It Ain't Easy Being Green

I’m still not sure why I succumbed.

It was late in the evening.  I was unwell.  It was a moment of weakness.  We had the same name.  I must have been nuts.

Even when Maureen rang me the night before to confirm the appointment, I didn’t rescind.  It wasn’t until she showed up on my doorstep at 9am armed with a full government mandate to help me reduce my carbon footprint, settled down for her first cup of tea, opened what must have been a 1598 page questionnaire on her laptop, and blithely informed me comfortingly that this would only take 3 (THREE!!!) fully participatory hours that I felt the tentacles of doom grasp me by the nethers and drag me mercilessly towards the abyss.  But it wasn’t til she asked me how many minutes a week my printer was used that I realised what ‘abyss’ really meant.

You see, it wasn’t that the cause wasn’t worthy, that the questions weren’t valid, that the intent wasn’t sound or that Maureen wasn’t lovely.  All of that was sweet.  It was that regardless of the outcome of this survey, I wasn’t going to do anything.  I’d already made the changes I was willing to make.  I knew what the remaining energy culprits were, and I wasn’t going to change them.  I’d weighed the cost, and hung it.  The second freezer stays.  The pool filter remains on.  Yes, every day.  I already knew what the incidental changes I could make were (becoming a lights Nazi, exchanging the ugly chandelier lightbulbs for even more aesthetically repugnant swirly energy efficient ones, spending a fortune replacing all the visually innocuous blinds in the house with a few miles of turgid thermal curtains) and I knew equally that I was never going to make them.  I didn’t care enough.  Nor was I willing to restrict the number of times the kids flush the loo or risk family health by washing the odd dirty knife in the container of stale dirty water.  She may have been motivated by ‘all those poor people’ on the other side of the planet who really do understand the meaning of the term ‘water shortage’, but I frankly didn’t see how me compromising our sanitary arrangements was going to help.  And if the money was that important, I wouldn’t already be paying a premium for green energy.

And it’s the same with any of the other decisions we make.  We all know we should eat less, drink less, exercise more, have more (or less) sex, meditate daily, do our kegels, be more present, play more games, be more creative, have more fun… so why don’t we?  We do course after course and read book after book telling us how to be more productive, more dynamic, better leaders, better team players – just better – so why aren’t we?

Because at some deep-seated psychological level, we don’t believe it will meet our needs as well as our current dysfunctional strategies will.  Oh, that and the fact that we’d have to break a pile of entrenched habits to do so, which in itself is a massive ask.  Habits are efficient.  The brain likes efficiency.  We don’t keep going on these courses or reading those books because we don’t already know most of this stuff, we go because for whatever reason, we are continuing to choose not to DO any of it.   As neuroscience has proved, change is exhausting, and that exhaustion hurts, whether we are individuals or large organisations.  But because we think we should do it, or even that it would be fantastic if we did do it – and thus live longer, be happier, be more successful etc –  we go along hoping that maybe this time we’ll be inspired enough to actually make the change and make it stick.  And then just feel even more guilty when we don’t.

So how do we do it?  How do we change our behaviour to become the more worthy effective beings and organisations we aspire to be?  By changing our perceptions and our beliefs about what works and what doesn’t, about what’s to our real benefit and what isn’t.  By accepting that change is often slow and overcoming our aversion to the discomfort of the new.  And most importantly, by engaging more than our rational mind and our guilty conscience.  As the Heath brothers would have it, by directing the rational mind, motivating our emotional mind, and by mapping out a clear path to the goal.  By creating the possibility of an epiphany, as Christopher Koch’s excellent CIO article on Change Management suggests, or at least making it easy for ourselves.  It didn’t matter how worthy I thought Maureen’s cause was.  I’d already made the changes I was willing to make, and she didn’t make me care enough to make any more.

She knew this of course, and it made her sad.  In a last ditch effort, she implored me to redeem the horrendous impact of my plasma indulgence by turning the TV et al off at the point.  Feeling guilty at having been such a recalcitrantly irredeemable case, I swallowed my virtue pill and complied.  And promptly failed to record any of my favourite programmes for that week.

So the TV stays on. But we are wearing more jumpers this year…

A Perfect Match

Just when you think you’ve seen everything, you go to a school reunion.  At the last one I attended, we all gleefully got to play ‘who on earth is that?’  An awesome testament to the powers of surgical transformation and personal chutzpa, our mystery classmate commanded the spotlight as she did the mwa-mwa tour of the room, dragging everyone’s helplessly mesmerised gaze with her.  Only when I heard her speak could I work out who she was, and then the game of finding any remotely familiar features was on.  Utterly riveting.  Amanda (appropriately enough, not her real name) had morphed from a scrawny, awkward, unkempt and rather odd girl into a buxom, pouty lacquered vision of… what must have been someone’s vision of a middle-aged barbie doll.  Unreal.  In every sense.

What was particularly striking however was that as fascinating as she was, people didn’t see her as a ‘who’, but rather as a ‘what’ – as a curiosity.  It’s hard to build a meaningful relationship on those terms.  But then brands have been doing that for years.

When I was dragged up through the strategic hallways of JWT, we were instructed to think of a brand as a person, theoretically complete with quirks and foibles to make it warm, unique and accessible.  Of course this was a farce.  Putting aside the debate over whether a concept or construct can ever be that 3 dimensionally human, the process by which this humanity was supposed to be inferred ensured it was a non-starter to begin with.  Rather like expecting Six Sigma  to foster innovation in a corporate environment.   Take a functional product or service, get a committee to fill in forms with laundry-lists of characteristics based on what they thought it ’should’ be or that they thought would appeal to ‘the market, water it down so it will exclude no one, package it up with a nice 30 sec TVC that brings those characteristics to life and presto!  Vanilla Frankenstein Ken Dolls masquerading as psychotically friendly bank managers weaving themselves into the milestones of our lives, Stepford mums twinkling over laundry stains and dirty toilets, and endless immaculate young couples oozing love and dental perfection whilst traveling the world and shopping enthusiastically for insurance.  (Why can’t banks market their perfectly valuable services without having to worm their way into our hearts and bar-mitzvahs?  Particularly since we all know they’ll eat our children if there’s a whiff of financial hardship on the horizon.)

A fascinating feat of strategic surgical engineering perhaps, but hardly magnetically attractive.  ’Perfection’ never is.

Little has changed, which is a pity.  The most magnetic brands are still those like Apple, Maui Jim, or Twitter that are determinedly themselves, that do not emerge slickly formed and beautifully botoxed for mass consumption, but start by standing for something real, then grow organically through interactions with the market (usually niche at first) they naturally appeal to.  They are created – co-created in fact, rather than produced and imposed.  Brands essentially only exist in the minds of the consumer or marketplace.  It is an illusion to think they can be controlled by their ‘maker’ – particularly in an era where on-line word of mouth rules.

Amanda’s perfect plasticity didn’t make her appealing.  But then, perhaps her niche lay elsewhere.  And ‘who’ now lived behind the ‘what’ she’d become was destined to remain a mystery.  Once she finished her whirlwind tour of the room, she ran out of things to say.  Next time I looked around, she’d disappeared.

Brave New World

I’m a printmaker (among other things) which means I make intaglio etchings – like this one.  There are a pile of ways of doing this, but all basically involve etching a groove in a ‘plate’ of some sort, then smearing it with ink, rubbing that back so that the ink remains in the grooves, and transferring the ink to damp paper by running it through a printing press – which looks something like the old wrangle washing machines.

I fell in love with this art form years ago, having avoided it for ever because I thought it was so rule-bound, meticulous and uptight.  How wrong could I be?  Maybe it was in Rembrandt’s day but these days anything goes, and ‘mistakes’ are not only rampant, but actively sought.

To make a metal (usually zinc or copper) plate, you clean it off, cover it in a waxy bitumen ‘ground’, exposing parts of the metal to create the image you want.  Then you chuck it in an appropriate tub of acid and let it do it’s thing.  The acid bites away the exposed metal and creates a ‘plate’.  In doing this, you essentially hand it over to the art gods, because from this point, while you can direct the process, you can’t really control it.  Which is the bit that I like best, because unlike ‘direct’ art forms like painting, while I have an idea of what I put in (albeit in negative and in reverse) I usually have no idea what’s going to come out.  Sometimes it’s what I expected or a step in the right direction, sometimes it’s a disaster, and sometimes it’s brilliant in a way I could never have deliberately created (but am always happy to take credit for).  Which is SO cool.  And at each reveal stage; cleaning the bitumen off, inking it up and then printing a proof, I look at the thing I created with curiosity and excitement – like a kid opening a christmas present.

It’s the same in business.  So many of my major breakthroughs and successes in both have resulted from accidents – encouraged or otherwise.  I know that to create something original, I have to improvise and trust the fact that I have the skill and ingenuity to find another way to do something if what I’m doing isn’t working.  As my old teacher used to say, chucking a dud plate back into the acid: “Where there’s metal, there’s hope”.  And the more skilled we become, the more we can relinquish control of the process, because whether in business or the studio, unless we make space for a bit of chaos, for random accidents and opportunities, our outcomes will be limited by what we can mentally project.  Which in hindsight is often very limited indeed.

Acid bath anyone?

All At Sea

Religion is no longer the opiate of the masses: choice is.

WorldWarped ©mofox

I  am totally, tragically addicted to WordWarp.

It looks harmless enough. Basic anagram game App: 6 scrambled letters, a list of blank word spaces, 2 minutes, go.  If you don’t get the 6 letter word, it’s all over red rover.  If you do, you go onto the next level and your score accumulates.  SO.  On this fateful evening, I’d managed to scrape my way up the escarpment to a grand total of 17,500.  I had no idea whether this placed me amongst the deities or the plebs.  I didn’t care.  It was about 4,000 more than I’d ever achieved before.  Now in an earlier moment of inspiration, I had ferreted out an Unscrambling App.   I wouldn’t use it, I said to myself, because that would be cheating.  It was kind of a ‘just in case’.  (Love the logic.) So I’m at 17,500, and I could not for the life of me unscramble the rather liberally-vowelled mess.  Feeling the pressure, and knowing how much was at stake, I threw conscience to the winds and scurried to the other app.  The answer?  OUTRUN.  Cool, I thought.  There was even a certain synergy to it.

Next word comes up: another unintelligible mass.  I powered through the list but when it came to the big kahuna I was stumped.  And here the insanity began.

The Gods were testing me and my moral fibre, I decided.  What???!!  Since when has it been cheating to use the resources available to us to find a solution?  Since school, I guess.  At school the purpose was not to find a solution per se, but to prove that you had learned how to do it for yourself, preferably better than anyone else.  But the programming that ‘to cheat = social pariah’ is so strong that it’s seeped beyond it’s boundaries to contaminate fertile ground.

How many healthy collaborations or potentially world-altering ideas, decent dinners, home repairs, or cross-departmental projects have been stymied by the notion that ‘it’s worthless unless I do it on my own’ mentality?   And if not born of pride or competitiveness, then try habit or lack of imagination.

I think we miss about 80% of the resources available to us in almost every situation we are in.  And if that’s not totally accurate (I read one survey somewhere that said it was 90%) then it’s a useful assumption to work with.  Whenever you’re stuck, ask: “Where’s the missing 80%?” and open your mind to unorthodox possibilities. You’ll be stunned at what you find.  The more resources – contacts, materials, talents, social groups, attitudes, whatever – you utilise, whether they were ‘designed’ for that purpose or not, the more choices you generate, & the better the solutions you can create.

So I hit 19,250 with the help of my trusty little app-aid when conscience strikes and I face The Test.  What did I do?  Unable to bear the moral conundrum I’d created for myself, I nobly decided to fall on my sword.  After all, if I couldn’t do it by myself, it wasn’t worth having.  I tossed the game.

And the 6 letter word?

CRETIN.

New Broom ©mofox

The worm has officially turned.  The downtrodden rise to overthrow their oppressors, an unfair situation is being reversed, and the soil is being aerated in preparation for new growth.  The business world is being forced to shift from a mechanised, information-based model to a creative, conceptual one.  What’s your stake in the revolution?

It may seem a bit of a stretch to liken creative thinkers as earthworms, yet Darwin insisted the earthworm is one of the most important creatures in history.  By doing what it does naturally, the earthworm transforms nutrient-starved dirt into rich, fertile, arable soil.  And it’s major enemies?  Commercial fertilizers, pesticides and extremely dry soil.  Not so dissimilar then.  The mega tsunami of technological developments, available information and globalisation have created a commoditised market where efficiency rules, and Better/Cheaper/Faster is the order of the day.  Dry soil indeed, for in a commoditised market, information is NOT power – it’s just data.

True power now lies in the ability to make information mean something so people can do something worthwhile with it.  Or to say it posh; the ability to extract insight and leverage it to create value.  Or in worm words, chewing the mulch to excrete the castings that fertilise the soil.

Nodding sagely to observations like these is fine, but there is no power in lip-service.  It is pointless to pontificate about creating a culture of innovation in a company that avoids risk and punishes failure (pesticides?).  Or to demand massive organisational change by imposing a system from the top instead of making sure it is organically relevant (commercial fertiliser?).  Or to claim to value ‘employee engagement’ while rewarding compliance over input, and while using carrots and sticks rather than purpose and creativity to spur motivation.  (Definitely dry soil – and Dan Pink’s TED talk on this is fabulous.)

Well, the worm has turned and it’s time to consider your revolutionary agenda.  The groundswell is building, and soon companies will either have to transform lip-service into action or cease to exist, because unless they act, their fields will fail to produce: they will be unable to adapt to a rapidly changing marketplace, unable to generate sufficient innovation, and unable to attract and retain high calibre talent.

Not so much turning, then, as spinning.

* Dervish comes from the Persian ‘Das’ and literally means ‘to open the doors’.  Which I suppose you would, if you saw one whirling your way …

Symphony in Fish Major ©mofox

Backyard Aquaponics is a Queensland company that combines aquaculture and hydroponics in a way that each not only cancels out the negative aspects of the other, but actually uses it as nourishment.  The fish tank and gravel veggie bed are linked: the fish-poo water gets used to feed the plants, which in turn clean and oxygenate the water for the happy fish. It uses 1/10 of the normal water required, the fish get less lurgies, and a patio-sized system can feed a whole family.

How cool is that?  A completely symbiotic system where the sum of the two combined is greater than the sum of the two individuals.

Symbiosis is of course the key to many business relationships too: supplier/dealer, partnerships, and cross-referring affiliations with shared infrastructures to name a few.  The most obvious example is the employer/employee relationship, but how often is this as healthy and maximising as it can be?  The key to the symbiotic relationship is balance of power – hardly something the classic company situation is renown for.  The rhino may be huge compared to the oxpecker but it still depends on it for its survival – not always the case with commoditised workforces.  But what if we looked at it differently?

What most employees want is greater down time and less stress for preferably more income.  What most employers want is increased revenue from better ideas, management and output.  Given that only 2% of people claim to have their ideas at work, and that stress, business and mechanised outputting are major creativity killers, it would make symbiotic sense to give employees more down time in order to increase the quality and quantity of the ideas they come up with.  And if this were done in an environment where the employees’ personal goals were in alignment with the company’s strategy, how powerful would that be?  Many truly innovative companies recognise this and do it already.  Several of Google’s key innovations have come from “15% Time” – the 15% of the working week that employees are free to do and play with what they want.  They are free to pootle around in their own way on things that interest them (and who wouldn’t want to be paid for doing that??), and the company gets an occasional massive breakthrough in return.

So ‘wasted’ time becomes the key to company innovation.  And the time ‘waster’ is refreshed, energised and more engaged than ever.  Corporate aquaponics – now where’s the downside in that?

Dump Poppies ©mofox

Kibera is Africa’s largest slum  (with over 1 million inhabitants) and one of the most spectacular testaments to the transforming power of human ingenuity I’ve ever seen. With huge limitations on land, energy, water and food, people’s survival depends on how ingenious and innovative they can be.  My favourite story is of how a local farming company Green Dreams is working with a group of reformed young criminals to convert garbage into organic manure and transform the slum garbage dump into an organic farms.  The google earth shots are amazing.

Three months after clearing the dump, a community of 30 families were harvesting, eating and selling organic produce, and are now selling their expertise to raise funds and help others.

The French might call it ‘bricolage’, Csikszentmihalyi describes it as generating energy from entropy – a key to Flow.  My friend’s nana would say it was making a silk purse from a sows ear, and my kids did it every time they dove into the ‘making box’ of discarded milk cartons and loo rolls to create a mythical creature or a full suit of armour.  The business equivalent is leveraged resourcefulness – the ability to see what’s possible, then to use what you’ve already got to achieve it.  I call it ingenuity. It is the core ingredient of all innovation and change and is absolutely intrinsic to all human beings, teams, organisations and brands.

You can transform your garbage dumps in two ways, both of which require that you see things with fresh eyes, looking beyond what you assume is there to what is really there.  Either you can start with the possibilities of the materials (it’s not garbage, it’s stuff, so how else could you use it?) or start with a vision of what you would like to create and reassess what you’ve got within that context.  The Kiberans recognised that under the garbage was land, and that much of the garbage or waste could be recycled to provide nutrients.  Fred Walker & Co recognised that leftover brewers’ yeast extract (a waste product of beer manufacture) could become a nutritious spread, and ultimately the cultural icon that is Vegemite. FujiXerox’s waste toner is sold to local steel mills for use in production, and they are investigating its use as a non-renewable fuel replacement.

What resources have you failed to recognise in your garbage heap? And what farms could you build instead?