Jane Abernethy, Chief Sustainability Officer at Humanscale, started as an industrial designer. As such, she has always thought about sustainability, which she sees as part of the inherent challenge of designing for what people really want (no one wants a toaster; they want toast). Jane has spent a lot of time thinking about how to evolve a company from within. She is a pragmatist in that she prefers to talk about results rather than aspirations; in this era of hyperbole and greenwash, that gives Jane a rather restrained profile, but it also keeps Humanscale honest.

We had a fascinating discussion about the complexities of supply chain management including the challenges of what to measure. We touched on circularity, which Jane says that she has long found compelling. If we could get it right, she says, “it could be ‘recycling, for real this time,’ as it was once described to me. ”

But today, Jane says, “We are not adapting our systems to accommodate faster progress and more effective collaboration, both of which are needed. And we also need to shift from thinking about how we ‘preserve’ our way of life to thinking about how we can adapt our way of life.”