Endless Knots

Why BP Crashed and Killed the Gulf

Harvard Business Review Blogs carries our post today on the role BP's organizational structure may have played in causing the horror show in the gulf. See "Why BP Crashed and Killed the Gulf." I wrote about this briefly here shortly after the explosion on April 20.

Message to other consultants about BP disaster

Dear colleagues,

Many of us have worked with BP (we did one small project for its-then Organizational Engineering group in 1993, thanks to Lilly Evans).

Many more of us have pointed to some great examples at BP, like its early start in knowledge management, communities of practice, and its unusual organization designs.

Now BP is at the heart of a colossal safety failure that killed eleven people, seriously injured many more, and which threatens the entire Gulf of Mexico.

Those of us in consulting spend so much time talking about communication and organization and so many other terms that I first listed them here then deleted them all because the stream together sounds like so much gobbledygook.

Although it will take time to determine everything that went wrong (here's an excellent piece by Forbes blogger Christopher Helman, "BP's Deepwater Disaster: What Happened and Why?", who suggests, among other reasons, a decision-making call that may have been in part to blame), this horrific incident offers both a practice field for prevention and a readiness plan for the next time something like this happens.

What advice can we, brilliant consultants of the world, offer BP and the US government right now--and offer to future BP-like disasters? No one in this catastrophe may ever hear what we have to say but every disaster (Haiti was barely 14 weeks ago) cries out for better collaboration, faster knowledge exchange, greater innovation.

I posted an initial thought yesterday. Yours?

Were you in NETWORKING? Please pass along

In 1982, Doubleday published Networking: The First Report and Directory, Jeff's and my first book.

The story of how that book came to market someday will, or rather, should appear in the annals of publishing -- first publisher (Methuen, a British publisher aiming to break into the US market) shelved its whole list just after we'd submitted manuscript; Doubleday picked it up, offering more than twice the original advance (great agent at time, Ron Bernstein); we got the contract to do the electronic typsetting, making it the first commercial book to be electronically typeset under auspices of the authors, never having been retyped by its publisher; translated into Japanese by that country's Economic Planning Agency, and on and on -- but alas this post is about the treasure hunt that we're launching here today.

Networking was, as its subtitle says, a "report" on 1600 grassroots and nonprofit networks focused on the seven topics listed on the cover, along with a directory of those networks.

Within the book was everything from the theory and practice of networks -- with a chapter-long essay devoted to each topic -- to the directory itself, organized in various ways -- by organization name, by location, by keyword, and by title of the network's publications.

Those listed range from The Sun Magazine to World Future Society to Franz Schumacher's Intermediate Technology Group (now Practical Action) to Tilth to Aspen Institute to CoEvolution Quarterly to Dr. Dobb's Journal to the National Center for Citizen Involvement, now the Open Library (where our two earliest books, including this one are listed) and Boston Women's Health Book Collective, now Our Bodies, Ourselves, to which we devoted a chapter of its own because of its unique networking skills. The fact that it's still going after nearly forty years makes the point.

We did all the research via networking, beginning with one letter (as in type it, sign it, put it in an envelope, attach a stamp, go to the post office - remember that?) that we sent to one person whom we knew to be a richly connected networker, who suggested nine others, whom we wrote to, who in turn sent us other suggestions -- and within 18 months, we'd received the names of 50,000 "networks" around the world. We wrote to 4000 of them and got back an astonishing 40% response rate - 1600 letters, packages, publications, descriptions, many with heartfelt expressions of why their leaders networked and how they did it. Incredible experience, to say the least. No Internet. Limited email (a little because a few of us pioneers were already online). Need I say: No web, no listservs, and, of course, no Google, Wikipedia, Twitter or Facebook. Just the poor postman, who left a trail of whiskey nips along our sidewalk.

So now it's 2009, more than a quarter-century later and we're wondering how many of those networks have survived (I chose the ones above that I could google). Why now? Not just idle curiosity but intense awareness that there are similarities between the early 1980s and today. Principal among them unemployment, as per Paul O. Flaim's, "Unemployment in 1982: the cost to workers and their families:"

The economy entered 1982 in a severe recession and labor market conditions deteriorated throughout the year. The unemployment rate, already high by historical standards at the onset of the recession in mid-1981, reached 10.8 percent at the end of 1982, higher than at any time in post-World War II history.

A few other interesting stats from then: the Dow was, get ready, 776 in August of that year, down 30% from its high of 1011 five years earlier. And, the drop in exports and spending just announced is mere fractions shy of "the 6.4 percent rate drop seen in the first quarter of 1982, when the economy was in a recession that lasted 16 months," according to Lucia Mutukani's "US economy weakens," in the Feb 29, 2009, Boston Globe.

Clearly, we made it through that tough time, not purely because of networking, of course (I'm not that much of a romantic), but in part because people got together and figured out some things they could do themselves. We're interested in how those networks have survived and intend to include them in the new bit of writing we're engaged in, details to come.

So would you please pass this note along to anyone you know who might have been in the book? When we have a spare minute (ha!), we'll scan the whole list and begin publishing that. Thanks in advance! And, Networking networkers, please post comments here.

Telecommute up, says Geek Doc

John Halamka, the vegan-rock-climbing smart-beyond-words if-it-makes-sense-I'll-try-it CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (and Harvard Medical School to be precise) has a great report on his telecommuting initiatives. It's so good that I'm stealing most of it. Execs, telecommute up! Saves carbon, money, time, and releases the emission most treasured by those in charge, productivity. And, friends, John's up for "The 2008 Medical Weblog Awards Sponsored by Epocrates: Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog Category" - I just voted for him. You can too (hint):

Some staff members are working from home on a full-time basis and others are doing so only one or two days a week. We have about 10-15% of the IT workforce (35 of our 350 staff) who work at home on any given day.

What is the impact? 35 people x 260 workdays = 9,100 days per year saved in commuting. That's 9,100 car-days off the road. This reduces the demand for parking, office space, and most importantly the employee stress/strain of fighting traffic.

From a management perspective, the past year has been very successful. Employee turnover is at 2%, employee satisfaction is high, and productivity has improved. Employees spend 2-3 hours a day working instead of preparing for their workday, commuting, and returning home.

Costs of the technology to empower home workers has been low - a partial subsidy of home internet connections, a fixed amount of prepaid cell phone time added to employee paychecks, and the use of the Juniper SSLVPN for secure remote access/desktop sharing.

"Not-so-lonely planet"

Oliver Morton, author of Mapping Mars and Eating the Sun and features editor for the journal Nature, has a brilliant piece about our extraordinary little orb, where it fits in the history of the universe, and how to draw a line between the durability of life here and global warming. Very few authors are capable of this kind of range, this manner of huge thinking, and this unusual insight. Read his NY Times op-ed, "Not-so-lonely planet," and you'll feel much better about everything.

Knights and Dames of the round table

This appears to be it, with nominations today of Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Illinois) for Secretary of Transportation and Rep. Hilda Solis (D-California) as Secretary of Labor. Click, wait for OrgScope map of US Gov to load and open, and you've got the Obama round table of cabinet nominees. You can dive down into the departments, change what you're looking at by clicking on the menu bar, and have a high ole' time.

Or just get used to the new faces here. (FYI, Dennis Blair nominated today as National Intelligence Director--thanks to Siobhan Gorman at Wall Street Journal for that news; still waiting for final touches at CIA, Federal Election Commission, Food and Drug Administration, Federal Trade Commission, and FDIC - Federal Deposit Insurance Corp and a host of other agencies -- none of which are cabinet-level jobs.)

The real green team

You know how interested I am in green teams, which I first wrote about here almost exactly a year ago (Carbon neutral, or shall we say, green teams).

Now PEBO has gone and appointed one that can really make a difference. Here's the scoop from CNN's Steve Hargreaves's piece, "Obama names energy team, vows new tack:"

The team -- the subject of speculation for weeks -- includes physicist Steven Chu as Energy secretary and former Environmental Protection Agency head Carol Browner in the newly created position of "climate czar." [Ed. note: One more czar - soon we'll need a Council of Czar(ina)s]

The team also includes Lisa Jackson, a former head of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection, as director of the EPA; and Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor from Los Angeles, as head of the Council on Environmental Quality.

So guess what? We've added them to the ever-growing map.

And here are their faces with their organizations, all in one little picture. Clockwise, Lisa Jackson at EPA; Nancy Sutley at Council on Environmental Quality; Carol Browner (welcome back, EPA head during Clinton administration) at Office of Energy; Climate & Environment; and Stephen Chu, Secretary of Energy ("Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has headed the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004"). Go PEBO Green Team!

For the telework skeptics

Kurt Cagle's "Is Telework the New Face of the Agile Workforce?" is a love letter to all those wondering whether people who work at home are: 1. actually watching Oprah; and 2. thereby burning up a whole lot more watts. Say it ain't so! He does in a piece worth the clicky:

...Sun's ergonomics people connected P3 International's Kill A Watt meter, a portable power meter that can connect into a workstation, onto both their internal computer systems and the participants home (or mobile) connections. What they discovered was that teleworkers consumed about 64 watts per hour, while their office counterparts consumed more than double, 130 watts per hour, just on their equipment.

Yet the vast benefit came in slashing the commute. The energy costs involved in running office equipment accounted for less than 2% of the total carbon footprint for an employee, while almost all of the rest, 97%, was involved in the commute to and from the office each day. By reducing trips to the office to 2 ½ days a week, a typical employee managed to save 5,400 kilowatt hours per year, according to Kristi McGee, senior director for Sun's Open Work services group.

How about a little sociology with that technology?

My Google alerts for virtual teams and collaboration runneth over, thanks to the high price of oil. Who'd'a thunk it?

Many reporters, for example, The New York Times's fine one, Steve Lohr, whose article, "As travel costs rise, more meetings go virtual," took the headline earlier this week. Nothing wrong with Lohr's article, good, solid reporting with news for the newbies to the area: Cisco's telepresence offering, high price tag aside, makes participants feel like they're "there;" "companies of all sizes are beginning to shift to Web-based meetings for training and sales;" and this, worth the pull quote:

A report last month by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, a group of technology companies, and the Climate Group, an environmental organization, estimated that up to 20 percent of business travel worldwide could be replaced by Web-based and conventional videoconferencing technology.

Twenty percent? Me thinks a lot higher. But, numbers aside, where Lohr's article is like all the rest - and where it misses the point - is in this: Technology alone does not solve the problem. I've harped on about this before. Our old motto, "90% people, 10% technology," is being drowned out by the reflexive action whereby companies/organizations throw technology into the hands that once held airline tickets.

It's not enough. Virtual meetings, including those conducted by Cisco's telepresence, can be very good indeed but I wager that the technology only contributes a small fraction of the reason attendees deem these meetings as good. It's the process by which the meeting is conducted, the inclusiveness of their facilitators, the hard work of the leaders - and their exemplary virtual behaviors - that make such meetings sing.

I've written about this a lot - here's an old favorite, "Bored on conference calls? Relief!"

It's the sociology, telecommuters

The New York Times wisely runs a full page of op-eds today on the impact of high gas prices, "Is Your Tank Half Empty or Half Full?", but none deals with the biggest problem introduced by telecommuting: How to really work effectively at a distance. The Times is not alone in headlining telecommuting (well, in truth, only one piece in today's paper, "Pajama Life" by Nicole Benson Goluboff, actually even touches on this). I've seen dozens of articles about the sudden move to telecommuting in the past few weeks, dozens. Having covered this topic in rather excruciating detail over many years, let me leave it at this for now: Our old slogan, "90% people, 10% technology," remains true. It's not about bandwidth, whiz-bang software, or mobile devices. The magic is in the sociology. Keep four things in mind, correct as necessary, and your telecommuting will work just fine: People, Purpose, Links, and Time.