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About me  Eastern Ruby  CFL  Ok Tedi  Android  USA to China  Standout  Lens  Integral  Stage  Diplomat  Achiever  BC Hydro  Individualist  Wombat  What next?  Climate  Simple  Clean  This speech
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About me Eastern Ruby CFL Ok Tedi Android USA to China Standout Lens Integral Stage Diplomat Achiever BC Hydro Individualist Wombat What next? Climate Simple Clean This speech |
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 Waste Management Association of Australia | A thinking feeling lean wasteline
Thorough-out this conference people have been hearing about significant results. On a scale of 1 to 3 how do you think we are going?
And despite this our overall society now has an even greater impact - we now need the equivalent of 1.5 worlds to absorb humanity's waste and provide our resources every year. My talk focuses on this. What's going on? How come we know how to change yet often don't do it even when such change is profitable? First some background and there are no prizes for guessing the activist in this one. This is 1990 and in various forms I have been a professional environmentalist for 20 years. Today I'm the director of GreenMode, a sustainability consultancy. One of our recent projects highlights the theme for this talk. This is Murraylands Life - a cutting edge $75 million sustainable housing development. It's design includes:
And critically:
So, a key questions is, if it costs no more why isn't everybody doing this? Doesn't a profit motive make change happen? Or is this what makes change happen? The ship is Eastern Ruby carrying rainforest timber from Sarawak. Malaysia The flags read "Stop the Chop" Greenpeace I'm on the ship. My friends - Richard and Doug - are holding the flags in the water. Pilot's ladder down the side of the ship was too short I jumped first from the zode with a full pack on in 2 metre swell. I caught the bottom run by literally with my fingernails and thought..... Ok well that's not repeatable here! Anyway I got up the ladder, told the crew at the top I was the 'forest patrol' and walked straight past climbing up the mast to hang the standard Greenpeace banner. The answer, of course, is that change is money and motivation and, a lot more too. And given this is complex we need some good maps. This illustration uses the humble light bulb. Look around you. In nearly any country you will see incandescent light bulbs or halogen down lights. To paraphrase Amory Lovins - each of these lights, remaining in its socket unchanged, is the same as walking past a $50 note on the pavement. But, for the last two decades while effective alternatives have been available, many people have nevertheless continued to walk past the light bulb. Answering why and specifically identifying the individual perspectives and society cultures - the left hand side of the screen - that drive or are barriers to change is step 1 of mapping this complexity. Compare this to how we've often been forced to expose waste practices. Whether its waste from a mine (above) An exhibit using a seven metre high android (this is equal to the electronic waste an average person in Britain would consume over lifetime (above). Or stopping toxic waste that is also widely shipped around the world ... these issues have been successfully highlighted primarily by images. In 1994 the power of these images helped changed an international convention. The Basel Convention now bans practices like the one above (American computer scrap sent to China and returned courtesy Greenpeace). But it's a limited change. It has not occurred at anything like the rate that would make rational sense. At the same time standout changes, dramatically cutting environmental impacts from human activities and consumption, are seen. Examples include:
These examples are a bigger scale version of the humble light bulb case study. That is we know it is in our individual, organisational and collective interests to act. But whether it's specific financial motivation or broader considerations there's a paradoxical gap between the drivers and action. Arguably the waste industry, recycling and avoidance has been at the forefront of confronting these sorts of sustainability issues. But there are still massive opportunities from resource efficiency and Hence the picture - we often look at the world through only one or two lenses - measurable objective numbers and profit. But successful waste and sustainability interventions are doing far more than this. They are actively considering and the worldviews and perspectives that individuals hold. And they are considering the organisational culture or society's developmental centre of gravity. More formally this is shown with a model explicitly highlighting internal views and perspectives as well as the objective measurement and outcomes. The left side represents the interior, subjective perspectives - Meaning and intent At times people preference their feelings about things much more than they preference external facts. The right side represents exterior or objective. The facts. Sometimes people believe that if you can't measure it, then it is not real. This denies interior depth If we're expecting to answer waste or sustainability or climate change challenges based only on a objective, measured - or if you like 'flatland' view - we're likely to be disappointed. In this short presentation there's only time to focus on one particular part of this model. A lens on how people make sense of the world - the top left hand side of the picture above. And just one piece of how we make sense of the world as well - our development. This is a very short detailed but important part of the presentation so please bear with me for one minute on this concept - our development. This has a very strong influence over the ways in which we approach issues like waste or the environment. Human development occurs in stages. This research into human attitudes has been ongoing for decades. Jean Piaget was foremost in this work and identified development stages in children and adolescents. For example when a three-year-old in the bathtub sees the water go down the drain, she makes a fairly straightforward connection between the water which disappears and her body and toys. These seem to be in imminent danger. At this stage in her life, the child does not have the capacity to see the difference between the disappearing water and the toys which are too large to wash away. Crying, she begs to be removed from the tub and she struggles to save all of her precious things as she escapes. Several months later, the same child - with something of a different mind now - calmly and playfully watches the last bit of water disappear, poking it with her toys as it goes. The water has not changed at all but, her ability to make fine distinctions has grown more complex. She now has a different form of understanding the world, a new stage perspective on the world or world-view. Our development does not stop as a teenager - thankfully! Most of the stages you see on the screen are drawn from Loevinger work and subsequent refinement of it. It's known as constructive development theory. What's important for us at the moment is to recognise that people, while capable of holding perspectives on an issue from several different stages tend to have a centre of gravity to their views. Let me give you a couple of examples of the most common stages The first stage is The Diplomat. A person interacting with others mostly with a perspective from this stage will typically: And the first quote above is from a self described climate sceptic. But before you judge, this person has put water tanks on her home, because she's always grown up drinking rainwater and it makes her feel good. When asked why she's done this however she firstly said it was a financial decision. Of course rainwater tanks don't really make that much financial sense. When this is worked through with the person she'll admit financial was not really the motivation. It was her desires along with her community's expectations. You'll find that similar community values run across many of the statements people viewing the world from a predominantly diplomat stage express. Second The Expert (yellow). A person at interacting with others from this stage typically: The impact is apparent - both for the useful outcomes as well as the frustration this can cause for a group seeking to act on a waste or environmental issues - in the second quote above. This person was describing a regional waste and sustainability leadership group and the projects they had catalysed and delivered (as well as been stymied on). I want to show you one more stage before playing an example. The next stage - achiever - is the first stage where you'll find significant action from a self chosen (but not self created) ethical system. It's a stage that is expressed in the modern industrialised world - think of some of our focus on technology to answer waste issues. Specifically Achievers: The first quote speaks of a person's experience in acting on emissions - you can get action when there is a "positive economic effect". But the limitations of this approach are made highlighted in the second quote. This is what happened after Nobel Laureate and (ex) USA Vice President Al Gore spoke to senior leaders in the person's organisation (the organisation was also undertaking a range of other climate change initiatives at the same time). Exactly the same business case, same profitable outcomes but, it was not possible to get engagement and action - or people who tried to get such engagement and action felt stuck - prior to extra intervention and the impact Al Gore had on the organisation and individuals within it. Now I'd like to show you an example of this in practice. Please watch for the appeal to modern day values that we have taken on board but not created for ourselves - achiever - with nods to the family and local community thrown in - diplomat and expert. Another interesting part of this clip is what is not acceptable in modern society. Wasting at home is regarded as abnormal. Hard material waste is being used to illustrate the stupidity of doing the same thing with electricity. This next stage is sometimes popularised as the 'Cultural Creatives'. Complexity of language and concepts is increasing and we're criticising the modern day for it's failures and limited scope. Something like 20% of Australians would resonate with this stage. The Individualist: The two quotes reflect an organisational perspective where the person (part of it's senior executive) is describing a devolved hierarchical system through which individual divisions take responsibility for sustainability delivery (while still being responsible for an overall set of organisational sustainability aims. The second quote is a person describing their reasons to act on environmental issues. Let me show you an example. It's speaking to people about our impact on other humans and life around the world. Gotta love the wombat... So what would this look like? These are my suggestions for what to do as a fist step to using this. I'll just give you one example on the last dot point above - and carbon action Here's a carbon waste example The individual perspectives can be put back together with society or organisational cultural drivers. And matched up with measured (or statements expressed as objective) actions - the right hand side of our quadrants before. Above is a snapshot example for climate change. Actions and reasons not to act (in the bottom right) match up with - often unexpressed, articulated or realised - feelings and values (in the top left). The point is we want change in a complex world. Bewildering complexity gridlocks action. Oversimplification won't work either. So how about simple complexity? It's always good to finish with a Nobel Prize Winner. This is Elinor Ostrom, 2009, Economics. I started out talking about environmental action - how we get change and need more. The more is that we need to move out of flatland. When the measurements are the most appropriate way of getting action - absolutely focus on them. But this is often not the case - so I've been suggesting you actively consider a fuller picture. If it's appropriate to just focus on the objective measurement stuff after this then do it. It's a more effective informed position to work from and saves you time and energy in delivering results. Clean Production: A thinking feeling lean wasteline background paper (pdf) here. |
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