Category: LinkedIn

There is no “simple button” or “magic bullet”. There is work. And there is continual improvement.

I learned something early in my career that stuck with me.

I could build technology. I’d studied, practised, was familiar with a range of tools, and could create something that worked well for me.

Reliably. Predictably.

Then, when I gave it to someone else, they always broke it in new and interesting ways that I hadn’t considered.

Some people think of this as a problem with humans – and some technologists work very hard to remove this irritant from their workflows.

But that’s a mistake. The people at an organisation are the ones that buy your product, that engage with it, that need it to make their work lives easier, that promote you if you make that happen.

So I learned to build for users, rather than just building for myself.

And this starts by understanding that your prospect is in an existing, probably complicated situation.

In that situation, they usually have an existing, probably complicated set of issues they consider problematic.

You can’t rock up and offer your nice, packaged brick of a solution to fill their jagged and misshapen issues.

It’s not going to work. Maybe you’re so great at selling that they buy it. The disappointment comes later.

The only way is to change our approach.

We need to shape our solutions to fit our client’s problematic situation.

And then constantly work with them to improve and make it better.

More than half the SaaS tools in organisations contribute “little or nothing to organizational outcomes”.

A post by Tom Fishburne of Marketoonist fame caught my eye last week.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tomfishburne_marketing-cartoon-marketoon-activity-7360671448283168768-C_N8

It cited research from Zylo that said the average firm had 275 tools in their technology stack.

16% of tools were purchased by IT, half by the business line, and the rest were shadow IT purchases.

In conversations with sustainability managers, a version of the following story comes up again and again.

1. We’re drowning in spreadsheets.
2. There is no budget for hiring, or we’re struggling to get people to do these jobs.
3. Internal audit has highlighted weaknesses that we need to improve.
4. Senior management think we need a system – someone has recommended XYZ software.
5. The software doesn’t save us any time in the work we need to do – but now we need to format everything so it fits the interface so that’s more work.
6. Any changes are complicated, costing more in changes or we have to do this outside the software.
7. We’re still paying for the license, but have gone back to Excel to get the work done.

There also seems to be a bit of a price war going on with sustainability software – one manager said they had shifted to another tool that cost 66% less. There is an oversupply of tools out there and the sector is probably overdue for a shakeout, so it’s not surprising that prices are plummeting.

We’ve approached this from the other end. Rather than building software, we use lean processes to get the data flowing cleanly, so that it can be used in the next stage, whether that’s in a DIY PowerBi system, internal management reporting, or a SaaS platform that clients have invested in.

Let me be clear, I’m not against SaaS – the data just shows that there’s a disconnect between what people buy and how they use it.

And if you’re a SaaS vendor customers seem to be looking at the level of implementation support that comes with your product.

If you’re a senior manager, talk to your team doing the work and see if the tools they have are really saving them time.

And if this is a problem, get in touch. We can help streamline the process, get the most out of your existing investments and get that tech stack working for you.

I’m enjoying building stuff again, after years of managing stuff being built – but as I look around, we’ve still not learned basic lessons about how to build useful technology.

Here are some thoughts.

Of all the seasons, the hungry season is the one we hope to never experience.

I watched “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” yesterday” – a 2019 directorial debut from Chiwetel Ejiofor.

The film is a micro exploration of what happens when human activity meets the effects of climate crisis and its impact on a subsistence farming family in Malawi.

1. The weather dictates the growing seasons.

You plant when the ground can be dug – it gets too hard in the dry season.

1. The rains are unpredictable Floods one year,

droughts the next. It’s a gamble.

1. Resources are scarce. The only tools are hoes –

a technology so old it predates the plough.

1. Short term interests. Cutting down trees gives farmers

money in the short term but removes the barrier that protects against floods.

Many of are so isolated from the food system that it’s hard to imagine what it’s like for subsistence farmers to be so dependent on the weather.

The developed world isn’t that much more resilient, really. COVID showed us that we are only a few days away from being unable to supply our basic needs if the system is disrupted.

How many people know there is a Hungry Gap in the UK – from around April to mid-June where we rely on imported and stored produce because the winter crops are down and the summer crops aren’t ready be harvested yet?

Spoiler alert – the story’s hero, William Kamkwamba, finds a book on energy and uses scavenged parts to build a working turbine, allowing his family to irrigate crops during the dry season and survive a famine.

Here’s the thing about the climate crisis.

We know it’s happening. We know that there are a range of reactions from people out there, from denial to catastrophizing.

What matters is the action we take.

I could read Terry Pratchett again and again and learn something new each time.

And the first page of Soul Music has the line “… if it is true that the act of observing changes the thing which is observed, it’s even more true that it changes the observer”.

This line helps explain some of what is going on right now in the world.

Let’s look at this in a specific context – what organisations are doing about sustainability.

8 years ago, when we first started building systems to count carbon, we were starting to observe something that was considered a problem.

It took a few years to build a data set that showed trends – where we could see the impact of production and system transformation in the numbers coming through.

And that inevitably started to change the organisation and the teams we worked in. We started to pay attention to how things were done, which contracts were in place, which materials were being used.

Just looking made a difference.

And that, I think, is what the backlash against ESG appears to be attacking.

People with vested interests don’t want you to look at things that will affect their businesses and profit centres.

It’s the central premise of the film “Don’t look up”.

And they have the political and regulatory power to attack the ways you look, from removing the ability to calculate emissions factors to stopping you using sustainability criteria in selecting suppliers.

I don’t think their efforts will work in the long term. It takes a lot of energy to push a narrative that protects a small group of people while putting the future of the majority at risk.

And of course, the climate doesn’t care about regulation and what people think. The pandemic cut transport emissions. At least some of us are more reluctant to fly as data shows turbulence increasing.

Just watching, observing, looking at what is going on around us is going to make a difference.

One of the hardest things to do with a service firm is to focus.

It takes a particular kind of discipline to turn away work.

Sometimes I see posts on here arguing that’s because service firms are desperate – they’ll take on anything.

I don’t think that’s right.

When you offer a service, it’s inevitable that if you do a good job clients will ask you if you can help with related issues.

And we want to help clients in any way we can so we’ll look into it and figure out what needs doing.

Often that leads to new service lines because if there is a problem that is worth solving then there’s an opportunity to provide a service.

But more often, it’s about having partners that you can work with that already do that kind of work well.

What we shouldn’t do is what my son did when I was teaching him how to ride a bicycle.

He came around a corner at full speed and then was suddenly distracted by some butterflies.

Butterflies are pretty, but you need to stay focused on the main job you’re doing.

The reward for doing good work is usually more work.

The thing I most enjoy working in a small, flat team is that our entire focus is on the value we deliver to a client.

That early, startup-like stage is simple.

Only do what adds value. Everything else is a cost.

The challenges start to mount as you grow.

Big companies start to organise into hierarchies, reporting lines, with a boss pulling the strings.

And pretty quickly, the focus shifts from the client to the bosses – we take decisions based on what the boss wants or thinks or we think they think.

And really, the boss is often least qualified to make the call because they are further and further away from the client, from the actual work being done.

The ones that realise this design operations that delegate and empower – letting teams self-organise and structure for impact.

Those that don’t rely on command-and-control strategies that look increasingly outdated.

For me, anyway, at this stage of building our business, it’s all about working in a team that is hyper-focused on creating client value.

Life time success can be predicted well by one of the 5 big personality traits.

I recall a remark by Jordan Peterson about the OCEAN model – the idea that personalities can be measured across 5 dimensions – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Of these he said conscientiousness is the biggest predictor of success and, of the two elements of conscientiousness, orderliness and industriousness, the latter is more important.

Or to put it in fewer words, people that work hard get ahead.

But, I wonder if that applies mainly to work – to the contribution you make.

I think leadership may be different – the best leaders are perhaps ones that score highly on openness instead.

Openness is being willing to look beyond the here and now. To engage with new ideas, even if they are uncomfortable or new, and grapple with existing organisational structures to bring in new and better.

Another way to look at this is to see great contributors as being heads down, focused on the work and the next task – on what’s happening right now.

Great leaders are heads up, scanning for what comes next.

These 5 words will change the way you think about work.

High Frequency Predictable Value Demand.

You may think you and your team are working very hard but take a closer look.

Customer demand is the term for the thing that we need to work on.

Demand is of two types – according to John Seddon – failure demand and value demand.

Failure demand is work that results from not getting what the customer wants or needs right. Not being clear about the specification and building the wrong thing. Not fixing the problem and having to go back out again.

It’s still work – but it’s because the system is not delivering.

Value demand is work the client needs and wants.

It’s the good stuff, building a tool or process that makes things better, fixing the fault in the machine the first time, laying the driveway using the right technique so the flags don’t pop up after the first winter.

That last one is a sore point…

So what about the other three words?

Once you know the sorts of things your client values, you can organise for greatest effectiveness.

High frequency – which requests come along again and again.

In carbon reporting, for example, we know that there are several emissions sources that are going to be a feature of most organisations – electricity, gas, petrol, diesel, propane, and so on.

They’re also predictable – bills come along every month for some, but some are billed less frequently. We can still predict that we’ll get a couple a year so if they’re missing that’s a problem.

Once we’ve see what HFPVD is, we can design processes that make it easier and quicker to deal with that demand.

Instead of rushing around trying to get all this done at the end of the year, we can do a little every month and get it done over time.

This has the side benefit of being able to put in monthly monitoring and control, or feed into other systems and management reporting.

To learn more about how HFPVD fits into the development of better service processes read the article linked in the comments below.

I’m wondering if the way in which we think about resourcing for sustainability is problematic.

I see more adverts for sustainability professionals in my feed and from a quick look at what companies are asking for it seems that they don’t really understand what these professionals do.

These roles are transformational ones, dealing with the complete overhaul of existing systems with mixed levels of internal support, and varying degrees of external hostility or support depending on where they are located.

And we ask them to do too much.

They’re expected to wrestle with the details of data collection across multiple subsidiaries, countries and suppliers.

They need to pull this together for regular reporting and management information.

They have to engage with a range of stakeholders across their organisation, getting them aligned on strategy.

They need to provide decision makers with recommendations and the backing information required to understand and evaluate options.

And they need to take action, making projects happen – everything from new solar panels to making sure contracts are renewable.

Have I missed anything?

Are there people out there that can do all of these things?

I listened to a talk recently with a large accountancy firm and solutions provider where they said that finding people with tenure in doing this work was like looking for unicorns.

I think firms need to think hard about what they really need to put together a team that works.

Here’s what I’d recommend after a decade of working on this.

The in-house team’s highest priority is engagement and decision making support.

They’ve got to engage with everyone else – legal, procurement, IT, operations – the list goes on, to build support and champions.

They need time with the CEO, CFO and the rest of the leadership team to educate, engage and involve them in assessing choices and deciding what to do.

Data management should be outsourced to a team that is willing to deal with the complexities of your specific situation.

This is a task often given to interns – but that’s problematic. Do you really want your most junior staff doing work that needs to be signed off by the CFO?

Who’s going to check and guarantee the work.

I’d suggest following Jack Welch’s advice – if you can’t put your best people on this, find someone else and get them to put their best people on it.

When it comes to reporting, choose a platform. There are many out there, or you can use BI tools to put something in place until you’re clear what you want.

Finally, you’re going to work with construction partners to get projects away.

If you’re in charge of resourcing, it’s not about hiring one individual and overloading them until they break and leave.

It’s about giving them the resources and support they need to get the job done.