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Friday 8 June 2012

How technology enables the Shared Economy

A great short speech by the founder of ZipCar (i.e. car sharing service) who is now working on BuzzCar (i.e. do your own carsharing).  Amazing how step by step the idea evolved from our anti-share attitude inching closer to real and increasingly effective results.



Speed and scale can be achieved when you combine excess capacity (of individuals, corporations or governments) with a common platform for participation.  This can grow faster than traditionally as it is collaboratively built infrastructure.

Also, she touches on the subject that our thinking has evolved from preferring centralised models to decentralised models and now to networks.  Here is a short video explaining this concept further... by the end of it you’ll think networks are the shizzle!


Social Technology for decision making

A few days ago I watched a documentary called us now, which was recommended to me on the Social Media course I am currently doing.  This film focusses on the potential of social media to make us a more collaborative species in regards to decision making. The examples in the film (e.g. couchsurfing, Ebbsfleet soccer picks, Zopa, slice the pie, etc) show that transformation of how we do things is now possible with speed and scale, and that it is now becoming possible to self-govern.
I love how people feel ownership when they can be a part of governance – I imagine that this will help us meet our needs better (syst cond 4)!  Imagine if what happened with the Ebbsfleet soccer team could happen in NZ rugby, I have definitely heard enough couch commentators to think this would be quite popular! Zopa (in NZ, maybe Nexx to come soon) shows us how to cut out the middle-man in banking, and with slice the pie the middle-man in music recording. The idea of giving out scholarships based on votes as opposed to one person deciding who and what is most worthy also resonates well with me, and hints that this is what could be done with public funds too (although need to find a way that this can't be corrupted). I imagine it could work well for shareholders, at least in cooperatives (e.g. the recently started Lyttleton store). Imagine - community consciousness can now be measured and used!  
I found it interesting there is a quote in there ‘those people who are best at adjusting from management to leader are those that are comfortable with the idea of letting go’… I will take that on board – because I am sure I want to be that kind of leader!

Friday 25 May 2012

Systems Thinking for New Zealand

For my first assignment I decided to focus on New Zealand to demonstrate my understanding of the things we learned in our first courses.  For this I made my first Prezi, and a report.

Thursday 10 May 2012

When like minds come together to discuss resilience in Auckland

Last night I attended the Hikurangi Foundation’s first Open Space Forum ‘New Zealand & the Next Industrial Age’ with Rowan Douglas (Willis Research Network) who gave a rough overview of his impression of New Zealand and the Insurance Industries take on how we have managed the Christchurch earthquake and what this new age of extremes will be like to operate in.  By extremes he means the ever increasing rate of natural disasters, economic instability, new technology, etc.


He pointed out that our Institutions were set up with the aim of achieving ‘efficiency’ but that the time has now come where we need ‘resilience’ (a.k.a. sustainability).  According to him, the Insurance Industry is in a state of rediscovery and has the challenge of learning about and deciding how to manage extremes, e.g. do we acquire the funds to assist societies after extreme turmoil using local or international schemes, and do they come from public or private sources?


Apparently, the Industry bases most of its operational guidelines (e.g. how much money to have on standby) on scientific data (good to hear!) acquired through computer modeling.  He didn’t spend too much time on this point, but went on to say that the Industry is currently in restructuring mode and outlined all of the reasons why New Zealand could be a model for the rest of the world in more ways than one. 

The Open Space Forum created 6 topics of conversation and after we had 30 minutes to chat amongst ourselves the groups shared a short summary.  The topics were:
·         Building resilient (proactive) communities: Main points were that we have to get more community engagement.  NZers lack knowledge of their local assets and attributes, which is a scary thought.  They also lack a conscience of how bad overseas conditions are and we also lack it on regional matters because we read the low-quality national news more than local newspapers.  
·         The use of legislation for resilience:  Some have realized that economic growth is not the same as wellbeing, but the conscious paradigm shift needs to occur both for public and private sectors.
·         The role data could play in communities and the ethics about its openness and source: organizations become sustainable and resilient only slowly, so they need to be able to measure that they are heading in the right direction along the way.  Seeing how data responds and organizes is very powerful and communities should have this ability (e.g. Whistler does it!).  At the moment government and business uses this tactic, and all the data that’s collected is framed for their use only.  Data and models are only useful when they are applicable.  Also, do we use their outputs to inform us or blindly?  Quite quietly, one woman spoke and not many picked up this gem: she said, ‘there is value in collecting data on peoples values to inform us’ and it just made me think back to the my favourite concept of ‘we should be voting on issues, not a popularity contest’ and the idea that probably founded our current political system i.e. we do not need to vote on issues if we know peoples values.  I bet there hasn’t been a hell of a lot of research (good and recent research I mean) into what NZers values are.  NZers are quite a diverse bunch you know?!  I must look into this.
·         Effective public-private-partnerships:  We often have public sector trying to do the private sector thing and failing but the private sector probably has to have its paradigm shift first i.e. what’s the purpose of business (hint: not just to make money like a greedy bugger anymore! Come up with something better!)
·         The national security of New Zealand and its clean green brand: this is the one I went to, and met a bunch of really interesting people. The main points that really resonated with me were: NZ’s long skinny shape needs to be considered for security and resilience reasons.  What industries do we need to be self-sufficient and resilient?  Would we be better off investing in new spread out infrastructure than upgrading our old one?  It’s vital that our current top-down heavy approach is matched with bottom-up approaches.  A collective fund (such as the EQ levy) would be helpful to finance after extreme events.  The one question we didn’t get to but I wanted to discuss was: What needs to happen to speed up adoption of good ideas?

What I took from the evening was the following:
·         Great conversations can happen when you put people who are interested in the same things in a room and let them choose which topics to discuss and contribute to.
·         A first glimpse into the perspective that the Insurance Industry has in regards to the future and its place in it.
·         Industries are all gagging to have indicators or tools to measure progress.  I am quite sure that we can still do better to develop an applicable measuring tool for how sustainable something is yet, and I’m keener than ever to dedicate some time into the subject.

Wednesday 9 May 2012

Reflections after the second Block Course

I have just returned home after spending 3 days in Raglan for the second sustainable practice block course.  I really enjoyed staying at Solscape - its fantastic views over the harbour (with gorgeous colours at sunrise and sunset) and voluptuous greenery made me feel as relaxed as if I were on holiday.  The learning was good fun and the people made it even better.  The first day and a half was spent on the community/business paper we are embarking on, and the latter half was used to teach us more about the power of social media... so in the next set of posts will likely feature these two topics predominantly.  However, I've noticed its turned into an info-dump at times, so I'll start popping in a few more purely reflective posts (like this one) to get more out of it.

What are the predominant thoughts I'm coming away with from this block course?  I'm definitely feeling more confident!  Steve's 'anything-is-fantastic, the-more-spontaneous-the-better and learn-your-own-way' thinking pattern is rubbing off on me more an more and I feel all the better all the time.  I can feel my true creativity coming back too, which I realise now is one of my strongest assets.  I've identified my 3 month goal (the length of these next papers) is to pretty much finish up all my assignment requirements, but they are the minor detail in the intention I'm putting forward to just practice applying all the things I have learned (whether they fit into the modules or not).  A reoccurring theme that has come up when I've dedicated time to thinking about what I want, and that is to have my fingers in a lot of pies.  Any time in my life - if there were literally(!) many flavours of pies in front of me - all I wanted was to have a taste of each.  I can confidently confess that I am a generalist who loves the big picture overview and its variety! So, what I'm going to do - apart from my assignments - is aim to help out all the other people in my class (and honorary members beyond) in lots of little ways.  A usual classroom wouldn't reward that, and that's probably why it took me so long to figure out.

Little extra comment:  On Sunday morning, whilst I was out at golf, I received a txt from mum to call her, and she told me that her dad passed away over night (daytime 5/5/12 in germany).  Fortunately, he had had a nice day with her sister (lunch and a visit to Oma's grave), and went to sleep just 5 minutes after returning to his room.  I was a little surprised at the news, but mum was so good about it that I didn't feel horrible.  We knew he wanted to go.  Oma passed away just under a year ago after battling cancer, and they had been together for over 60 years!  Later in the day I spent some time processing it, and the cliche feelings of appreciating time on this earth came on.  Mark and I went out for dinner to toast Opa and got talking about our future options.  Afterwards, when we were home, I showed him a really interesting video I thought would be quite fitting for him to see (sustainability focussed of course haha!) - and the experience was amazing... I had always shown him this-or-that video, but in this one the message was so that things really clicked into place for him.  We are on the same page now more so than ever before.  Thank you Opa for kicking it off! Prost!

Thursday 26 April 2012

Tools for Measuring Success

For every organisation that wants to measure its progress on the journey to sustainability, there need to be tools that are appropriate for their situation. Fortunately, many have already been developed (even though strong sustainability hasn't always been their goal). One of the most official that large corporations are already familiar with is the ISO 14001 standard. Here is a research article reviewing it from the point of view of the Natural Step framework.  The main conclusion is "tools such as ISO 14001, while a useful start, do not in themselves assist an organization in strategic planning, with true sustainability in mind".  As Karl-Henrick mentions in the presentation a few blogs down, all of these have a place and are useful, but currently only the 5-level framework is capable of looking at the whole picture to stimulate thinking towards transformational change.

Other tools are:
  • Envirostep (an entry level online assessment tool to help SMEs understand, improve and communicate environmental performance)
  • Tourism Oil Price Tool (an online assessment tool for New Zealand tourism businesses to assess relative exposure to profitability risks associated with higher world oil prices)
  • The Global Reporting Initiative have an indicator search.
  • ANEW New Zealand Integrated Structure of Indicators - this site has a variety of national and international case studies on indicators. Their research project aims to assist Councils to develop their community outcomes and performance indicators and to assist in moving toward an integrated structure of indicators across all Councils

Sustainable Housing in NZ

Who knew that there were so many cool things happening in NZ in regards to sustainable shelter!  This Solar Action Innovative Housing issue (2010) has a whole lot of information, including a the results of the Sustainable Habitat Challenge which was launched to stimulate new building design ideas; this Building a Better Way: Summary for Designers document they produced afterwards gives a detailed overview of some inspirations.  Such a clever idea to use a national competition to gather research data (see page 12 of the newsletter)!  So efficient its genius!
Also, for anyone who is interested in Villa renovations, see this Retrofit and Renovation resource.

Better by Design

A cool talk by Adam Lowry who spoke on Creating Positive Change Through Design Integration in Business at the Better By Design CEO Summit in NZ (2010).

After he was fed up with the common notion of having to buy inferior products to 'be good to the planet' he started a cleaning products range which has been quite successful and forced their competitors to think differently, thereby creating massive change (bigger than just their business).



Can't argue with success... and it seems that CEO's have really cottoned on to the importance of sustainability, it was listed as one of the 5 big shifts in this space by James Goodman and Martin Wright when they produced this article Five shifts in Sustainability that will make waves in 2011.  
Oh, we are in 2012 now right?! So here's my quick observational response to how spot-on these projections were:
1. Nowhere to hide as the open society arrives (absolutely, as long as the internet is alive we are all going to be more an more informed than before and this will lead to bottom-up rising-up all over the place).
2. Africa, from basket case to boom time (yep, the biggest untapped market is being tapped.  Whether it be negatives like land-grabs or positives like start-up support - numerous examples in Richard Branson's book Screw Business as Usual; he's even set up a centre for entrepreneurship there - Africa is the place to consider).
3. Biodiversity, its a business issue (I'm not sure how much this factored in, I have a feeling its something that is being discussed in a lot of boardrooms but I haven't seen many headlines or commitments to support other species yet... but I sooo want to!)
4. The return of climate change, will science strike back (yes, I'd agree that there is less of a climate-denier presence than there was in 2010, based on my NZ perspective at least)
5. CEO's have finally cottoned on, what now? (again, there might be plenty of boardroom discussions but we need more action, now!  Overall though as the stats in the article indicate, more and more people are getting it, we are closer to actions than we have been before.)

Wednesday 25 April 2012

Whistler Canada case study

Here is a video of interviews with Whistler's municipal decision makers about the decision making process they used to evaluate a new infrastructure investment using the Natural Step Framework.



I have yet to finish reading the Whistler 2020 plan and Key Lessons, as soon as I do I'll update this post with more info.

The Whistler 2020 Performance monitoring programme tracks and reports their status and progress toward the Whistler 2020 Vision through Core Indicators and Strategy Indicators. You can track Whistler's progress towards or away from each Whistler 2020 Priority, Strategy and Sustainability Objectives. The monitoring programme tracks progress, informs decision making, and ensures accountability while educating and engaging community members and stakeholders. Progress is reported at least annually for most indicators.  Pretty cool huh?

Applying ABCD