"Tired of crass consumerism dominating Christmas?"
This subtitle accompanied a New Zealand Herald article by Jan Corbett way back in December 2000.
Jan described how the previous Christmas, PR firm The Dock Street Group had done something shocking: it didn't send a single present to a single client. Instead it sent a gift-wrapped certificate saying that in lieu of a gift, the firm was making a donation to the Fred Hollows Foundation, to support its wonderful work restoring sight to cataract-blinded people in the developing world. The Foundation was one of the firm's clients, so perhaps this was an obvious move - but it has had an ever-widening spinoff.
By the time I saw the article, I'd already bought Christmas presents for my clients - but the following year, 2001, I did some research, found two charities to support, created a certificate and included it with my clients' Christmas cards.
Working as I do in the environmental area, I decided to "balance my portfolio" by supporting two social charities with my Christmas donations, Amnesty International and the then-named "Domestic Violence Centre" in Auckland.
I was a bit nervous about this, because statistically it was probable that of the people to whom I sent cards, some would be more or less guilty of domestic violence. But I plucked up my moral courage and did it anyway.
To my surprise, I got a raft of emails and phone calls from my clients congratulating me on this move - far more than had ever thanked me for my gifts. Over the years, I've seen more and more people do the same, with of course the fantastic opportunities opened up by agencies such as OxFam and other allowing anyone to support more and more good causes.
Other reasons make this a good idea - many of my clients work for government agencies of various kinds, and have very high standards and even rules about accepting gifts from people with whom they have a commercial relationship. So these charity gift certificates are a great way of letting my wonderful clients know how much I enjoy working with them, while still preserving their independance.
A second reason for me is that there are so many worthwhile charities out there and I felt that giving a bigger sum to two of them would be better than giving dribs and drabs of coins to street collectors on a random basis (though I still sometimes do this, especially to surf lifesavers). When I say No and explain why, these people are always very understanding.
Now in 2011, this is the tenth year I have supported my two chosen charities, with the DVC now re-named SHINE, or "Safe Homes In Nz for Everyone". And of course, I've moved to e-cards as well....
I'll take a break from this blog over the holiday season and will resume sometime in the New Year.
Wishing you all the best for the end of year break, be it with snow and skiing or sun and swimming! - and for a very happy and fulfilling new year in 2012.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Carbon taxes add value for smart businesses
Do you think that global climate change is happening?
If you think it is happening, do you think that people are causing it?
Do you follow the news on emissions controls such as cap and trade or carbon tax schemes?
Do you think the answers matter? Because I don’t.
Why? There’s no point squabbling about it – BECAUSE – carbon emissions are what we call a ‘proxy indicator’ of waste: they are one measurement that indirectly measures lots of other things. So if your vehicle fleet is poorly maintained, you’ll be wasting fuel and oil – that is, carbon – and a good fleet maintenance program will save you not only fuel but also wear and tear on your vehicles. Yes, that’s right – it will save you MONEY.
It’s the same for any other form of waste. Everything we do or use has a carbon cost.
Those offcuts in your factory come from goods or materials that were grown, mined or caught, transported, processed, transported again, processed by you – then transported to the landfill. Reduce that waste, and you reduce the amount of carbon you emit whenever you waste goods or materials that you bought from your suppliers. What do you save? MONEY.
Work in an office? Good insulation, more efficient lighting and heating, more energy-efficient equipment and a host of other straightforward measures will reduce the carbon emissions from running the building and providing your services. What do you save? MONEY.
It works for everything from farming cows to cloud computing.
See? Climate change is not the enemy – and carbon is your friend!
It shows you where your use of resources of all kinds is needlessly costly, and how you can run a smarter, more cost-effective organization.
It also means we can leave the science of the debate to the scientists. So, if climate change is happened and we are causing it, reducing our carbon emissions means we’ll have taken some big steps to slowing it down – thereby reducing some very serious (and expensive) risks to people and economies all round the world. If it isn’t happening or we aren’t causing it, our businesses will be more intelligent, efficient and profitable.
Either way, we win - IF we take action.
"What is the worst that could happen?" This is a wonderful book on the topic by Greg Craven. Click here and here to see him talk about that and "How It All Ends" – sensationally good and very funny.
If you think it is happening, do you think that people are causing it?
Do you follow the news on emissions controls such as cap and trade or carbon tax schemes?
Do you think the answers matter? Because I don’t.
Why? There’s no point squabbling about it – BECAUSE – carbon emissions are what we call a ‘proxy indicator’ of waste: they are one measurement that indirectly measures lots of other things. So if your vehicle fleet is poorly maintained, you’ll be wasting fuel and oil – that is, carbon – and a good fleet maintenance program will save you not only fuel but also wear and tear on your vehicles. Yes, that’s right – it will save you MONEY.
It’s the same for any other form of waste. Everything we do or use has a carbon cost.
Those offcuts in your factory come from goods or materials that were grown, mined or caught, transported, processed, transported again, processed by you – then transported to the landfill. Reduce that waste, and you reduce the amount of carbon you emit whenever you waste goods or materials that you bought from your suppliers. What do you save? MONEY.
Work in an office? Good insulation, more efficient lighting and heating, more energy-efficient equipment and a host of other straightforward measures will reduce the carbon emissions from running the building and providing your services. What do you save? MONEY.
It works for everything from farming cows to cloud computing.
See? Climate change is not the enemy – and carbon is your friend!
It shows you where your use of resources of all kinds is needlessly costly, and how you can run a smarter, more cost-effective organization.
It also means we can leave the science of the debate to the scientists. So, if climate change is happened and we are causing it, reducing our carbon emissions means we’ll have taken some big steps to slowing it down – thereby reducing some very serious (and expensive) risks to people and economies all round the world. If it isn’t happening or we aren’t causing it, our businesses will be more intelligent, efficient and profitable.
Either way, we win - IF we take action.
"What is the worst that could happen?" This is a wonderful book on the topic by Greg Craven. Click here and here to see him talk about that and "How It All Ends" – sensationally good and very funny.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Heading past seven billion people on the planet - exploding some population myths
The birth of numbers of symbolic 7-billionth babies round the world has been greeted with both happiness and horror. Joy of course to the parents, accompanied by worry about whether the planet can support its burgeoning population.
Yet already by the 3rd Century, Tertullian was saying “We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us” - this at a time when world population was some 200 million. 18 centuries later and with 34 times more people, others including Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich have predicted disasters arising from overpopulation.
However as many observers including Jared Diamond and author and journalist Fred Pearce pointed out in the late 20th Century and early 2000s, the biggest threat is not too many people: it's the gross (and ultimately unsatisfying) over-consumption of resources by 20% of the world’s population which leaves depleted and polluted resources for the 80% of the world’s less privileged. In fact David Suzuki said in an interview that if we all lived like the average american, the world could only support 200 million people - maybe Tertullian was onto something!
Compounding this result, we're seeing the number of households increase faster than the number of people: more and more single people or childless couples fill their homes with all the appliances and other things that can service whole families.
In recent decades we've realised (largely by accident) that the best antidote to explosive population growth is female literacy: teach women to read and they will access the family planning they need – provided infant mortality is reduced. If parents know their children will survive to young adulthood, they will reduce their family size.
Where this happens, the rapidity of the resulting demographic transition is startling: it inverts the classic population pyramid – lots of children at the base, a narrow peak of old people and a thin tier in between of income earners supporting them both – into a tower with wider cap of older people supported by a shrinking workforce to be succeeded in turn by an even smaller number of children. This is what we now see in Japan, Europe, Scandinavia and other "developed" economies.
Commentators now believe that if higher living and educational standards spread round the world (before its economy and ecology are toppled by unsustainably high demands on water and other resources) the world’s population is likely to stabilize at about 9 billion people – and it is likely to fall as more and more people enjoy better lifestyles. And it seems that industrial-scale agriculture is not needed over every square inch of the Earth - in developed nations we waste a quarter or a third of our food while in other parts of the world, war, pests and poor storage rob the people of the opportunities to farm their land and of the fruits of their labour when they do.
So we need to focus on getting to a world full of healthy people whose ability to live happily is supported by stable states.
If course this would signal a major re-think of the current growth-based economic model, as we move towards stable or shrinking populations and while some of us on the planet learn how to live more happily by consuming less so as to enable those who need to consume more to enjoy a decent standard of living.
As Jared Diamond points out, "Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required ...because ... much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ [and of course, the rest of us in the developed world] wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures."
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
An oil spill on iconic beaches: time for local capacity-building and shipping to go green
My heart is wrung by the toxic bunker oil killing birds and sea life along the beach where I grew up: the magnificent Bay of Plenty on New Zealand's beautiful East Coast. My friends along the beaches at Mt Maunganui and Papamoa are distraught, and communities on Motiti and Mayor Islands and all along the Bay from the Mount to Maketu are horrified at the damage it will do to traditional, recreational and commercial fisheries, tourism and the hearts and minds of people who use these beaches every day, all year round.
Search for "Rena, Astrolabe Reef" and you will see it all. Many questions remain, notably why a ship should hit a well-charted reef in fine weather, and why it took nearly a week of said fine weather before the first signs of activity took place to prevent the spilling of the 1700 tonnes of oil on board. And why a ship that has had a number of deficiencies identified in New Zealand in September and been detained for in Australia for other deficiencies to be made good should have been allowed to continue plying New Zealand waters. The Captain and First Officer have been arrested and Maritime New Zealand has dramatically stepped up its on the ground response, its level of communication with the affected communities and its training of volunteers to help remove the ghastly globs and dead and dying birds now washing up on the beaches.
More information will emerge over time, but this tragedy got me thinking about two of my passions: capacity-building and the low-carbon economy.
As I understand it, local ports like Tauranga, where the Rena was headed, used to have their own spill response capability, but legislative changes some years ago centralised this function in Wellington, our capital city, which is more or less in the middle of New Zealand at the southern end of the North Island. It appears that at least some of the delay in response was a result of this physical distance - 460 nautical miles.
Why not restore this function to the ports, with Maritime New Zealand taking a strategic analysis and training role? New Zealand has a small population, a tad over 4.4 million, but the length of our coastline gives us one of the world's biggest exclusive economic zones. This makes it hard for us to police the area, so why not re-establish local emergency response capacity in a way that shares roles and resourcing? Inspection, education and where necessary enforcement of cultural, recreational and commercial shell and fin fisheries could be one role; search and rescue another; alongside emergency response capacity. Complement this with outreach and training for the communities who are spontaneously taking on an active kaitiaki and guardianship role and you have a skilled and committed resource. There are already many iwi and marine, dune and beach care groups and many other environmental and community groups of all kinds along the Bay of Plenty and with the right kind of support, their capacity could be further built up in many areas.
But why do we still have ships on the seas with such dangerous and outdated carbon-intense technology?
Ports and their approaches all round the world are vulnerable to maritime mishaps. Yet it's possible to have ships with a mere modicum of lubricating oil on board that are powered by kite sails, solar panels and even solar panels on towers that can be turned to act as sails as well as energy-harvesters. These ships can cut a ship's fuel costs by up to 90% and significantly lower its environmental impact. Even better, they're beautiful - take a look here - reminiscent of the glory days of sailing ships! The solar cells can capture energy for storage, while the kites can be used in overcast weather to conserve battery charges. The batteries can then power electric engines for use in bad weather and maneuvering in and out of harbours and ports.
Electric engines have powerful, energy-efficient variable speed drives. They are nearly silent - a tremendous boon to our marine life now suffering increasing levels of disruption and physical damage from ever-growing levels of human-induced noise. We'd have to think of new ways to warn at-risk animals of imminent collisions - and this is a great opportunity for innovative research and technology that could be applied more widely, for example to underwater turbines and the like.
Yes, batteries are toxic and dangerous things - but they don't escape and float away to kill life in the water and on our coastlines: if they go down with a ship, they are far more readily recoverable than fossil fuels.
Oh, and this would help us on the way to a low-carbon economy - a report by the U.N. International Maritime Organisation said annual CO2 emissions from world shipping reached 1.12 billion tonnes in 2007, about 3.5% of total global carbon emissions, and that growing international seaborne trade and related fuel consumption will raise emissions from ships by 30 % to 1.475 billion tonnes by 2020.
And of course, the fly in the ointment of this particular panacea is.... oil tankers. Not much point having them electric when they carry millions of litres of oil as their cargo. As Greenpeace said in a 25 February 1990 advertisement in the New York Times (I've rephrased it slightly), "It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was ours."
Now that's a whole new conversation!
Search for "Rena, Astrolabe Reef" and you will see it all. Many questions remain, notably why a ship should hit a well-charted reef in fine weather, and why it took nearly a week of said fine weather before the first signs of activity took place to prevent the spilling of the 1700 tonnes of oil on board. And why a ship that has had a number of deficiencies identified in New Zealand in September and been detained for in Australia for other deficiencies to be made good should have been allowed to continue plying New Zealand waters. The Captain and First Officer have been arrested and Maritime New Zealand has dramatically stepped up its on the ground response, its level of communication with the affected communities and its training of volunteers to help remove the ghastly globs and dead and dying birds now washing up on the beaches.
More information will emerge over time, but this tragedy got me thinking about two of my passions: capacity-building and the low-carbon economy.
As I understand it, local ports like Tauranga, where the Rena was headed, used to have their own spill response capability, but legislative changes some years ago centralised this function in Wellington, our capital city, which is more or less in the middle of New Zealand at the southern end of the North Island. It appears that at least some of the delay in response was a result of this physical distance - 460 nautical miles.
Why not restore this function to the ports, with Maritime New Zealand taking a strategic analysis and training role? New Zealand has a small population, a tad over 4.4 million, but the length of our coastline gives us one of the world's biggest exclusive economic zones. This makes it hard for us to police the area, so why not re-establish local emergency response capacity in a way that shares roles and resourcing? Inspection, education and where necessary enforcement of cultural, recreational and commercial shell and fin fisheries could be one role; search and rescue another; alongside emergency response capacity. Complement this with outreach and training for the communities who are spontaneously taking on an active kaitiaki and guardianship role and you have a skilled and committed resource. There are already many iwi and marine, dune and beach care groups and many other environmental and community groups of all kinds along the Bay of Plenty and with the right kind of support, their capacity could be further built up in many areas.
But why do we still have ships on the seas with such dangerous and outdated carbon-intense technology?
Ports and their approaches all round the world are vulnerable to maritime mishaps. Yet it's possible to have ships with a mere modicum of lubricating oil on board that are powered by kite sails, solar panels and even solar panels on towers that can be turned to act as sails as well as energy-harvesters. These ships can cut a ship's fuel costs by up to 90% and significantly lower its environmental impact. Even better, they're beautiful - take a look here - reminiscent of the glory days of sailing ships! The solar cells can capture energy for storage, while the kites can be used in overcast weather to conserve battery charges. The batteries can then power electric engines for use in bad weather and maneuvering in and out of harbours and ports.
Electric engines have powerful, energy-efficient variable speed drives. They are nearly silent - a tremendous boon to our marine life now suffering increasing levels of disruption and physical damage from ever-growing levels of human-induced noise. We'd have to think of new ways to warn at-risk animals of imminent collisions - and this is a great opportunity for innovative research and technology that could be applied more widely, for example to underwater turbines and the like.
Yes, batteries are toxic and dangerous things - but they don't escape and float away to kill life in the water and on our coastlines: if they go down with a ship, they are far more readily recoverable than fossil fuels.
Oh, and this would help us on the way to a low-carbon economy - a report by the U.N. International Maritime Organisation said annual CO2 emissions from world shipping reached 1.12 billion tonnes in 2007, about 3.5% of total global carbon emissions, and that growing international seaborne trade and related fuel consumption will raise emissions from ships by 30 % to 1.475 billion tonnes by 2020.
Which will be the first world port to insist on a sustainable supply chain by accepting only wind and solar-powered vessels?
Hmmm.... how many pluses does all this add up to compared with one giant minus on the beach which I will visit to mourn over next weekend?And of course, the fly in the ointment of this particular panacea is.... oil tankers. Not much point having them electric when they carry millions of litres of oil as their cargo. As Greenpeace said in a 25 February 1990 advertisement in the New York Times (I've rephrased it slightly), "It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was ours."
Now that's a whole new conversation!
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Learning to love learning
Over the last few weeks I've been immersed in work on measuring the outcomes and effectiveness of watershed management plans - stuff I've been looking at for some years now. The most common finding is that many plans aren't written in a way that enables their implementation and outcomes to be documented. Among the many other barriers to identifying the effectiveness of our plans are lack of time for overworked staff to look back at their achievements and a widespread culture of fear in public and private spheres. People are scared of 'getting it wrong'.
This is so sad. In both business and government I see people who love their work. Giving them the tools and time to step back and reflect on their organization and its operations is part of the process of developing a form of reflexive awareness, and is a major step on the path to becoming a learning organization that 'gets' continuous improvement. This sets alight a love of learning about our work by way of monitoring, review and adaptive management - something environmental agencies talk about a great deal but find harder to do in practice.
How much time and money to invest in monitoring and evaluation varies between organizations and their function, but I've seen a figure of 5-10% of project budget suggested by Katie Delahaye Paine, and this gives us somewhere to start.
We need a very strategic and holistic yet targeted approach, especially if we are aiming to assess outcomes and effectiveness across the four social, cultural economic and environmental wellbeings. Sometimes minor tweakings of approach can enable us to create benefits across two or more of these wellbeings and we need to track this thinking and doing.
Einstein, it seems, was a genius in more than just physics: one of my favorite quotes from him is 'Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.'
This is so sad. In both business and government I see people who love their work. Giving them the tools and time to step back and reflect on their organization and its operations is part of the process of developing a form of reflexive awareness, and is a major step on the path to becoming a learning organization that 'gets' continuous improvement. This sets alight a love of learning about our work by way of monitoring, review and adaptive management - something environmental agencies talk about a great deal but find harder to do in practice.
How much time and money to invest in monitoring and evaluation varies between organizations and their function, but I've seen a figure of 5-10% of project budget suggested by Katie Delahaye Paine, and this gives us somewhere to start.
We need a very strategic and holistic yet targeted approach, especially if we are aiming to assess outcomes and effectiveness across the four social, cultural economic and environmental wellbeings. Sometimes minor tweakings of approach can enable us to create benefits across two or more of these wellbeings and we need to track this thinking and doing.
Einstein, it seems, was a genius in more than just physics: one of my favorite quotes from him is 'Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.'
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Risky times, risk perception and the sabotage of our own inner kluge
I’ve been writing a lot about risk over the last year or two. My trusty little old Oxford dictionary defines risk as ‘hazard, chance of bad consequences, loss etc; exposure to mischance’ – but also as ‘venture on, take the chances of’.
The online Business Dictionary defines its general meaning as ‘probability or threat of a damage, injury, liability, loss, or other negative occurrence, caused by external or internal vulnerabilities, and which may be neutralized through pre-meditated action’ and its workplace meaning as ‘product of the impact of the severity (consequence) and impact of the likelihood (probability) of a hazardous event or phenomenon’.
Interestingly, most of the definitions of risk are financial – something I’m sure was never a consideration in the risky business of human evolution.
Answers.com offered ‘the possibility of suffering harm or loss; danger’, ‘a factor, thing, element, or course involving uncertain danger; a hazard” and ‘exposure to possible harm, loss, or injury’ and ‘to put up as a stake in a game or speculation’ and ‘a venture depending on chance’.
Suggested Thesaurus equivalents at Answers.com include hazard, danger, peril, menace or jeopardy; bet, gamble, stake, venture, wager, chance and speculate; or venture and adventure.
We can see that the negative connotations of risk can blur into some that sound rather more exciting and positive!
Our own perceptions of and attitudes to risk influence the balance that businesses need to strike between timidity and inaction resulting in stagnation, all the way along to irresponsible gambling resulting in failure.
Somewhere in the middle is a path that combines common sense and creativity that is realistic yet strikes the sweet balance somewhere between prudence and innovation.
Risk is a fact of life – and it has upsides as well as downsides. We are always subconsciously weighing the odds all the time in all spheres of our life. Some risks can pay off hugely while others are obviously foolhardy – and few people will exactly agree on which is which.
We need to know what we’re up against, here: our inner kluge. Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, says the human mind is a kluge - an engineering term for ‘a solution that is clumsy or inelegant yet surprisingly effective’. Our brains are clumsy things, he says - but they handle the tasks life throws at them pretty well. Yet while capable of great things, the haphazard and opportunistic construction of the brain means most of us have a terrible memory and generally poor will power - and often behave irrationally.
How does this manifest? Marcus claims we are much more the ‘rationalizing’ than the ‘rational’ animal: we constantly sabotage our long term goals by poor short term decisions (think getting fit, rich or thin!) then justify them with a rash of retrospective rationalizations. And, he says, we’re much more likely to remember to buy toilet paper when we are in the bathroom than when we’re in the supermarket.
How can we outwit our inner kluge? Scenario-based contingency plans related to risks that threaten our goals are a great help in everyday life, says Marcus: ‘If I see chips, I’ll avoid them, says the dieter’. We can routinely use them in business and environmental management as well: ‘If I see a problem with an environmental control, I’ll fix it or call someone’.
This relates to what David Apgar calls our ‘risk intelligence’ or risk IQ. Apgar insists that risk intelligence is learnable: he says that our ability – as an individual and a company – to understand and learn about risk, compared with that of others, can make or break a project. Nearly everyone can work out how to manage an identified risk – but people or organizations that are better at identifying risks have ‘better raw material in the form of information for managing’ them and this can lead to real competitive advantages. He insists that it is possible for us to compare our abilities and use the information to learn how to make better risk decisions and project choices.
Choosing to become a learning organization via the approaches to risk management outlined by Gary Marcus and David Apgar will allow each of us to develop particular strengths: some of us will become great at assessing risk, others at managing it, and others about communicating what we learn so as to improve our business performance.
Remember – wherever there is a risk, there is always an opportunity to work smarter, do better, meet a challenge, learn something new, build an unbeatable team and have more fun!
The online Business Dictionary defines its general meaning as ‘probability or threat of a damage, injury, liability, loss, or other negative occurrence, caused by external or internal vulnerabilities, and which may be neutralized through pre-meditated action’ and its workplace meaning as ‘product of the impact of the severity (consequence) and impact of the likelihood (probability) of a hazardous event or phenomenon’.
Interestingly, most of the definitions of risk are financial – something I’m sure was never a consideration in the risky business of human evolution.
Answers.com offered ‘the possibility of suffering harm or loss; danger’, ‘a factor, thing, element, or course involving uncertain danger; a hazard” and ‘exposure to possible harm, loss, or injury’ and ‘to put up as a stake in a game or speculation’ and ‘a venture depending on chance’.
Suggested Thesaurus equivalents at Answers.com include hazard, danger, peril, menace or jeopardy; bet, gamble, stake, venture, wager, chance and speculate; or venture and adventure.
We can see that the negative connotations of risk can blur into some that sound rather more exciting and positive!
Our own perceptions of and attitudes to risk influence the balance that businesses need to strike between timidity and inaction resulting in stagnation, all the way along to irresponsible gambling resulting in failure.
Somewhere in the middle is a path that combines common sense and creativity that is realistic yet strikes the sweet balance somewhere between prudence and innovation.
Risk is a fact of life – and it has upsides as well as downsides. We are always subconsciously weighing the odds all the time in all spheres of our life. Some risks can pay off hugely while others are obviously foolhardy – and few people will exactly agree on which is which.
We need to know what we’re up against, here: our inner kluge. Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, says the human mind is a kluge - an engineering term for ‘a solution that is clumsy or inelegant yet surprisingly effective’. Our brains are clumsy things, he says - but they handle the tasks life throws at them pretty well. Yet while capable of great things, the haphazard and opportunistic construction of the brain means most of us have a terrible memory and generally poor will power - and often behave irrationally.
How does this manifest? Marcus claims we are much more the ‘rationalizing’ than the ‘rational’ animal: we constantly sabotage our long term goals by poor short term decisions (think getting fit, rich or thin!) then justify them with a rash of retrospective rationalizations. And, he says, we’re much more likely to remember to buy toilet paper when we are in the bathroom than when we’re in the supermarket.
How can we outwit our inner kluge? Scenario-based contingency plans related to risks that threaten our goals are a great help in everyday life, says Marcus: ‘If I see chips, I’ll avoid them, says the dieter’. We can routinely use them in business and environmental management as well: ‘If I see a problem with an environmental control, I’ll fix it or call someone’.
This relates to what David Apgar calls our ‘risk intelligence’ or risk IQ. Apgar insists that risk intelligence is learnable: he says that our ability – as an individual and a company – to understand and learn about risk, compared with that of others, can make or break a project. Nearly everyone can work out how to manage an identified risk – but people or organizations that are better at identifying risks have ‘better raw material in the form of information for managing’ them and this can lead to real competitive advantages. He insists that it is possible for us to compare our abilities and use the information to learn how to make better risk decisions and project choices.
Choosing to become a learning organization via the approaches to risk management outlined by Gary Marcus and David Apgar will allow each of us to develop particular strengths: some of us will become great at assessing risk, others at managing it, and others about communicating what we learn so as to improve our business performance.
Remember – wherever there is a risk, there is always an opportunity to work smarter, do better, meet a challenge, learn something new, build an unbeatable team and have more fun!
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Company culture: the iceberg effect
Company culture is like PR – it’s something you have whether you plan it or not.
And for many organizations, it’s unspoken and implicit. I’ve seen this in my work on manufacturing and construction sites and on farms. For example, on one site, people will walk past a faulty environmental control while staff on another will call the environmental team or simply fix it themselves. How much harder will it be for an individual to break with the group dynamic in the former case and fix or point out the fault in time to prevent a polluting spill?
Ed Schein shows organizational culture as an iceberg – artifacts like buildings and logos are at the very tip, and the rest of the bit above the waterline is made up of the organization’s espoused values – the things people say in their environmental policies, for example, or on their website and in promotional materials.
But the 80% below the waterline is like the unconscious mind – here lurk the organization’s basic underlying assumptions or values that may only be guessed at by observing people’s everyday actions – the things that send an unspoken signal, “This is how things are done round here.”
So the likelihood of environmental incidents reflects the environmental culture of the organization, because it influences what individual employees actually do.
I’ve become increasingly aware of and truly astounded by the influence of such apparently subtle things like culture and leadership - and have observed companies turn themselves around by simply deciding they have to improve the way they work.
Creating a positive culture is an essential aspect of effective management in any workplace. In the same way, a strong environmental culture means the values and priorities placed on all aspects of the environment are observed by everyone at every level of the organization, aligning everyone's actions towards a common goal. Conversely, if the day-to-day behavior of directors, managers, supervisors and staff does not support good practice, the environmental culture will be weak even where the company has good structural and procedural controls.
Based on his observations of the medical profession, surgeon Atul Gawande says many of the big improvements come not from big technical breakthroughs but from changes to the way things are done. He says doing better requires the ability to recognize ‘better’ when you find it, and for this you need to ‘count things’ – in other words, paperwork is important.
Good documentation allows us to track relations between symptoms and diagnosis, treatment and outcome, says Gawande (and yes, we can do this for the environment), without relying on memory, anecdote and prejudice.
I'm grateful to my friend and colleague Dr Lesley Stone for enlightening me about Ed Schein's iceberg model as part of the training she and our late colleague Greg Brown gave me and others on the Target Zero team. We all worked together for three years on a major waste avoidance/resource efficiency project and continued this work in different forms for many years. Lesley is now the Sustainability Adviser for Auckland University.
And for many organizations, it’s unspoken and implicit. I’ve seen this in my work on manufacturing and construction sites and on farms. For example, on one site, people will walk past a faulty environmental control while staff on another will call the environmental team or simply fix it themselves. How much harder will it be for an individual to break with the group dynamic in the former case and fix or point out the fault in time to prevent a polluting spill?
Ed Schein shows organizational culture as an iceberg – artifacts like buildings and logos are at the very tip, and the rest of the bit above the waterline is made up of the organization’s espoused values – the things people say in their environmental policies, for example, or on their website and in promotional materials.
But the 80% below the waterline is like the unconscious mind – here lurk the organization’s basic underlying assumptions or values that may only be guessed at by observing people’s everyday actions – the things that send an unspoken signal, “This is how things are done round here.”
So the likelihood of environmental incidents reflects the environmental culture of the organization, because it influences what individual employees actually do.
I’ve become increasingly aware of and truly astounded by the influence of such apparently subtle things like culture and leadership - and have observed companies turn themselves around by simply deciding they have to improve the way they work.
Creating a positive culture is an essential aspect of effective management in any workplace. In the same way, a strong environmental culture means the values and priorities placed on all aspects of the environment are observed by everyone at every level of the organization, aligning everyone's actions towards a common goal. Conversely, if the day-to-day behavior of directors, managers, supervisors and staff does not support good practice, the environmental culture will be weak even where the company has good structural and procedural controls.
Based on his observations of the medical profession, surgeon Atul Gawande says many of the big improvements come not from big technical breakthroughs but from changes to the way things are done. He says doing better requires the ability to recognize ‘better’ when you find it, and for this you need to ‘count things’ – in other words, paperwork is important.
Good documentation allows us to track relations between symptoms and diagnosis, treatment and outcome, says Gawande (and yes, we can do this for the environment), without relying on memory, anecdote and prejudice.
I'm grateful to my friend and colleague Dr Lesley Stone for enlightening me about Ed Schein's iceberg model as part of the training she and our late colleague Greg Brown gave me and others on the Target Zero team. We all worked together for three years on a major waste avoidance/resource efficiency project and continued this work in different forms for many years. Lesley is now the Sustainability Adviser for Auckland University.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
'Eco-non-money' growing within the economy
A grab-bag of ideas could be symptomatic of a wider groundswell of support for an economic system that values people and the environment. I've already blogged (e.g. 3 May 2011) about the growing disillusion with unethical practices in the financial sector - hilariously, a report released a year or more ago by the New Economics Foundation called "A bit rich: Calculating the real value to society of different professions" found that for every £1 they are paid, low-paid hospital cleaners generate over £10 in social value. By contrast, by promoting tax avoidance, very highly-paid tax accountants destroy £47 of value for every pound in value they generate. The report is very thought-provoking and impressively well-referenced.
A more recent radio item on the moneyless economy on 7 August noted that we assume goods and services must be valued in monetary terms, but highlighted a growing movement internationally that’s "questioning whether there aren’t more interesting and satisfying ways of exchanging goods and services". People interviewed spoke about the Freecycle Network™, which is made up of 5,000-odd groups with over 8.5 million members around the world. This "grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement" enables people to get and give stuff for free in their own towns in order to re-use good things and keep them out of landfills. Locally in New Zealand and globally there are any number of "green dollar" movements such as the Wairarapa Green Dollar Exchange and the Bay of Islands Community Exchange (BOICE), that facilitates the exchange of local goods and services among Bay of Islands communities using a complementary mutual credit currency, the BOIDOL (BOI$). The Bank of Real Solutions has grassroots solutions on topics as diverse as community gardens, cycling, food, health, reuse, recycling, conservation, education, elders, gardening, local currencies, pest control, sustainability training, tree planting, water weed control, wetland restoration and youth engagement.
Businesses are coming on board, with examples such as the Local Living Economy movement that aims to ensure that economic power resides locally to the greatest extent possible, sustaining vibrant, livable communities and healthy ecosystems in the process.
Whole nations may even be taking control of their economy, like Iceland, where ordinary citizens revolted against their failed banking system and even co-operatively redrafted their constitution!
Such moves are sometimes called "the alternative economy", which one group defines as "an economic structure that is separate from, and operates largely independently of, the traditional economy. It will have its own currency and means of conducting commerce, with the goal of creating a high level of self-sufficiency, as well as ample employment opportunities and a high level of material and spiritual well being for participants, while embracing sustainability principles."
It is fascinating to see these and many more related movements springing up to meet the ongoing academic debate on ecological economics, which provides the theory around environmental and social wellbeing. Let's see how soon this theory and practice can come together to heal our divided societies and wounded ecosystems.
A more recent radio item on the moneyless economy on 7 August noted that we assume goods and services must be valued in monetary terms, but highlighted a growing movement internationally that’s "questioning whether there aren’t more interesting and satisfying ways of exchanging goods and services". People interviewed spoke about the Freecycle Network™, which is made up of 5,000-odd groups with over 8.5 million members around the world. This "grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement" enables people to get and give stuff for free in their own towns in order to re-use good things and keep them out of landfills. Locally in New Zealand and globally there are any number of "green dollar" movements such as the Wairarapa Green Dollar Exchange and the Bay of Islands Community Exchange (BOICE), that facilitates the exchange of local goods and services among Bay of Islands communities using a complementary mutual credit currency, the BOIDOL (BOI$). The Bank of Real Solutions has grassroots solutions on topics as diverse as community gardens, cycling, food, health, reuse, recycling, conservation, education, elders, gardening, local currencies, pest control, sustainability training, tree planting, water weed control, wetland restoration and youth engagement.
Businesses are coming on board, with examples such as the Local Living Economy movement that aims to ensure that economic power resides locally to the greatest extent possible, sustaining vibrant, livable communities and healthy ecosystems in the process.
Whole nations may even be taking control of their economy, like Iceland, where ordinary citizens revolted against their failed banking system and even co-operatively redrafted their constitution!
Such moves are sometimes called "the alternative economy", which one group defines as "an economic structure that is separate from, and operates largely independently of, the traditional economy. It will have its own currency and means of conducting commerce, with the goal of creating a high level of self-sufficiency, as well as ample employment opportunities and a high level of material and spiritual well being for participants, while embracing sustainability principles."
It is fascinating to see these and many more related movements springing up to meet the ongoing academic debate on ecological economics, which provides the theory around environmental and social wellbeing. Let's see how soon this theory and practice can come together to heal our divided societies and wounded ecosystems.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Making decisions in uncertain times
Why do people keep writing books about what’s going to happen in the near and far future, asks iconoclast Dan Gardner, when these ‘experts’ have an appalling track record on the accuracy of their predictions? In his recent book Future Babble, he also asks why the rest of us in droves keep buying these books! His explanation is that we cannot tolerate uncertainty, and demand to know what’s coming next - that wrong certainty feels better than uncertainty.
Yet uncertainty has characterized most of human history: why does it still feel so uncomfortable? In her book The Optimism Bias, neuroscientist Tali Sharot argues that a positive outlook probably helped us survive as a species by enabling us to feel happy in the present despite the uncertainties of the immediate (and even more so the long term) future.
Alas, this can lead us to assume that radical change is unnecessary and that ‘normal service’ will soon resume, say Andrew Campbell and Stuart Sinclair. They attribute this to the ‘human trait of being overly influenced by past experiences and judgments’, which decision making experts call ‘anchoring’. Everything we do and how we do it tends to be anchored in the past: we keep doing the same things in the same way. This mostly works fine when the present is the same as the past. When everything around us has changed, we meet Einstein's famous definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Our certainty that the boom of the two decades leading in to 2008 would carry on forever seems sadly deluded now, as Harvard Business Review editorial director Justin Fox observes. I read his comments to indicate that every company will have to explore its entrepreneurial depths simply to stay in business, and had to chuckle at his acerbic comment that it’s time we got positive and embraced uncertainty instead of just whining about it.
Knowing all these things doesn’t, however, help governments or businesses work out what we should actually do next - especially in light of a growing body of research findings that decisions made when we are tired or anxious are usually bad ones.
One thing’s for sure; businesses these days we need to make some kind of decision or join the dinosaurs. And we need a mental jolt to focus our attention on the need to do so.
‘What will you do when what you do disappears?’ Professional speaker and author Ann Andrews shellshocked her audience at a recent engagement with this question. She left them with three questions to ponder: are you ‘headlighting’ the road ahead and creating your skills for it? Is the road ahead going to ‘work’ for you? And what could ‘working’ actually mean to you?
These are the questions we need to think about - along with those 2am jolts - the worries that wake us up in the night.
Perhaps a picnic in a beautiful spot of nature or a week's team retreat with lots of sleeping and walking will help us relax enough to hatch the ideas we need to come up with to keep our businesses in business.
Yet uncertainty has characterized most of human history: why does it still feel so uncomfortable? In her book The Optimism Bias, neuroscientist Tali Sharot argues that a positive outlook probably helped us survive as a species by enabling us to feel happy in the present despite the uncertainties of the immediate (and even more so the long term) future.
Alas, this can lead us to assume that radical change is unnecessary and that ‘normal service’ will soon resume, say Andrew Campbell and Stuart Sinclair. They attribute this to the ‘human trait of being overly influenced by past experiences and judgments’, which decision making experts call ‘anchoring’. Everything we do and how we do it tends to be anchored in the past: we keep doing the same things in the same way. This mostly works fine when the present is the same as the past. When everything around us has changed, we meet Einstein's famous definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Our certainty that the boom of the two decades leading in to 2008 would carry on forever seems sadly deluded now, as Harvard Business Review editorial director Justin Fox observes. I read his comments to indicate that every company will have to explore its entrepreneurial depths simply to stay in business, and had to chuckle at his acerbic comment that it’s time we got positive and embraced uncertainty instead of just whining about it.
Knowing all these things doesn’t, however, help governments or businesses work out what we should actually do next - especially in light of a growing body of research findings that decisions made when we are tired or anxious are usually bad ones.
One thing’s for sure; businesses these days we need to make some kind of decision or join the dinosaurs. And we need a mental jolt to focus our attention on the need to do so.
‘What will you do when what you do disappears?’ Professional speaker and author Ann Andrews shellshocked her audience at a recent engagement with this question. She left them with three questions to ponder: are you ‘headlighting’ the road ahead and creating your skills for it? Is the road ahead going to ‘work’ for you? And what could ‘working’ actually mean to you?
These are the questions we need to think about - along with those 2am jolts - the worries that wake us up in the night.
Perhaps a picnic in a beautiful spot of nature or a week's team retreat with lots of sleeping and walking will help us relax enough to hatch the ideas we need to come up with to keep our businesses in business.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Ethics and profits: oxymoron or path to business sustainability?
Companies that are bad at environmental management are bad at managing everything. Not surprisingly, they are less profitable than their industry peers. As a bright-eyed young sewage scientist in 1990, I discovered this in an article that analysed the performance of the firms in the Fortune 500 list to find out if there were any features that made the good ones stand out - and the bad.
What fascinated me was that the stragglers amongst America's biggest listed companies - those with the lowest share value and return to investors - were not only more likely to be polluters, they were also more likely to have extremely bad staff relations, very poor customer relations, problem with the tax department, problems with their lenders and insurers and more ... all of which contributed to their poor financial performance.
This single piece of information gave me a fascination with business and set me on a path of discovery. The following year in 1991, New Zealand's Resource Management Act was passed, amalgamating many separate pieces of environmental legislation. It meant that as well as dealing with water and soil pollution, the team at the environmental regulatory body where I then worked were also able to deal with air pollution. We were eagerly looking forward to working with new industries to improve their environmental performance - and it took us only a few months to realize that all our water polluters were air polluters, too: it was a sorry pageant of the same old names that cropped up on our pollution radar.
Over recent years more and more evidence has come my way through my work and reading to confirm that companies that are good performers in any one area tend to be all-round good performers - and that sadly, the opposite is also true.
In the wake of the global financial debacle, this debate is refocusing on ethics, those attitudes and practices that underlie how we run our businesses, yet are very often implicit and unexamined. Crises trigger such periodic bouts of conscience-examination, and perhaps what they also do is focus the rest of us on the comments that will invariably have been made by astute observers.
One such commentary is Marianne Jenning's book 'The seven signs of ethical collapse', which came out of a long period of analyzing what allowed organizations' ethical performance to progressively decline. She describes antidotes to each sign, so I guess the challenge is to embed the positive and holistic model into standard organizational (as well as business) practice.
And businesses that do this, consciously or not, do outperform their peers' financial performance, as is shown by the analysis of the world's most ethical companies by the Ethisphere Institute.
A bright side of the current financial fiasco?
What fascinated me was that the stragglers amongst America's biggest listed companies - those with the lowest share value and return to investors - were not only more likely to be polluters, they were also more likely to have extremely bad staff relations, very poor customer relations, problem with the tax department, problems with their lenders and insurers and more ... all of which contributed to their poor financial performance.
This single piece of information gave me a fascination with business and set me on a path of discovery. The following year in 1991, New Zealand's Resource Management Act was passed, amalgamating many separate pieces of environmental legislation. It meant that as well as dealing with water and soil pollution, the team at the environmental regulatory body where I then worked were also able to deal with air pollution. We were eagerly looking forward to working with new industries to improve their environmental performance - and it took us only a few months to realize that all our water polluters were air polluters, too: it was a sorry pageant of the same old names that cropped up on our pollution radar.
Over recent years more and more evidence has come my way through my work and reading to confirm that companies that are good performers in any one area tend to be all-round good performers - and that sadly, the opposite is also true.
In the wake of the global financial debacle, this debate is refocusing on ethics, those attitudes and practices that underlie how we run our businesses, yet are very often implicit and unexamined. Crises trigger such periodic bouts of conscience-examination, and perhaps what they also do is focus the rest of us on the comments that will invariably have been made by astute observers.
One such commentary is Marianne Jenning's book 'The seven signs of ethical collapse', which came out of a long period of analyzing what allowed organizations' ethical performance to progressively decline. She describes antidotes to each sign, so I guess the challenge is to embed the positive and holistic model into standard organizational (as well as business) practice.
And businesses that do this, consciously or not, do outperform their peers' financial performance, as is shown by the analysis of the world's most ethical companies by the Ethisphere Institute.
A bright side of the current financial fiasco?
Thursday, July 21, 2011
People power: defining happy, healthy and prosperous communities
The welfare of a nation ‘cannot be inferred from a measurement of national income,’ said Simon Kuznets (the economist who invented GDP) in 1934. It is a poor measure of anything other than the flow of money through an economy – for example it can't measure the overall wellbeing of people and the environment. But his advice was ignored until the late 20th century, when a number of people in cities and countries all round the world started looking at what have become known as genuine progress indicators that measure a wider range of indicators of how people and nations are doing.
For example, in Canada, Ron Colman has led the development of a comprehensive suite of indicators of areas of wellbeing covering arts, culture and recreation; civic engagement; community vitality; education; environment; health; living standards and time use – all things of much more interest to most of the world’s people than GDP!
As well as ecological economics, which accounts for the environmental externalities that classical economics acknowledges are excluded from its considerations, we see the proliferation of all sorts of alternative schools of economic thought, including happiness economics.
The spark that Bhutan lit by developing a happiness index for its people has encouraged many nations to consider such measures all over the world.
But exactly who develops the indicators we use to measure these important but elusive concepts that mean many things to many people? The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment findings on governance looked at better ways to manage our interactions with the natural world and to reduce the risk to business and communities (we could add vulnerable nations to this list) of progressive ecosystem decline.
We could look at a few simple models.
The 'Grassroots-up' model lets communities have their say. Better communication - especially the Internet - and education enables better public participation in decision-making by improving people’s use of existing procedural or democratic rights and empowering groups particularly dependent on ecosystem services or affected by their degradation, including women and indigenous and young people. It leads to more transparent decision-making, increased accountability and reduced corruption and can provide better information about products and services which allows people to exert consumer pressure more effectively.
The 'Top down' model sees governments take more effective action than merely commissioning another report. Governments need to be reassured that their constituencies want such change, and we do see some international cooperation and agreements and some better ways to centralize decision-making to solve environmental issues that cross international boundaries.
Ideally, these two meet in the middle in a 'Bottom up meets top down' model, where we develop ways to devolve decision-making to local and regional communities while ensuring effective coordination of their various efforts at national and community scale.
The Anew New Zealand project aims to engage all New Zealanders in a debate about what matters most to all of us, to define and work towards achieving the outcomes we co-create. We are a small nation, and trying new stuff on behalf of the rest of the world is something we do well. An exciting phase may be about to begin!
And learning together as we go is the key: find out about some of the research and tools that are now available at Dr Will Allen's resource-rich website, Learning for Sustainability.
Some of the content of this blog is adapted from some thoughts I put together for the wonderful Ann Andrews of The Corporate Toolbox for her ebook, "378 Predictions for doing business in 2010". Many thanks to Ann for allowing me to reproduce some of that material here.
For example, in Canada, Ron Colman has led the development of a comprehensive suite of indicators of areas of wellbeing covering arts, culture and recreation; civic engagement; community vitality; education; environment; health; living standards and time use – all things of much more interest to most of the world’s people than GDP!
As well as ecological economics, which accounts for the environmental externalities that classical economics acknowledges are excluded from its considerations, we see the proliferation of all sorts of alternative schools of economic thought, including happiness economics.
The spark that Bhutan lit by developing a happiness index for its people has encouraged many nations to consider such measures all over the world.
But exactly who develops the indicators we use to measure these important but elusive concepts that mean many things to many people? The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment findings on governance looked at better ways to manage our interactions with the natural world and to reduce the risk to business and communities (we could add vulnerable nations to this list) of progressive ecosystem decline.
We could look at a few simple models.
The 'Grassroots-up' model lets communities have their say. Better communication - especially the Internet - and education enables better public participation in decision-making by improving people’s use of existing procedural or democratic rights and empowering groups particularly dependent on ecosystem services or affected by their degradation, including women and indigenous and young people. It leads to more transparent decision-making, increased accountability and reduced corruption and can provide better information about products and services which allows people to exert consumer pressure more effectively.
The 'Top down' model sees governments take more effective action than merely commissioning another report. Governments need to be reassured that their constituencies want such change, and we do see some international cooperation and agreements and some better ways to centralize decision-making to solve environmental issues that cross international boundaries.
Ideally, these two meet in the middle in a 'Bottom up meets top down' model, where we develop ways to devolve decision-making to local and regional communities while ensuring effective coordination of their various efforts at national and community scale.
The Anew New Zealand project aims to engage all New Zealanders in a debate about what matters most to all of us, to define and work towards achieving the outcomes we co-create. We are a small nation, and trying new stuff on behalf of the rest of the world is something we do well. An exciting phase may be about to begin!
And learning together as we go is the key: find out about some of the research and tools that are now available at Dr Will Allen's resource-rich website, Learning for Sustainability.
Some of the content of this blog is adapted from some thoughts I put together for the wonderful Ann Andrews of The Corporate Toolbox for her ebook, "378 Predictions for doing business in 2010". Many thanks to Ann for allowing me to reproduce some of that material here.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Openness to different views builds brain resilience
In a fascinating interview, The New York Times Science Editor Barbara Strauch told Kim Hill some of what she has learned about the human brain. She has has written two books on the teenage and middle-aged brains and how research is expanding our knowledge of their development and function.
One thing that struck me was the research into the brains and lives of people who die old and at a high level of functioning, yet whose brains on autopsy reveal severe damage from the plaques and tangles associated with Alzheimer's disease. The level of impairment associated with such damage should have been significantly more serious, raising the question of what causes this protective effect. As Barbara Strauch put it, these people seem to have developed some spare capacity in the brain that can be pressed into service to maintain function despite increasing damage.
Exercise and good diet (antioxidants and all the rest of the usual list) appear to be very important (I read somewhere else that sustained high levels of stress are to be avoided, as they are damaging over the long term). A high level of education, and presumably ongoing learning and/or other forms of mental stimulation are also strongly associated with high functioning brains well into late old age.
But it was one comment in particular that intrigued me: Barbara observed that being exposed to people whose views are very different from your own is also extremely good for metal agility and resilience.
Among my projects at the moment is an engagement plan on issues related to stormwater (or rainwater, as Hans Shreier would call it). We are scoping what level of engagement within the organization and with the community is needed for sustainable long term outcomes. Genuine engagement on complex issues involves multiple parties with many different and sometimes conflicting or competing points of view.
At the same time, I'm helping with some postgraduate lectures at the University, where Sam Trowsdale has set up a very popular course on Water and Society. It involves extensive analysis of stakeholders and their views and interplay in relation to the water sensitive city. One of the most popular parts of this course is a series of presentations from a developer, an environmental regulator and representatives of indigenous and community groups.
So it seems to me that cultivating openness to the views of those who may seem to be our opponents is not only part of solving what Sam calls the complex, messy, wicked problems of the real world, but also an investment in the long term agility and resilience of our own brain!
And maybe even in the cultivation of new allies and friends, too.....
One thing that struck me was the research into the brains and lives of people who die old and at a high level of functioning, yet whose brains on autopsy reveal severe damage from the plaques and tangles associated with Alzheimer's disease. The level of impairment associated with such damage should have been significantly more serious, raising the question of what causes this protective effect. As Barbara Strauch put it, these people seem to have developed some spare capacity in the brain that can be pressed into service to maintain function despite increasing damage.
Exercise and good diet (antioxidants and all the rest of the usual list) appear to be very important (I read somewhere else that sustained high levels of stress are to be avoided, as they are damaging over the long term). A high level of education, and presumably ongoing learning and/or other forms of mental stimulation are also strongly associated with high functioning brains well into late old age.
But it was one comment in particular that intrigued me: Barbara observed that being exposed to people whose views are very different from your own is also extremely good for metal agility and resilience.
Among my projects at the moment is an engagement plan on issues related to stormwater (or rainwater, as Hans Shreier would call it). We are scoping what level of engagement within the organization and with the community is needed for sustainable long term outcomes. Genuine engagement on complex issues involves multiple parties with many different and sometimes conflicting or competing points of view.
At the same time, I'm helping with some postgraduate lectures at the University, where Sam Trowsdale has set up a very popular course on Water and Society. It involves extensive analysis of stakeholders and their views and interplay in relation to the water sensitive city. One of the most popular parts of this course is a series of presentations from a developer, an environmental regulator and representatives of indigenous and community groups.
So it seems to me that cultivating openness to the views of those who may seem to be our opponents is not only part of solving what Sam calls the complex, messy, wicked problems of the real world, but also an investment in the long term agility and resilience of our own brain!
And maybe even in the cultivation of new allies and friends, too.....
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Good news encourages us all
The "honking geese" video was a great hit at April's National Speakers Association of Australia conference. Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi, showed this to illustrate how geese flying in formation honk to encourage those in the lead, who face the most aerodynamic resistance, to keep flying at a good pace. When the leaders eventually tire, they fall back and slipstream a bit to recover - and take up the honking to encourage the new leaders. What a wonderful example of a positive team.
Yet it seems much of our media coverage is based on the premise that "bad news is good news" - disaster sells. This prompted renowned Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki to write with Holly Dressel his book, "Good news for a change" - a delightful pun! And it's so true that too much doom disempowers us all - apathy becomes a rational response!
Conversely, when we hear good news stories that explain just how others have made a difference, it makes us feel we can do it, too.
In the same way, positive reinforcement helps us learn, quickly and joyfully.
Paula Denby-Gibbs demonstrated the power of positive reinforcement some years ago to a room full of fascinated professional trainers. In her session, "Going to the dogs", Paula brought in five or six of her dogs and showed how whenever she scattered a large number of small soft toys across the room, they'd been trained to collect them up and put them in a big basket. Then she announced she was going to train them before our eyes to do something new - to take the toys one by one OUT of the basket and put them on the floor. When she said to them, "Toys out!", they didn't know what to do. One sat and looked at her, another hid under a chair in the front row and a couple more wandered off to the back of the room.
"Just like us!", she said. Paula trains dogs and people - and says, "Surprise, surprise! There's no difference in how we learn." She pointed out that if people don’t know exactly what it is you want them to do, then, like animals, they will indulge in displacement behavior – it looks as thought they are being noisy, distracted or disobedient – but our heading off for a coffee or talking about what we did at the weekend instead of carrying out the task is simply an alternative behavior we do instead of the (unknown) thing that you want them to do - just like her dogs.
Then one dog wandered up near the basket, and Paula clicked her clicker - a sound that the dogs know means they've done well and will soon be rewarded with a nice morsel of food. So it wandered a bit closer, and she clicked again. Another dog, on hearing the clicks, came closer too and he got a click as well. Then the first dog put his head in the basket and got a click and a snack. In less than four or five minutes, they'd all got it, and had removed all the toys from the basket and place them tidily around it - and been rewarded for their work.
The process was unbelievably fast: every time a dog did something that was closer to the goal, positive reinforcement was instant. Paula said that this Pavlovian effect of frequent positive reinforcement is known as Thorndike's Law of Effect: "Responses that produce rewards tend to increase in frequency" - and he published it in 1905!
Paula said that negative feedback or forced performance will result in reduced effort, eventual shut-down, learned helplessness, resistance and resentment, suspicion and mistrust and escape or survival reflexes. Sound familiar?
Hearing good news stories about what companies, families and governments can do to improve our wellbeing in economic, social, cultural and environmental terms encourages us all to make more of an effort, be willing to act, be more resilient in the face of challenges, build our confidence, ameliorate stress and be more and more receptive to learning and continual improvement.
So let's give ourselves and each other more encouraging honks and clicks!
Yet it seems much of our media coverage is based on the premise that "bad news is good news" - disaster sells. This prompted renowned Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki to write with Holly Dressel his book, "Good news for a change" - a delightful pun! And it's so true that too much doom disempowers us all - apathy becomes a rational response!
Conversely, when we hear good news stories that explain just how others have made a difference, it makes us feel we can do it, too.
In the same way, positive reinforcement helps us learn, quickly and joyfully.
Paula Denby-Gibbs demonstrated the power of positive reinforcement some years ago to a room full of fascinated professional trainers. In her session, "Going to the dogs", Paula brought in five or six of her dogs and showed how whenever she scattered a large number of small soft toys across the room, they'd been trained to collect them up and put them in a big basket. Then she announced she was going to train them before our eyes to do something new - to take the toys one by one OUT of the basket and put them on the floor. When she said to them, "Toys out!", they didn't know what to do. One sat and looked at her, another hid under a chair in the front row and a couple more wandered off to the back of the room.
"Just like us!", she said. Paula trains dogs and people - and says, "Surprise, surprise! There's no difference in how we learn." She pointed out that if people don’t know exactly what it is you want them to do, then, like animals, they will indulge in displacement behavior – it looks as thought they are being noisy, distracted or disobedient – but our heading off for a coffee or talking about what we did at the weekend instead of carrying out the task is simply an alternative behavior we do instead of the (unknown) thing that you want them to do - just like her dogs.
Then one dog wandered up near the basket, and Paula clicked her clicker - a sound that the dogs know means they've done well and will soon be rewarded with a nice morsel of food. So it wandered a bit closer, and she clicked again. Another dog, on hearing the clicks, came closer too and he got a click as well. Then the first dog put his head in the basket and got a click and a snack. In less than four or five minutes, they'd all got it, and had removed all the toys from the basket and place them tidily around it - and been rewarded for their work.
The process was unbelievably fast: every time a dog did something that was closer to the goal, positive reinforcement was instant. Paula said that this Pavlovian effect of frequent positive reinforcement is known as Thorndike's Law of Effect: "Responses that produce rewards tend to increase in frequency" - and he published it in 1905!
Paula said that negative feedback or forced performance will result in reduced effort, eventual shut-down, learned helplessness, resistance and resentment, suspicion and mistrust and escape or survival reflexes. Sound familiar?
Hearing good news stories about what companies, families and governments can do to improve our wellbeing in economic, social, cultural and environmental terms encourages us all to make more of an effort, be willing to act, be more resilient in the face of challenges, build our confidence, ameliorate stress and be more and more receptive to learning and continual improvement.
So let's give ourselves and each other more encouraging honks and clicks!
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Carbon Nation - I love it! Wit, humour and business sense from film-maker Peter Byck
I absolutely adore reading my New Scientist magazine in the evenings - I even avidly read the table of contents for a sneak peek at what's in store.
Having been away for five weeks meant I had a stack to get through, even without counting the other great mags I subscribe to.
The Feedback column at the end is always very funny - but the issue of 28 May 2011 had a laugh-out-loud opinion piece by film-maker Peter Byck. Entitled "Green spangled banner", it's about his latest film, "Carbon Nation". The subtitle says "The best way to promote clean energy is to ignore climate change and focus on things like jobs, money and national security". I am going to see this film, not because these are all frightfully worthy things, but because his writing tells me it will be hilarious.
The film is also informative and non-polarizing: it focuses on the money we can make and save, and the money we're already paying in carbon-related externalities - costs we pick up because emitters (us included) don't.
Peter makes the case that a low-carbon economy is a national security issue, a great business opportunity, and even a way to keep families together, as decabonization encourages us to dream up smart ways of working.
What a way to get savvy about they post-carbon economy! I've been saying for ages that we need to get our hands on the money we can make from not emitting carbon before the money men get their hands on the money we lose by emitting it!
Click here to see a short interview with Peter.
And while you're there - see what I said about the same thing here. Now... off to organize a showing of the film....
Having been away for five weeks meant I had a stack to get through, even without counting the other great mags I subscribe to.
The Feedback column at the end is always very funny - but the issue of 28 May 2011 had a laugh-out-loud opinion piece by film-maker Peter Byck. Entitled "Green spangled banner", it's about his latest film, "Carbon Nation". The subtitle says "The best way to promote clean energy is to ignore climate change and focus on things like jobs, money and national security". I am going to see this film, not because these are all frightfully worthy things, but because his writing tells me it will be hilarious.
The film is also informative and non-polarizing: it focuses on the money we can make and save, and the money we're already paying in carbon-related externalities - costs we pick up because emitters (us included) don't.
Peter makes the case that a low-carbon economy is a national security issue, a great business opportunity, and even a way to keep families together, as decabonization encourages us to dream up smart ways of working.
What a way to get savvy about they post-carbon economy! I've been saying for ages that we need to get our hands on the money we can make from not emitting carbon before the money men get their hands on the money we lose by emitting it!
Click here to see a short interview with Peter.
And while you're there - see what I said about the same thing here. Now... off to organize a showing of the film....
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Post-disaster community and ecosystem reconstruction: online gaming and the path to the restoration economy
It seems that major earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes, tsunami, droughts, floods, snows and fires have characterized the last few years.
What do all these natural disasters mean for businesses and the environment?
In the short term, we rightly focus on rescue and the alleviation of suffering. In the medium term we focus on getting businesses up and running. We also see growing focus on environmental restoration as part of a sustainable recovery - a much longer term process, but one we need to build in from the start. I believe it offers a path to a more viable future for people, communities, businesses and the environment.
We've heard the debate about river, delta and coastal restoration to help New Orleans recover from its devastating floods and enjoy a higher level of future security. Similarly, a vigorous debate about the nature of reconstruction is emerging in Christchurch, New Zealand, as the region continues to experience an unusual sequence of powerful and destructive aftershocks. Pervading the discussion of big issues of demolition, relocation and restoration is a growing theme of eco-city principles to inform how we go about these major activities.
Christchurch City Council has for many years taken a value-based approach to managing its waterways - I loved going there because right in the middle of the CBD, I could look into the Avon River and see trout in there, just doing their thing! No longer, alas - the tremors have disturbed the river's gradient and it is full of sediment and causing flooding as it adjusts its flowpath. But the Council's wonderful Waterways and Wetlands Guideline will continue to inform the management and restoration of this and other water bodies in this beautiful city.
This morning on the radio I heard an interview with Evan Smith, a resident of Richmond in Christchurch, a 5,000-strong community in a red zone, where repair won't be permitted. He was saying that the people there would like to move together as a community, noting that there might be economies of scale where for example, a group of people could form a trust and all build together. What a tribute to the power of community!
Why not inform such new developments with the best of eco-principles, starting with water-sensitive development layout that also accommodates passive solar design for sustainable houses and restoration of wild and scenic places for children, adults and flora and fauna? Energy, water and sewer services have been badly hit in the ongoing aftershocks, so what about providing for decentralized (on-site) water and energy solutions, possibly also on a group management basis? This and other ideas would help build the capacity of the many professions and specialized trades involved in new developments, and possibly even lay the foundations for future viable businesses.
In this way, I believe it is possible that post-disaster community and ecosystem reconstruction provides an impetus for us to follow the path to the restoration economy. In his wonderful book, Storm Cunningham explains how the restoration economy is large and growing, but very under-recognized, and spells out his formula for a comprehensive economic stimulus - how to plan and fund the renewal of natural and built assets to efficiently and reliably generate socio-economic revitalization.
Working out how to do this may not be easy - but online gaming (remember the old Sim City?) can be successfully adapted to model many diverse and sometimes conflicting visions. Bob Frame is advertising an online game on the future of Christchurch - Magnetic South - this Friday and Saturday (assuming, as he says, that the terra stays reasonably firma). You can register here and find a video and instructions on how to play, plus an accompanying blog. If you use Twitter then you could use: Join #MagneticSouth 24/25 Jun to explore and shape an attractive long-term future for Christchurch.
What do all these natural disasters mean for businesses and the environment?
In the short term, we rightly focus on rescue and the alleviation of suffering. In the medium term we focus on getting businesses up and running. We also see growing focus on environmental restoration as part of a sustainable recovery - a much longer term process, but one we need to build in from the start. I believe it offers a path to a more viable future for people, communities, businesses and the environment.
We've heard the debate about river, delta and coastal restoration to help New Orleans recover from its devastating floods and enjoy a higher level of future security. Similarly, a vigorous debate about the nature of reconstruction is emerging in Christchurch, New Zealand, as the region continues to experience an unusual sequence of powerful and destructive aftershocks. Pervading the discussion of big issues of demolition, relocation and restoration is a growing theme of eco-city principles to inform how we go about these major activities.
Christchurch City Council has for many years taken a value-based approach to managing its waterways - I loved going there because right in the middle of the CBD, I could look into the Avon River and see trout in there, just doing their thing! No longer, alas - the tremors have disturbed the river's gradient and it is full of sediment and causing flooding as it adjusts its flowpath. But the Council's wonderful Waterways and Wetlands Guideline will continue to inform the management and restoration of this and other water bodies in this beautiful city.
This morning on the radio I heard an interview with Evan Smith, a resident of Richmond in Christchurch, a 5,000-strong community in a red zone, where repair won't be permitted. He was saying that the people there would like to move together as a community, noting that there might be economies of scale where for example, a group of people could form a trust and all build together. What a tribute to the power of community!
Why not inform such new developments with the best of eco-principles, starting with water-sensitive development layout that also accommodates passive solar design for sustainable houses and restoration of wild and scenic places for children, adults and flora and fauna? Energy, water and sewer services have been badly hit in the ongoing aftershocks, so what about providing for decentralized (on-site) water and energy solutions, possibly also on a group management basis? This and other ideas would help build the capacity of the many professions and specialized trades involved in new developments, and possibly even lay the foundations for future viable businesses.
In this way, I believe it is possible that post-disaster community and ecosystem reconstruction provides an impetus for us to follow the path to the restoration economy. In his wonderful book, Storm Cunningham explains how the restoration economy is large and growing, but very under-recognized, and spells out his formula for a comprehensive economic stimulus - how to plan and fund the renewal of natural and built assets to efficiently and reliably generate socio-economic revitalization.
Working out how to do this may not be easy - but online gaming (remember the old Sim City?) can be successfully adapted to model many diverse and sometimes conflicting visions. Bob Frame is advertising an online game on the future of Christchurch - Magnetic South - this Friday and Saturday (assuming, as he says, that the terra stays reasonably firma). You can register here and find a video and instructions on how to play, plus an accompanying blog. If you use Twitter then you could use: Join #MagneticSouth 24/25 Jun to explore and shape an attractive long-term future for Christchurch.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Quietude and creativity, essential companions for successful businesses
Two weeks into a four-week meditation retreat and ideas for two books came to me in a flash.
Both arrived fully formed and were captured in a frenzied three days of writing in any available spare time. After that - back to the meditation, knowing my ideas were safely documented and wouldn't evaporate before I got back to my desk.
Interesting timing: after some training, speaking and consulting work in June, July will see me completing the seventh and last chapter of a book that I've had to put on hold for some months. The content? The vital importance of creativity for businesses if they are to become more sustainable in every way - staying profitably in business for the long haul while contributing to increasingly positive social, cultural and environmental outcomes.
I'll be drawing on a number of excellent sources, one of which substantiates a fabulous quote from Sarah Gibbs, co-founder of successful company Trilogy, who says "If you don't have half a day a week to think, you need to hire more staff." The source in question is a wonderful book by Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: why intelligence increases when you think less.
Never have we needed new creative insights more than we do now, yet we are working harder than ever before - and while we can remain efficient, we cannot be creative at the same time.
My recent experience on the retreat certainly proved this to me beyond all doubt. My aim for the rest of 2011 is to take some advice from many years ago and which has recently resurfaced; to take every thirteenth week off. Read here how this increases your productivity.
The seventh chapter of my book will address this as part of suggesting how civil construction companies can create their own sustainability road map and be part of creating the new future that people and businesses worldwide all need.
So my next week off to refresh my creativity and recalibrate my world view will see me away from my desk again from 5-9 September.... it's in the diary.
And those other new books? I'll be completing them after getting my first completed book (now with the editor) selling online sometime in July, alongside finishing Chapter 7. I'll blog about each book as it is released.
Both arrived fully formed and were captured in a frenzied three days of writing in any available spare time. After that - back to the meditation, knowing my ideas were safely documented and wouldn't evaporate before I got back to my desk.
Interesting timing: after some training, speaking and consulting work in June, July will see me completing the seventh and last chapter of a book that I've had to put on hold for some months. The content? The vital importance of creativity for businesses if they are to become more sustainable in every way - staying profitably in business for the long haul while contributing to increasingly positive social, cultural and environmental outcomes.
I'll be drawing on a number of excellent sources, one of which substantiates a fabulous quote from Sarah Gibbs, co-founder of successful company Trilogy, who says "If you don't have half a day a week to think, you need to hire more staff." The source in question is a wonderful book by Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: why intelligence increases when you think less.
Never have we needed new creative insights more than we do now, yet we are working harder than ever before - and while we can remain efficient, we cannot be creative at the same time.
My recent experience on the retreat certainly proved this to me beyond all doubt. My aim for the rest of 2011 is to take some advice from many years ago and which has recently resurfaced; to take every thirteenth week off. Read here how this increases your productivity.
The seventh chapter of my book will address this as part of suggesting how civil construction companies can create their own sustainability road map and be part of creating the new future that people and businesses worldwide all need.
So my next week off to refresh my creativity and recalibrate my world view will see me away from my desk again from 5-9 September.... it's in the diary.
And those other new books? I'll be completing them after getting my first completed book (now with the editor) selling online sometime in July, alongside finishing Chapter 7. I'll blog about each book as it is released.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Why accountants are the new cool
In these challenging times, accountants are the new cool. Why? You can’t manage what you don't measure – and accountants are great at measuring things.
In fields as diverse as industrial resource efficiency, mitigating the adverse effects of farming on the environment, erosion and sediment control on big construction sites, integrated watershed management, quadruple bottom line monitoring (across all four wellbeings; social, cultural, economic and environmental) and sustainable urban infrastructure, I’ve found accountants to be key people.
Globally, the profession is developing business metrics and assessment and reporting tools for environmental issues that affect the profitability of everyone from farmers to financiers. Accountants have the ability, for example, to help:
Accountants that can advise their clients on efficiencies delivered by sustainability initiatives are invaluable: such initiatives may be the only thing that will help large and small firms alike to stay afloat as the global economic context remains challenging and unpredictable. For example, accountants can work out the payback period on the hire, lease or purchase of more fuel- and energy-efficient vehicles, premises or equipment; or on the changeover to different products and services: they’re are likely to be the closest thing to a sustainability adviser many firms will ever see.
Accountants have vital skills for better-informed business management processes that will deliver more strategic value for firms and more sustainable development for nations.
Smart businesses will be asking their accountants to work in new ways that deliver better bottom line value and ongoing viability.
In fields as diverse as industrial resource efficiency, mitigating the adverse effects of farming on the environment, erosion and sediment control on big construction sites, integrated watershed management, quadruple bottom line monitoring (across all four wellbeings; social, cultural, economic and environmental) and sustainable urban infrastructure, I’ve found accountants to be key people.
Globally, the profession is developing business metrics and assessment and reporting tools for environmental issues that affect the profitability of everyone from farmers to financiers. Accountants have the ability, for example, to help:
- manufacturers to quantify their resource use, identify waste and measure waste minimization and more efficient resource use – and the resulting profits
- farmers to assess their carbon intensity and account for nitrogen, water and other inputs that affect the quality of rural environments and water ways
- architects and builders of public, commercial and domestic buildings to make the case for sustainability retrofits to save energy and water, and to prepare cost-benefit analyses to justify increased capital investment in more sustainable buildings and services by assessing their ongoing operational efficiencies
- infrastructure operators to assess the economic and other benefits of more sustainable infrastructure choices
- key emitters and absorbers of carbon to play their role in the carbon markets
- all organizations to assess the energy (carbon), water, materials and labor intensity of their products and services (including full life-cycle analysis), a key step in the drive for higher productivity
- all sectors prepare integrated monitoring reports as will be increasingly demanded by informed consumers and purchasers of services and supplies, including by governments in emerging economies such as China and India which will become growing markets for the West
- develop innovative approaches to lead the way for businesses that embrace sustainability in these and other emerging fields.
Accountants that can advise their clients on efficiencies delivered by sustainability initiatives are invaluable: such initiatives may be the only thing that will help large and small firms alike to stay afloat as the global economic context remains challenging and unpredictable. For example, accountants can work out the payback period on the hire, lease or purchase of more fuel- and energy-efficient vehicles, premises or equipment; or on the changeover to different products and services: they’re are likely to be the closest thing to a sustainability adviser many firms will ever see.
Accountants have vital skills for better-informed business management processes that will deliver more strategic value for firms and more sustainable development for nations.
Smart businesses will be asking their accountants to work in new ways that deliver better bottom line value and ongoing viability.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Happiness is the new GDP
We all know about Bhutan, but Canada has done it for ages, Britain is thinking about it, and France has taken it on board, too.
What is it? Gross National Happiness, to complement - or even replace - GDP.
The search for meaning in life is also seeing governments world-wide acknowledge that financial measures such as gross domestic product can’t tell us everything about how well people are really doing. Things like cleaning up oil spills and building more prisons are great for GDP, but most of us would prefer clean water and less crime. And we work to live, not live to work, right…?
So more and more businesses are focusing on people – staff, directors, shareholders, value chains, customers and local communities – in ways that make a measurable difference to our shared quality of life and overall happiness. And more and more shareholders, suppliers, customers, communities and governments are looking for businesses that do this.
Effective businesses will be measuring their outputs in units that reflect social and environmental as well as financial and economic wellbeing. They have to: as consumers realize that more ‘stuff’ doesn't yield the lasting pleasure so lavishly promised in the advertisements, they are replacing ‘things’ with experiences – spending time with family and friends and enjoying natural and cultural activities.
Built-in obsolescence is starting to die and leasing is progressively replacing the purchase of many products, as people realize they can share or hire cars and appliances as and when they need them – even items like floorings and furniture, in both their professional and personal lives. To give the best service, reduce the expense of repair and replacement and avoid the costs of wastefully disposing of increasingly scarce resources, such service suppliers will have to make sure their products are better made and more easily repaired and recycled – or even “up-cycled” into more useful and intelligent products.
Farsighted businesses will see that leasing a product to a client is an ongoing service based on reliability and relationships, and this will yield them genuine lifetime clients whose value is worth so much more than just a series of sales.
The content of this blog is adapted from some thoughts I put together for the wonderful Ann Andrews of The Corporate Toolbox for her free ebook, "What's next? 29 Entrepreneurs share Predictions for 2011/12". Many thanks to Ann for allowing me to reproduce some of that material here.
What is it? Gross National Happiness, to complement - or even replace - GDP.
The search for meaning in life is also seeing governments world-wide acknowledge that financial measures such as gross domestic product can’t tell us everything about how well people are really doing. Things like cleaning up oil spills and building more prisons are great for GDP, but most of us would prefer clean water and less crime. And we work to live, not live to work, right…?
So more and more businesses are focusing on people – staff, directors, shareholders, value chains, customers and local communities – in ways that make a measurable difference to our shared quality of life and overall happiness. And more and more shareholders, suppliers, customers, communities and governments are looking for businesses that do this.
Effective businesses will be measuring their outputs in units that reflect social and environmental as well as financial and economic wellbeing. They have to: as consumers realize that more ‘stuff’ doesn't yield the lasting pleasure so lavishly promised in the advertisements, they are replacing ‘things’ with experiences – spending time with family and friends and enjoying natural and cultural activities.
Built-in obsolescence is starting to die and leasing is progressively replacing the purchase of many products, as people realize they can share or hire cars and appliances as and when they need them – even items like floorings and furniture, in both their professional and personal lives. To give the best service, reduce the expense of repair and replacement and avoid the costs of wastefully disposing of increasingly scarce resources, such service suppliers will have to make sure their products are better made and more easily repaired and recycled – or even “up-cycled” into more useful and intelligent products.
Farsighted businesses will see that leasing a product to a client is an ongoing service based on reliability and relationships, and this will yield them genuine lifetime clients whose value is worth so much more than just a series of sales.
The content of this blog is adapted from some thoughts I put together for the wonderful Ann Andrews of The Corporate Toolbox for her free ebook, "What's next? 29 Entrepreneurs share Predictions for 2011/12". Many thanks to Ann for allowing me to reproduce some of that material here.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Carbon-free: more value for smart businesses
Do you think that global climate change is happening?
If you think it is happening, do you think that people are causing it?
Do you follow the news on climate change or emissions controls such as cap and trade or carbon tax schemes?
Do you think your answers matter? Because I don’t.
Why? There’s no point squabbling about it – BECAUSE – carbon emissions are what we call a ‘proxy indicator’ of waste: they are one measurement that indirectly measures lots of other things. So if your vehicle fleet is poorly maintained, you’ll be wasting fuel and oil – that is, carbon – and a good fleet maintenance program will save you not only fuel but also wear and tear on your vehicles. Yes, that’s right – it will save you MONEY.
It’s the same for any other form of waste. Everything we do or use has a carbon cost.
Those offcuts in your factory come from goods or materials that were grown, mined or caught, transported, processed, transported again, processed by you – then transported to the landfill. Reduce that waste, and you reduce the amount of carbon you emit whenever you waste goods or materials that you bought from your suppliers. What do you save? MONEY.
Work in an office? Good insulation, more efficient lighting and heating, more energy-efficient equipment and a host of other straightforward measures will reduce the carbon emissions from running the building and providing your services. What do you save? MONEY.
It works for everything from farming cows to cloud computing.
See? Climate change is not the enemy – and carbon is your friend!
It shows you where your use of resources of all kinds is needlessly costly, and how you can run a smarter, more cost-effective organization.
It also means we can leave the science of the debate to the scientists. So, if climate change is happened and we are causing it, reducing our carbon emissions means we’ll have taken some big steps to slowing it down – thereby reducing some very serious (and expensive) risks to people and economies all round the world. If it isn’t happening or we aren’t causing it, our businesses will be more intelligent, efficient and profitable. Either way, we win - IF we take action.
But too many businesses in the developing world are still sitting on their hands. Sure, it’s hard to plan when governments are failing to send consistent (or indeed any) signals to the business world. But this raises the risk that our economies will continue to stagnate and will be overtaken by those of the developing world who are already experiencing shocking environmental conditions.
As they strive to bring prosperity to their people, emerging nations have given up hope of getting support from the wealthy West for reducing their carbon emissions. They know they need to mitigate climate change effects such as food shortages caused by more frequent floods and droughts from which they are likely to suffer the most.
Emerging nations now see environmentally responsible technologies as a driver of innovation and social as well as economic development, and will start to outcompete those in the West still wedded to ‘business as usual’ (see reference (1) below). Emerging nations can now afford to do this: 2010 was the year that China overtook Japan as the World’s second largest economy and Brazil, Russia and India are hot on its heels (2). Innovative businesses will focus on meeting the sustainable development needs of emerging economies, from which they will be able to leverage back into their own.
Some of the content of this blog is adapted from some thoughts I put together for the wonderful Ann Andrews of The Corporate Toolbox for her free ebook, "What's next? 29 Entrepreneurs share Predictions for 2011/12". Many thanks to Ann for allowing me to reproduce some of that material here.
See me speaking to the "Carbon Quiz" here.
References
(1) Lord Nicholas Stern of Brentford in the three Sir Douglas Robb Lectures 2010. Find out more at the foot of the page here.
(2) Gwynne Dyer, The Revolution has already arrived. An article in the New Zealand Herald of 3 January 2011.
If you think it is happening, do you think that people are causing it?
Do you follow the news on climate change or emissions controls such as cap and trade or carbon tax schemes?
Do you think your answers matter? Because I don’t.
Why? There’s no point squabbling about it – BECAUSE – carbon emissions are what we call a ‘proxy indicator’ of waste: they are one measurement that indirectly measures lots of other things. So if your vehicle fleet is poorly maintained, you’ll be wasting fuel and oil – that is, carbon – and a good fleet maintenance program will save you not only fuel but also wear and tear on your vehicles. Yes, that’s right – it will save you MONEY.
It’s the same for any other form of waste. Everything we do or use has a carbon cost.
Those offcuts in your factory come from goods or materials that were grown, mined or caught, transported, processed, transported again, processed by you – then transported to the landfill. Reduce that waste, and you reduce the amount of carbon you emit whenever you waste goods or materials that you bought from your suppliers. What do you save? MONEY.
Work in an office? Good insulation, more efficient lighting and heating, more energy-efficient equipment and a host of other straightforward measures will reduce the carbon emissions from running the building and providing your services. What do you save? MONEY.
It works for everything from farming cows to cloud computing.
See? Climate change is not the enemy – and carbon is your friend!
It shows you where your use of resources of all kinds is needlessly costly, and how you can run a smarter, more cost-effective organization.
It also means we can leave the science of the debate to the scientists. So, if climate change is happened and we are causing it, reducing our carbon emissions means we’ll have taken some big steps to slowing it down – thereby reducing some very serious (and expensive) risks to people and economies all round the world. If it isn’t happening or we aren’t causing it, our businesses will be more intelligent, efficient and profitable. Either way, we win - IF we take action.
But too many businesses in the developing world are still sitting on their hands. Sure, it’s hard to plan when governments are failing to send consistent (or indeed any) signals to the business world. But this raises the risk that our economies will continue to stagnate and will be overtaken by those of the developing world who are already experiencing shocking environmental conditions.
As they strive to bring prosperity to their people, emerging nations have given up hope of getting support from the wealthy West for reducing their carbon emissions. They know they need to mitigate climate change effects such as food shortages caused by more frequent floods and droughts from which they are likely to suffer the most.
Emerging nations now see environmentally responsible technologies as a driver of innovation and social as well as economic development, and will start to outcompete those in the West still wedded to ‘business as usual’ (see reference (1) below). Emerging nations can now afford to do this: 2010 was the year that China overtook Japan as the World’s second largest economy and Brazil, Russia and India are hot on its heels (2). Innovative businesses will focus on meeting the sustainable development needs of emerging economies, from which they will be able to leverage back into their own.
Some of the content of this blog is adapted from some thoughts I put together for the wonderful Ann Andrews of The Corporate Toolbox for her free ebook, "What's next? 29 Entrepreneurs share Predictions for 2011/12". Many thanks to Ann for allowing me to reproduce some of that material here.
See me speaking to the "Carbon Quiz" here.
References
(1) Lord Nicholas Stern of Brentford in the three Sir Douglas Robb Lectures 2010. Find out more at the foot of the page here.
(2) Gwynne Dyer, The Revolution has already arrived. An article in the New Zealand Herald of 3 January 2011.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Ecosystem services are the new metric
The economic, social and cultural benefits of a healthy environment are one of the things that GDP doesn’t measure. However, in 2007 the World Bank conservatively estimated (see reference (1) below) the cost of China’s pollution at 5.8% of its GDP.
Recent reports (2) show that business is beginning to notice the cost of such environmental harm: 27% of global CEOs surveyed by PwC in 2009 expressed concern about the impacts of biodiversity loss on their business growth prospects.
For example, direct and indirect costs to business, communities and governments from biodiversity loss from logging natural (as opposed to plantation) forests include flood damage, property loss, transport interruptions, soil erosion, reservoir infilling, loss of productive land and reduced timber output, soil fertility, rainfall and water runoff.
Nature does a lot of things for us for free, including purifying water, soil and air and pollinating food crops. Such “ecosystem services” offer new and wider opportunities for every business sector. Astute businesses will be positioning themselves to get a hold of some of the billion dollar opportunities offered by rapidly emerging biodiversity and ecosystem services assessment, certification and trading systems.
That’s why one of the results will be that cities will be the new countryside.
As our Victorian era infrastructure decays and people all over the world flock to the cities, the pressure is on them to meet their own needs for water and food in ways that also meet their inhabitants’ needs for healthy and restorative environments. Businesses in the urban design, transport, building, energy and engineering sectors are realizing they need to work with a host of other professionals and with urban communities to bring nature and its processes and services back into the city – and make the most of the associated business opportunities. Multi-disciplinary businesses will be taking on people with social, ecological and design skills and forging new and fruitful alliances with firms that have complementary skills in order to progressively transform our cities into vibrant and beautiful places that restore both nature and people.
The content of this blog is adapted from some thoughts I put together for the wonderful Ann Andrews of The Corporate Toolbox for her free ebook, "What's next? 29 Entrepreneurs share Predictions for 2011/12". Many thanks to Ann for allowing me to reproduce some of that material here.
References
(1) Jonathan Watts, 2010. When a billion Chinese jump. Faber/Allen and Unwin.
(2) TEEB – The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Report for Business - Executive Summary 2010. Downloadable from here.
Recent reports (2) show that business is beginning to notice the cost of such environmental harm: 27% of global CEOs surveyed by PwC in 2009 expressed concern about the impacts of biodiversity loss on their business growth prospects.
For example, direct and indirect costs to business, communities and governments from biodiversity loss from logging natural (as opposed to plantation) forests include flood damage, property loss, transport interruptions, soil erosion, reservoir infilling, loss of productive land and reduced timber output, soil fertility, rainfall and water runoff.
Nature does a lot of things for us for free, including purifying water, soil and air and pollinating food crops. Such “ecosystem services” offer new and wider opportunities for every business sector. Astute businesses will be positioning themselves to get a hold of some of the billion dollar opportunities offered by rapidly emerging biodiversity and ecosystem services assessment, certification and trading systems.
That’s why one of the results will be that cities will be the new countryside.
As our Victorian era infrastructure decays and people all over the world flock to the cities, the pressure is on them to meet their own needs for water and food in ways that also meet their inhabitants’ needs for healthy and restorative environments. Businesses in the urban design, transport, building, energy and engineering sectors are realizing they need to work with a host of other professionals and with urban communities to bring nature and its processes and services back into the city – and make the most of the associated business opportunities. Multi-disciplinary businesses will be taking on people with social, ecological and design skills and forging new and fruitful alliances with firms that have complementary skills in order to progressively transform our cities into vibrant and beautiful places that restore both nature and people.
The content of this blog is adapted from some thoughts I put together for the wonderful Ann Andrews of The Corporate Toolbox for her free ebook, "What's next? 29 Entrepreneurs share Predictions for 2011/12". Many thanks to Ann for allowing me to reproduce some of that material here.
References
(1) Jonathan Watts, 2010. When a billion Chinese jump. Faber/Allen and Unwin.
(2) TEEB – The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Report for Business - Executive Summary 2010. Downloadable from here.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Productivity is the new green
Praseodymium, lanthanum, ytterbium – no, it’s not a spell from a Hogwart’s wizarding textbook: these are some of the 17 rare earths that are… rare. Used in all manner of essential electrical and infrastructure components, they are now so scarce that the few nations lucky enough to have them are reluctant to part with them. Of course, part of the reason they are so rare is that most of them end up in the landfill in the 2.25 million tons of electronics people in the US threw away in 2007 (see reference (1) below).
However, water, oil, food as well as many other commodities we’ve taken for granted are also becoming increasingly scarce. In some places, money can’t buy water that just isn’t there, as several large US cities are finding (2).
We are likely to see wildly fluctuating but generally rising prices for many basic commodities. Prudent businesses will be planning to survive this financial insecurity by carrying out wide-ranging risk assessments of financial exposure related to their resource inputs.
Necessity is the mother of invention, as the old saying goes: the upside of scarcity and uncertainty is that it will stimulate innovation. As businesses develop alternatives for their resources, products and processes and work out how to do more with less, they will find themselves using more environmentally and socially sustainable practices.
Some may do this because they want to; others will discover that’s what they’ve been doing once they’ve gone a way down the path. In either case, they will find out things they didn't know about their people and processes. This learning process means they will become smarter and more profitable organizations.
Creative businesses will be measuring productivity in new ways – waste per widget instead of widgets per worker, for example – and the boost that everyone in the firm and its value chain gets from contributing to new ideas will give these businesses the edge over their competitors.
The content of this blog is adapted from some thoughts I put together for the wonderful Ann Andrews of The Corporate Toolbox for her free ebook, "What's next? 29 Entrepreneurs share Predictions for 2011/12". Many thanks to Ann for allowing me to reproduce some of that material here.
And again.... more on all this in my keynote presentation, "The Productivity Paradox"!
References
(1) David Pogue, 2011. “Gadgets are garbage: your brand new device is about to be obsolete. Save it from the trash heap.” An article in the May 2011 issue of Scientific American.
(2) Kyla Fullenwider, 3 November 2010. Is Your City Running Out of Water? The Ten Largest Cities Facing a Water Crisis. Find out more at http://www.good.is/post/is-your-city-running-out-of-water-the-ten-largest-cities-facing-a-water-crisis/.
However, water, oil, food as well as many other commodities we’ve taken for granted are also becoming increasingly scarce. In some places, money can’t buy water that just isn’t there, as several large US cities are finding (2).
We are likely to see wildly fluctuating but generally rising prices for many basic commodities. Prudent businesses will be planning to survive this financial insecurity by carrying out wide-ranging risk assessments of financial exposure related to their resource inputs.
Necessity is the mother of invention, as the old saying goes: the upside of scarcity and uncertainty is that it will stimulate innovation. As businesses develop alternatives for their resources, products and processes and work out how to do more with less, they will find themselves using more environmentally and socially sustainable practices.
Some may do this because they want to; others will discover that’s what they’ve been doing once they’ve gone a way down the path. In either case, they will find out things they didn't know about their people and processes. This learning process means they will become smarter and more profitable organizations.
Creative businesses will be measuring productivity in new ways – waste per widget instead of widgets per worker, for example – and the boost that everyone in the firm and its value chain gets from contributing to new ideas will give these businesses the edge over their competitors.
The content of this blog is adapted from some thoughts I put together for the wonderful Ann Andrews of The Corporate Toolbox for her free ebook, "What's next? 29 Entrepreneurs share Predictions for 2011/12". Many thanks to Ann for allowing me to reproduce some of that material here.
And again.... more on all this in my keynote presentation, "The Productivity Paradox"!
References
(1) David Pogue, 2011. “Gadgets are garbage: your brand new device is about to be obsolete. Save it from the trash heap.” An article in the May 2011 issue of Scientific American.
(2) Kyla Fullenwider, 3 November 2010. Is Your City Running Out of Water? The Ten Largest Cities Facing a Water Crisis. Find out more at http://www.good.is/post/is-your-city-running-out-of-water-the-ten-largest-cities-facing-a-water-crisis/.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Ethics is the new black
People everywhere are rethinking the meaning of life and the role of work in contributing to that meaning. For many businesses, governments, community organizations and families, this has opened up opportunities to take stock; not just financially, but also in terms of their mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health.
What could this mean for businesses over the next year or two?
Society’s deep disillusionment with cynical, unethical, greedy and, let’s face it, downright dishonest practices in the financial and other sectors has forced many businesses to look within.
How can we navigate in an uncertain world unless we have a moral compass to guide us through complex and difficult decisions? Why are more businesses searching for their compass?
Because it’s becoming evident that ethical companies that go beyond legal compliance with tax and company law to become more socially and environmentally responsible are more profitable, too (see reference (1) below). Competitive businesses will be focusing on ethics to broaden their appeal to buyers and investors.
Sheer survival means businesses are competing intensely for the best and brightest staff. And those people are checking out potential employers very carefully. What they’re looking for is meaningful work – work that gives them professional satisfaction and is congruent with their personal values. They’re finding it in organizations that talk and walk social and environmental responsibility. A US survey of 100,000 people found 80-85% wanted to work for companies that were socially, ethically and environmentally responsible (2). Such employees will deliver 9% and higher productivity boosts for their firms (3). Responsible businesses will be recruiting the best to stay ahead of the rest.
More on all this in my keynote presentation, “The Productivity Paradox".
This is the first in a series of blogs that will be updated while I'm away - and TOTALLY offline! - for the next five or six weeks. The content is adapted from some thoughts I put together for the wonderful Ann Andrews of The Corporate Toolbox for her free ebook, "What's next? 29 Entrepreneurs share Predictions for 2011/12". Many thanks to Ann for allowing me to reproduce some of that material here.
References:
(1) The World’s Most Ethical Companies are designated on the basis of real and sustained ethical leadership within their industries, putting into real business practice the Ethisphere Institute’s credo of “Good. Smart. Business. Profit.” Find out more at http://ethisphere.com/wme2010/.
(2) Kelly Services. 2009. Ethical and Environmental Policies Serve as a Magnet in Attracting Employees According to Kelly Services Global Workplace Survey. October 28, 2009. Downloadable from http://ir.kellyservices.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=419388.
(3) Monahan, Tom. 2009. The role of business ethics in employee engagement. A 4 November 2009 article on the Ethisphere website downloadable from http://ethisphere.com/the-role-of-business-ethics-in-employee-engagement/.
What could this mean for businesses over the next year or two?
Society’s deep disillusionment with cynical, unethical, greedy and, let’s face it, downright dishonest practices in the financial and other sectors has forced many businesses to look within.
How can we navigate in an uncertain world unless we have a moral compass to guide us through complex and difficult decisions? Why are more businesses searching for their compass?
Because it’s becoming evident that ethical companies that go beyond legal compliance with tax and company law to become more socially and environmentally responsible are more profitable, too (see reference (1) below). Competitive businesses will be focusing on ethics to broaden their appeal to buyers and investors.
Sheer survival means businesses are competing intensely for the best and brightest staff. And those people are checking out potential employers very carefully. What they’re looking for is meaningful work – work that gives them professional satisfaction and is congruent with their personal values. They’re finding it in organizations that talk and walk social and environmental responsibility. A US survey of 100,000 people found 80-85% wanted to work for companies that were socially, ethically and environmentally responsible (2). Such employees will deliver 9% and higher productivity boosts for their firms (3). Responsible businesses will be recruiting the best to stay ahead of the rest.
More on all this in my keynote presentation, “The Productivity Paradox".
This is the first in a series of blogs that will be updated while I'm away - and TOTALLY offline! - for the next five or six weeks. The content is adapted from some thoughts I put together for the wonderful Ann Andrews of The Corporate Toolbox for her free ebook, "What's next? 29 Entrepreneurs share Predictions for 2011/12". Many thanks to Ann for allowing me to reproduce some of that material here.
References:
(1) The World’s Most Ethical Companies are designated on the basis of real and sustained ethical leadership within their industries, putting into real business practice the Ethisphere Institute’s credo of “Good. Smart. Business. Profit.” Find out more at http://ethisphere.com/wme2010/.
(2) Kelly Services. 2009. Ethical and Environmental Policies Serve as a Magnet in Attracting Employees According to Kelly Services Global Workplace Survey. October 28, 2009. Downloadable from http://ir.kellyservices.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=419388.
(3) Monahan, Tom. 2009. The role of business ethics in employee engagement. A 4 November 2009 article on the Ethisphere website downloadable from http://ethisphere.com/the-role-of-business-ethics-in-employee-engagement/.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Conserving Biodiversity in Subdivision Development: link to webinar
On Tuesday 22 March 2011, Dr Mark Hostetler, Associate Professor in the Department of Wildlife Ecology & Conservation at the University of Florida, gave a webinar on Conserving Biodiversity in Subdivision Development.
You can find a recording of the webinar here.
The topic summary says that "Many residential developments and rural properties are situated near or in habitats that sustain native plant and animal communities. Conserving or restoring the unique natural features inherent on every parcel of land benefits the local environment, property owners, and the region’s heritage. When land is subdivided, how does one conserve local biodiversity and minimize impacts on surrounding landscapes? Design, construction, and post-construction phases are often not discussed holistically when green developments are built."
The webinar "introduces participants to the key principles and practices required to create conservation subdivisions. The webinar is part of a four module continuing education course developed by the Program for Resource Efficient Communities at the University of Florida. This continuing education course is devoted to defining, recognizing, restoring, and managing residential communities for biodiversity within the urban and rural matrix. The course is being offered in May in association with American Citizen Planner and Michigan State University. It is relevant to county and city planners, landscape architects, architects, civil engineers, environmental consultants, developers, private landowners, and interested citizens. More information will be presented during the webinar."
Mark has over twenty years of experience in urban wildlife issues and natural resource management. He conducts research and outreach on how urban landscapes could be designed and managed, from small to large scales, to conserve biodiversity. He has extensive experience in working with homeowners, developers, and policymakers on ways to manage and design residential developments for biodiversity. Dr. Hostetler co-founded UF’s Program for Resource Efficient Communities (PREC) and collaborates with an interdisciplinary team of scientists and graduate students. In conjunction with PREC, Mark is working with policymakers and developers to establish natural resource conservation strategies in communities that are billed as “green” developments. In particular, he works with planners and built environment professionals to establish management programs for conservation subdivisions. Dr. Hostetler has a bachelor’s in biology from Purdue University (1987) and his master’s (1992) and doctorate in zoology (1997) are both from University of Florida.
There is more information about Mark's work at the links below:
Wildlife Information - http://www.wec.ufl.edu/extension/
Living Green - http://livinggreen.ifas.ufl.edu
Program for Resource Efficient Communities - http://www.buildgreen.ufl.edu
You can find a recording of the webinar here.
The topic summary says that "Many residential developments and rural properties are situated near or in habitats that sustain native plant and animal communities. Conserving or restoring the unique natural features inherent on every parcel of land benefits the local environment, property owners, and the region’s heritage. When land is subdivided, how does one conserve local biodiversity and minimize impacts on surrounding landscapes? Design, construction, and post-construction phases are often not discussed holistically when green developments are built."
The webinar "introduces participants to the key principles and practices required to create conservation subdivisions. The webinar is part of a four module continuing education course developed by the Program for Resource Efficient Communities at the University of Florida. This continuing education course is devoted to defining, recognizing, restoring, and managing residential communities for biodiversity within the urban and rural matrix. The course is being offered in May in association with American Citizen Planner and Michigan State University. It is relevant to county and city planners, landscape architects, architects, civil engineers, environmental consultants, developers, private landowners, and interested citizens. More information will be presented during the webinar."
Mark has over twenty years of experience in urban wildlife issues and natural resource management. He conducts research and outreach on how urban landscapes could be designed and managed, from small to large scales, to conserve biodiversity. He has extensive experience in working with homeowners, developers, and policymakers on ways to manage and design residential developments for biodiversity. Dr. Hostetler co-founded UF’s Program for Resource Efficient Communities (PREC) and collaborates with an interdisciplinary team of scientists and graduate students. In conjunction with PREC, Mark is working with policymakers and developers to establish natural resource conservation strategies in communities that are billed as “green” developments. In particular, he works with planners and built environment professionals to establish management programs for conservation subdivisions. Dr. Hostetler has a bachelor’s in biology from Purdue University (1987) and his master’s (1992) and doctorate in zoology (1997) are both from University of Florida.
There is more information about Mark's work at the links below:
Wildlife Information - http://www.wec.ufl.edu/extension/
Living Green - http://livinggreen.ifas.ufl.edu
Program for Resource Efficient Communities - http://www.buildgreen.ufl.edu
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Values, assets, services, resources - choosing our words
Since my last blog, I've been working on watershed management plans and thinking about the extent to which we consciously consider the natural aspects of our watersheds, including the fresh or salt water bodies into which they eventually flow.
What difference does it make to how we approach our management planning if we use different words?
I can't help but feel that it really does make a difference. Top of mind or gut feel and untested ideas follow!
The terminology chosen for New Zealand's major piece of environmental legislation, the Resource Management Act, is "resource". My trusty little old Oxford dictionary tells me that the word resource is usually used in the plural to refer to "means of supplying a want, stock that can be drawn on" as well as various other meanings including ingenuity. Sure, the purpose of the Act is stated in section 5 as being sustainable management, which means "managing the use, development, and protection of natural and physical resources in a way, or at a rate, which enables people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural well-being and for their health and safety while—(a) sustaining the potential of natural and physical resources (excluding minerals) to meet the reasonably foreseeable needs of future generations; and (b) safeguarding the life-supporting capacity of air, water, soil, and ecosystems; and (c) avoiding, remedying, or mitigating any adverse effects of activities on the environment." Without being a lawyer or policy-maker, it does seem to me that the presumption is that resources are there to be used, and while "protection", or refraining from use (likely only some extractive or consumptive or otherwise damaging, rather than all uses - we do let people into national parks, don't we) is a less preferred option. Strictly speaking, I suspect those words "use, development, and protection" are meant in principle to be given equal weight, with the balancing between them varying from place to place - depending on its "values".
Ecosystem services is a term increasingly used to describe the benefits that we enjoy for free from the natural processes that go on in ecosystems. One online definition of "services" offered among many other meanings, "contribution to the welfare of others", a definition I liked. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the services that ecosystems provide for us include provisioning services such as food and water; regulating services such as flood and disease control; cultural services such as spiritual, recreational, and cultural benefits; and supporting services such as nutrient cycling that maintain the conditions for life on Earth. I think it is a great idea for us to become more consciously aware of the tremendous benefits like these that we gain from natural systems. More and more we are trying to put a financial value on them - this might encourage us to see "protection", or non-use, as a beneficial thing. For example, an early effort in 1997 by Robert Costanza et al put an average price tag of US$33 trillion a year on these fundamental ecosystem services, which, the article said, "are largely taken for granted because they are free". That was nearly twice the value of the global gross national product (GNP) of US$18 trillion at the time. In 2008, the 2008 TEEB "Cost of Policy Inaction Study" estimated the annual economic cost of loss of ecosystem services by biodiversity and ecosystem degradation at US$2-4.5 trillion , or 3.3-7.5% of global GDP. In a way this definition brings us back to the phrase "life-supporting capacity" in the Resource Management Act - and this is a good thing! A salutary reminder, one might say.
Okay, what about assets? Lots of definitions here! One was "something valuable that an entity owns, benefits from, or has use of, in generating income". Another was a "useful or valuable quality, person, or thing; an advantage or resource" (that word again!). One of the things I liked about many of my dictionary and online definitions was the references to things like balance sheets, stock and inventories, because they imply that we're sitting on top of something valuable - which, in watersheds, we are! These terms also bring to mind the term "natural capital" and remind us that sensible money managers use or reinvest their interest and hold firmly onto the capital!
Perhaps not surprisingly, derived as they are from economic thinking, the definitions of natural capital I found were quite use-focused, one from the UK referring to "any stock or flow of energy and material within the environment that produces goods and services", and Wikipedia defining it as "the extension of the economic notion of capital (manufactured means of production) to goods and services relating to the natural environment. Natural capital is thus the stock of natural ecosystems that yields a flow of valuable ecosystem goods or services into the future." Again, this has to be a good way to think.
Where do "values" fit in? The terms I've looked at are all based on values, but these are seldom spelled out. Christchurch City Council made its values very explicit when it wrote its Waterways, wetlands and drainage guide. The Council sets out its philosophy of encouraging people to work with natural features and processes in the landscape. Noting that managing waterways or wetlands frequently includes their restoration and protection, the council integrated their urban stormwater and natural drainage functions with other core values of ecology, landscape, recreation, heritage and culture. The result is a multi-disciplinary and values-based approach to site assessment and to the design and management of developments and land use activities. These intangible values are slightly different from the tangible natural values the PPWCMA focuses on, but these two approaches would probably generate similar outcomes. Certainly in Christchurch, there have been some wonderful water-sensitive and economically beneficial results.
Well, I had hoped to argue myself into a position where I could say that one of these four terms was better than the rest (well, perhaps with three terms tied for first place and "resources" coming last!) but having gone through this admittedly very superficial analysis, I don't think I can. Perhaps we need all these kinds of terms and views to really get a grip on any watershed from a number of different perspectives. But I have no doubt that if we are to use values in our assessments and recommendations, we need to be very explicit and clear about what they are and how they will, in a very practical sense, guide our decision-making.
What difference does it make to how we approach our management planning if we use different words?
I can't help but feel that it really does make a difference. Top of mind or gut feel and untested ideas follow!
The terminology chosen for New Zealand's major piece of environmental legislation, the Resource Management Act, is "resource". My trusty little old Oxford dictionary tells me that the word resource is usually used in the plural to refer to "means of supplying a want, stock that can be drawn on" as well as various other meanings including ingenuity. Sure, the purpose of the Act is stated in section 5 as being sustainable management, which means "managing the use, development, and protection of natural and physical resources in a way, or at a rate, which enables people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural well-being and for their health and safety while—(a) sustaining the potential of natural and physical resources (excluding minerals) to meet the reasonably foreseeable needs of future generations; and (b) safeguarding the life-supporting capacity of air, water, soil, and ecosystems; and (c) avoiding, remedying, or mitigating any adverse effects of activities on the environment." Without being a lawyer or policy-maker, it does seem to me that the presumption is that resources are there to be used, and while "protection", or refraining from use (likely only some extractive or consumptive or otherwise damaging, rather than all uses - we do let people into national parks, don't we) is a less preferred option. Strictly speaking, I suspect those words "use, development, and protection" are meant in principle to be given equal weight, with the balancing between them varying from place to place - depending on its "values".
Ecosystem services is a term increasingly used to describe the benefits that we enjoy for free from the natural processes that go on in ecosystems. One online definition of "services" offered among many other meanings, "contribution to the welfare of others", a definition I liked. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the services that ecosystems provide for us include provisioning services such as food and water; regulating services such as flood and disease control; cultural services such as spiritual, recreational, and cultural benefits; and supporting services such as nutrient cycling that maintain the conditions for life on Earth. I think it is a great idea for us to become more consciously aware of the tremendous benefits like these that we gain from natural systems. More and more we are trying to put a financial value on them - this might encourage us to see "protection", or non-use, as a beneficial thing. For example, an early effort in 1997 by Robert Costanza et al put an average price tag of US$33 trillion a year on these fundamental ecosystem services, which, the article said, "are largely taken for granted because they are free". That was nearly twice the value of the global gross national product (GNP) of US$18 trillion at the time. In 2008, the 2008 TEEB "Cost of Policy Inaction Study" estimated the annual economic cost of loss of ecosystem services by biodiversity and ecosystem degradation at US$2-4.5 trillion , or 3.3-7.5% of global GDP. In a way this definition brings us back to the phrase "life-supporting capacity" in the Resource Management Act - and this is a good thing! A salutary reminder, one might say.
Okay, what about assets? Lots of definitions here! One was "something valuable that an entity owns, benefits from, or has use of, in generating income". Another was a "useful or valuable quality, person, or thing; an advantage or resource" (that word again!). One of the things I liked about many of my dictionary and online definitions was the references to things like balance sheets, stock and inventories, because they imply that we're sitting on top of something valuable - which, in watersheds, we are! These terms also bring to mind the term "natural capital" and remind us that sensible money managers use or reinvest their interest and hold firmly onto the capital!
Perhaps not surprisingly, derived as they are from economic thinking, the definitions of natural capital I found were quite use-focused, one from the UK referring to "any stock or flow of energy and material within the environment that produces goods and services", and Wikipedia defining it as "the extension of the economic notion of capital (manufactured means of production) to goods and services relating to the natural environment. Natural capital is thus the stock of natural ecosystems that yields a flow of valuable ecosystem goods or services into the future." Again, this has to be a good way to think.
Where do "values" fit in? The terms I've looked at are all based on values, but these are seldom spelled out. Christchurch City Council made its values very explicit when it wrote its Waterways, wetlands and drainage guide. The Council sets out its philosophy of encouraging people to work with natural features and processes in the landscape. Noting that managing waterways or wetlands frequently includes their restoration and protection, the council integrated their urban stormwater and natural drainage functions with other core values of ecology, landscape, recreation, heritage and culture. The result is a multi-disciplinary and values-based approach to site assessment and to the design and management of developments and land use activities. These intangible values are slightly different from the tangible natural values the PPWCMA focuses on, but these two approaches would probably generate similar outcomes. Certainly in Christchurch, there have been some wonderful water-sensitive and economically beneficial results.
Well, I had hoped to argue myself into a position where I could say that one of these four terms was better than the rest (well, perhaps with three terms tied for first place and "resources" coming last!) but having gone through this admittedly very superficial analysis, I don't think I can. Perhaps we need all these kinds of terms and views to really get a grip on any watershed from a number of different perspectives. But I have no doubt that if we are to use values in our assessments and recommendations, we need to be very explicit and clear about what they are and how they will, in a very practical sense, guide our decision-making.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)