NCS (Net Civilisation Score): the true measure of an organisation’s impact on the world?

Lazar Dzamic

v. 2.0 (as the model evolves, so does the article; V2.0 includes feedback I have received from friends who’d read the V1.0 version)

I know this piece will sound bonkers to many. Yet, we have to start somewhere. Lots of other things that we take for granted now were bonkers way ago. One never knows…

A perennial frustration for many who are engaged in conversations about the ethical challenges in business and marketing is with how disparate they are. We don’t have a unified vocabulary or a unified set of metrics to measure an organisation’s impact on the world. For some, it is all about carbon footprint; for others, it is about air, soil or water pollution; some look at the mountains of waste our civilisation shits behind itself, while some are deeply concerned about detrimental social consequences of rampant consumerism.

It is the proverbial describing of an elephant by just touching it, not seeing it. And the elephant in the collective planetary room is massive!

I think it’s time to change that. We need a more unified measure of what we do to the world around us and a more unified way of talking about it.

From NPS to NCS

It would be quite unusual for someone reading this article to not be aware of one of the most seductive metrics in modern business: the NPS (Net Promoter Score). Many companies are using it, despite mounting evidence that it is largely useless. But we keep believing. It’s simple. This is its main power. We like simple things and TLAs (3-letter acronyms).

You probably haven’t heard of the NCS, though. No wonder. I invented it some time ago, but, apart from my Uni/MBA lectures and in-house trainings, I haven’t talked about it a lot publicly. A few short articles here and there. Busy life…

NCS stands for the ‘Net Civilisation Score’ – or ‘Community’, if you don’t like the more abstract word ‘civilisation’. It is quite bizarre how the concept of civilisation does not feature in the discourse of most marketers or business leaders, obsessed with the next earnings call.

Like the NPS, it tries to be a simple metric, but for capturing an organisation’s total impact on the world, not just a positive business impact on customers, as in the case of the NPS. In other words: a single unifying measure of how ‘good’ an organisation is overall. It is the only practical composite metric I know of for realistically assessing where we stand against our claims – good, bad or just ‘meh’ – as far as our ‘green’, ‘purpose’, ‘ESG’, ‘sustainable’, ‘responsible’, ‘CSR’ and other virtue signals are concerned. Its purpose is to cut through bullshit.

To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the limits of our language are the limits of our world. If the language is precise, the meanings are precise too and our actions tend to be of a similar kind. That is why I hope that the NCS can help with our scattered conversations and create a sort of the shared linguistic currency, as far as holding organisations to account in all respects of their behaviour is concerned.

Think of the NCS also as the linguistic and practically more radical and specific flip side of the B-Corps initiative (undoubtedly a good step towards better corporate practices), where the ‘goodness’ of an organisation is measured in even more direct ways, above and beyond more standard stakeholder groups and diversity initiatives.

After all, as we have seen so far, especially in marketing industries, people of various social, ethnic and other backgrounds can still make an equal damage to the world if they operate within an ideological system that puts business performance above everything else.

We are scared of the answer…

It is an unspoken professional fact of life that the marketing/promotional industry – the one I can relate to the best – is unbelievably perceptually asymmetric. I believe that is by design.

On the one hand, companies, agencies and various promotional industry trade bodies are falling over themselves to prove their positive impact on society. They use concepts such as ‘value-added’ to the economy and talk about stimulating competition, promoting choice, introducing new and better products, supporting the media system, developing the overall (mythical) societal creativity, even making life more fun!

In other words, to quote Prof. Sut Jhally, the largest social experiment in the history of the modern world (maybe overall) is desperate to paint itself as a force for good. No amount of money is going to be spared for research that confirms these postulates.

Interestingly, I am not aware of almost any industry-funded research that shows its negative sides. Apart from some perfunctory initiatives on the industry’s direct CO2 footprint – a massive red herring in my opinion – there is nothing. Nada. An omertà. The only figures we ever see are the good figures.

Holding the industry to account falls largely on the shoulders of academics, experts involved in various NGOs (the recent Badvertising book is a really good primer on this topic too, strongly recommended) and the ‘awaken’ ex-industry experts like myself. But almost nothing from the still active members of the industry, especially senior in rank. Hence the perceptual asymmetry I mentioned above.

Why is that? The answer is clear to all, apart from the most invested (or deluded) industry bods and its business and ideological patrons. The industry’s overall civilisational score is devastating and indefensible. By ‘civilisational’ I mean: all the aspects of our lives on this planet that the ‘markprom’ industry affects.

Here are just a few most obvious ones:

• The industry has weaponised social sciences and personal data for the purpose of commercial and political influence. The amount of data and scientific work that goes into promotional activities is stupendous.
• Marketing is today the world’s largest industrial system, cumulatively, for turning natural resources into waste.
• Promotion of unhealthy diets, with devastating impacts on our wellbeing and the societal health bill.
• Trivialisation of our lives via endless mass distractions playing on our cognitive biases and anxieties.
• Affective polarisation of the democratic societies, propelled by the advertising- and engagement-based business models of global digital platforms.

The industry knows it is not a force for good. But, as with all of us, cognitive dissonance, and then post-rationalisations, kick in: many of the things we, the Mythocrats, do are not illegal (yet), it is a massive business, it beats sitting in grey cubicles doing mindless jobs all day, personal rewards could be great and, boy, it IS fun! Or, used to be.

The real consequences of their work rarely beep on the radar of a marketing person. And even if they do, many feel they can’t do anything about it. It’s their job. Many don’t have a choice. Many, still, feel the industry is as natural as rain or sunlight – a logical consequence of the world we live in. What’s to talk about? If I don’t do it, someone else will…

To stimulate that debate, I am proposing a new (to the general public) composite metric for measuring an organisation’ true impact on the world around it. It’s a dare: you really think you are that good? OK, prove it. Look at everything you are doing, all the consequences of your business – direct and indirect – draw the line under it and see whether you are above or below the line. Now, there’s a new meaning of that ancient industry divide…

What is the NCS made of?

NCS has three components, three ‘zones of impact’, three different ‘pollutions’:

1. Cognitive Pollution

2. Social Pollution

3. Environmental Pollution

They, of course, all work together, feed off one another, a dynamic system, a dark vortex of a sort creating a vicious circulation of destruction. Think of them as three atoms in a dangerous molecule, vibrating at the same time.

If you press me, I would say that Cognitive Pollution sits above the other two in the causal order, at it is the sole key source of all other ‘pollutions’ and the ‘master’ damage that predatory capitalism and its willing marketing servants inflict on the world. It is about the ways the ‘markprom’ industries shape our civilisational epistemology: the ways we perceive what society – and, consequently, ways of feeling, thinking and behaving – should be about. But let’s leave that for another article…

Cognitive Pollution deals with aspects that will be the hardest to measure and the easiest to push back against – and yet we can all feel it in our relentless pursuit of meaning, purpose and human relationships in the modern society.

In essence, it is about the mental models, the ‘framings’ that the organisation uses and projects to its audiences on an individual level, shaping the way we think about the world.

For example, is the organisation teaching us to think success first, people second? Are the organisation’s business model KPIs dependent on stimulating us to spend as much time as we can in its media and sales spaces – is it a dopamine dealer? Does it use techniques similar to those of cults? Is it training us to pursue instant gratification, to measure happiness through spend and pleasure? Is it relying on our inherent cognitive biases to trigger and train us for impulsive behaviour? Is it making us confused and passive through deliberate obfuscation and relativisation? Is it trivialising our lives, conditioning us to focus on the narrow, shallow and transient? Is it infantilising us, by presenting anything that is not entertaining as boring? Is the organisation pushing buttons of our various anxieties to influence our behaviour and our emotions?

Social Pollution would measure the organisation’s contribution to generating unproductive, unhealthy or downright damaging or destructive social consequences. Think racial, gender, sexual and any other stereotyping; promoting unhealthy lifestyles based on processed, sugary or fat food; developing attention span deficits based on constant distractions; affective polarisation of societies for the sake of platform business models; exploitation of fears and anxieties around various issues – whether unrealistic body images and other fake or distorted representations of reality or unsustainable lifestyles or ‘not being in the know’ (FOMO); targeting vulnerable social groups and stimulating debt and gambling, tech addictions, vaping or binge drinking; normalising unhealthy attitudes to workplace stress or abuse of social relationships for profit; using ‘dark UI patterns’ to manipulate their users; using excessive amounts of ‘native advertising’, especially poorly marked, to manipulate the media environment.

Also, one of the parameters here should be about how much and in what ways the organisation is weaponising social sciences for profit (what are, if any, ethical considerations about the levels and ways of data collection, research and profiling used to understand the psychology and behaviour of the target audiences).

Environmental Pollution would measure exactly that: what is the organisation’s overall environmental impact on the planet? How much environmental ‘externalisation’ it does in various ways: energy it consumes, CO2, chemicals, (micro)plastics, effluent, toxic water, smoke, metals & minerals, radiation, land use and/or destruction, animals it breeds or destroys, landfills it creates, but also the number of trees planted, environmental charity initiatives and other positives, small and big; basically, every activity that impacts on the local and global environment in any possible way, in every country it operates in or offshores its business activities to – all neatly documented and independently assessed.

As I said, all the things above – some more, some less – are bloody hard to measure, are the ‘subjective’, the ‘incalculable’, the ‘easy to dismiss’. However, social and many exacts sciences – so useful for increasing the effectiveness of marketing – also point to these effects in various ways. We are now beyond reasonable doubt that these effects truly exist. We just don’t measure them yet in a unified way.

The forces of denial and obfuscation are very strong despite being aware of the damage they do, as we now know from the troves of research and documents on how the tobacco industry dismissed and obfuscated health claims for decades, how oil companies, also for decades, knew about the climate consequences of their industry and how now the ‘dopamine cartel’ (to use Ted Gioia’s phrase) of the social media platforms also knows the damage they create. And are doing very little meaningful about it.

Some of my early readers did ask me why I’m using the word ‘pollution’ to define the measurement dimensions – the ‘zones of impact’ – for the NCS, why am I starting from the negative? Well, what other word to use? Look at the world around us: it is polluted in so many ways. The things that describe the NCS are not anomalies, they are the rule, the normal, the mainstream; they are not small aberrations chipping away at our otherwise perfect life, they are the life itself for so many of us. To use the neutral word ‘impact’ would be, at least in my mind, an unforgivable relativisation of the massive evidence of the damage we do to our world.

How to measure the NCS?

I’m refining it as we speak – and will welcome your feedback too – but this is the rough methodology.

1. Appoint your NCS Council

First, my firm belief (and experience) is that an organisation CANNOT do it by itself! Too many biases, to many vested or open interests, too much temptation and internal pressures to attenuate, whitewash, evade or escape.

Instead, in the unlikely event that an organisation really means it, it should appoint an external NCS Council made of, say, five independent trusted people with a robust personal ethical record. By ‘robust’ I mean what most of us would in common sense consider difficult to dispute.

The council members could be social entrepreneurs, NGO/charity executives, academics and experts studying various environmental, social and individual issues, social workers, journalists, teachers, spiritual leaders, doctors – anyone whose primary means of living is not to generate profit and who have a broader societal view, without the blinkers of the quarterly analyst calls, shareholder return and EBIDTA obsession. They should be smart, reasonable and well-meaning.

(In the future, hopefully not too distant, the NCS Councils may even become licensed bodies, like gas engineers. Imagine a good job of the future: a Certified NCS Evaluator!)

The NCS Council would be empowered by the Board (or the owner) of the organisation to procure evidence about various aspects of the organisation’s business – literally anything they deem important – and then combine it with their own external research or experience (if they have expertise in a particular area). They should also have some internal and external expert help if they need it.

The Council would meet regularly to analyse and discuss the evidence and agree on the takeouts. Then they would use the NCS Balanced Scorecard to quantify their findings.

As you can see, this is where we immediately hit the snag making the NCS practically impossible for most organisations: no sane commercial institution would put its reputation in the hands of these people! They are the other side! They are the ones that constantly challenge and criticise. Of course they will have a different opinion, they are not in business! (as if that is an argument).

How on earth can one defend their societal position by being on the other side of this kind of minds is beyond me, but as we know humans can destroy everything around them and still think they are good people. That’s what our minds do to us, otherwise life would be unbearable…

This is where the NCS dies a quiet death and everything else that follows below is just an intellectual exercise, a thought experiment. Most companies I can bring to my mind or I was ever involved with will have massive problems staying in the net positive across all three above pollutions – which makes it nigh impossible to find an organisation ready to commit to a totally unbiased, quantified audit by an external expert party – and willing to pay for it!

But, let’s suppose for a moment there are some brave souls who would be willing to do it. They appoint the NCS Council – what then?

2. Use the NCS Balanced Scorecard

This would be the main tool for the Council. Like many other similar scorecards, this too tries to quantify across various parameters, then calculate the composite score(s).

The parameters are made from the key dimensions used to explain main pollutions above. Here are some examples, but bear in mind this is work in progress…

Cognitive Pollution

Parameter 1: Is the organisation using addiction mechanisms to keep consumers/users in its marketing or sales spaces?

Parameter 2: Is the organisation promoting mental models based on instant gratification and impulse behaviour?

Social Pollution

Parameter 1: Is the organisation glamourising highly processed, salty or sugary food?

Parameter 2: Is the organisation promulgating discriminatory ethnic, social, gender or other stereotypes?

Environmental Pollution

Parameter 1: How much net waste, directly and indirectly, the organisation creates?

Parameter 2: Does the organisation ‘externalise’ the mitigation of its business impacts to consumers or society overall?

Things like that. Only more of them, for every ‘pollution’, all rated from ‘minus x’ to ‘plus x’. This would make the ‘Balanced Scorecard’.

The Council members would go through each parameter in each pollution, look at the evidence, discuss it and then score each parameter individually. The scores are then averaged for that parameter between the member’s scores (or they may agree on the average immediately without individual scoring). Once they have the average for each parameter, they calculate the average score for each pollution – and the average of these three would give the total NCS. If some of the three pollution averages sit on the opposite sides of the scale, the net score is calculated as the net difference between them.

The organisation could have the total NCS of, say, +3 or -6. There is no particular reason I’ve picked 10 as the minimum/maximum value except that it’s neat. (Maybe I should choose a 100, as it would present the results in more dramatic terms – sounds worse if your NCS is -80 than -8, right?) Discuss.

Conclusion

So, next time an organisation brags about its CSR, I would ask it about their NCS.

It could potentially be yet another way to prick the pompous bubbles of virtue signalling and ‘washes’ of various kinds.

More work is of course needed to define more precisely and in more quantifiable ways each of the parameters in the Scorecard. This is where the ‘hive mind’ comes to play, I hope. Measuring the three ‘pollutions’ won’t be easy, despite many methodological approaches many sciences, social and natural, have already developed to measure numerous individual impacts I have aggregated above.

The ‘wicked problems’ require ‘wicked solutions’: unprecedented, trans-disciplinary, even brave, thinking outside of the box. If the organisations, especially large companies, don’t want to do it themselves, as I expect it to happen, maybe an NGO could pick up the mantle and adopt the NCS as their policy focus?

Giving scores to organisations of all kinds could generate a new kind of public pressure – especially if the NCS develops into some sort of a ‘trust mark’ to help companies prove more robustly their ‘sustainable’ and ‘responsible’ credentials during the NPD phase and for marketing afterwards.

It is not just that we would now have a new way of evaluating the shampoo that claims to make me beautiful while creating new plastics and makes me feel excluded if I don’t use it, but we may now have a way to measure that we now have a new shampoo that does not create more plastics, that confirms the beauty of all humankind and does not make me feel deeply included.

Imagine a trust mark bestowed to organisations and their products and services by a consumer watchdog group or even an enlightened government, if they achieve a certain NCS score?

Again, I am under no illusion that this will be done in reality, at least soon, by anyone with any significance in the business community. I don’t think the NCS will become real, especially in the neo-liberal world. But I did want to point to a way of reframing our sustainability and ethics discussions, to give them just a little bit more specificity in how we challenge the status quo of ‘purposewashing’.

I could only hope that the NCS may become a new vocabulary currency for connecting our disconnected debates about the impact of business and ‘markprom’ industries on our world. A vocabulary I truly hope the new generation of activists may adopt.

I feel it in my bones that so many actors in business, in marketing industries, in tech of all kinds, are beyond redemption as their very business models are predicated on manipulation, deception, distraction, addiction and a palette of affective responses of all kinds that reduce our abilities to think. What the Silicon Valley calls ‘the race to the bottom of the brainstem’. The more we are reduced to emotional impulses and habits, to addictions of various sorts, the better for the business.

This is why I feel I won’t see the NCS in practice soon. But I do hope.

If the industrial revolution was built on steam, the modern one runs on hot air. Time to cool it off a bit.

NOTE: This is the 2nd draft of the text and I’m grateful to my industry and academic colleagues for their feedback on the first; it expanded on many a side I had originally just skimmed over. Should you wish to help me develop it more, discuss it or promote it as a concept, give me a shout on LinkedIn. I will update the article as the NCS methodology develops over time, hopefully with your kind help.