The Compostmodern conference in San Francisco March 22–23 tossed designers and like-minded thinkers together for one day of TED-like talks and one of hands-on creative work, all focused on design and sustainability. Like the event in 2011, it was amazing—you could practically see glowing light bulbs (LEDs of course) floating above participants’ heads.

The theme was resilience; we got excited about all the great examples of how much branding contributes to the success of a new project, whether it’s for an underserved community, getting people to eat local sustainable crab, or creating a cool café in a small town. I’m still digesting the inspiration and ideas. Here are a few bits of advice from conference speakers who made a big impression.

John Bielenberg, Project M
Make small bets. One of the biggest things that gets in the way of innovation and new ideas is fear of failure or looking dumb. So make the risk small, act fast, adjust, and repeat. The steps of his Future Blitz Cycle of Rapid Ingenuity are: Be bold > Get out > Think wrong > Make stuff > Bet small > Move fast.

Ezio Manzini, DESIS Network
Centralized systems are very fragile and brittle. Designing for resilience means designing distributed systems, pursuing collaboration and innovation, and focusing on groups of people with capabilities, not individuals with needs.

Tiffany Shlain, filmmaker
“Courage is a muscle you constantly need to exercise.”

Terry Irwin, Carnegie Mellon School of Design
“Humans’ propensity to produce monoculture is amazing.” Designing appropriately has as much to do with how we think as it does with skills. Designers tend to impose order—grid systems become an obsession. But entropy eventually dissolves the order. So, design to take advantage of that, and take cultural and social systems into consideration.

Madeleine Lansky, psychiatrist
Relationships and unconscious dynamics determine a project’s success—80 percent of all projects fail. People are passionate, diverse, and competitive. They come to projects with different knowledge, facts, and expectations. When people feel unheard or undervalued, they go into fight or flight mode. Acknowledge group fractures and use them as a way to grow.

Julie Sammons, chief community officer, Hylo
Resilience is not about bouncing back. It’s about adaptation and response, and having more than one option available. Design can adjust, adapt and maintain. Look to nature. Reshuffle, remix.

Howard Brown, co-founder, dMass
Everything in our built environment is the earth’s crust redesigned. Products are a medium, not the benefit: we don’t need batteries; we need portable energy devices. Most products are mostly waste. Consider products’ naked value: what they deliver to the user minus their embodied mass (all the resources used to make them).

David McConville, resilience-design.org
“The universe we design for is the one we’re going to get.”

One speaker said that design is a gift of seeing the world as it could be. At Thinkshift, we’re more inspired than ever to be bold, get out, act fast, collaborate, and be resilient.

Accuracy is essential to credibility. Duh, right? Yet organizations miss the accuracy boat all the time. And even one or two innocuous slip-ups can cast doubt on everything you say.

Just look at the “climategate” kerfuffle, where a few questionable (stolen) e-mails between scientists were taken to indicate rot at the heart of all their work. Or at how the inclusion of an unsubstantiated speculation on the melting rate of Himalayan glaciers in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report brought forth a barrage of claims that all climate science is bunk.

Sure, these reactions came from people who are climate science skeptics (at best)—but that’s the point. Every business making a benefit claim for its products or services and any advocacy group promoting a policy solution faces skeptics. Inaccuracy encourages doubt to spread.

So why is there so much inaccuracy in communications of all kinds? Anyone who’s not actively trying to deceive realizes that factual statements should be correct; when they’re not, speed and sloppiness are usually the culprits. The rule: check every statement. Then check it again.

The more slippery (and common) problem is claims that are inaccurate by implication—for example, packaging that can be recycled only at rare, specialized facilities but is simply  labeled “recyclable” with no explanation. Companies that do this may earn greenie points from the uninformed, but once people find out their recycling can’t actually be recycled, they tend to get peeved—and massively distrustful. Credible claims are realistically correct, not just technically correct. The rule: if you’re implying something untrue, then you’re not telling the truth.

Underwriters Laboratory’s UL Environment, which is certifying green products and verifying green product claims, has just announced the first product to be rated: Serious Materials’ EcoRock drywall. The product appears genuine, based on the excellent information on the company website, and it’s also got Cradle to Cradle certification.

While the UL assessment has UL’s brand clout behind it, they could add assurance and help alleviate consumer confusion over what’s truly friendly for the environment by providing complete disclosure about what their certifications mean on their website. Right now, there’s nothing on the UL Environment website that makes the label credible (except for the aforementioned brand power). By comparison, the Cradle to Cradle site has full disclosure.

Some questions they can answer: How and what are they testing? What is the process? What are the benchmarks and standards? Are they only looking at claims made or are they also comparing the product to similar ones? Do they consider what’s possible, so that if a company is only doing the bare minimum, it counts less?

Eco-labels are proliferating at a pretty fast clip. If they’re going to clear up confusion and help consumers sort out conflicting environmental claims and know what makes one thing greener than another, certifiers (and product marketers) need to help educate.

For more on the UL rollout, see Sustainable Industries’ excellent article. It was also covered at GreenBiz.com.