gap is and how big it is that's preventing people from making a better, more responsible, sustainable choice.

And then when we can close that gap, then sustainability stops being a risk mitigating factor, a cost to the business and starts becoming a driver of consumer demand. Purchase intent, which again is the holy grail. So going back to what Decarbonizing Commerce is all about is how do you commercialize sustainability?

And that's exactly what we do. So that's what we do all day every day is help clients figure out how to commercialize sustainability.

Keith Anderson: And in terms of your background and, Heidi's background, has sustainability always been your focus, or are you coming to the topic from a different perspective?

Phil White: Yeah, no, it's a great question. So before we started Grounded, we worked for a big global advertising network that everyone knows and we actually run the Unilever business here in North America. And we were kind of pretty instrumental in trying to figure out how you can translate Paul Polman's, sustainable living plan into tangible brand building activations and campaigns, basically. And the more we got into doing that, the more we wanted to do it, because we saw the positive impact that we could have, the more engaged the teams that we ran were and wanted to be part of it. And of course, as we did more of that, we got more connected to the UN and the Sustainable Development Goals.

And we began to kind of, see the importance of why this was critical, right? In terms of driving, trying to, activate that plan to save the world. So it's really all of those three things coming together that made us go, okay, well, actually we want to be doing more, of this.

And because we work with a big multinational, agency holding group, and we're working with one of the biggest multinational companies on the planet, amazing credibility and amazing experience, but it's still too slow. We're not seeing the impact that we want to have. We're not operating in an agile and exponential way.

So I think like most kind of slightly jaundiced and tired advertising agency execs, we decided that it was time to kind of separate from the mothership and go off and do our own thing. So Grounded was born in 2018, actually, to be exactly that. A smaller boutique, more agile, more nimble, exponential agency to help you kind of transform purpose into profit and create value by doing good.

So that's kind of how we all started.

Keith Anderson: Well, maybe we can bring it to life with, one or two case studies or examples. I think it would be really interesting to hear, who are the types of folks that are approaching you and what's the problem they're approaching you with? And then what do we do, what do you do to move the needle forward?

Phil White: Yeah. Great question. So we kind of work with four, I guess you could say four main constituents. So we work with big kind of global enterprise level brands. Will that be Ford or the Lycra company or Nestle or Nespresso or whoever it might be. And that tends to be focused on two things. One is kind of helping them better articulate their overall corporate or brand purpose.

And two is, as we talked about at the start, is how do you then connect that to the, your sustainability goals and commitments in order to turn those into drivers of value or purchase intent across whatever your brand portfolio is. So that's kind of, Pillar 1. The other kind of main constituent we work with, and connected to that then of course are the retailers, because often they're CPG orientated brands that need to then be activated at retail.

So that's kind of where the retailers come in. We do have some retail, direct retail clients like Grove, Collaborative, for example. But usually it's through the lens of the brands themselves that we kind of engage with the retailers and, generally that tends to be the case. The other kind of main constituents are non profits.

And they have a similar problem often in that they might have low brand awareness or low brand relevance or saliency that are out there in the market. But they're trying to fund all these programs on the ground and of course they need money. They need people to put their hands in the pockets and support them.

So it's kind of the same deal. It's, it's a parallel world in terms of how do you figure out what your mission and your purpose is? How do you make that engaging and clear for people to want to support it? And then how do you drive the behavior change to people to put their hands in the pockets and support it?

And it's, really the same thing. So, as we got into this and we started working with some larger non profits like the World Food Program and the UN Institutes Hospital and Plan International and the Samaritans and whoever it might be, we, quickly realized that there was a lot of commonality between what we'd learned for the past 30 years in terms of, brand building at a global level and activation and how you can apply some of those principles, package them up in perhaps a more accessible or exponential way for non profits.

So that's kind of what we did, and I guess kind of what lies at the heart of what we do, to bridge that gap, a lot of the work we do is design sprint based, so we often kind of show up and do a lot of workshops and design sprints, and we do it efficiently, we do it at speed, and iteratively, and we facilitate it ourselves because that makes it accessible for the big brands who might be just stuck in a rut or stuck in their existing relationships, or just are struggling to kind of push the needle internally for whatever the myriad reasons there might be around sustainability.

So it gives them a very quick opportunity, a wedge, if you like, to be able to kind of jump on and do something and get that ball rolling. And for nonprofits, from a financial equation point of view, obviously it's more accessible. So we can go in and we can do it fast because we generally know what we're doing and it ain't our first rodeo.

So we can go in there fairly quickly and deliver the value and deliver the clarity that we need. so that tends to be kind of how we work. So I would say, in kind of summary, 

we tend to do three things. We tend to kind of work with brands, retailers, startups, and nonprofits to help them articulate their purpose, pull that down into a brand position and then go to market strategy.

We help them activate their brands, whether through packaging, design, identity, omnichannel experiences, digital, so whatever it is along the path of purchase and based on understanding where that intention action gap is to drive the behavior change and close that intention action gap. And then we help them accelerate their impact and that tends to kind of come down to obviously tracking and measurement because you can't.

Manage what you can't measure, lots of kind of partnerships, either commercial or non profit. We work quite closely with UN Officer Partnerships, actually, and figure out often how to design sprint potential partnerships between for profit and non for profit sectors to, again, to accelerate SDGs.

Going back to what I kind of said based on our experience with Unilever. And then we tend to do kind of publish and write quite a lot of thought leadership and do speaking engagements and run design sprints again, just to start getting that flywheel internally spinning. So people feel that they're able to kind of make progress against whatever initiatives or platforms that are already out there and working.

So they tend to be the kind of three things, but I'd say the core of what all that really comes down to is the retail aspect. Because, the ability to then combine commercial innovation with brand activation or social innovation to brand activation is obviously the bit that is where the biggest gap is in our experience.

So that's why we very much tend to focus and often, design sprint with brands and retailers together to try and come up with platforms that are going to drive that sustainability agenda through to the end consumer or the end shopper and drive the behavior change that everyone's looking for.

Keith Anderson: And when we talk about behavior change, are we talking purely about making a product or brand switching or substitution decision, I'm going to swap a more sustainable option for what I'm currently buying, or is it in some cases even more significant behavioral change, for example, just making it up, switching from single use to refillable and reusable packaging.

Phil White: Both and a lot more. So, a good example might be, so we were recently engaged by a startup that had licensed the, like the, Brita brand actually from Clorox. And they wanted to create a new bottled water and we're like, "Oh no, the world doesn't need another bottled water. That's the very last thing we need."

But when we got into it, we kind of thinking about the Brita system and the Brita equity, we realized, that there was a gap between, using your Brita kind of container at home, which is obviously a more, much more sustainable way of consuming and storing water and the actual kind of reality, the usage gap of people forgetting their swell bottles and forgetting their reusable bottles when they went out or, did whatever.

There was a gap in the market.

Keith Anderson: I think it's Stanley bottles now, Phil.

Phil White: Stanley, there you go. I'm obviously out of touch and this was only two years ago. But what that gap was meaning that what people were doing was doing what everyone does is just default to walk into your nearest retail outlet and buy a plastic water bottle, right?

So that was the gap that we were actually filling. That was the category opportunity, but also the intention action gap that we're quite literally trying to close. So as a result of that, we did a lot of research, competitive landscape assessments and retail audits and focus groups and you name it, all the usual stuff and realized that actually this problem was much bigger than we thought it was.

And there was the real, there was a really behavioral problem there that people were forgetting, wanted to do the right thing and not buy plastic water bottles and all that kind of stuff, but reality, when you're out or you're late for work or you're stuck out as you've been on vacation, you know outside and you're desperate for a drink, you're gonna just do what you do and go and buy a bottle, a plastic water bottle.

'Cause usually that's the only option. So this entire platform is about how do we develop a product that fills that gap, that addresses that need, which switches people out of buying plastic water bottles, but also kind of gets them into a more regular behavior where they can actually fill up their water bottle at home.

They can buy it once, they can drink it on the go, but they can keep it because it can be used for six or seven times. So they can actually use it as a kind of interim, as a fill in for their kind of normal kind of swell or Stanley water bottle. So that was a bit of everything. That was like changing perception, changing attitudes, changing behavior, locking people into a new system or new ritual, as well as identifying the bigger category gap that was driving the, which was driving, kind of negative environmental impact, let's say. So maybe that's a good example of, how, it addressed all of those things simultaneously.

So to your point, yeah, it's rarely one thing, but the, idea of figuring out where the intention action gap along the journey is, once you know where the biggest intention action gap is, where it's occurring, how big it is, then you can focus on, all your energy on addressing that. And then use rest the journey tactically to kind of try and embed or habituate the right behavior, which is often what we end up trying to do.

Keith Anderson: And just sticking with that example, how much of the, effort to close that intent to action gap happened at the, were there ad campaigns that support it? Is it a packaging redesign? What kind of retail activation ends up being pivotal to something like that?

Phil White: Yeah, yes, all of the above, definitely an omni channel, but it started effectively with a new product, a new pack, an entirely new kind of product packaging driven proposition, which then obviously fundamentally needed to be merchandised and displayed at retail in the category and at the moment where people would otherwise default to buying and doing what they usually do.

So, it's still launching and rolling out, frankly. And a lot of it has been driven initially through social, through very kind of targeted, geo targeted social media to just raise the awareness and the relevance and set the occasion. But of course, retail, just in terms of its ability to kind of drive visibility and accessibility is obviously the most important thing, particularly in this category.

Which is, that's what drives the category. It's visibility and accessibility. That's it, basically. So if you're not, if you're not, if you're not visible and you're not available, then you ain't gonna, you ain't gonna win.

Keith Anderson: Makes a ton of sense. And, then, of course, there's the commercial value equation. Do we sell more? Are the margins, comparable or accretive? Is that part of the work also? or are we starting really from the customer and working backwards?

Phil White: Yeah, 

so often what we try and do with the intention action gap is we try and size it. How big is it? And then what for value can you put against not closing it? Right? So, what's the category selling story, right? What's the size of the prize or the money that's being left on the table by not closing the gap?

And that's usually the way in because as we all know, rightly or wrongly, depending on which way you look at it, retailers want to drive category value, right? They want to drive category profit. And you can talk a lot of great stuff around sustainability, but unless it's going to drive the value commercially at a category level that retailers are looking for, it's going to be very hard to convince buyers to support it. It's just the reality of how the machine works, right? 

But if you can frame it as, well, this is how much money you're losing on the table, leaving on the table, if you don't do this, and this is the quantified amount, right? Oh, and by the way, this also ties back to your, your sustainability objectives as a retailer that you've pledged to uphold that you're holding your suppliers to account for to deliver.

We're turning up not only doing that for you, which helps, with your kind of own commitments, but we can deliver higher category profit and value. Why wouldn't you do it? And that's really the essence of what it comes down to, it's connecting those dots.

Keith Anderson: And are you starting to see the retailers be responsive to that kind of framing? I mean, I, look at some retailers who are increasingly vocal about how they're incorporating some of these factors in decisions about assortment and merchandising. They're introducing their own labeling schemes to add credentialing to some of the products that meet their conditions.

Is that something that's still relatively limited across major retail or is it becoming more widespread?

Phil White: I mean, I think, I don't think there's a clinker answer to that. I think it just depends. you have retailers that embody those values into their own label products and portfolios, right? We all know who they are and do very well at it. And there are those that are trying to figure out how to do it.

And there are those that are on the bleeding edge of circularity and changing their infrastructure, right? To, try and deliver it with reverse logistics and reselling and re-commerce and all the other good stuff that needs to be kind of built up around it. So, It just depends. And I think part of it is going back to kind of figuring out then, from a brand owner's point of view is what's our purpose?

What can we realistically deliver, credibly deliver from a sustainability point of view? How is that going to support the sustainability commitments of our retailer, our customers, and therefore what activation platform can we build around it? To kind of move the needle. and I think there's always tends to be, particularly in this space, that tends to be a kind of just a general conception that if you don't knock it out of the park, then it's not worth doing.

And of course that's never the case. Rome was not built in a day. It's the little incremental steps over time that build up that result in the, in, in the impact. So half of the problems often, and again, why we approach this from a design spring point of view is that the barriers to then engagement are as low as we can possibly get them.

We can get as many people together, cross sector people from together from different, areas of the business interacting and interfacing and ideating around it. So the chances of something getting out there and happening are greatly increased. And then it's a case of giving it a run and seeing what happens.

And, usually, I would say, once you get it in and it starts working, then it tends to kind of grow and then sometimes becomes a category platform and then sometimes becomes an ongoing evergreen platform and sometimes even gets to become a complete category invention priority kind of moving forward for a, for a retailer.

So yeah, there's so many different ways in which it can, kind of show up. It, I think it really just depends on kind of where you are on your journey, and trying to figure out that connection point between, you feel like what the brand stands for, where the intention action gap is, and what's going to have the biggest impact socially and environmentally.

Keith Anderson: Yeah, I, I was speaking with a brand this morning who I think is, sort of mid flight on a very similar initiative. They're trying to pivot from single use to refillable, in at least one of their product lines. And like most brands, they're starting, they've been in market for about a year, six months in a limited regional pilot, six months nationally, and the early results are encouraging.

They've now converted about 25 percent of their own brand buyers to the refill. The economics look good for the retailer and them, and they're, to your point, now starting to explore, well, what kind of, shelf design is going to be necessary to really scale this. And so, it's, turning into an opportunity for a particular retailer, along with this brand, to do something, unique and different that, Who knows?

I know at least the brand is hopeful that in 12 or 18 months, it'll migrate from the first retailer to many others.

Phil White: Yeah. And, not for nothing, we all know what, we all know the policies that are coming down the pipe. Right. Particularly EPR and the impact that's going to have on both brands and retailers to, to kind of, clean their act up a little bit, quite frankly.

So with all of these things coming down the pipe, I think we're going to, we're anticipating that we're going to see a lot more of these initiatives and innovations, not because they're nice to do, but because they're a have to do.

Keith Anderson: Sure. Sure.

Phil White: So that's the, that, that's the hope anyway. Yeah.

Keith Anderson: Thinking almost about the other side of the coin, I'm thinking of another major brand who just reassigned one of their veteran executives, 20 year veteran at the company, with experience in a lot of functions, sales, marketing, e-commerce, very little in sustainability, but that person has now been tasked with taking credit, and getting credit with shoppers and retailers for some of the good things they've already done.

Is that a scenario that you've encountered where in fact, they've already done things to clean up their act and now it's as much about finding a way to present that? Both commercially and to consumers?

Phil White: Yeah, for sure. So something that we'll hopefully talk about the conference in Chicago a little bit more around is, a kind of design sprint that we've developed called Retail Activation for Good. And it's quite literally designed to do everything that we just kind of talked about. And even though we kind of launched it about three years ago and it was based on, lots of deep insight with some of the biggest brands and retailers on the planet who were kind enough to contribute their thought leadership and examples to help us build out this framework in these case studies. 

Believe it or not, it was quite tough to get it going. And we were like, we don't understand why, because everyone's asking for it. And it took a while for the penny to drop because a lot of these big companies are still kind of caught up internally with what's our purpose and what's our sustainability goals and commitments and how to report against them and how do we quantify them and how do we kind of position them internally and how do we get funding in and, getting it down to the, what you might call the tactical level of retail is, of course, where everyone knows it needs to be.

But getting there, crossing that bridge and taking that path is a bit of a challenge. So it's taking a while for companies to go through that journey of internal transformation and understanding, and then figure out how to collapse the traditional silos that exist within, larger companies and be more kind of, what's the word?

Intersectional is probably the right word in terms of how do we approach these problems.

 And, how does the CMO and the CSO and the COO and the CRO, the CIO, whoever it might be, all get together to kind of figure out, say that, sustainability doesn't exist in a silo. It touches or should drive everything from innovation to activation.

So that not only demands a different mindset and way of thinking, functionally and, operationally, it demands a different way of working. so it, we tend to find that, even though retail activation for good makes complete sense. To many companies, many are still on that journey of transformation and trying to figure out how to kind of rally the support and change the design and their operational infrastructure to enable them to actually get to the point of doing that.

And there's relatively few actually proportionally that are there and that are able, to do it. 

Keith Anderson: Are there any that you would hold up as, shiny beacons of inspiration for folks listening?

Phil White: Yeah, I mean, there's some that do just do that naturally and intuitively, Grove Collaborative probably being a kind of good one because of just their proposition and their purpose and their positioning. You've got larger organizations that have been doing this actually for, a number of years, whether that be kind of PNGs and Unilevers through to your kind of, your Patagonias and whatever it might be, right?

And, as a certified B Corp ourselves, we tend to kind of see that, a lot of the B Corp brands and businesses tend to kind of, again, have a tendency to kind of do this more intuitively anyway, because it's kind of embedded into their operating and procedure and their governance, right. And how they think and kind of how they behave. So, and what's kind of interesting is what we're seeing is that the smaller, the kind of smaller disruptors that are coming into established categories and shaking things up a bit tend to be also be the more sustainable or purpose driven brands that are able to get that flywheel spinning quicker and have a cohort, a smaller cohort, a very active, often younger, more dynamic consumers behind them are kind of helping to kind of drive that agenda.

So that's an interesting thing that we're seeing, whether that be in beauty or fashion or diapers or whatever it might be, you're getting these smaller players coming in and kind of disrupting the status quo a little bit. And they're the ones actually that we're finding are really kind of leading the pack and, encouraging the larger companies to try and, change their behavior, which tends to result in those larger companies trying to buy them and acquire them.

Which sometimes works, more often than not doesn't, because as soon as you get... if you're bought by a big brother or big sister, then you kind of tend to lose the essence and the drive behind what made you a disruptor in the first place, because you get lost in the, you kind of get lost in the, matrix, so to speak.

So yeah, it's just, it's really, it's just a really interesting time to be intersectionally kind of where we're at, because there are so many forces at play.

Keith Anderson: Yeah. I mean, you've just touched on something that, I pay very close attention to, which is where is the change originating, and, scaling? It, to your point, it very often starts with the emerging brands who have the benefit of being able to design from day one for the next decade or two without a century long legacy and large scale production facilities and established ways of working.

They get to start from scratch and design the product and business that they think will be durable, for the future. But exactly as you say, they often struggle to remain independent. And then the question becomes, what does that integration, look like? Is it assimilation or do they end up setting the pace for the new mothership?

Phil White: Right. And a good parallel to that is, whether you, depending on what side of the fence you're on, if you look at the kind of carbon offset marketplace and how many new disruptors have come in to, providing carbon offset platforms and verifiable projects. But what we're kind of finding is those smaller disruptors are kind of drying up a bit because the investors behind them are losing patience, frankly,

Keith Anderson: Yep.

Phil White: in their ability to kind of convert and get the growth,

get the growth multipliers that they're looking for. So those are tending to go out of business or being acquired by other larger companies who are, who have got the resources and have got the infrastructure to be able to start to scale them. So that's a really interesting kind of dynamic that's going on just in that category.

But I think that probably holds for quite a few, actually, when you kind of look at how it seems to be working. So,

Keith Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. And I look at it, I mean, as, you and I have discussed offline, a lot of the work that I did in the early days of online grocery and e-commerce was helping some of the big retailers and brands initially assess, what's the speed and likelihood that this is going to be a big factor in my own business?

And there was a lot of discussion and debate about, well, sure, for these small companies, it makes sense, but at our scale, it doesn't make sense. But looking back 10 or 15 years later, there's no question for direct to consumer and other emerging brands, it's, 80 percent in some cases of their total sales. But look at the majors, Amazon is a top five customer for basically any major CPG at this point.

And so I'm optimistic that we'll see a similar maturity curve in this sense, where the companies again, that have the luxury of no legacy, they can get everything closer to right on the first swing at bat and, eventually as the infrastructure and the systems and the ways of working and the data and the tool set,

all these things that are in development get refined and more sophisticated and battle tested. I think it's going to continue to borrow the word you used, it's going to grow exponentially.

Phil White: Yeah,

Keith Anderson: that's why you and I are both out here trying to help companies, get ahead of it because, the problem with ignoring things on an exponential trajectory is it always seems small and inconsequential until suddenly it's the only thing anybody can talk about,

Phil White: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, hockey stick kicks in pretty quick, doesn't it? And you need to be at that election point, yeah, ready and open and willing to know how to do it. Yeah.

Keith Anderson: Well, one thing I'm looking forward to is your sessions at the Summit in Chicago. Aside from that, is there anything on the horizon that you're really excited about or, looking forward to?

Phil White: Lots. In fact, we were talking about it a bit before. I know kind of climate week, there's a lot going on at climate week, New York. And there's a kind of big CSO awards ceremony that's kind of happening during climate week that I'm kind of looking forward to and just kind of seeing some of the impact that some of these kind of global enterprise level CEOs are having on some of the issues that we've talked about, so that's kind of really exciting. We've got a kind of few interesting kind of projects in the pipeline as well, both on a kind of brand level and a non profit level. There's one non profit in particular, which I've really enjoyed working with, which I think has universal application to everybody called ProSocial World, and they've basically managed to combine evolutionary social and political science together to create a framework that enables groups to better cooperate and collaborate together.

So if you can imagine the implication of that across every single sector, whether that be individuals, groups, organizations, networks, states, countries, nations, you name it. It has tremendous power. And one of the, as we all know, the new economic paradigm needs to shift from competitive to pre-competitive and it needs to be based on collaboration versus competition, because otherwise we're all going to run out of resources very quickly. And, the tragedy of the commons is going to kick in pretty quickly as it is already in some, in some markets. So, yeah, so that's the, that's what I'm most excited about because it ladders up to this new economic paradigm and it just challenges the very precepts on which we even think commerce is built. So that's kind of what I'm kind of quite excited about. And with, and we're hoping to run a session at the UN in November around the conscious attention economy, which is kind of linked to that,

which is how do you kind of engage people in a more meaningful way and value, value their attention, not just in terms of clicks and eyeballs or whatever, but value their conscious attention in their ability to tackle some of these big, kind of larger issues, whether it be false narratives or AI and algorithms all the way through to how we currently monetize media.

So lots of interesting stuff coming, going on. 

Keith Anderson: No shortage of things to stay up to speed on.

Well, Phil, I really enjoyed the conversation. I'm sure listeners did also. If folks want to get in touch with you, how can they reach you?

Phil White: Yeah. So, website is grounded.world, or you can just drop me an email at phil@grounded.world, kind of simple as that.

Keith Anderson: Wonderful. Well, thanks so much for joining us.

Phil White: Thanks for having me. Great to see you.

Keith Anderson: Thanks for listening. I'm Keith Anderson, the executive producer and host of Decarbonizing Commerce. Sonic Futures handles audio, music, and video production. If you enjoyed the show, we'd really appreciate it if you took a moment to subscribe and leave a review or share it with a colleague. For the full episode and more member exclusive insight and analysis, join the decarbonizing commerce community at Decarbonize.co. Thanks for listening and we'll see you on the next episode of Decarbonizing Commerce.

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