Resiliency Over Efficiency
by Danny McGee
Every Friday morning, we have an all-team meeting that includes 15 mins of learning. “Learning” is a broad term that applies to personal topics of interest, local nonprofits telling us about their work, new sustainability start-ups, and Ted Talks we thought people might enjoy. About 18 months ago, we watched Dan Pink’s Ted Talk on The Puzzle of Motivation (check it out if you haven’t watched it).
Without going into all the details, my takeaway was that efficiency incentives stifle innovation. In other words, if you compete on how fast you complete a task, you narrow the focus and concentrate the mind, limiting your ability to come up with creative solutions.
Last month, I listened to an episode of the Knowledge Project Podcast where Kenneth Stanley spoke on how to “set the right objectives.” His thesis was that, for problems that have yet to be solved, solutions do not come from incremental progress but from the number of attempts. Unsolved problems require creative solutions, not linear thinking.
Efficiency in Sustainability
Imagine a scenario where you recently took a job as head of sustainability for a manufacturing company. Your predecessor was an outspoken sustainability advocate within the company, even creating your current job title. Before they retired, they convinced the company to set some very audacious goals; now, you oversee meeting those goals. You must make your 20 factories zero-waste, your whole organization net-zero, and all your products free of Red-List chemicals.
I will say something I never imagined myself saying: efficiency is not the solution to meeting these goals or surviving climate change.
While some companies have achieved these goals, they aren’t the type of goals that have a playbook. These are goals that are going to require new and creative ways of thinking. Doubling down on what worked in the past is not the solution. What worked in the past was efficiency; efficient machines, efficient labor force, efficient management systems, and efficient financing. But efficiency will only get us so far, and spoiler: it’s not far enough.
Shifting Our Approach
Unfortunately, I don’t offer you a playbook, but I do have a recommendation on an approach. The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, published in 1990, remains relevant arguing that competitive advantage is driven by your organization’s ability to learn faster than your competition. Specifically, you should focus on the following:
Fostering personal mastery by allowing people the time and resources to explore and clarify ideas, bringing all metrics back to purpose, vision, and values.
Challenging mental models by building reflection points into the workflow, identifying mental models, and promoting diverse teams.
Building a shared team vision through common language, safe spaces for discussion on challenging topics, and the willingness to incorporate new ideas into the vision.
Supporting team learning by naming and suspending assumptions as you work through new ideas to create a shared understanding of the subject matter.
Each one of these actions will return a robust google search result, which just shows there is no single way to apply these disciplines, but rather a variety of small steps. Start celebrating failures as opportunities to learn; track metadata on how often you evaluate your processes; track “at bats” over outcomes; focus resources on a single pilot project for the purpose of learning and testing ideas.
Systems Matter More than Goals
James Clear says it well in his NYT bestselling book, Atomic Habits: “If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your systems instead.” When you focus on incremental change, the final results will take care of themselves. Too often, companies set goals and expect a linear, consistent trajectory. In their head-down, systemized approach, they not only miss out on powerful solutions but will also plateau at their goal line and consider it “good enough.” In the same book, Clear writes about the “power of tiny gains,” acknowledging that a 1% improvement daily creates exponential progress over time - 37 times better in just one year, to be exact.
When it comes to energy and sustainability, of course, if you still have T8 (or heaven forbid T12) fluorescent light bulbs in your factories, you should switch to LEDs. If you aren’t doing compressed air leak studies every 2 to 3 years, you should be doing those. If you aren’t sorting your recyclables, do that, please. But that alone won’t get you to net-zero carbon or zero-waste factories; you need to go a level deeper. Start by seeing if you can find a home for one hard-to-recycle material or try to create one product Red List free. Can’t get to Red-List-free? How about just free of PFAS? Start small, iterate often, think outside the box, and focus on your systems; let the goals take care of themselves.
If your expectations are linear, they’re too restrained. If your focus is on your goals, you’re missing the potential impact of your systems. If you’re approaching climate change through the lens of efficiency, you’ll sacrifice resiliency. The shift from a shareholder to a stakeholder economy doesn’t just impact our outcome; it needs to drastically change our approach.