The Golden Rule, With Sleeves Rolled Up: Oliver Lloyd's episode

By Sandy Glanfield

My conversation with Oliver Lloyd this week sent me down a rabbit hole, in the best way.

Oliver believes something that sounds simple and turns out to be quietly radical: that we should share how we make things. His whole design practice leans towards open source ways of working, the idea that if you come up with a good design or a better method, you let others use it and build on it, rather than locking it in a drawer marked ‘mine.’

The pushback is always the same. “But Oliver, if you share it, someone will steal it. What about your intellectual property?” That's the machinery we've built to make sure that if you make it, you get the money. Fair enough, we all have to eat. But listening to him, I kept thinking how much that instinct, hold on tight, guard it, monetise it, gets in the way of the things that would actually help all of us.

So I did what any reasonable person does at eleven at night. I started Googling. And I found the loveliest phrase: pre-competitive collaboration. It's when rivals agree to work together on a shared problem, precisely so no single one of them carries the risk of going first. There's even a real example, the Global Salmon Initiative, where fifteen salmon-farming companies who compete in every other respect pool what they know on sustainability, because some things are simply too big to fix alone.

Salmon farmers, setting aside their rivalries, to look after the ocean they all depend on.

And I got carried away imagining it everywhere. Take the thing that has annoyed me for years: plastic-wrapped fruit and veg. A bag of apples that spent their whole lives outdoors wearing nothing but skin. Tomatoes shrink-wrapped onto a tray as though they might make a run for it. It needles me every time I'm at the counter peeling plastic off something nature already packaged perfectly well.

And here's the thing. No single supermarket wants to be the one to strip the plastic, in case their produce looks less shiny than the shrink-wrapped stuff next door. Going first risks sales. But if they all agreed to do it together, nobody loses. The plastic just quietly disappears. That's the whole trick: the right thing becomes easy the moment we agree to do it together.

Imagine it in refillable packaging, in electronics built to last, in how we design new technology. We talk about things like AI as though they're weather, just happening to us, when really we could get in a room and decide what we want them to be. We have more control than we think, and more people care than we think.

That last part is pure Oliver. He said that this work can feel terribly lonely, but that there are far more of us than anyone realises. It's just a matter of finding each other.

Which is where our Golden Rule quietly walks in, treating others, and the planet, as we'd wish to be treated. Because underneath the clever name, pre-competitive collaboration is just people agreeing not to take advantage of each other. Nobody gets punished for doing the right thing, because everyone does it together. That's the Golden Rule with its sleeves rolled up, and it asks us to loosen our grip a little: to value what we can build for each other over what we can keep for ourselves, and the planet over the price tag.

Which is exactly what Oliver has been cheerfully doing all along, and being called naïve for. So I'm choosing to get excited rather than cynical, and to believe that the salmon farmers are really onto something.