First, do no harm

I recently discovered Polly Higgins and the story she told again and again until the world started listening. Polly was a barrister who left her career to fight for something radical and urgent: to make ecocide, the destruction of ecosystems, an international crime.

She wanted this not just so that corporations could be punished but so that we could change the rules entirely, and her idea was simple at heart: what if we stopped putting profit above life, and made care the legal baseline?

First: do no harm. Then: think about profit.

She imagined a world where leaders and corporations were held accountable for destroying ecosystems, not to shut business down but to give it the legal permission and moral urgency to reinvent itself.

Polly imagined a future where harm wasn’t inevitable, and so do I.

Through a systems lens

Here I step back from the story to look at the system it belongs to, how the same pattern shows up elsewhere, and where it sits in the Coherence Framework.

Polly understood something about systems that most reform efforts miss: behaviour follows the rules of the game, and the rules follow the story a culture tells about what matters. For as long as that story says profit comes first and harm is an externality, the law will price destruction as a cost of doing business, and good people inside companies will keep making decisions they would never make in their own lives.

The same pattern runs through systems of every size, from a family where keeping the peace matters more than naming harm, to a workplace where the targets are clear and the human cost appears in no report, to an economy that counts a felled forest as growth and unpaid care as nothing. In each of them, harm is less a malfunction than what the system has been designed not to see.

The pattern to notice is where the line gets drawn around what counts. Whatever sits outside it, whether an ecosystem, a person’s wellbeing or the next generation, can be damaged without consequence because it never appears in the accounts, which is why moving that line is one of the most powerful interventions there is. Donella Meadows ranked the rules of a system well above its numbers for exactly this reason: change what’s permitted, and behaviour reorganises around it.

In the Coherence Framework this is the structure layer, where values either become real or stay decorative. A company can say it cares about nature and still be rewarded for destroying it, and making ecocide a crime changes that incentive so that integrity stops being a personal sacrifice and becomes the easier path.

What I love most about Polly’s framing is that it was never meant to punish. First, do no harm is a baseline, one that gives business permission to reinvent itself and gives the people inside it a way to act on what they already know is right.