Martine Stillman
Martine Stillman
VP of Engineering @ Synapse Product Development
“I took myself into a future state where humankind has overcome this challenge of sustaining life on our planet, and we have solved climate change. As an engineer, I have to believe in that possibility. That’s my core faith is the infinite nature of possibilities.”
Action Prompts
// SELF REFLECTION
Martine compares building a sustainable future to building a mosaic. She reminds us that we can all meaningfully contribute to the bigger picture.
Think of a product you use regularly -- e.g. a food, beauty or household product
Spend 10 minutes mapping out its life cycle. We want you to consider the early and later stages of its lifecycle that you don’t usually think about. This includes the footprint and fate of all resources used throughout its life.
--Source of raw materials, including packaging
--Transportation
--Design/Manufacturing/Assembly
--Distribution/Sales
--Usage/Waste/Disposal/Resting Place
What did you uncover or learn?
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// TEAM EXPLORATION
Sustainability Newsroom
The purpose of this game is to play investigative journalists. Work together to research, ideate and build a story on what you’re learning about business success through a sustainability lens. Conduct as 1 team or break up into multiple teams. 90 minutes total.
Each team pick a company, product or service that has experienced immense growth in the last decade (examples: Uber, Uniqlo, Starbucks). Remember, that kind of growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum!
Spend 60 minutes crafting a front page news story mockup, that uncovers & reveals your research on the hidden impacts in this company’s growth.
Answer the following questions:
1. What internal & external factors may have facilitated that growth?
2. What resource(s) were used to enable the immense growth?
3. At whose expense did they experience this success?
4. Who benefited the most from this product or service?
After your research & composition time, spend 30 minutes sharing out each team’s story and what you learned about the hidden cost of success.
Resources
Cradle to Cradle
How products can be designed from the outset so after their useful lives, they’ll provide nourishment for something new.
How does Synapse apply sustainable design into product development?
In this week’s feature, Martine Stillman (she/her) weaves meaningful connections between her passions around sustainability, and how she advocates for long term thinking in her role as VP of Engineering at Synapse. She teaches us how “cradle-to-cradle” design informs her philosophy as a leader, and how she influences her clients and mainstream tech culture to more deeply consider the impact of their products on the world.
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Sustainability, Starting Right Where I Am
I had what I call a crisis of conscience a year and a half ago. I was out for a hike with a friend who is a lawyer in the environmental space, working for communities that need to be relocated due to sea level rise. I said, “I think I need to quit my job and go work for a solar panel manufacturer, or some sort of more sustainable engineering industry.” She said, “Don’t quit your job, you work for an engineering innovation company. Try to take the framework that you have, and push for more sustainable options for your clients.”
I really took that to heart because I do think there's a magic to doing what you can with what you have, right where you are -- not saying, I need such and such degree, or I need to get such and such job before I can make impactful changes.
It looks different for everyone. For some people, that'll look like evaluating how much methane you're generating by how much trash you're making, or trying to purchase less over the course of a year, trying to thrift, or reuse items or mend things. Those can all be really impactful things. Eating less meat is actually like one of the most impactful things that any human can do. There are really meaningful changes that every person can make.
When we talk about the cultural effects that we're seeing when we talk about the marginalization of particular groups, there's the sustainability impact there. We need buy-in and participation from everyone if we're if we're going to overcome these challenges.
When you look at macroeconomic factors at play, you can't you can't deny the impact that that's going to have on sustainability work. You can't deny the impact that it will have on emissions globally. It's a very complex, interconnected net of factors at play. There's really no untangling one from the other.
Challenging The “Instant Everything Now” POV
I realized in the course of the soul searching, that I was having a very American cultural influenced perspective on it, and even a tech world view of it. In the United States, right now in 2020, in the tech world, there's this sort of illusion that if you want to make change, it can be almost instantaneous. You don't like your job, you just quit, and you get a different job that happens in the course of a month. It's not a three year long process.
I really tried to give myself permission to say, “This is going to be a longer process than you would like it to be. You’re not going to go from not being very aware and not very sustainable, to suddenly being completely carbon neutral.” Having an entire career of sustainable design focus in a year isn’t practical.
I needed to give myself permission to recognize this is going to be a multi stage process. This is a marathon and not a sprint. I need to break it down into smaller chunks, and think about each chunk and celebrate each chunk and work on each chunk individually. That's how I can have the greatest impact. That’s how we can all have the greatest impact. If we focus on wanting to see that change in a very short amount of time, we're likely to disappoint ourselves when we miss our own goals. That will really zap our energy for this long-term effort that we need to make.
Interdependent Mosaic Of Solutions
I took myself into a future state where humankind has overcome this challenge of sustaining life on our planet, and we have solved climate change. As an engineer, I have to believe in that possibility. That's my core faith is the infinite nature of possibilities. So if I believe in that, and if I fast forward in my mind to a future state, I realized that there are going to be a million pieces to this mosaic. It's not going to be one thing. It's not going to be like, we suddenly walk away from every car on earth, and then boom, we've solved the problem. It's going to be everything that’s made, everything that is done is going to be done in a more and more and more sustainable way.
So even if I just put three or five pieces in the mosaic, this is how a mosaic is built. It's built one piece at a time. It's important that we all take responsibility for the pieces that we can put in the mosaic. We might only be putting a small segment of our pieces in, and it's going to rely on pieces being put in by everyone across the planet. I also have faith that if we raise our children in this way, where we say, “Don't feel guilty about the pieces that are not your responsibility, make sure that you are doing everything you can to enable other people to put their pieces in as well.”
Introducing The Life Cycle Assessment
Engineering is kind of the same whether you're applying it to a sustainable mission, or whether you're applying it to a non-sustainable mission. It’s been really exciting for people to see how their work can be translated into very material, concrete benefits to sustainable ends. They also realize that there’s a lot of work and training that needs to be done on some of these techniques. One of them is called LCA, which stands for Life Cycle Assessment, where we try to evaluate the impact of a product from the very beginning raw material extraction, that will then create the product all the way through to disposal or reuse. It’s either cradle to grave or cradle to cradle.
There’s a lot of training and learning that we need to do to figure out how we actually implement this. As we come to grips with realities, and overcome that despair about sustainability and product design, we realize there are impacts that we can make. Those impacts are going to be made in very concrete ways. We’ve been trying to get more and more people on our staff trained up on how to make design considerations that can translate into good benefits. Putting the theory into practice is interesting, but it's not super glamorous. The actual nuts and bolts of getting these things done is not a scenario where people come along and like pin sustainability medals on you when you're busy crunching numbers in a spreadsheet. It's not it's not all glamour, but it is functional. We're excited to see the benefits that we’ll hopefully reap on the other side.
We usually want that lightbulb moment. It’s human nature! When you’re running the race, you want to see a finish line. You don't just want to keep running. That's not exactly how it works. Sustainable design is a very iterative process. There's this sense that the race is never won, and you're never done. So you design it, and then you run a bunch of analysis to figure out where you're at, and then you try and identify what's called the hotspots. You look at those hotspots, and then you say, “Okay, these are the things that we're going to work on.” You try and iterate on those. This is also the nature of engineering. Engineering is one of those situations in which sometimes, like civil engineers, when they build a bridge, people drive across the bridge and it feels done. Often, though, there's some iteration that needs to be done. That bridge needs to be maintained. Product development is the same way. You make one product, you release it, then you kind of have to iterate on it. So sustainable design is very much like that, too. So we make some improvements on the hotspots, but you haven't made it fully sustainable.
Steering The Ship Of The Synapse Portfolio
Synapse is not actually a sustainable design business. We’re a product development company.
For years and years, our portfolio has relied on an assortment of products across a variety of industries. We're very much in the business of doing excellent work to foster innovation and to keep people employed. That means that we don't always have as much agency. We have to choose whether or not we put food on the table, or whether we are completely values aligned with each and every one of our clients. That's a hard thing to come to grips with. When you're a consultant, you probably won't be values aligned with every one of your clients. So what do you do? How do you draw that line?
A lot of companies have been evaluating their complicity in the systems of racial injustice, and we've also been evaluating our complicity in the system of white supremacy. As a company founded by four white male founders, we're not unique. That's a very common startup story. What role does that play in our success? How can we understand the framework that we were built in, while simultaneously doing what we can to dismantle that now, and to take responsibility for our complicity? What can we do to tip the scales in the right direction?
This also goes to climate change and sustainability, too, right? I mean, every person in every company has a role to play in sustainability. You want history to reveal that your company, your mission and your life was on the right side. If you’re running a big ship, you have to be realistic about how long it's going to take to turn that ship. One of the things that I've been trying to do is to position Synapse to capitalize on the winds where we can, and to set us up for the future so that we have enough grounding, we have enough expertise and experience, so that when that perfect sustainability client comes knocking, we can say absolutely, we are the right ones. Look at everything we've been doing, we've been waiting for you for years.
I'm very aware that I’m a farmer standing in an empty field holding a bunch of seeds. I might not even be here to see these seeds become full plants. Maybe the Synapse seeds never get to be the tall, beautiful sunflowers that I'm imagining. But if we grow half of a plant, and then someone from our staff goes somewhere else, then they sow some seeds. If we can just cast this net wider and wider, I think that we will in the end, turn this whole ship around.
When we think about the systems that we work within, I think we have a responsibility to lead up where we can. At Synapse, we have great relationships with clients, and they've been trusting us to help them make technological decisions for years. It's actually very powerful for us to come in and say, “Okay, it's 2020. Have you thought about your sustainability positioning? Are you interested in adding a Life Cycle Assessment workstream to this product development effort that we're doing for you? We’re seeing other clients who want to tell their consumers about how they've improved the sustainability of their products. Are you interested in that?”
That's going to be great for our business, and it’s a way that we can subvert this mainstream business culture. Even better than subverting, we're adding. We're saying, “This is something that needs to be mainstream business culture.” We’re leading from where we are, we're doing what we can with what we have, we're taking existing client relationships, we're taking growing market effects that are happening around sustainability, with the knowledge we're trying to build internally. Each one of us has a responsibility for how we can gently push these things forward. Hopefully, 20 years from now, it'll be obvious. Everybody will have sustainable design as part of their product development roadmap.
Beyond Altruism & Generating Value For The Future
Every Synapster would love to see Synapse be a company where we are wholly oriented towards products that change lives and make a difference. Obviously, I have a strong sustainability bent. Not every Synapster is there with me. Some people feel like it's really important to reach deeply into these healthcare projects, because that's another way that we can positively impact lives.
In a future state, I could see our work fragmented across a bunch of different verticals, and we would say, each one of these products is really impactful in its own special and unique way. Depending on the lens that you're looking through, a client can look more values aligned or less. It will be important in our future state to understand how we look at our portfolio and where we spend our energy, and making sure that we’re trying to do the best that we can to have the types of clients and missions that deeply energize our team. It's not just because we want to be altruistic. It's also because that's what makes our team deeply excited.
I met with a textile manufacturer recently who said they have built the first purpose-built sustainable factory for textile creation in the world. You would never do that out of a sense of altruism, you would only do that through business motivation. I think that is so amazing. Every yoga pant manufacturer in the world wants to be able to put out a line of yoga pants that says this fabric is sustainable right now. That’s something that happened, because the people said, “We want sustainable yoga pants.”
We also see sustainability following cost savings. We set out to do a cost down exercise, and we removed a bunch of parts from the design that weren't really necessary. We were able to combine a bunch of things, we used a lot less material, the product got lighter, because we had removed some things or combined some parts and changed the material choices. Then it won a sustainability award! Because it was lighter to ship, it took less raw resources. It took less energy and manufacturing because there were fewer parts. I'd love to see that happen across everything.
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