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Monthly Archives: April 2009
Sustainability is FREE?
AuSSI is the Australian SAM Sustainability Index. This is a index which highlights the performance of organizations in Australia which are relatively better in terms of their performance in the planet, people and profits area.
The latest update shows that the performance of this index mimics the performance of the ASX 200, the general stock index perfectly over many years.
This is quite interesting. What does this tell us?
- Is Sustainability a better corporate strategy in general? May not be.
- Sustainability has no extra cost, best case is that it is performance neutral. In essence, FREE.
My conclusions could be wrong. However, this graph clearly highlights that there is an opportunity here. If a sustainability strategy which is better for the company, community and the climate creates a long term share performance which is on average same as a non-sustainability startegy (for a lack of a better word), then in essence the costs of sustainability are free and derive benefits which match the costs atleast.
In total, this is a good result. More investigation is require.
Thinking in Systems Online Course
I wrote about the book Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows and Jeremy from ISEE Systems informs me through this comment that they have developed a course based on the book for a sustainability strategy. It is a 4 session web based seminar costing USD 200.
One of the presenters is the editor of the book. Check it out here. The speed with which these guys have reacted is impressive. I am thinking of attending this course.
ICT and Sustainability Strategy – Research from Telstra
It is evident that ICT can provide solutions which help in providing flexible work practices in turn having costs, energy and carbon savings.
Telstra, the large Australian telecommunication provider has created a whitepaper on ICT and Sustainability. Their PR agency contacted me by e-mail and provided the details.
This paper (which can be downloaded here by registering) co-authored with the World Wildlife Fund or WWF as it is generally called has inputs from CapGemini consulting on ROI.
Basically, this is a paper which highlights the use of video conferering, tele communiting and web contact center using Telstra solutions and its impact on savings in terms of cost and carbon. Even though it is a sell for Telstra’s solutions (and there is nothing wrong with that), I especially liked the Return on Investment tool provided in the Appendix.
This ROI tool is quite comprehensive and provides a detailed cost benefit analysis of the solutions. And in a time span of 5 years for large organizations there is a clear case of investing in these solutions.
For example, the Teleworking solution for a 1800 member organization starting with 200 teleworkers and increasing 5% every year in Sydney or Melbourne has a Net Present Value of $2 million in a span of 5 years. That is a good return. This is based on a lot of assumptions in terms of costs etc however, one such assumption is a work from home of 3 days a week.
I think this is not feasible for many organizations and a more typical work week may be 3 days at the office and 2 days at home. I will be interested to check out the excel or webbased calculator to work with my own assumptions.
Interestingly, I am developing a new initiative to research and establish a teleworking solution within my organization starting in May. This will be quite handy.
Ceramic Fuel Cells – good match for India’s needs
Gottliebsen writes about a small Australian company trying to generate de-centralized clean power.
Ceramic Fuel Cells has developed a small $6,000 home generator that has an 85 per cent power/heat conversion rate. A normal large power station has a 40 per cent power conversion rate. Ceramic’s high conversion figures have fascinated a whole range of European and Japanese power utilities who can see that the units can slash greenhouse emissions and halve the amount of gas required to generate home/office electricity and heating. And as the energy is produced in the home or office there is no transmission waste, although surplus electricity can be sold back to the grid.
Rural India and parts of urban India need local electricity and cooling facilities and lack continuous electricity. AUD6000 is about Rs 200,000 which is not a large amount for a business or a small shop. Depending on the operating costs and fuel required, this could be a good replacement to the millions of diesel generators used across India. Same will be true for a number of developing countries.
I think there is a good market and a business plan can be developed.
Thinking in Systems
Darcy Hithcock from AXIS highlights Donella Meadows book “Thinking in Systems: A Primer” in her latest newsletter.
A lot of the sustainability solutions are around understanding “systems” and the “places to intervene in a system” to find a solution or a better equilibrium.
I understand the benefits and now I need to dig deeper, learn the vocabulary and implement systems thinking in my work and life.
I wish I could have met Donella Meadows before she died unexpectedly in 2001. She’s a brilliant mind but also an excellent teacher. The book, finished and published posthumously, is filled with easy-to-understand metaphors and examples (Slinkys and hot cups of coffee.), making a complex subject approachable. She also emphasizes that systems thinking isn’t better than reductionist thinking; it’s complimentary. As our world tries to pull ourselves out of an unsustainable and crashed economy, these concepts are well worth revisiting.
She reveals common human mistakes when dealing with systems:
–we focus on stocks (fish in sea, forests) more than flows (rates of decline);
–we focus more in inflows (producing more stuff to grow the economy) rather than outflows (slowing the rate at which things need to be replaced);
–we focus more on events than patterns;
–because of delays in the system, we often use interventions that make the problem worse (e.g., inventory imbalances).“You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take you eyes of short-term events and look for long-term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries, nonlinearities and delays. You are likely to mistreat, misdesign, or misread systems if you don’t respect the properties of resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy.”
Of particular use is her listing of common system traps and what to do about them:
* policy resistance
* tragedy of the commons.
* Drift to low performance
* Escalation
* Success to the successful.
* Shifting the burden to intervenor
* Rule beating
* Seeking the wrong goalIn Part Three, Meadows explains her places to intervene in a system. This is the part most people are familiar with but in this lexicon, there are 12 points (from least effective to highest impact):
* Numbers
* Buffers
* Stock and Flow Structures
* Delays
* Balancing feedback loops
* Reinforcing feedback loops
* Information flows
* Rules
* Self-organization
* Goals
* Paradigms
* Transcending paradigms
*She advises us to
* first get the ‘beat’ of a system before trying to change it,
* expose your mental models,
* honor, respect and distribute information
* Use language with care, infused with systems concepts
* Pay attention to what is important, not just quantifiable
* Make feedback policies for feedback systems
* Go for the good of the whole
* Listen to the wisdom in the system
* Locate responsibility in the system
* Stay humble
* Celebrate complexity.In the end, she discovers that “ We can’t control systems of figure them out. But we can dance with them!”
