What is Ethical Growth?

Intro

I've used web and growth marketing to grow social enterprises, charities and startups for 15 years. Growth marketing is the data-driven science of marketing that's all about using code and algorithms to help your people find you - usually by subverting the code and algorithms of the giant social media platforms.

It's a lot of fun for someone who likes seeing good ideas thrive.

But as someone who is also alarmed by the current state of the world and deeply committed to helping create a better one, it raises lots of big ethical questions.

• What's the best way for an ethical idea to grow?
• Is it ethical for any business to use social media? What about AI?
• At what point are we encouraging the very systems we want to change?

It's easy to just ignore the questions and move forward with growth. It's also easy to take the high ground and opt out of all digital media entirely. But sitting in the uncomfortable space between those two options, I've done a lot of nuanced thinking about their answers. The right answers are always more complex and liminal than the easy sledgehammer approaches, and they're worth thinking through in order to choose the right path for your idea.

Underlying all these questions is our certain knowledge that change is urgently needed. Unethical tech giants and corporations have too much influence on policy, and have no priorities around benefiting humanity. We need to supplant them with ethical ideas that are good for the people and planet. Growing impact ideas and helping them take over the world is one way to achieve that.

Ethical Growth questions apply equally to startups, businesses, charities, social enterprises and nonprofits. As Brianne West (powerhouse founder of Ethique and Incrediballs) said to me - "Every business is a social enterprise! Some just don't know it yet." That's because every business, project, venture and initiative starts with a good idea that you think will help people.

This post outlines an approach I've come up with to answer Ethical Growth questions. The aim is to help your good idea change the world.

Degrowth, Death & Compost

The pitfalls of endless economic growth are well established, particularly by the degrowth movement. There's the environmental degradation - as economies expand, they typically consume more resources and produce more pollution, contributing to climate change, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity. Growth can also rely on exploitation, exploiting workers by driving the cost of labor down or exploiting buyers by driving the cost of items up, or both. It can worsen inequality, where the benefits flow disproportionately to those who already have wealth. And it requires us to borrow from future generations by using up finite resources faster than they can be replenished.

Not all growth is bad

When we hear a lot about capitalism’s constant need for growth outpacing our resources and leading to environmental catastrophe, we imagine growth like a tumor, and this makes growth sound really bad and scary.

There are some types of growth that are really good, however.

When trees grow it’s a wonderful thing. Gardens, flower and vegetables, wheat and fungi all grow and improve the world. When a baby grows it brings us joy. Birds, whales, mammals and insects all grow and contribute to a flourishing natural environment.

On the other hand, algal bloom, mould and fungus can grow in ways that are really gross. Populations of brown marmorated stink bugs are growing out of control because climate change has extended their breeding season. In New Zealand the growth of imported possum, rabbit, stoat, rat and ferret populations have wrought havoc on our unique native species and done almost irreparable damage to our natural habitat.

On the other, other hand, there are environments where these populations are naturally kept under control. In Australia, for example, there are a large amount of natural predators that eat possums and compete for habitats and food, so the possum population remains small. Possums are regarded as cute furry friends in Australia, while in New Zealand they are regarded as a threat. The limited population means they remain a positive part of the ecosystem in Australia.

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Good growth

The point is this: growth can be really, really good, as long as there is also death. The difference between a tumor and a tree is that trees die, stop growing, and give back to the ground eventually. Death is really, really sad, and as a culture we don't have the tools for talking about death in a positive light, though we have plenty of tools to avoid talking about it. I wonder if this might be hurting our approach to growing good ideas.

If trees grew forever they would form a canopy that would block out the sun and make other types of life impossible. The idea of a tree growing forever is ridiculous, yet it’s what we expect economies to do.

Trees maintain balance in our complex ecosystem by proceeding all their growth with subsequent death and composting. The composting returns all their carbon, water, nutrients and seeds to the soil, and this provides the nourishment that new trees need to sprout. The death of every tree contains the gift of new life.

When a fungal node withers its nutrients and chemical signals are passed on to the next node through the mycelium network, and a new spore grows somewhere else on the network carrying the same genetic instructions. If you’ve seen Mountainhead, tech futurists tend to borrow this idea when they dream about uploading their minds to machines - so the meat death of a body doesn’t mean an end to the benefits to the world that can be gained from one person’s knowledge and experience. Fungal spores don’t carry experience, but they do carry genetic potential, seeding the next generation with the raw instructions to begin again. If technology allows us to cooperate more like a fungal network, it could, the thinking goes, speed up our collective knowledge advancement. Imagine if AGI had access to learn from the whole length and breadth of human experience, and identify patterns and recommend improvements.

Death in the fungal sense is just a passing-on.

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Company death

For companies, initiatives and movements to grow with a positive impact, they must also be able to die. But it’s really hard for a business to die. Even if your company never traded, never sent an invoice, and never opened a bank account, in New Zealand you still have to file nil returns or “non-active” declarations with the IRD, wait for a “no-objection” letter, and sit through months of public notices so that creditors that you never had can object. In practice, it’s easier to just let your company sit there inert, and pay your $50 filing fee every year. There are thousands of zombie companies on the Companies Register for this reason.

Tamara Buckland is hosting some playful events around death, grief and endings for workplaces, and Lane Litz is running some interesting experiments around dead startups. We’re beginning to talk about these things. What if the death of a company wasn’t just a sad ending, but a joyous composting that provided the gift of new life?

The compost model of business planning, first put to me by Mix Irvine, suggests that every business, initiative, project and relationship should have a composting timeline. This would be a natural interval where people sit down and decide where they have the enthusiasm to commit to carrying on along the same path with gusto, commit to carrying on differently into a new experiment, or compost it completely and take the leanings away.

Every business owner and entrepreneur has one or two dead companies under their belt (myself included), and knows that their third company wouldn’t have been a success without all the learnings, the nutrients and water and carbon, that came from the death of the earlier companies. Passing on this information, like fungi, means our businesses get better every time. Death is how we learn.

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What is Ethical Growth?

My proposal for a model of ethical growth centers around these key questions:

• Does a project need to grow to be successful?
• Is there a point of growth that will impede success?
• What will the idea lose and gain from fast growth? What will the idea lose and gain from slow growth? What will the idea lose and gain from shrinking?
• At what point should the idea die?
• How can we plan compost cycles from the outset to ensure we are shedding and learning?
• What tools and methods for growth align with the project’s values?

1. Ethical Growth is asking: Does the idea need to grow to be successful?

No growth
Many Grassroots community initiatives do not need to grow to be successful. Once they reach everyone interested in their community, their growth stops, and their energy turns to providing for the community’s needs. Pukerua Bay Hub  is a good example here - they just won a major award for their amazing community building project. They tested it as a “Pop up” in order to figure out what the community needed, and if the Hub wasn't the right formula they were happy to compost the idea - the "Pop up" gave them the flexibility to adapt. The success of the project has meant they're now figuring out how to become a permanent installation in Pukerua Bay - staying the same size but securing their longevity.

Many excellent businesses also thrive on staying small. My local plumber could try and expand to become regional, but then he'd miss out on the joy he gets from speaking to each customer face-to-face. Because he only has to pay three people he's consistently able to turn substantial profits in his community, whereas expansion would bring extra costs that would reduce his profit in the medium term, and may never pay off. For him the benefits of staying small far outweigh the possibilities of going big. And that's why I like him as my plumber.

Growth is not innately positive or negative, and lots of the best ideas benefit from not growing - from staying local, staying personal, and staying small.

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2. Ethical Growth is determining what type of growth is best for your idea

Low growth
There are other grassroots movements that benefit from some growth. When I was part of Kaitahi, a community meal run by Sophie Barclay that we cooked from waste food in Point Chevalier, the model worked so well that other neighborhoods asked to use it. We created guides, instructions and resources so that other communities could replicate the project. The Kaitahi model spread out over Auckland city to Bayswater, and brought many neighborhoods together.

Growth with limits
Climate Training Co is another example - they run institutional climate action workshops. Their movement is based on people power but the more councils and major corporations that they run workshops with, the more the country and the world benefits. They donate proceeds to Climate Club, a newsletter of “10 minute climate actions for busy people,” so the more people that join the better. I created and implemented a growth strategy for them that paid attention to their resources and constraints. They wanted some growth but it had to be manageable. Working together through that growth process we increased council workshop inquiries 38%. The right tools and methods for growth expanded their impact sustainably.

High growth
Some movements benefit from massive growth. The Obama volunteer campaign is a case in point here, outlined in the book Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything. By figuring out how to mobilize an entire nation they changed the course of history.

Closer to home, Vote For Climate was a campaign we launched in the lead-up to the 2023 election. By using digital tools we were able to launch a nationwide initiative that gained 350 volunteers virtually overnight, and moved the needle on “topics for discussion” that election. Social media allowed us massive reach that we were able to channel into a positive impact.

When you put egos and individuals aside, what type of growth is best for your idea - no growth, low growth or high growth? My advice is, commit to one type from the beginning, make sure everyone is on board and plan accordingly. Then set an annual date to review whether that type of growth is still serving the idea.

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3. Ethical Growth is deciding what pace of growth is best for your idea

Ethical Growth means thinking about the pros and cons of slow growth vs. fast growth, and weighing that up against the needs of people and planet.

At the moment CoShop is pursuing slow growth. CoShop is a wonderful model that lets grocery shoppers buy directly from farmers, cutting out the plastic, inflated costs and sunk quality of supermarkets. Each regional hub requires staff to pack the boxes of produce from the farmers, making them easy for shoppers to pick up. The founder, Ira Bailey, is moving slowly despite high demand, because he wants to get the packing model right for both the farmers and the shoppers. Slow growth is the right formula for CoShop, despite increasing pressure to "go massive."

In the tech startup world, fast growth is aggressively encouraged by the VC model.

Fast growth can be excellent if it helps a good idea have a global positive impact. Sometimes an initiative needs to grow fast to seize on first-mover advantage (the benefits that come from being the first known name in a new industry or product category). Sometimes an idea needs to grow fast because of an imminent threat like sweeping ecosystem collapse and irreversible weather catastrophe. Sometimes an idea needs to grow fast just because people have short attention spans and its the best way to run a particular project. These are all good reasons for fast growth.

Because social media reaches 1 in 2 people in the world every month, it is possible to achieve fast growth with limited resources, good ideas, and a bit of luck. We’ve seen ideas sweep the globe on TikTok, Facebook and Twitter (#MeToo , #BlackLivesMatter) because they were catchy, timely and used social media networks as a ladder to reach global heights.

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Vibe Coding, AI & Ethical Growth
The VC model used to be really necessary for ambitious tech projects, because the cost of development was so expensive. But just this month, in my humble opinion, all that has changed forever.

The reason for this change is twofold: v0.dev was upgraded to v0.app, and Claude 4.1 was released, improving Claude code.

V0.app and Claude Artifacts are both incredible free tools for building full scale web applications by just typing what you want into an AI chat. The apps you create are private by default and you can download the full code. You tell the tool what you want, it takes a stab at it, and then you write comments to improve or change certain bits.

While the power of digital creation has traditionally rested in the hands of university-educated men, it is now available to everyone for free. Building an online project that people find useful can conceivably happen as a side project until it has enough impact to sustain a full-time job. You can get enough development done to start making your project sustainable for free.

Of course, a little bit of coding knowledge helps, and I love Josh Vial’s course “Learn to code a little bit” for this reason - it’s specifically designed to give people the coding knowledge they need to make the most of AI creation tools. Josh Vial created Dev Academy Aotearoa which taught me how to code, so I’m sure the content is incredibly valuable.

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High Fast Ethical Growth
I fundamentally believe that high fast growth of an impact idea can change the world - can and must.

When we think about Ecosia - a search engine that plants trees, or duckduckgo, a search engine that prioritizes privacy, we see ideas that have had enormous impact because they grew global. Or TOMS shoes, the classic social impact example that exploded the buy-one-give-one model worldwide. Or Kiva microlending - a liberating financial framework that creates economic independence for women. These are all values-led ideas that have significantly changed the world by growing big.

I want to see your Facebook alternative that's actively designed to help people form deep real-world connections. I want to see your affordable phone operating system that keeps my data private. I want to see your transportation alternatives that serve all levels of income.

I know you have these ideas, and that you don't start them because they have to go big to be successful - they have to achieve fast high growth - and you think it'll be too hard to make that work.

I don't think it's too hard.

With the right tools and methods, global growth is absolutely possible with small budgets, smart insights and a bit of luck. If it's the right model for you, global growth can make your good idea change the world.

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4. Ethical Growth is setting parameters around growth effects

While good growth can change the world, it can also have a negative impact on an organization. As a growth marketer I saw time and again that I would bring massive growth to a company, only to find them buckle under the pressure of having to hire fast and upgrade their processes to fill the gaps. There’s a rule of thumb that every 8 employees radically changes a company’s culture. If the company doesn’t have a solid foundation to begin with, and doesn’t have the time to hire for values over instant skills fit, this is a recipe for disaster in a growing operation. People fall out, tasks fall through the cracks, management structures collapse and get remedied by introducing extra layers of management that grind progress to a halt.

As a result of this pattern, I’ve started to look at growth as a full-organization challenge, not simply a marketing one. My job has repeatedly moved me into the product and human processes of stabilizing growth, which center around strengthening people and culture, and integrating smart tech tools for efficient operations.

Ethical Growth means setting parameters around which growth affects you’re willing to accommodate, and how you’ll adapt and change to accommodate the growth. It means having a plan in place for if you grow a little, a medium amount, or grow beyond your wildest dreams. Be ambitious, and have the courage to make an actual plan. What’s your cultural bedrock? What makes people want to work with you? How will you protect, enshrine and scale that? Who will your first hires be? Do you know people in that area? Who will you ask for help? What are the first systems that will fall over with growth? What processes do you do manually that you’ll need to automate?

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5. Ethical Growth is committing to death and composting

Ethical Growth involves adding death into the planning phase of a company. When you start a new project, ask yourself how long you're committed to doing it for, and what indicators you'll need to see in order to continue. Make sure everyone who joins is on board with that timeframe. Then review every year and decide whether to kill it or keep going.

It means embracing death as the best decision for many businesses, organizations and movements at many points in time.

And it means having a playbook of tools to make death and composting a fun, beneficial process that everyone learns from, gains from and finds valuable.

I recently attended Letting Go: A Gathering for Fresh Starts by Tamara Buckland. Its focus was on work deaths - redundancies, restructures and times of change. The purpose was to formalize letting go of the thing - the job, the contract, the anger - in order to take the learnings forward into the next thing. A handful of people stood together in a park on cloudy weekday with the wind circulating around the trees. Kākā flitted across the sky like Mesozoic pterosaurs, and there was something strangely ancient about the process. We touched bark, we wrote on stones and we collectively let go and moved forward. Tamara told us, “This is an invitation to not be polite.” Death is really, really sad. It's hard. It’s ugly. And that's why transformation happens.

This gathering is an example of some of the new and weird ways we can reimagine company closures, evolutions, wind-downs and composting.

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6. Ethical Growth is choosing the right pathway to growth

Ethical Growth requires giving deep consideration to the ways, means and tools that you use to achieve growth, and ensuring that these unquestionably align with your ethics.

In this way, Ethical Growth ensures your long-term integrity.

There are a range of considerations to go into in regards to your growth, and it's important to walk through each of them to choose the right growth framework for you. To help, I've built a tool that walks through these questions for you. They concern things like:

• Local, National or Global growth?
• Offline and / or Online?
• Personal and / or Automated?
• Climate positive, Climate neutral or Doesn’t matter / Will change later (Climate negative)
• AI or no AI?
• Low-wage labor or no low-wage labor?
• Use tools with strong privacy or medium privacy or doesn’t matter (low/no privacy)?
• Use tools with strong ethics or medium ethics or doesn’t matter (low/no ethics)?
• Prefer open source over closed source?
• Support companies with good diversity policies or ambivalent diversity policies or doesn’t matter (low/no diversity policies)?
• Support companies that give back over companies that don’t give back?
• Support nonprofits and social enterprises over profit-oriented companies?

Growth Tools and their Ethics: A chart

Here's a little visualization I created of the tools you might want to use. I got AI to do the plotting. Tools and methods with a high ethical rating would have a positive climate impact, use no low-wage labor or pay a living wage, have strong hiring and diversity policies, have strong privacy protections, and give back to the community through a social enterprise or nonprofit model.

Hover to see the name of each a tool. Left is low growth and right is high growth. Top is high ethics and bottom is low ethics.

On the Top Left are low growth tools with excellent ethics (Sponsoring charities and schools, Hosting local meetups).

On the Bottom Right is high growth tools with poor ethics (Meta Ads, Google Ads).

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Charting growth tools by their ethics vs growth impact. The full list of tools is here - use the 'Chat' function to add your thoughts.

What this suggests

There are many ethical ways to grow - but the fastest, largest growth impact comes from the least ethical tools. If you made the most ethical choices, you might be limited to offline, in-person methods which are good for the world but currently have low growth impact. This works for low, slow or no growth pathways.

For faster, high growth pathways, it might require a trojan-horse approach of using social media infrastructure to grow the movements that are going to take down the most problematic giant organizations. Tools like Launchbot tell you how to configure your settings to ensure you’re protecting your company and user data as much as possible when interacting with these services. The aim is to use their benefits while reducing your engagement in their harm.

Social Media & Ethical Growth

Using social media for impact growth is an ethically complex area, that I'll explore in more depth in a later post. But if it's the right path for you, it is the fastest, most powerful path to changing the world.

This is because it is by far the lowest-cost way to reach the largest amount of people. For $200 in Meta ads I can achieve the same measurable results as $10,000 in billboards. For impact ideas with scrappy budgets, social media networks present an unbelievable opportunity to change opinion and the world. The kind of scale of impact that our activist grandparents could have only dreamed of.

The important thing is that these methods need to be used with caution, awareness, and with tools like Launchbot that help you generate massive impact while giving them as little money as possible.

Low, slow and no growth enable the most ethically pure paths to growth, but may have limited impact as a result. This is the right choice for many ideas, and simply requires a bit more effort, resource and creativity in how to reach people. If this is the right path for you, Launchbot generates offline, open source and in-person strategies to help you have the right impact in the right way for you.

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Conclusion: Ethical Growth as an Impact Model

In summary, Ethical Growth is a framework that helps us think about our growth choices in relation to ethical businesses, social enterprises, startups, nonprofits, charities, climate organizations and impact initiatives.

To repeat: underscoring all these considerations is our certain knowledge that change is urgently needed. Unethical corporate giants have too much influence on policy, and have no agenda to benefit humanity. We need to replace them with ethical ideas that want to do good things for the world. Growing impact ideas and helping them take over the world is one way to achieve that. I hope this framework helps.

End > Compost > Reseed > Sprout

Let me know your idea shoots, shrubs and saplings. Subscribe HopeMechanic to get emailed the next post, where I'll go into more detail about the ethical considerations involved in using specific AI models and social media giants for growth.
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