I got into an argument with a woman about composting this morning. Bear with me.

Most neighbourhood disputes involve fences, noise, or parking. Mine involved two poodles, a storm drain, and a woman with a surprisingly confident position on composting.

This morning a woman walked past my house and quietly dropped a bag of dog poo down the storm drain.

In one quick flick of the wrist, it disappeared into the abyss. Not subtly. Just quickly. The way you do something when you've fully committed to it but would prefer not to make eye contact with anyone, including yourself.

I walked over and asked if she'd just done that. She knew I knew. I knew she knew I knew. We both knew. I'm pretty sure even her poodles knew.

She told me the bags were compostable. Then told me to leave her alone. Then told me I was ruining her morning. Here was a person, next to a storm drain she had just filled with dog poo, explaining to me with complete conviction why this was fine.

The compostable bag is a masterpiece of engineering and, as it turns out, human reasoning.

But this wasn't really about composting. It was about having an answer ready. A story that conveniently sits between what you did and how you'd like to feel about it. Something to deploy in exactly this kind of situation so you can walk away still being the reasonable one. Possibly while your poodles look at the ground.

In business it's the metric that looks like progress but isn't. The document written instead of the hard decision made. The product that almost works, launched anyway, because stopping now would mean admitting the last six months went somewhere deeply uncomfortable and probably expensive.

In health it's the gym membership purchased instead of attended. The supplement bought because the ad looked cool and the label says the right things, regardless of whether you'll use it. Excellent intentions. But destined for the graveyard of products at the back of the kitchen pantry, next to the protein powder from 2023.

There's a line from Australian Army Chief David Morrison that I've been coming back to lately: the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

I'm pretty sure he was talking about workplace culture and not poodles at the time. But the moment I heard it, I thought about every product built to feel like the answer rather than actually be it. Every decision optimised for the sale rather than the outcome. When I started building Radical Good I wrote it on a piece of paper and stuck it above my desk.

The health and wellness industry has a lot of compostable bag thinking in it. Not always dishonest. Often just optimised for the wrong thing. For the shelf, not the person. For the claim, not the result. For how it looks in an ad rather than whether it actually works for someone living a real, active, busy life.

Every time we make a formulation decision I ask the same question: is this the right answer for that person, or is this just our compostable bag?

The woman rounded the corner before I could explain any of this to her. Probably for the best.

Her poodles seemed lovely though.