I’ve been learning about balance lately in a highly colaborative workplace. In this environment people come together to determine plans.

I’ve seem Kick-off meetings that attempted to involve everyone degenerate into chaos, I’ve seen well run teams conduct research around problems and solutions and then in the end no real change.  I’ve seen the talkers wandering from office to office selling their version of history and sometimes with great impact.

Can you develop an idea without doing some research.

Can you research an idea without approaching people for their expertise and explaining your idea.

In explaining and having people question how your activities will affect them, how do you explain if you don’t yet have a plan.  (You are still doing research right?)

So you get some information and you start converting your idea into a plan.

If you do have a plan, how do you avoid the impression that you have come up with a wonderful plan for their life without consulting them.

If you consult them, how are you going to balance their interests with the interests of others.

When do you involve people with a project, early enough so that they have a sense of ownership and buy-in, and so that you can benefit from their insights, but not too early so that their confusion poisons the vision for the project.  To early and you have chaos. Too late and you surprise people and they react. (people like surprises, but only for Christmas)

There seems to be a lot of rhetoric tied up in deciding when to involve people.  We’ve all see the projects that stretch on for an eternity and at the end we learn that almost the entire organization was at some point consulted, but in the end the result doesn’t really fit with the desires of the people listed as participants.  We hear about transparency, which seems to imply that you can’t have a meeting without inviting everyone.  We hear about vision and direction and goals, which usually means you missed the last meeting when everything was decided.

There are the pre-meetings before the meeting so that the people with goals can get everybody on side for the meeting and there are the post meeting where the misunderstandings get hammered out in the corridor safely away from where the meeting minutes might capture the insights that dispelled the confusion.

There are the shadow meeting which we all suspect must be taking place because half of the meeting participants are using words as if they had special meanings that had been hammered out previously. (Am I the only one who doesn’t think that makes logical sense?  Why is everyone sitting there smiling at me as if they knew something I don’t?)

For me respect is a big part of meetings.  I not only want to get to consensus, to hammer out issues and get to the root of problems, to get decisions on solutions or directions, I want to be building relationship with the people I meet.  I want to have a stronger connection with them the next time we meet.  A bridge that can carry more weight which, if required can bear the load of some ambiguity or confusion until it can be cleared up.

What are your thoughts about how soon is too soon to involve stakeholders in your meetings?

Our local electricity provider has been running “power smart” adds where strangers suddenly appear in your home or office cheering when you turn out the light as you leave the room, or as you turn off the powerbar to your computer.  The message is that you should be encouraged for such conservation.  I have in the past mindlessly accepted the idea behind these ads as valid, since I have for my adult life turned out the lights I’m not using, but recently I’m coming to question some of what I’m hearing.

Sometimes you might leave a light on for a feeling of security, or if you were to turn off the powerbar, your appliances might lose track of the date or time.  So there are valid reasons for leaving these on when you are not using them.

In TV-Land, all the switches and powerbars are easy to reach (although ugly lying on the desk etc).  In my life I don’t have VERY convenient powerbars, and am more likely to have to reach behind your appliances to find the power bars to turn them on and off (shock hazzard from loose plugs you can’t see clearly is so remote I won’t address that at all).  So the activity isn’t as free as it appears in the ads.  It costs me something.  Convenience (when the remote controls can’t make the appliance wake up), time (running around the house turning things off as I leave).  There is a cost to me.  The concept of power leaches or vampires, that suck a tiny amount of energy constantly has been a popular topic in the press in 2008.

Additionally there have been a number of ads about replacing my old inefficient refrigerator with a new energy smart refrigerator.  I’ve realized that I need to do some research on my own.  What is the cost and what is the benefit to me to the utility and to the environment.

Now I am the kind of guy who turns the VCR or TV off when I’m not actively using them. The lights all go out at night (with the exception of the 0.3Watt LED night lights in the halls).  I turn off lights I’m not using, but I installed the lights so they could be used.  They work for me, not the other way around.   So with a heart that wants to conserve and show my thankfulness through not wasting what I’ve been given, I wanted to know where we were wasting energy.  I purchased a $17 (blue planet?) meter from my local hardware store that can show the Amps, Watts and Volts being used by an appliance in real-time.  Additionally it can log the electricity usage, showing you the total Kilo Watt Hours (KWH) consumed by the appliance over a period of many days.  After you enter the cost of electricity ($0.072 / KWH here) into the meter, it can tell you the dollar cost of your appliance for the time it has been plugged in.  I started making discoveries:

computer / adsl modem / router / UPS / printer : $0.25 / day

Old inefficient refrigerator from the last decade: $0.40 / day

TV / VCR / video game / stereo: $0.10 / day

Laptop computer: $0.05 / day

Microwave:  $0.02 / day

So this causes me to think carefully about what I’m hearing and being told.  I’m being told to switch off the power bar for my TV etc, when the use of the devices is only $0.30 / day.  So conceivably I might save 1 or 2 cents there.  Hardly worth the time is it?  Could I pay you a penny to stop doing what you are doing and spend 10 seconds coming over here and flipping this switch?  If you were paid $20/hour, that is 5.5 cents per 10 seconds.  Now its true, if you have nothing else to do it wouldn’t hurt for you to spend your spare time doing this, but the benefit seems really really minute compared to the cost?  Why is your utility spending $100,000s on this advertising?

My understanding of the issue is that it comes down to capacity.  If they need to build another power plant that is exceedingly expensive, but if they can continue to sell power from the existing power plants, that is a much more reasonable proposition for them.  The issue is nothing if we are talking about you saving $0.01 of electricity for flipping off the power bar.  The issue is really only significant thanks to the power of multiplication.  If you can convince 5,000,000 people to save that much electricity, you just saved $50,000 of electricity per day.  So the impact to your utility is huge, but the savings for you as an individual user of electricity is essentially nothing.

Now how about that refrigerator.  $0.40 per day to keep my food from spoiling seems like a good deal to me.  I don’t have to go down into a cellar, I don’t have to drop my food down a well, or deal with bricks of ice, or food poisoning.  I think it is a bargain.  Through my study of the new energy efficient fridges on the market it appears that the new fridges would use half the electricity per day.  Over the course of a year that would save me $73 in electricity.  However a new fridge costs around $800 (depending on what you buy).  So it would take me 10 years for the fridge’s energy savings to pay for the fridge.  I don’t know about you, but with the quality of manufactured goods dropping, I’m not sure I would expect my new fridge to last me 10 years.  This old fridge on the other hand, continues to work and looks after the food just fine.  So the marketting says “buy a new energy smart fridge”.  To do that, somebody needs to manufacture the fridge with all its glass and plastic and metal and compressors and chemicals and foam.  Then they need to ship it across the country or around the world, advertise it, house it in a store, get it here, and dump my old fridge in a landfill or recycling depot (landfill that sells metal).  It seems to me that the most environmentally responsible thing I can do is to make my existing appliances last as long as I can. 

So suffice it to say that the meter has probably paid for itself in debunking “new appliance savings” and in giving me some peace of mind about the little power leaches plugged in at my house.

 I am happy to say that we enjoy the light provided by the current generation of Compact Flourescent light bulbs (CFL)s  Instead of 100W we use 50W of light over our sink.  Instead of 160W we use 44W in our bathroom. The list goes on of the places we have installed these.  The hallway light behind me, the lamp in the corner.  They aren’t the best light for all situations, but we know that the 33W we are using right now beats the 150W we would have had otherwise.  To my mind this is a very smart energy saving, because apart from purchasing the bulbs initially, there is no incremental cost to turning on a CFL over a standard incandescent light.  It just saves me money and saves us all power without inconveniencing me or introducing an additional cost.

We need to take a very strong stand against “GreenWash” in all its forms.  Keep your brain engaged as you are urged to do this or to do that to save the planet.  Among the genuinely good information there is certainly hype that is designed to pad someone elses wallet at the expense of your own.

In improving Quality, continual improvement through the practice of incremental refinement is a powerful approach.

For example, as I drive home I have a route that works quite well. It is the most direct path between two points or the fastest path between two points. As I go along I start to notice things. Hey, people are turning off here, I wonder why or hey, Google disagrees with me and thinks it knows it better route. (Google maps that is, Google doesn’t talk to me yet…) Or hey, I wonder where that road goes it comes out at an intersection and looks busier than the road I took previously. Through experience we don’t become experts at driving down new roads but we become experts driving down the roads that we know. So with each opportunity to observe a contrary point of view each opportunity to experience the effect of plans. We are in a position to improve and to do better.

I believe in continual refinement. Let’s draft a document, present it to some other knowledgeable people and have them critique it. Then lets present it to our customers and have them shoot it full of holes. After each critique and review, we see problems and we fix them, so it becomes better and better and better until we have a really good document. The alternative is to try and get things perfect before we benefit from the insight and correction we might be offered. Producing PERFECT work is the realm of those who fear that the customer will discover they are not perfect.  In producing PERFECT work (which is really just unreviewed work) Those doing the writing will tend to overthink second guess and overcorrect the work in the hopes that it will not fail, this extra “dilligence” will result in an increased cost that may or may not pay off in acceptance by the customer.

So, let’s put it out so the customers can test it.  Every time the work encounters a problem, we hear about it and we’re able to improve our documentation. Things that we anticipated would be a problem, are not.  However those that we never would have anticipated become problems. We let our customers help us achieve quality through continual and repeated refinement.

In the case of a business process that is being refined, where incremental change is possible (and it isn’t always) staff experience less disruption, maintain more productivity and generally experience less stress caused by change.

Some customers I worked with had been drafting some webpages which would represent their department and department’s initiatives.  They had these pages in draft form for 3 years, during which time, none of their customers could read the information they had been thoughtfully compiling.  The information by that point, ironically was out of date and would require updating.  Their desire to get the information absolutely perfect had effectively removed the entire benefit of compiling the information in the first place.

Often in the IT environment where I work, we wrestle with the need for information that should be documeted, but which has not been. Even if we had partial information, outdated information, or incorrect information that would be preferable to NO INFORMATION.  At least partial information gives you a place to start. A contact, a server name, a vendor’s 1800 number.  So I am through my experience a fan of work that is created imperfect, and then refined as opportunity presents itself. 

Well, this document has been sitting in draft for a while, so I’m going to kick it out there.  Maybe though it it incomplete, it will be of some benefit.  Let me know what you think, and I’ll improve it as we go.

Since 2002 I’ve been running this micro ISV (independent software vendor) and I’ve really enjoyed working with some great customers over the years.  In the current season, I’m taking stock of my life and auditing where I spend my time.  My small children and my wife deserve the bulk of my non-working hours, and that has never been up for debate.  Children however grow up and become more social and require more direct attention.  I’m making sure my kids get that from me, and adjusting the way that I work with GreenTree to accomodate that. 

One way that I have been attempting to honour my customers for the last 6 years is by filling in the gaps myself.  Where a customer has requested A and B, but really those don’t make sense without C, I’ve built C for them at no cost.  Where a customer has asked for a feature that requires massive re-working, I’ve shared the cost of that re-working with them.  So while they have seen some of the costs of customizing software, they have not had seen the whole cost.  I however had seen that hidden cost, often working unseen late into the evenings only to get up early the next morning for work.   So I’ve attempted recently to restore balance and cut out the overwork.

In order for my family or my business to be healthy, I must be healthy.  A tree providing shade to animals, soil retention to the land, and purification for the air, must be thriving.   I see that now, and I’m ready for this next season of re-focussing and prioritizing, of Auditing my life.  I am the green tree.

Greg.