25/02/09:
CLIMATE CHANGE: Raising Our “Game” to Lower the Temperature

So far, the climate change debate has largely neglected the issues surrounding people performance. That is, the performance of those charged with grasping for UK plc, the business opportunities hidden within the challenge of climate change.


The responses of people, not of systems per se, will determine whether or not UK plc is effective in harnessing in time, the radically new work objectives and practices required to transform its operations from today’s “business as usual” model, to one which is capable of operating in tune with our planet’s stability systems and finite resource banks. How we enable people at all levels and functions across UK plc to “raise their game” to deal with climate change, is, in Richard’s view, a vital element of the debate.


In a free society, change is only adopted effectively, if the people who are doing the work, carrying the risks and paying the bills of change, find change personally desirable in their specific circumstances. Desirable change implies choice, e.g. in the routes to achieving change towards any given carbon emissions reduction objective. Such choice implies change enabled by leadership, where people are afforded the space and the tools to experiment productively and are motivated and rewarded to achieve optimum results through learning.


This leadership approach features in Japanese systems of work which enable ordinary people to achieve extra-ordinary results every day, with ordinary inputs of mental and physical effort. This approach aims to motivate people for optimum performance, e.g. by encouraging continuous systems innovation to take out the snags which both demotivate workers, thereby hindering the smooth delivery of required customer value and cause the unsustainable CO2 emissions and waste of materials and other resources.


For UK plc, the “bottom line” of all this is a new focus on the “people and process” aspects of change, to increase capability through motivation. The goal is a “cooler”, less fraught operation in which people and teams are empowered to design out the sources of climate change related business risk, as part of improving both their own work satisfaction and their delivery of required customer value. Raising our game in this way, should lower the ambient temperature, metaphorically of our work place environments and actually of our planet, the physical “enabler” for our economy.

07/10/08:
RESOLVING CLIMATE CHANGE – Better by Nature’s Ways than by Degree

When considering climate change, we tend to think in terms of change by degree. This is fine, when we are comparing the severity of weather events with past experience, or considering rises in the average temperature of a given region. But, when it comes to rethinking our economy to stem the causes of climate change. Are we wise still to employ this incremental approach? Richard thinks not. Resolving climate change requires changes in the quality of our thinking to take a new direction, not just incremental changes in its quantity, that is in the pace and scale at which we continue on the established path.

Over the past twenty years, studies of “biomimicry” (abstracting good design from nature [1]), have begun to reveal the development principles behind nature’s extraordinarily capable materials and mechanisms. If to achieve a planet-compatible economy, we need to redesign our products and services and the tools and systems by which these products and services are produced and delivered. Nature’s development principles could prove to be very relevant pointers, to guide our new thinking. Why is this?

First, because nature’s development principles and their resulting materials and mechanisms, have all been “environment tested”. They have evolved in tune with natural environments, enabling the many thousands of plants and animals which depend on them, to thrive in harmony with a wide range of habitats. Second, because these principles point the way to low “footprint”, planet-compatible development, using low levels of energy to fashion highly capable materials and mechanisms, from local raw materials. This contrasts starkly with our current development principles, which typically use high levels of energy, to extract, move and convert scattered raw materials into man made materials and mechanisms, resulting in high “footprint” products and services with poor planet-compatibility.

Example: Silk worm silk is stronger than steel cable (weight for weight) and more capable. This silk is produced from locally available bio-materials, in low temperature processes which, when compared with our corresponding processes, e.g. to extract the ore, make and refine the steel and draw and wind the steel cable, are many times more energy efficient. Biomimicry is revealing many such examples relevant to the rethinking of our economy.

Richard argues that to realign our economy with nature as part of our response to climate change. We need to rethink business development in terms of nature’s principles and mechanisms and begin to adopt them. This means rethinking our current, planet-incompatible development priority of generating an ever bigger economy, substituting the better priority of creating an ever better economy. Based increasingly on nature’s principles, this better economy is ever better aligned with our planet’s stability systems and finite material resources, providing ever more capable, affordable products and services.

Adopting nature’s ways offers the order of magnitude reductions in energy and materials usage which are the hard necessities, if we are ever to reduce our “greenhouse” gas emissions by the 50% and 80% targets now being proposed. Adopting nature’s ways, the fruits of biomimicry, looks to offer a much more effective response to climate change, than merely trying to moderate our established, “business as usual” practices by degree.

Refs: 1. Definition of biomimicry - Professor J. Vincent, University of Bath, UK.

21/02/08:
HAS THE “CARBON FOOTPRINT” COME OF AGE?

Has the “carbon footprint” come of age, as a mainstream criterion for business competitiveness? The drive by some leading fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) retailers to make their businesses “carbon neutral” (by progressively reducing the carbon emissions arising from their products and operations and off-setting the diminishing remainder) is now stimulating leading FMCG manufacturers the measure and to manage the “carbon footprints” of their products.

(The “carbon footprint” of a product is the sum of the carbon emissions generated from; raw materials and packaging supply, plus product production and distribution. Some companies also include emissions generated during product use, end-of-life disposal or materials and energy recovery and even consumer store-to-home transport. Carbon footprint is usually expressed as grams of carbon per product unit.)

Why do these moves bring carbon into the mainstream of business competitiveness? Because, by buying off-sets for the residual carbon emissions which they cannot yet eliminate. The retailers concerned have linked the carbon footprints of the products which they sell, directly to their operating costs. As a consequence, products with a persistently high carbon footprint will raise direct operating costs for retailers.

Richard believes that this will generate retailer pressure on suppliers to reduce the carbon footprints of their products, thereby adding the carbon footprint to the mix of criteria by which products compete for retailer shelf-space. This, along with the pricing of carbon emissions in cap and trade schemes, will almost certainly bring carbon management performance into the mainstream of business operation for manufacturers, as well as for their investors and other shareholders.

Richard comments: “Carbon footprint management has to become a desirable, mainstream part of day-to-day business management, if we are to reduce carbon emissions progressively, on the scale now needed to contain the risks of further exacerbating climate change.”

“These changes in FMCG supply are interesting in another way. Carbon footprints as a competitiveness criterion may herald the beginning of an important change in the focus of business development, away from bigger, more consumptive product supply, towards “smarter” products and supply systems which both satisfy customers profitably and reduce the human pressures on our planet of so doing.”