Domino chain reaction

Chatting with a friend recently surfaced an objection I hear a lot, distilled down to this:

What the difference if I make any changes for climate reasons? I’m one person, we’re one small business. We’re not going to fix the climate.

That’s true – you’re not. No one person or entity will fix it. What you do might not even make a dent in the global climate.

But that’s not why we do it.

It’s a community thing. One person or business does a good thing – say they switch to an ethical bank or create a policy where they only source locally – then someone follows suit, followed by more, and soon enough everyone’s catching on. The people who aren’t doing it are suddenly out of place, while the people who are have built a collective power that does make a dent.

It reminded me of a story told in a business book (I think it was in “The One Thing” by Gary Keller but I might be wrong). This is real – you line up dominos, each one is 1.5x larger than the previous one, then push the little one which is 1cm tall. The little one is just big enough to topple the bigger one after it, which topples the next one, then the next and so on. No matter how big the next domino gets (the height of a house; the height of a skyscraper), the previous one can always topple it.

And it all stared with that first little 1cm domino.

Because everyone doing their part is how this will get done – a bunch of little dominoes knocking over big things.

Here’s a video of the domino chain reaction.