Intentional design is the most productive kind. It begins with “who’s it for?” and “what’s it for?” as foundational questions.
Along the way, complicated systems muddy design because there are so many “who”s to answer to.
Take this simple product found at a Hilton hotel, designed and sold by a division of Sysco, the giant food service company. It’s a little bigger than your thumb…
Well, if the “what’s it for” is to use in the shower, and the “who’s it for” is the hotel guest, it fails in countless ways.
It’s almost impossible to read (white type on a clear background). If you’re wearing glasses, or there’s steam, or you need glasses, then it is impossible to read.
It’s almost impossible to open as well. The diameter of the top is too small for most people to get a good grip on, particularly when used as intended–while in the shower. It turns out that the top doesn’t even screw off, there’s a tiny sharp lip that has to be popped up.
And now we get to the system problems.
The user didn’t purchase this. A well-meaning bureaucrat at Hilton worked with a well-meaning salesperson at a Sysco company to make the transaction happen. Both of them were trying to please their bosses. This might be as simple as, “buy something cheap,” but it could also have to do with favors owed, financing options or the convenience of delivery.
But wait, it gets worse.
When this container is used just one time, it’s discarded. It’s almost certainly put in an incinerator and burned for electricity or simply thrown into a landfill, where it will remain for a million years. The bottle is not only made of plastic, it’s at least five times thicker and heavier than it needs to be to do its job.
It’s not a refillable pump that is affixed to the wall and lasts for four years. It’s a disposable jar that uses almost as much energy to produce and lasts for one day.
The end result is hundreds of thousands or millions of these bottles, poisoning our world, simply because one designer asked the wrong questions.
This is the reason The Carbon Almanac needs to be part of the conversation at ordinary companies like Hilton, for typical employees like the hard-working person who is the customer of the hard-working person who designed the bottle in the first place. Because one person designed one item that ended up being reproduced a million times, frustrating hundreds of thousands of wet people in hundreds of thousands of showers and then producing countless pounds of toxic carbon released into the air.
Nobody wins when this happens. It wastes time and money and goodwill. All because the system isn’t clear about who it’s for and what it’s for.
Someone is going to ask you. They probably already have.
A co-worker, a boss, a politician, a kid… they’ll ask you about sustainability, the climate, investments, choices to be made about the future.
This is the Cliff’s Notes and guidebook for that moment.
We make choices every day. Choices about what to buy, whether to recycle something, what to drive, who to vote for, how to produce and whether to go for more or for less. We make choices about the future, often with considerable consequences.
But we’re confused. Often deliberately, by forces that would rather we didn’t make up our own minds, who prefer that we don’t learn what need to learn. And sometimes we’re confused simply as a side effect of a complicated situation made even more complicated by a flurry of charts, graphs and opinions.
We need to make up our own minds.
Over the last 9 months, I’ve learned an enormous amount. Changed my mind about things I was sure were true. I’ve discovered thoughtful analysis and significant falsehoods. When I volunteered to help organize the Carbon Almanac, I didn’t know that thousands of people in more than 90 countries would volunteer to join the process, and I’m so glad they did.
And today’s the day the book arrives in the US and Canada, with worldwide editions coming soon. (I’d avoid the audio edition, as it’s really designed to be a browsable, shareable almanac.)
We have two slogans:
Don’t take our word for it and It’s not too late.
You’re already being asked to decide. Knowing what’s going on and being able to look up authoritative data gives you the chance to make up your own mind. There are more than 1,000 sources, all online, all organized in the Almanac. Isn’t it better to know?
And it isn’t too late to make an impact. But we need to begin. We need to see the systems and make a decision about whether they’re the systems we want to hand off to our kids.
I’m grateful to every person who contributed to this all-volunteer effort, and to you, for caring enough to learn about what’s happening. I hope you’ll get a few copies, share them and join with people around the world to learn what’s happening.
Thank you.
PS We’re doing a worldwide book signing on Saturday. I’ll post more details later in the week.
The purpose of most communication isn’t to completely explain yourself. Too often, we get stuck relieving tension, making our case and closing the door on the discussion.
The purpose is to open the door to interaction, learning and action. “Who’s there?” is a fine response to hope for.
Communication is a process, not an event.
The all-volunteer Carbon Almanac launches tomorrow. You can pre-order today for delivery on pub day in the US (I recommend the print edition much more than the digital or audio–it’s best as a book.) It’s not too late but we need to begin changing our systems. And you can’t change a system until you see it.
When we examine our life experiences, the ones that stand out are usually about change. Either we were changed or we helped someone else get to where they sought to go.
And change is fleeting. And change changes us. We can’t step in the same river twice, because the second time, the river itself has changed.
The pressure we put on ourselves for every project to be “the best ever” experience creates a shallow race for bling instead of a deeper, more useful focus on what’s actually possible.
Seeking to rank our experiences takes us out of the moment. It turns us into sportscasters, spectators and statisticians. We end up comparing our wedding or our box office numbers or our tweet stats not only to our own best ever, but to the stats of others.
This summer is unlikely to be your best summer ever. But it will be a summer, and it’s up to each of us to decide what to do with it.
Every project is worth the journey if we let it be.
Humans gossipped before we figured out fire, housing or farming. It’s built into our culture and possibly our DNA.
Gossip informs culture and can influence connection and hierarchies. And in many communities, it’s destructive.
If office gossip is benefitting you and the people you work with, good for you. But if office gossip is leading to stress, turnover or low satisfaction, it might be time to do something about it.
Two suggestions:
The first is a simple boundary. Don’t talk about anyone on the team unless they’re in the room.
This is simple to say and surprisingly difficult to do. Talking about people behind their back is built into the practice of management. It’s also the main sport of the water cooler and the fuel for gossip.
One boss meets with another boss to talk about an employee. And now there’s a reason to gossip and wonder.
With Zoom calls transcending space and time, there’s no longer a logistical reason to leave someone out. And you can adopt the posture that if it’s worth talking about someone, it’s worth including the person being talked about.
Once this becomes your practice, it gets more difficult to speculate about what was said, because nothing was said.
The second, which can’t work until you’ve consistently done the first, is to challenge office gossip at every turn. Thriving DM traffic on your Slack, cliques in the lunchroom–these undermine the organization you’re building. You wouldn’t tolerate people stealing petty cash or telling off your customers… the culture becomes what you tolerate.
Gossip won’t disappear. It can’t. But making it clear to the high performers that things aren’t like that around here–and meaning it–sends a message about the focus and culture of the team you’re working so hard to build.
There are two kinds of skills, resources and tools:
Ones that get used up as you use them.
And ones that get better when you do.
Nobody wants there to be a crowd at the ski area on a bluebird powder day–too many people use up the new snow.
On the other hand, it’s no fun at all to go dancing when you’re the only one in the club.
A painting or a song that’s experienced by more people is worth more. A carpenter increases her skills when she works on new projects (to a point). On the other hand, a sharp knife gets dull if you use it too often…
If you’ve got something that benefits from use, from practice and community, use it and share it.
It may be that I think we’re facing something serious, something costly, something urgent–and you don’t.
We can have an honest conversation about the problem without worrying about whether there’s an easy or certain solution.
We can also have a conversation about whether it’s a problem (problems have solutions) or whether it’s simply a situation, something like gravity that we have to live with.
Once we agree that we have a problem, the status quo will show up. It will argue with every tool it has that any variation from the current path is too risky, too expensive and too painful to consider. The status quo will stall. It will argue for studies and will amplify the pain that will be caused to some as we try to make things better for everyone.
And the status quo usually wins. That’s because the makers of change are now playing defense, forced to justify every choice and ameliorate every inconvenience.
Perhaps there’s a more useful way forward.
We begin by agreeing that there’s a problem.
And then each party, every single one, needs to put forward a plan. A plan that either addresses the problem or takes responsibility for not addressing it.
And for each plan, we can consider the likely outcomes. For each plan, we can ask, “will that work?” and follow it up with, “why?” and “how?”
Perhaps you don’t think it’s a problem worth solving. That’s important to bring up before we ask you if you have a plan.
Delay might be the best option. But then let’s be honest and announce that instead of simply stalling.
