Category: Rich Pictures

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.

It used to take us 18 months to get a new client.

Anyone that works with large companies has experienced this.

From the time you get an introduction to when a proposal is signed it’s easily over a year.

It was anyway.

We usually travelled to meet the client.

That always felt a little unsustainable – burning fuel to find out how you could help someone use less fuel.

The sense that this was an important meeting always put some pressure on everyone attending, especially those responsible for sales.

You had spent time and money to get here, and the next 45 minutes were crucial to going ahead.

And that’s where things often fell apart.

The problem with a sales meeting or a demo is that we feel that it’s our one chance to tell the clients about everything it is that we do.

So we spent the first 80% of the meeting talking about ourselves – our backgrounds, our product, the problems we solve.

Then we spent the next 20% of the meeting asking for feedback about what the client thought of us.

By the end of the meeting we had no idea what the client really wanted – because we hadn’t given them a chance to tell us.

So we doubled down, sending out huge proposals that set out everything we did again, hoping that something would land.

Unsurprisingly, that didn’t work either.

Eventually we learned how to do it better.

We had to talk less and listen more.

When we did that, we learned more about their situation and what they needed from someone – perhaps us if we were the right fit.

We built a process around this approach – one where we can figure out if we want to work together in a couple of hours – focusing on what matters to our client instead of wildly pitching everything we think we can do.

And it’s real simple.

It starts with a conversation rather than trying to sell something.

Over time my immediate bookshelf has resolved itself into three categories.

Writing, drawing and systems.

I have more books than shelf space in my office.

Every once in a while I cull them, moving ones that I don’t read often into storage.

On my systems shelf is a slim tome called “Systems thinking in the public sector” by John Seddon, a title that I picked up in a charity shop in 2019.

It’s one of the few books that had such an impact that I wrote to the author, who kindly invited me to a seminar.

The big idea, the one that changed how I looked at things and underpins my research now, is that you have to think differently about services than products.

In essence, when you run a manufacturing operation that makes products your objective is to reduce variation from a nominal value.

You want all your car doors to be identical – if they all vary a little that’s going to be problematic.

As you vary from that box you’re trying to make costs go up and quality suffers.

In services, however, the nominal value is not quite as easy to grasp.

Take what I do, for example. If you’re doing carbon accounting it’s easy to start by reaching for an objective standard – the GHG protocol, the UK’s SECR and so on. You ask – what must we do, how do we know we’re doing it right?

The answer, unsatisfyingly, is that it depends. Guidance is descriptive rather than prescriptive.

A few quick examples. If you have a large UK portfolio and a small global one, can you just focus on the large one? Similarly, if a particular raw material is the bulk of your Scope 3, can you focus on just that category. If you’re in a hard to abate sector is it ok to set targets for just the elements of emissions that you control?

In situations like these, the approach we take is a negotiation – leaders, advisers and auditors review the position and talk about how to approach it and agree what to do next.

And each company does this differently, in a way that’s often squiggly.

The data collection and reporting service we design for these different companies has to be able to cope with the variety of demands they have – a one-size-fits-all solution often isn’t enough.

If you’re selling a box – something that focuses on reducing variation, that standardises, systematises an approach, then you probably have customers.

If you’re designing a service that wraps around the individual needs of the stakeholders in an organisation – then you probably have clients.

What matters is knowing the difference.