What is the link between apparel sourcing and subconscious beliefs?

In mid-November, I held a MasterClass for business school students. Our schedule was packed: Within three hours, we discussed strategic networking, corporate culture and change management.

I explained a very useful change management concept to the students. It is called “competing commitments” and was developed by Harvard Busines school professors Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. Kegan and Lahey raised the question: “Why do teams and individuals state one goal, yet then they seem to do everything in their power to self-sabotage?”. Competing commitments, in their view, create a lasting immunity to change. As a (future) manager, being able to detect these hidden barriers to change and how to address them is an essential tool.

I noticed that the students had a hard a hard time processing the “resistance to change” concept. Hence we get practical. We switched to working mode. Kegan and Laskow Lahey didn’t stop at musing about hidden competing commitments. They created a worskheet. The students and I fleshed out the “competing commitment worksheet” by using examples provided by the students themselves.

*Methodology*: The worksheet is based on a sequence of questions:

1. State the improvement goal (the desired change)

2. Identify behaviors that prevent you/ others from achieving this goal

3. Diagnose the “real issue” — digging deep to bring to the surface which hidden commitments could be at work

4. Create hypotheses: Which big assumptions or world views could back up these competing commitments?

5. Identify experiments which can slowly but surely mitigate the impact of these worldviews (and consequently, the competing commitments).

The more examples we collected and discussed (in Zoom breakout groups of 4–5 students), the more interesting the session became. I choose to focus on one example in this article, as I found it particularly compelling: one student had recently been involved in a student consulting project serving a luxury products conglomerate.

Photo by kevin laminto on Unsplash

The student shared that he had recently consulted with the employees of a French luxury conglomerate. The project was part of a corporate push for more sustainability. The objective of the project consisted of making sourcing — the origin of materials used — more transparent. As you probably know, most apparel companies struggle to trace where the raw material comes from that they use (for example, 40% of Australian brands struggled to do so according to a 2022 article by the New Daily). The push was justified.

But the luxury conglomerate employees struggled with making the sourcing process more transparent. In fact, they opposed it (openly or less openly so). Employees used various tactics to prevent a stronger degree of transparency. They consisted of creating (project / disclosure) delays. This was fascinating to the student (who participated in my class) and me because the stated goal of the project was to make the sources of (raw) materials more transparent.

So without further ado, we used the competing commitment worksheet to shed light on some of the subconscious beliefs that might be at play:

While the company’s improvement goal consisted of providing a stronger degree of transparency pertaining to its supply chain (and consequently, the origin of the materials used), there were competing commitments that prevented its employees from achieving this goal.

The hidden commitment was to preserve the myth of exclusivity.

By not disclosing the origin of the materials used, the “rarity” of the materials could be marketed (for example, as part of the product branding strategy). From an employee’s point of view, this makes sense. You want to protect brand secrets and maintain a high product margin. What happens when the actual price of raw materials is disclosed (and it is quite low)? The myth of exclusivity gets shattered.

Some of the big assumptions that were the foundation for this behavior are: exclusivity and transparency are mutually exclusive. By being transparent, the value fo the brand gets diluted.

We didn’t stop there. We looked at the “solution” column of the worksheet. What are some of experiments one (= the student and his client) could implement in order to overcome these worldviews? I suggested that the luxury conglomerate’s employees could partner up with a fashion designer like Stella McCartney. She is known for having actively implemented traceability and transparency in her fashion house operations for years (see Business of Fashion profile). Her brand is popular. I also mused that more and more consumers might prefer to be shown the origin of products. Even a premium / luxury yproduct like one issued by this French luxury conglomerate group would benefit from it. The student found that enticing.

One is not powerless in the face of competing commitments — doing the exercise (once or repeatedly) helps remedying them. The exercise is a powerful coaching tool.

Change is never easy and if you have been socialized in a fashion “maison” (house) or luxury conglomerate that prides itself of exclusivity and high-quality luxury items, it might take some time to unearth beliefs around (sourcing) transparency and exclusivity. You probably would have never guessed that some of your resistance might originate from dormant competing commitments and that it’s time to address them. It’s for a good cause!

Sources:

Business of Fashion: “Stella McCartney, designer”. Link.

Harvard Business Review, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey: “The Real Reason People Won’t Change”. November 2001. Link.

The New Daily, Genevieve Thorpe: “Threadbare ethics of Australia’s fashion brands shown in charity group’s report”. 18 October 2022. Link.