Intelligent Futures Insights

Back in the air

2010-04-26T22:21:00.000-06:00

Just a quick entry. A great demonstration of how connected our world is today. Here’s a video showing the planes getting back in the air after the volcano-induced shutdown of European airspace.

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

The Blog Cloud

2010-03-19T11:25:00.004-06:00

I've been negligent when it comes to blogging over the past months. My time and attention has been taken away from the IF blog thanks to a new project I hope to launch in the next week or two (stay tuned!). In the meantime, I came across a cool tool called Many Eyes. It's a visualization tool that you can use free on the web. Just upload your data and choose how you'd like to present it. I've written a number of times in this space about finding new ways of getting your message across. Here's one tool to help you do that.

I decided to do a "word cloud" of my blog from the beginning to

the present day. Very interesting to see what has come up frequently. You can see it below:

From the mouths of babes...

2010-01-29T05:54:00.002-07:00

Last week was a crazy speaking week. Here's what it looked like:

Monday - Present an overview of planning in Calgary to the Architectural Technologies program at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.

Wednesday morning - Three one-hour talks with grade 6 classes at Olympic Heights Elementary School about imagineCALGARY and sustainability.

Wednesday afternoon - Present on sustainability planning to a graduate seminar - "The Postmodern City" at the University of Calgary's Faculty of Environmental Design.

Thursday - Present planning history and sustainability to the undergraduate course I teach, "Planning the Canadian City" at the University of Calgary.

6 speaking engagements in 4 days. Needless to say, I didn't need to hear myself speak all weekend. A couple of thoughts on that diversity of audiences:

Don't underestimate the intelligence or insightfulness of kids. During my presentations at Olympic Heights Elementary, here are some questions I was asked:

"What is the single most important goal in the imagineCALGARY Plan?"

"How did you come up with the questions you used for your visioning?"

"Why did imagineCALGARY start in the first place?"

"We are concerned about the health of the forest next to our school. What ways can we get people to work on improving it?"

Not exactly out-of-left-field questions. It was fascinating to see how these kids - who are working on a multi-month project on the long term sustainability of Calgary - were able to cut to some core issues in a short time. Often times we get caught up in the minutia or stalled on semantics, rather than focusing on what is really important. I think the next time I catch myself in that mode, I'll call my niece or nephew for some advice.

Know your audience. A very basic premise, I know, but having such a crazy range of speaking engagements in such a short time, it only reinforced this idea. Yes, it takes more effort to consider what is relevant for your audience. Yes, it takes more time to prepare a new presentation. In the end, though, your audience will get much more out of it and you will benefit from an engaged group that you can learn from as well.

Back from Beijing

2009-11-19T11:34:00.005-07:00

I just returned from Beijing where I was on the facilitation team for the LEAD (Leadership in Environment and Development) International Session. This annual event brings together the 13 LEAD regional training programs for a 7-day session on leadership, climate change and sustainability.

The diversity that came together in Beijing was incredible. In just my Working Group alone, we had individuals from India, Germany, Pakistan, China, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Malawi, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, South Africa, Singapore and Indonesia. We had people in industry, education, banking, forestry, environment, and engineering, just to name a few of the professions and backgrounds of this group. Amongst other roles during the week, I facilitated this group of leaders throughout the conference. In 7 days, I learned a number of things from this amazing group of people, including:

When you have capacity in the room, get out of the way.

From the first day our working group met, it was evident that there was an immense amount of knowledge and capacity in the room. While many people are intimidated by the diversity that a group like this represents, I firmly believe that diversity is a key element of successful groups. Working Group 6 in Beijing affirmed that belief. The backgrounds, personalities and styles were diverse, but complementary. From the early stages of our process, it was clear that my job was to get the group comfortable with each other, the conference and their task (creating a 10-minute presentation for the conference participants on the last day). Once that was accomplished, I went into “un-facilitation” mode and let this group full of articulate, passionate and intelligent people move ahead.

Often times, folks in my position make everything about them and try to control every aspect of a process. That’s a bad move. In short, with everybody capable and comfortable, just get out of the way. Things will work out just fine.

Working Group 6: A study in intelligence, passion and capacity

Respect = progress

After I took a back seat in the Working Group 6 process, one key attribute of the group kept surfacing: respect. Throughout the week, the members of our group showed each other a tremendous amount of respect. They went out of their way to ensure everyone’s voice was heard. They listened intently to everyone’s ideas. They acknowledged each person’s strengths and contributions to the group. The group created a situation where everyone felt valuable and welcome.

Without this respect, the group wouldn’t have progressed as quickly and effectively as they did. Aretha Franklin would have been proud.

We need to use creativity and passion more often.

The end result of Working Group 6’s efforts was an incredible video discussing the economy and the need to shift to a more sustainable way of doing business. Tapping into the diversity of the group and respecting each other, the video demonstrated the power of creativity and passion in communicating and motivating people. Too often, we get bogged down in bureaucratic, stale ways of communicating. The term “death by PowerPoint” comes to mind.

A good demonstration of how creativity and passion motivates can be found in the video’s main editor - Rogelio Canizales Perez from Mexico. With only 24 hours to create and develop the presentation concept, the group had to put in a late night. After a certain point, though, it came down to editing the video clips and ideas that the team had put together. Rogelio stayed up until 6am editing the video to ensure it was ready for the 9am start time for the presentation. Rogelio later told the group that he felt so motivated by his teammates that it wasn’t a chore for him to stay up all night to create the video.

That’s the power of respect, creativity, passion and teamwork.

People are the solution.

As the week progressed, it became apparent that the conference participants could be put into one of two categories: those that saw people as the source of our problems and those that saw people as the solution to our problems. While both are right in a sense, those that saw people as the solution were able to communicate in a way that connected with the audience on a much more profound level that just blurting out facts and figures. Often times, discussions on sustainability and climate change become too technical, too abstract. The LEAD International Session participants used humour, music, drama, video and even dance to get people thinking and acting in a new way. Remember that if these issues are to be addressed, it’s people that will do the work, so try to connect with them in a meaningful way.

All in all, it was an incredible week and definitely worth the jetlag and fatigue that I’m feeling upon returning back to Canada.

(And I’ll try to track down the Working Group 6 video from Rogelio and post it here as soon as possible!)

- John, November 19, 2009

Check your mindset

2009-10-23T17:00:00.006-06:00

I just saw a very interesting episode of the PBS show Frontline, entitled "The Warning." It looks at how a woman named Brooksley Born - the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission - attempted to warn the powers-that-be that the economy was headed for trouble and that the derivatives market should be regulated. At the centre of the story is Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve and his insistence on clinging to his beliefs and mindsets. It's a fascinating (and frustrating) story in and of itself, but it's also a great lesson about mental models.

Often, we get our mental models of the world confused with reality. We think the way we see and interpret the world is the way it is. Think about the glass-is-half-full versus the glass-is-half-empty as an extremely simple comparison of two mental models. One views the world in terms of plenty, the other views it as wanting. In Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind, which I recently wrote about, mental models are discussed at length. A couple of pertinent quotes from the book:

"Very little in life should be viewed as incontrovertibly real."

"Contented (mental) model defense is by far the most prevalent (conceptual) model - it is the factory setting for most people, who are generally unconscious of its operation. When we engage in contented model defense, we adopt a theory and then seek to support and defend it. As we accumulate data in support of the theory we've adopted, we become more certain that our theory represents the truth and more content that we have achieved our ultimate goal, certainty." (p. 125)

With that in mind, let's go back to Alan Greenspan. In a remarkable Congressional hearing from last year, Greenspan articulates his error in mistaking his mindset for reality and failing to critically check his assumptions. The direct relation from Martin's quote above and 1:15-1:32 of the video below is quite astounding.

Lesson learned: Try to go less than 40 years before you check in on your assumptions of how you view the world.

-John, October 23, 2009

The Opposable Mind and Getting Things Done

2009-10-01T13:17:00.005-06:00

I just finished reading a terrific book by Roger Martin called The Opposable Mind. Using a series of case studies, Martin, the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, breaks down the concept of integrative thinking and looks at those who have successfully navigated in between opposing ideas to come up with a creative and effective solution.

This book is important for those trying to come up with holistic solutions to issues - whether in business, community or government. In Martin's words, "the most common failing of conventional thinking is the tendency to lose sight of the whole decision. It may be easier to dole out pieces of a decision to various corporate functions, but that ensures no one will take a holistic view of a particular problem." In a world where issues, people and decisions are increasingly connected, the art of integrative thinking will be a most valued trait.

Throughout my reading of this book, I continually thought of one person: Barack Obama. There are a number of admirable characteristics about President Obama, but his ability to not fall prey to the oversimplified view of either end of the political spectrum has really stood out for me. One of the most impressive examples of this is his speech in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008. Rather than selecting a side on racial polarization, he addressed the complexity of the issue with honesty and eloquence. As Martin points out in his book, it is this ground in between the poles that real discussion can happen and where the most effective solutions are found.

In addition to having a current, high profile individual that exemplifies integrative thinking, the good news coming out of Martin's book is that the ability to use integrative thinking is a process that can be learned and improved upon. At Intelligent Futures, this is something we try to bring to our work all the time and The Opposable Mind is now a tool that we can share with those we work with.

- John, October 1, 2009

UNEP Executive Directors Panel

2009-09-07T08:09:00.002-06:00

Two months after my time at the Global Environmental Governance Forum in Glion, Switzerland (see my postings from July) and I'm still reflecting on the discussion on a regular basis. Just recently, a video of the panel of the five Executive Directors of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) that occurred in Glion was posted. As someone who works more regularly at the local level of global issues, what stood out for me looking back on this speakers panel is how many of the themes I work in - cooperation, shared vision and goals, interdependence - are all front and centre on the international scene as well.

This panel discussion provides a unique insight into issues of environment, governance and collaboration by a group of folks representing over 40 years of experience and reflection.

- John, September 7, 2009.

Tell the story in a different way

2009-08-24T19:16:00.007-06:00

A message that I continually hammer home for the students in my Urban Studies class "Planning the Canadian City" is that they need to find interesting and imaginative ways of telling their story. Rather than have a series of exams where the students just regurgitate information, only to forget it the next week, the class is one large group project, with various assignments asking them to study a community and come up with recommendations for its future. In order to emphasize the importance of getting their message across, a 20 minute presentation is worth 40% of their entire term mark. The related paper is worth another 40%. The entire semester, I continually try to get them away from the standard, double-sided, 12-point, Times New Roman paper that they are forced to do in every other class. Outside of the classroom, that kind of report would be used as a coaster.

I have recently come across two excellent examples of sharing information in innovative and powerful ways. Good magazine has a remarkable series of "transparencies" as they call them. They are graphics that help portray information - from bankruptcies to sports mascots to the use of water - and are some of the best I have seen. In the example below, they look at the most used words in two books on either side of the American political spectrum: Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (in blue on the left) and Ann Coulter’s Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (in red on the right). Fascinating stuff.

For a complete listing of the graphics, go to their Good Transparencies Archive on Flickr. Trust me, you'll come out of it with some great new ideas of telling your story.

The other fascinating way of portraying information I recently saw was a TED Talk by Chris Jordan. Using "large-format, long-zoom artwork," he portrays daunting statistics - like the fact that 1 million plastic cups are used on US airline flights every six hours - in a thought-provoking way. His work really does an incredible job of putting these facts across in a way that people can relate to. This is something we all need to do a better job of.

Here is the talk:

- John, August 24, 2009

Sustainability Initiative Top 10

2009-08-13T16:22:00.004-06:00

My colleague Blythe Butler and I were just discussing our work on sustainability and were trying to come up with a summary of key things to think about when getting into a sustainability initiative. We decided on a Letterman-esque compilation (minus the backup band and dramatic drumroll, of course). So, without further delay, here is:

The Top 10 List of Things You Should Know When You’re Getting Into A Sustainability Initiative

Sustainability is not just about the environment. Don’t forget about the economic, cultural, built, social and governance elements of your community or organization.
Sustainability is a collective issue that requires collective action. Have a dynamic, exciting and effective engagement process.
Be clear about your objectives. Design a well-defined but flexible process.
Be prepared to listen, learn and adapt. Facilitate the process to maximize the collective wisdom of your participants.
Know where you’re coming from and where you are. Do a situational analysis.
Follow the momentum. Engage champions early to build commitment.
Your process, decisions and documents should be transparent. Design a credible and accessible governance structure.
Encourage personal responsibility. Give participants the tools to own the process.
Communicate the context. Use language and stories that participants can relate to.
Focus on getting it right versus being right. See all of the above.

Brain-Expanding Days on the Road

2009-07-13T06:43:00.009-06:00

I’ve had a crazy couple of weeks. First, I was up in Iqaluit as part of my climate change adaptation project. Then, I moved onto Switzerland to participate in the Global Environmental Governance Forum. After that, I headed to London to meet up with some friends from the LEAD Network. I’ve been writing as I go, but frankly, by the end of each day, my brain has been too full to do spend time uploading my thoughts.

The result is this super-entry – a collection of writings on my experiences over the last few weeks…..

Become the sponge

June 29, 2009

I’m in Glion, Switzerland at the Global Environmental Governance Forum. Developed by Yale University and the College of William & Mary, the Global Environmental Governance Project “seeks to link thought and action in an effort to improve environmental governance at multiple levels. Through grounded historical research, contemporary policy analysis, and track two diplomacy, it aims to lay the foundation for an effective analytical and political process for reinvigorating global environmental governance.”

This event is a unique look back at the development of the global environmental movement and institutions – particularly the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). I have been fortunate enough to be selected as part of a group of “emerging leaders” that were selected from 10 countries. The intent of this event is to hear reflections from the architects of the current system, look at current challenges with key players now in the system and then bring together the “emerging” generation to look at ways of improving the system. This event marks the first time in history that the five Executive Directors of UNEP have been together at the same time. To witness the discussions is a real honour. As I told many of my colleagues in the Emerging Leaders group, I’m going to be in sponge mode as much as possible over the next few days.

Here is a news report on the event produced by one of my emerging leader colleagues, Joe Ageyo:

There are approximately 80 people gathered here in Glion and the credentials of the people are astonishing. Just to give you a sense, here are some of the participants:

Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit; UNEP Executive Director (1973-1975)
Mostafa Tolba, Undersecretary of State for Higher Education and Minister of Youth in Egypt; Led Egypt's delegation to the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (1972); UNEP Deputy Executive Director (1973-1975); UNEP Executive Director (1976-1992)
Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director (2006-present); Director-General of IUCN (2001-2006)
Ambassador John W. McDonald, Chairman of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy; Secretary of the U.S. Delegation to the 1972 Stockholm Conference
Bill Ruckleshaus, Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (1983-1985); US Delegate to Stockholm Conference and representative to Brundtland Commission
Julia Marton -Lefèvre, Director General of IUCN; Rector of UN-mandated University for Peace; Executive Director of LEAD International
Jim MacNeill, Secretary-General of Brundtland Commission (1984-1987); OECD Director of Environment (1978-84); Chairman World Bank Independent Inspection Panel (1999-02)
H.E. Mr. Lumumba Stanislaus-Kaw Di-Aping, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Sudan to the UN

During this retrospective view, one primary thing stood out for me:

The issues haven’t changed. The timeframe is just more urgent.

The issues that resulted in the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the eventual development of the United Nations Environment Program are still with us. Tensions around development between developed and developing nations; degradation of natural resources; lack of coordination and cooperation amongst nations. These issues are as relevant and pressing – if not more so – that they were almost 40 years ago when these visionaries tried to forge a new way forward.

So if the issues haven’t changed, then the “what” is the same. It’s time to look at ways to build a new “how.” That’s always the toughest question.

Perspective

June 30, 2009

We had a full day of listening to many of the current players in the global environmental governance system – most of whom work in the United Nations. Just like actors in many other systems, once they are imbedded, it’s difficult – if not impossible – for them to get perspective on what they do or how they fit into the bigger picture.

Rather than discussing how the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) fits into a larger system, they were talking as if UNEP was the system. I just kept thinking back to my entry from March 18th about the worm and the sauerkraut. A colleague of mine from the emerging leaders group – Jason Morris-Jung, a doctoral candidate at Berkeley – shared a similar saying from Vietnam that I think applies just as well with the folks in the UN system, based on my perspective of the last couple of days:

“To a frog in a well, the sky is very small.”

Gaining this perspective is vital, especially for an issues as complex as the global environment. There are so many actors, perspectives and solutions that one single organization – no matter how capable – can’t possible solve the issues alone. Gaining a perspective of how UNEP fits into a larger system would go a long way to determining how to build on its strengths within that context in order to create the most effective change possible.

When Bill talks, just listen.

June 30, 2009

The discussions during day 2 of the Global Environmental Governance Forum in Glion, Switzerland, often bordered on the hopeless. The severity of the problems and the difficulty of making real progress can be completely overwhelming at times. On this front, some gems of wisdom came from Bill Ruckelshaus, the first Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, who also returned to become its fifth Administrator. Oh yes, he also was the Director of the FBI for a while and the Assistant Attorney General during Watergate. I’m not kidding. One of those posts would be the pinnacle of a career for most mortals. Unbelievable.

While much of the discussion focused on the United Nations and national governments, Bill reminded us that the only way things really move dramatically is if citizens want it. He encouraged us to find ways to rally the citizens rather than the officials towards solving climate change.

Reflecting on his experience at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Bill said, “I worked for two Presidents: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Neither of them were exactly charter members of the Sierra Club, but they made strong choices on the environment because the people were demanding it.”

Bill also made some terrific points about focusing on hope rather than despair. Using Barak Obama’s campaign as a recent example, he emphasized that people will act and respond when there is light at the end of the tunnel.

These are really, really important points. At every international session I go to I’m reminded of the differences in power that citizens have in various countries across the world. Regardless, it’s essential that the average citizen rallies behind the environmental issues we face if they are going to be solved – whether in Canada, Brazil or Ethiopia. The challenge – as is discussed often in this blog – is how to effectively communicate in a way that helps people understand the issue and inspires them to act.

When someone with the knowledge and experience of Bill Ruckelshaus talks about hope, collaboration and engagement as the way forward, I’m even more convinced that these are the necessary ingredients to meet the issues of our time. He also pointed out that if we could create some sort of super-position that merged his roles as the Administrator of the EPA and the Director of the FBI, that would help too.

A wake-up call

July 1, 2009

Day 3 of the Global Environmental Governance Forum and it was time for the Emerging Leaders to become the focus and try to develop some ideas and actions for improving the system. As it turns out, revising nearly 40 years of international effort in 8 hours isn’t all that easy.

There was a lot of great discussion and lots of great ideas that came out of our discussions, but an interesting thing happened along the way. Ambassador Di-Aping of Sudan stood up and told us in no uncertain terms that what we were proposing was the same-old, same-old. And you know what? In many respects, he was right. We were unnecessarily limiting our discussion and ideas. Despite not being imbedded in the system ourselves, we were thinking that way. In talking with my colleague Kristen Hite, this may be understandable because we didn’t take the time to clearly articulate what our vision was. Without this, it was fascinating how we turned into frogs in a well (see the June 30 entry).

The time constraints were extremely tight and the discussions were very exciting, but without a collective direction within our group, we were unable to move our discussion beyond conventional thinking. It took a wake-up call from someone outside our group to bring us to that reality.

Lessons learned/re-affirmed? Vision is vital and so is diversity of perspective.

Finding the right music

July 2, 2009

At the Global Environmental Governance Forum, a stream of discussion was around whether this broad issue was like a symphony – where there are multiple players, but they need to work together to make great music; or was it like jazz – where you have a basic structure that is improvised around (see my entry from June 18^th. Great minds think alike.)

While I think both analogies are helpful, another one came from Mark Gold, one of my colleagues at the conference and the Executive Director of Heal the Bay in Los Angeles. The institutions of global environmental governance don’t seem to be having a substantial impact on the key issues of our time. Our structures, decision-making and processes aren’t doing the job.

Mark suggested that in the light of what we learned over the past few days, we might need a different kind of music that is anti-establishment and will radically shift things in order to make new progress. Symphony or jazz might not be the right tune. In short, Mark recommended:

“Don’t forget punk.”

Climate change through the lens of art (or art through the lens of climate change).

London, July 3, 2009

I was able to attend a fascinating event at the Tate Britain gallery in London the other night. It was entitled “What can Turner and Rothko tell us anything new about climate change?” and was run by some friends from the LEAD network – Sarah Hendel-Blackford, Steve Colling and Rachel Madan. The intention of this project is to explore how works of art can express issues of climate change.

Steve, Sarah and Rachel discuss the issues with the audience.

Focusing on an exhibition of works by Turner and Rothko the discussion looked at how interpretations of art can articulate issues of climate change. The interactive discussions got into specific elements like sea level rise, but really focused on the emotional side of facing a problem as daunting as climate change.

I was intrigued by the idea of using new types of media to discuss climate change. So far, the majority of non-Al Gore spokespeople on climate change have been scientists. As a generalization, no one would accuse scientists of being the most inspiring communicators. By using art to express the issues and emotions that climate change exposes, Sarah, Steve and Rachel have opened the door for new kinds of discussions to happen. For an issue that is so complex, overwhelming and sometimes confusing, we need a lot of ways to get the message across. My brain is full of ideas of how develop similar initiatives to expand the conversation.

Jazz in the Garden

2009-06-18T10:06:00.004-06:00

In our work, we have benefited from using an approach of bringing together two seemingly unrelated concepts: composting and jazz music. Each applies to a separate phase of work, but they ultimately come together to create successful processes.

In the composting phase, you take the time to add the necessary ingredients for a successful project plan – timelines, tasks, responsibilities, and most importantly, frameworks and objectives. At this time, you’re asking crucial questions like “What are we trying to achieve?”, “How will we approach the work?” and “What are the best methods to meet our objectives?” Each one of these questions is like the green, brown and black material that you put into a composter to create vital, nutritious soil.

Take the time to "compost" in your process planning and it will pay dividends down the road.

I call this the composting period, because at this point in time, there is no big, exciting progress being made. You’re learning about the project, the circumstances and any new information related to the community, organization or methodologies that you’re going to use. A lot of people just want to get on with it and see this as a waste of time, but just like composting, if you are able to be patient and persistent enough in your project planning, you’ll see real benefits.

After a certain point, however, you need to stop planning and start acting. In our work, this means the beginning of engagement with community members or staff of an organization. Cue the jazz music.

A key characteristic of jazz is improvisation. The players in the band build off interactions with each other as they move through the music. Our work attempts to bring out the collective wisdom of a community or organization. The difference here is that we don’t prepare a plan for folks to comment on or approve, but we build something with them. With so many diverse community or organizational members – the members of our jazz band – you really want to highlight and build off the views, experiences and talents that these diverse people bring to the process. Unlike the composting period, you don’t have the luxury of reflecting and studying ad nauseum. If the jazz musicians on stage stopped to discuss and think about a new direction they were going to take the music, it wouldn’t be much of a performance. In our work, you have to be able to adapt and respond in a way that keeps the process exciting, engaging and moving forward.

It’s at this point where the composting period and the jazz music come together. When we start to build the music with the folks we are engaged with, we don’t make indiscriminate decisions based on rationale that changes from day-to-day. Instead, we build off of the structures and key directions that we developed in the composting period. Rather than creating an inflexible workplan, the time taken early in the process actually provides a level of clarity that allows us the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances while meeting our most important objectives. Without this structure, it would just be chaos. I’ll leave it to jazz legend Charles Mingus to conclude:

"You can't improvise on nothing, man; you've gotta improvise on something."

- Charles Mingus

Seth Godin and Tribes

2009-06-03T10:55:00.002-06:00

Seth Godin is my blogging hero. In Seth's Blog, he "riffs on marketing, respect, and the way ideas spread." What stands out for me is how thoughtful Godin is. He talks about issues that are both current and timeless, but rather than provide the typical over-the-top-knee-jerk reaction to things, he provides real insight in how to look at issues from a different perspective. The first line of his current post is "If you sell crack to kindergarten students, no need to read this." You get the picture.

Seth recently spoke at the TED conference and it is one of the best talks I've seen. Speaking on issues of ideas, values, leadership and tribes, Seth makes a compelling case that the power to lead change is in the hands of ordinary people. We are trying to integrate many of these ideas into our work at Intelligent Futures and I'm sure that Seth will continue to provide great insights as we move ahead.

Here's the talk. It's 17 minutes well spent:

- John, June 3, 2009

Getting it right versus being right

2009-05-22T10:34:00.005-06:00

I haven’t put an entry onto the blog for a while, as I’ve been busy wrapping up the completion of the Cochrane Sustainability Plan. You can see the final plan here.

The journey of developing the Cochrane Sustainability Plan has been quite remarkable. Over a 4-month period, nearly 500 citizens contributed their views in the visioning process. A group of 75 committed citizens were intimately involved in the process and were the real authors of this plan. Over 11 months, these folks contributed over 700 hours of meeting time to help create a plan for the future of their community. Most of that time was during a compressed 5-month period.

In leading the process to create this plan, a key attribute of these citizens began to become apparent:

They were focused on getting it right as opposed to being right.

This is an important distinction – especially when trying to create a plan that an entire community can use to work together. These citizens of Cochrane contributed a remarkable amount of time, knowledge and passion about their community, yet they were able to listen to one another and respect each other’s opinions. Without this, the process would have devolved into a competition of superior ideas or views, rather than a collaborative effort for the future of the community.

Is this what you use to hold onto your ideas?

Often times, we tend to hold onto our ideas or viewpoints with a vice grip. This is particularly prevalent with things that we care about. Mixed in with this are elements of ego, open mindedness and past experience. When the objective is to create as much common ground as possible, however, we need to take the long view of where we need to end up. That’s what was so inspiring about the citizens of Cochrane in our process – they stayed focused on the long view and didn’t worry about being right all the time. In your work, it’s an important question to keep in mind:

Am I trying to get it right or am I trying to be right?

- John, May 22, 2009

What I learned from my high school basketball team

2009-04-29T13:03:00.002-06:00

Late January 1991. My high school basketball team from Regina was in a Saskatoon locker room waiting to start the final of a tournament against a tough team from Edmonton. Our assistant coach was harping on his usual message: the five guys on the court needed to know:

what play we were running
what each player’s role was, and
what the overall objective was.

As he finished his speech, he coined a new phrase for his message: samepagedness.

For the rest of the season, before every game, he would stress the importance of samepagedness. We went on to win the city championship that year and earned a bronze medal at the provincial championships. Cue Bruce Springsteen singing “Glory Days.”

Fast forward to the present day. I use this story all the time in my work. Why? This captures what we are trying to do in our work with communities and organizations. Whether developing community sustainability plans or organizational strategic plans, the objective is the same: create samepagedness. If we are trying to mobilize as much action as possible to address the issues of our time, we need to continually develop samepagedness. Different members of the community or organization need to know what we are trying to achieve and what everyone’s role is.

18 years after that season, I’m still using that lesson I learned. I don’t miss those short shorts we wore on that team, but I sure would like some of that hair back. Mine seems to be disappearing.

- John, April 29, 2009

The lesson of the beer cup

2009-04-17T07:04:00.007-06:00

A friend of mine recently conducted a waste management experiment while at a Calgary Flames hockey game. Instead of throwing his recently emptied beer cup away and starting with a fresh one, he took his perfectly functional, but used cup to get a refill. His plan was thwarted immediately. Whether it was a Saddledome policy or a health regulation, he was told he had to use a new container if he wanted another beer. He was thirsty. He had no choice. The poor guy.

Undeterred, he accepted his new beer in a new vessel, but tried to leave without a lid on his new beer cup. He was told that he must use the lid if he wanted to walk back to his seat. Waste reduction strike two.

This is just a simple story that highlights the importance of understanding choice within a context. Often, we simplify issues of sustainability down to personal choice - a do the right thing sort of argument. The trouble is that we often neglect the fact that choices are informed - or in the case of the beer cup - directed a certain way because of the context in which those choices exist. So whether it's issues of beer cup reuse or urban public policy, more focus needs to be put onto the context that influences individual choices. Otherwise, we're asking hockey fans to make a choice between one less cup in the garbage and another beer. Hockey fans get thirsty - I think you know which one would lose out more often than not.

- John, April 17, 2009

Choice and the city

2009-04-13T21:36:00.007-06:00

"The point of cities is multiplicity of choice."

-Jane Jacobs

When I was in Paris last fall, we stayed in a small apartment just off of Rue de Montorgueil - an incredibly vibrant street in the second arrondissment. Lined with bakeries, restaurants, cafes and countless types of food, I was struck by the diversity of choice this one street represented. Within just a few blocks, I could purchase fish, cheese, wine, bread, gelato, fill a prescription, pick up a pair of jeans, sit down for a coffee or enjoy a meal on a sidewalk patio. To move along Rue de Montorgueil, I had the option of walking, taking a bike or riding a scooter. If I wanted to go beyond this area, I also could take a taxi, hop on a bus or take the metro. In my time there, walking was the mode of choice. It allowed us to take in the beauty of life in Paris. It didn't hurt that this was the best way to burn all the calories we consumed at the aforementioned food shops either.

All too often, we build our cities without consideration of real choice in mind. Whether the types of housing to live in, how to move around the city, or where we are able to interact with each other, all these aspects of city life are limited to a small number of choices in a way that is segregated rather than integrated. Work here. Get in a car. Live there. Get in a car. Socialize here. The result are places that are often lifeless and sterile because they don't offer any reasons for people to choose to be there for large parts of the day. Life in these places is often disconnected. The best places to live allow you to integrate parts of your life.

I decided to take a time lapse video of Rue de Montorgueil to study how one area can actually be alive for much of the day. The diversity of choices give people reason to be there throughout the day from morning until night.

- John, April 14, 2009

Take off those blinders

2009-04-08T11:57:00.004-06:00

In an April 6 essay in the Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon makes the case for the value of fear. Homer-Dixon writes that conventional wisdom deems fear as bad and that fear just begets more fear. In the article, he writes:

“But, in this case, conventional wisdom is wrong. The truth is that fear is good. The economic crisis we're facing is not at root the result of too much fear but of too little. If we had been more afraid for our economic well-being, we would have saved more, borrowed and speculated less, and been more cautious about letting financial wizards make bets with our money using opaque mathematical models.

Today, if we were more afraid for our futures and those of our children, we would be doing much more to address potential problems – such as climate change and nuclear terrorism – that could derail our societies tomorrow.”

Let’s look at the definition of these two key words Homer-Dixon is discussing: pessimism and optimism. According to the dictionary on my trusty Macbook:

Pessimism is defined as “a tendency to see the worst aspect of things or believe that the worst will happen; a lack of hope or confidence in the future.”

Optimism is defined as “hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something.”

As usual, Homer-Dixon makes a strong argument in his essay. However, looking at these two definitions above, I would put a somewhat different frame on his discussion. I would argue that neither optimism nor pessimism is helpful in and of themselves. In my view, the real culprit is tunnel vision. Many of the issues we face today – including the current financial crisis – are the result of tunnel vision. Tunnel vision can result in looking at only one piece of the issue or just within one timeframe. Sometimes entire populations are guilty of it, while other times individuals in key positions have tunnel vision.

In the case of the current financial crisis, tunnel vision resulted in a relatively small amount of individuals being focused on profit maximization over a very short term. There is possibly no human-made system that is more connected than the global economic system. Those connections exist, yet were ignored. The result is the crisis we see today.

Rather than keeping the blinders on, we need to start playing “connect-the-dots” in our decision-making. In his 2006 book The Upside of Down, Homer-Dixon carefully explains how our global systems are linked, or “tightly coupled” as he puts it. These ever-increasing connections in our world require us to understand the linkages between our decisions and the impacts they have beyond just what tunnel vision allows for. Disregarding these connections and the impacts of decisions across economic, environmental and social realms is unproductive at best and irresponsible at worst.

Taken to the extreme, optimism and pessimism are both forms of tunnel vision. Taking off the blinders allows for a better understanding of the whole, an ability to see connections and to understand implications over a longer timeframe. For the natural optimist, connecting the dots will create a more thorough understanding of impacts to create a more holistic picture. This will likely temper the blind all-is-going-to-work-out-for-the-best instincts of these folks. For the pessimist, connecting the dots will enable an understanding of potential opportunities to move from the doom-and-gloom into more positive solutions.

Either way, the focus should be on creating productive and realistic solutions. Taking off the blinders is the best way to make this happen.

- John, April 8, 2009

Making Sustainability Approachable

2009-04-06T18:30:00.004-06:00

Imagine that you ran into someone you know on the street and they asked you to tell them what sustainable development or sustainability was about. You could answer it this way:

"Ecologically sustainable development can be thought of as changes in economic structure, organization and activity of an economic ecological system that are directed towards maximum welfare and which can be sustained by available resources." (From Braat, L.C., and Steetskamp, I. (1991). "Ecological-Economic Analysis for Regional Sustainable Development," in Ecological Economics, R. Costanza, ed. Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 269-288.)

If you’re lucky, you’ll receive a blank stare. If you’re talking to someone less patient, they’d probably be halfway down the block by the time you’ve finished. If the objective is to make sustainability understandable and approachable, neither option is desirable. A lot of folks that are passionate about sustainability – whether in their professional or personal life – tend to think of it only in the lengthy, academic terms exemplified in the definition above.

In our work on the Cochrane Sustainability Plan, we developed three key phrases to capture how we were approaching this sustainability thing:

Think long term.
Look at the whole.
See the connections.

Now imagine again that you’ve been asked the same question on the street. Which of the two options do you think would help people immediately understand sustainability and potentially get your conversation partner interested or even excited about it?

The issues that we face today require widespread understanding and collective action. Sustainability provides an approach and mindset that can address these issues in a holistic manner. We need as many hands on deck as possible. If you’re a “sustainability nerd” (which I would consider myself), then think about how you make sustainability approachable. It’s something we need to constantly think about and work on.

In an earlier blog entry I talked about the importance of feedback. The next time you’re explaining sustainability to someone, look for the feedback. If you see someone’s backside walking down the street as you’re doing this explanation, you know you need to try again.

This is a bad sign if you're trying to explain sustainability to someone.

- John, April 6, 2009

Language and The Boot

2009-03-26T11:28:00.004-06:00

If you were talking to an English person and you asked them to put a bag of groceries in your boot, you’d watch them go to your car. If you asked a North American the same thing, they would look down at your feet. Then they would likely follow that up with a rather confused look. They might even ask a simple question like, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Same word. Same language. Completely different meaning.

In our work at Intelligent Futures, we are continually trying to understand the language of the communities and organizations that we work. Every community and organization is unique and has its own context – including history, pressures and language. The key is taking the time to listen, rather than pushing your language and interpretation down someone else’s throat.

This approach to language is important because it shows respect for the existing experiences and knowledge of the people you are talking to and working with. If you’re trying to work with people to make change in a community or organization, you need to know your stuff, but you also have to be able to listen and adapt. Language is vital to this.

A good example of this is in our work with the Cochrane Sustainability Plan. During a meeting with the Culture Citizen Action Group, we were trying to identify indicators that they could recommend for the Sustainability Plan. Early in the process, the group struggled to understand what this meant and frustration was setting in. Rather than going academic and verbose, we explained that we were simply looking for “measures” that will tell us how we’re doing. That simple shift in language from “indicators” to “measures” made all the difference in the world and the ideas began to flow instantly.

This is a very intelligent, energetic and committed group of citizens. There was no shortage of brainpower in the room. The usual language that these folks typically use just doesn’t include “indicator.” That’s probably a good thing. I’d rather chat with someone at a cocktail party who doesn’t use the word “indicator” on a daily basis anyway.

If we were to impose our initial language on them, the work wouldn’t have progressed, the participants would have been frustrated and future buy-in and action could have been compromised.

Think about language and the context you’re in. Otherwise, you might see the boot. And I don’t mean the English version.

- John, March 26, 2009

Don't become the worm

2009-03-18T13:44:00.009-06:00

I teach an Urban Studies class called “Planning the Canadian City” at the University of Calgary. Recently, we had an interesting discussion about professions, learning and change. We were fortunate to have Pat Gordon as our guest speaker. Pat is the project manager for the Plan It Calgary project – Calgary’s integrated land use and mobility plan.

After her presentation on the direction that Plan It is heading, one of our students asked Pat “how do you ensure that things don’t go back to the ‘old way’ of doing business at City Hall after you have finished this project?”

A very important question with no easy answers.

Pat spoke about the importance of having people with varied experiences, professions and backgrounds on the team to avoid groupthink. She also felt strongly that there is a distinct advantage to having people on the team that are earlier in their careers to bring a more fresh perspective to the work. I then added to the conversation by mentioning a phenomenon that I have observed as planners move their career.

It seems that there is an interesting learning curve that happens for planners. I’m sure this happens across many professions, but I’ll pick on planners for the time being. In school, many students have big ideas and really want to change the world and how things work. This changes over time. It doesn’t happen overnight, but in a number of slow steps:

Step 1 – Students complete school and enter the planning field.

Step 2 – In starting their careers, they realize they still have a great deal to learn. This makes sense. Planning is a very complex profession and each community or organization has its own history that young planners need to know and understand.

Step 3 – Here is where the shift (potentially) starts to happen. As they begin to learn about why their particular organization, institution or community behaves or makes decisions a certain way, they start to think that that is the way of approaching an issue.

Step 4 – If they start to make the shift in Step 3, then they think of the ideas they had in school as overly idealistic, unrealistic or just generally impossible. Slowly, these ideas of change shrink in the rearview mirror as their careers move down the road.

Step 5 – By this point, these planners have all but lost their initial hopes for making change and in the extreme cases have become one of those people that when asked why things are done a certain way, they respond “Because we’ve always done it that way.”

This can be reflected by a conversation that I overhead a few months ago:

“Traffic is getting really bad these days, isn’t it?”

“It sure is. It takes me forever to get downtown to work these days. Sometimes up to an hour each way.”

“Yeah, well, there’s nothing you can do about it anyways. It’s just too bad.”

Where did I hear this? AT A PLANNING CONFERENCE in Banff, Alberta this past fall. This exemplifies someone that has reached that 5^th stage of their career. These are professionals that help shape how cities are built and yet have this fatalistic, I-can’t-do-anything-about-it attitude towards the work. Whether for personal sanity, making their life easier or painful experience, these individuals felt that they could no longer make a difference.

My message to the class was that it is up to them to keep their ideas alive, to take the time to remember why they got into the profession in the first place, and to have the tenacity to stick with it. I’m not advocating for blind ignorance of reality. On the contrary. Having a clear understanding of the realities – including institutional knowledge of why decisions have been made a certain way in the past – helps to move toward the improved future that many planners start their career thinking they’ll contribute to. That’s why it’s so important to continually learn, listen to other perspectives and look for new ways of doing the work. The balance is to understand your context without becoming so immersed in it that you lose perspective, much like a quote I once heard:

“To a worm in a jar of sauerkraut, the whole world is sauerkraut.”

- John, March 18, 2009

Iqaluit's Red Light District

2009-03-15T08:34:00.011-06:00

I just got back from Iqaluit - Nunavut, Canada’s capital city - as part of a climate change adaptation project through the Canadian Institute of Planners. It was my second time there and during a drive-around tour, I was reminded of their local infrastructure setup and how a good portion of the houses in Iqaluit get water and remove their sewage. Because parts of their communities do not have piped servicing, they have to receive their water and sewage services by truck.

Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada (located at the red placemark)

Each house in these areas has a light at the front with a red bulb. If the light is out, it means they need water. An illuminated red light means that they have an adequate amount of water. Five days a week, a team of five trucks will head out on their assigned route and look for houses with that light out. They will fill the water tank until the red light flips back on, letting them know the tank is full, and then move on to the next house.

Not quite a red light district like the infamous one in Amsterdam.

Even on a stormy day, you can still see the red light is on at the right side of this house in Iqaluit.

Iqaluit’s system got me thinking about the importance of information within bigger, more complex systems – whether it be our cities or natural systems. Systems experts call this process of information dissemination “feedback”. In Iqaluit, this information then causes the action of refilling the water tank. This system of cause and effect is known as a “feedback loop.” Another good example of a feedback loop is your nervous system. If you put your hand on a hot stove, your nervous system creates a feedback loop from your fingertips to your brain to tell you to move your hand. These feedback loops are vital to understand the world around us and to adjust our behaviour accordingly.

With a system that is as (relatively) simple as Iqaluit’s water system or your hand on a stove, these feedback loops are fairly straightforward and provide the necessary information nearly immediately. The trouble is that many of our natural and human-made systems are very complex, so there isn’t the direct relationship between one element to another. An example is in the issue of traffic and how we build our cities. Many people assume that there is a simple relationship between the amount of roads and traffic flow. Gridlock? Just build more roads! Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Transportation and traffic issues are a complex mix of city design, housing location and density, employment location, transit service, fuel costs, local economic makeup, personal choice and cultural norms. Just to name a few. There’s also the issue of “induced demand” – the phenomenon where building new road capacity actual creates demand for more road capacity. Thus, the saying that “solving traffic problems by building more roads is like solving your weight problem by buying bigger pants.”

So what to do about it? In these complex systems, it is necessary for everyone (including and especially our leaders) to find the deeper causes for issues that we face. A good way to do this is to act like a 3 year-old and ask “why?” a few times. Let’s give this a try:

We have gridlock in our city.

“Why?”

Because there are too many vehicles on the road at the same time.

“Why?”

Because they are all leaving the same area and heading to the same area all at once.

“Why?”

Because we have separated where people live and work through our zoning.

In just 3 “why’s” we were able to get to a deeper cause than if we just reacted to a problem. You could dig even deeper, but just this level of inquiry will allow you to make decisions at a more meaningful level. Many times, people don’t have the time or the right job description to look for those deeper reasons. Very few jobs reward understanding complexity. This ends up causing us all trouble in the long run.

The other difficulty with complex systems is that there is often a lag time for getting the information (the feedback) to understand the consequences of decisions. In the traffic example, the zoning decisions likely happened decades before the gridlock showed up. In the meantime, the overall culture of the community may have shifted to a car-centric one – creating even more decisions that would eventually lead to the current day gridlock.

Now what? We need to continually work to shift how we perceive problems and look for solutions.

In an interesting 2006 TED talk, Jamais Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging.com articulated this very well. He stated that one of WorldChanging’s goals was to “make the invisible visible.” This is a great way of putting it. If we can do a better job of understanding the nature of our systems and see the connections, along with doing a better job of understanding the feedback loops, then many of the invisible causes or consequences in our world will become more visible. At the end of the day, we will make wiser decisions.

So while many of the issues we face are daunting and complex, our communities, organizations and institutions need to transform how they think to find the connections between the parts of our world and positively influence the decisions they make. We all need to look for – and create – the red lights like in Iqaluit.

- John, March 15, 2009

Julie Andrews and sustainability

2009-02-18T08:58:00.016-07:00

Believe it or not, the two most famous roles that Julie Andrews ever played - Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins - help to inform us about creating more sustainable communities and organizations.

In their 2007 book The Starfish and the Spider, authors Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom talk about the differences between the increasingly prominent decentralized organization (the starfish) and the classic centralized organization (the spider). In the book, they talk a great deal about catalysts - individuals that instigate change in a more decentralized way than the stereotypical leader. Catalysts enable others to build capacity and lead themselves, rather than becoming dependent on a single leader.

To illustrate the idea, Brafman and Beckstrom discuss the differences between the aforementioned roles of Julie Andrews. In The Sound of Music, Maria helps the von Trapp family become a functional family. That's great and wonderful, but at the end of the day (or the movie), she has to stick around to keep things running smoothly. The von Trapp family needs her to lead them.

Contrast this with Mary Poppins. Mary flies in and helps out a dysfunctional family unit as well. The difference here is that when the Banks household is up and running on their own, Mary can pop her umbrella up and fly off, knowing that they are able to lead themselves.

In moving towards more sustainable communities and organizations, there need to be many more Mary Poppins in the world than Maria von Trapps. The scope of issues that we face requires nothing less than collective action on a huge scale. If we have too many people acting like little von Trapps, sitting around and waiting for someone else to act or tell them what to do, then we won't get to where we need to go. On the other hand, if there were more Mary Poppins in the world, then we'd have a lot more capacity in our communities and organizations to address complex challenges together.

That's what we're trying to do with our work at Intelligent Futures. We're trying to channel our inner Mary Poppins and help communities and organizations solve their own issues. Just don't expect us to dress the part. We don't look good in hats.

- John, February 18, 2009

The Tortoise, the Hare and Sustainability

2009-02-16T18:01:00.001-07:00

"Aggressively patient"

This was the best term I heard in 2008. It came from Bob Willard – a renowned expert on the business case for sustainability. I first heard this while participating in a sustainability leadership training program called LEAD (Leadership in Environment and Development) in Toronto this past summer. In trying to make our communities, businesses and organizations more sustainable, this is a quality we need to have – aggressive patience.

What does this term mean? In my view, it’s about staying the course and not getting easily flustered when things don’t go exactly as planned. It’s about being vigilant and being ready to seize opportunities when they arise. It’s about constantly reading the situation to understand the context you are working in.

In many ways, “aggressively patient” captures the dichotomy of trying to work towards a more sustainable future. Think of the fable about the tortoise and the hare. Slow and steady wins the race, right? In many instances, that’s the case, but here’s the trouble – many of our organizations, communities and businesses are slow to change. Understanding the drivers for change within a context will allow you to be patient and make meaningful change happen. The approach to change is often like the tortoise.

The problem is, many of the issues we face – such as climate change – are moving at the speed of the hare. Unlike the hare, however, these issues are not stopping for a nap. In the climate change example, the speed of the hare is moving faster than the world's most acclaimed climate scientists predicted.

That’s why I love the term “aggressively patient.” It represents the most impressive qualities of both characters in the story - the patience and determination of the tortoise with the aggressiveness of the hare. We need more people that have this quality if we’re going to effectively tackle issues of sustainability.

Do you have the ability to be aggressively patient?

- John, February 16, 2009