Endless Knots

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.

Checklist for green teams - beta version

The folks over at The Content Economy led by Oscar Berg's efforts (sparked by my post, "Carbon neutral teams") are working on a checklist for "green teams." Do you really need to meet face-to-face or will virtual meeting via conference call or videoconference work? When you do travel, what small gestures can you make that also reduce CO2 emissions? What can you do right this minute, today, to contribute to wiser use of our precious natural resources (ah-hem, always turns off your computer, perhaps)?

After brainstorming with his colleagues (they met face-to-face in Stockholm, he took the train from Lund in the south of Sweden), Oscar has posted their first list on their blog in the hopes that others will comment. Let's call this the begining of a collaborative process of creating a checklist that we all can use to make wiser decisions about how we meet. Check it out and add your thoughts there. Great work, you guys! (For the record, I don't "know" Oscar at all; we've never even exchanged emails but our mutual interest in this topic has sparked this creative undertaking via our blogs.)

And in the interest of getting as many people to think about this as possible, I'm poaching their list right here as well. Please think about what Oscar and his colleagues have come up with and make some comments, which we can share back and forth among blogs:

1. Start with yourself and where you are – think of how you can reduce the CO2 emissions that you cause at work (we already assume that you think of what you can do at home). Here are some of all the things you can do:
   
   - Turn off your computer when not using it – and unplug the power adapter
   - Drink water on tap (filtered if necessary) instead of drinking bottled water
   - When you go to meetings nearby - take the bike, public transportation by train or bus, or share a car
   - When you stay at hotels - shower instead of taking baths, reuse your towels, choose a hotel with a climate policy…
   - When you need to eat - choose seasonal fruits for the fruit basket, walk to the nearest restaurant, eat locally produced food…
2. Ask yourself when a face-to-face meeting that requires travelling is really necessary - and when it’s not. Reflect on and question your own behaviour – are you sometimes travelling because you like it or get a feeling that you are an important person when doing so?
3. If you need to meet but not necessarily face-to-face, ask yourself if any of there are other ways to meet and communicate than by a face-to-face meeting in real life - phone conference, instant messaging, group chat, web conferencing…
4. If a face-to-face meeting is really necessary, is it an option to meet virtually? Video conferencing, virtual meeting place (Second Life)…
5. If you really need to meet face-to-face in real life, check if you can meet at a location where as few of the meeting attendees as possible have to travel to the meeting, thereby shortening the total distance travelled by the meeting participants. Also question what persons really need to participate in the meeting (identify and try to stop meeting professionals from attending).
6. If you need to travel yourself to the meeting, check what transportation options you have at hand. Try to choose the means of transportation that produces the least CO2 emissions but still offers a reasonable travel time and cost – and be sure to include the cost for any CO2 emissions in the cost! If it takes a few hours longer by train than by plane – can you motivate taking the train if you can work during the travel?
7. If possible, always try to compensate for the CO2 emissions that you cause by traveling. You can calculate how much CO2 emissions you produce and how much you should pay on the CarbonNeutral Company’s web site: http://www.carbonneutral.com/pages/businesscalc.asp
8. Finally, be open and proud about your achievements when it comes to minimizing CO2 emissions. Tell others that you choose not to travel to a meeting because you did not find it necessary to meet and that you solved it with other means of communication instead, that you walked instead of taking a cab to the nearby meeting, that you chose to go by train instead of flying, and so on. It will not only show that you care about the environment, but also that you are a responsible and caring person in general. It builds trust. Don't be afraid of how other people might react. For some, it can be an eye-opener and they might be impressed with your reasoning and behaviour, and eventually they will start changing their own behaviour. Others might be offended since it might cause bad conscience. But whatever kind of reaction you will get, telling others about your choices will help move things in the right direction.

Oscar takes the challenge

Further to our new friend Oscar Berg in Sweden, who's thinking about green teams. Go, Oscar! He's "taking the challenge to write a checklist for situations when I need to get together face-to-face and when other alternatives such as web conferencing might be just as suitable or at least possible."

A post by Jessica Lipnack about “carbon-neutral teams” gave me the idea and being quoted on her blog provided some extra motivation. I am involving my fellow bloggers Henrik and Anders (Anders wrote a peace called “Are we finally ready for eco-meetings?” a while ago). Anyway, we are compiling a list of candidate items for the checklist and I hope to present it in some time.

By the way, do you know that you can calculate how much emission of carbon dioxide you cause by flying? The CarbonNeutral Company offers calculators and the airline SAS actually allows you to compensate for the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) that you cause when you travel with them. Good initiative. But what we need is to do is also to compary flying to other transportation alternatives.

Let’s take my flight next week from Malmö to Stockholm and back again as an example. By taking the plane, I would have caused an emission of 0.1644 tonnes of CO2. By taking the train instead, I will cause an emission of only 0.00012 tonnes of CO2. Do I need to say more? I guess not. I will take the train from now on.

And I posted this back to Oscar's blog (nothing like self-quoting): "I played with the numbers a little to make them more understandable to those of limited intelligence like myself: if a ton is 2000 pounds, then your flight would release the equivalent of a sumo-wrestler worth of CO2 (328 pounds), while the train ride would release something like a cup of coffee, four ounces."

Green teams begin the year

Bill Ives, again, captures the heart of what I tried to say in Carbon neutral teams (below) in his New Year's post, Will Green Teams Become Prominent in 2008? This phrase, "green teams," has been running through my mind since I first posted. Think we should write a book about it? (Googling reveals that lots of folks are using the expression.)

Carbon neutral or, shall we say, green teams

For years, we've been singing the praises of virtual teams for their ability to bring together differing perspectives, amass greater intelligence, and gain the benefit of more human diversity--then wrap it all together in a world where the sun never sets. Nice stuff.

Along the way, people have also been pointing out that working at a distance is less expensive, less stressful, and more environmentally friendly.

Now comes the news that HarperCollins UK, a Rupert Murdoch company,"has claimed it is the first major trade publisher in the UK to become carbon neutral, after reducing its carbon footprint by 8% over the past year and investing in carbon offsetting."  According to The Bookseller.com, "After focusing on reducing its electricity and gas consumption, cutting business air travel and curbing fleet mileage, its carbon footprint dropped..."

Thus, let me introduce the idea of "carbon neutral" or perhaps better, "green teams." When we talk about "individual" efforts to reduce emissions, perhaps we can also consider "team" efforts. OK, we already have such teams--in our beloved city of Newton, Massachusetts, anyway--that "team up" every spring to remove detritus from the banks of the storied Charles River. Thousands of other communities are doing the same.

But what about making our at-work teams carbon neutral? Instead of that next in-person meeting, whether a few miles away or a few thousand, how about meeting online? How about developing a checklist for why you need to get together face-to-face, then rating each upcoming event? Unless you exceed a certain threshold, you stay put.

I'm not saying we should never have conferences or team get-togethers or anything like that. But consider this: tomorrow morning, we will have an important meeting where we go over some fundamental ideas with a client, or I should say, a client and a potential client. We will be here in West Newton; another will be in Boston; and the third? Bangalore, India. Carbon neutral, all the way.

PS: There's a great roundup on UK and US publishers' efforts to reduce emissions at Publishing News. And need I say that a simple Google search turns up the world's first carbon neutral soccer team?

Energy-conscious computing

Some years ago, we were in a joint venture with the dearly departed Digital Equipment Corporation. The purpose was to build a regional "computer conferencing" system, called, yes, New England Commons, that would then link to the other regional computer conferencing systems, notably, Metanet in Washington, DC., Unison, a similar system in Denver, and, in the Bay Area, you guessed it, The Well. Some day, the business plan read, all of these regional systems would meld into one national system allowing people all over the country to talk to one another online. Name of the parent company: Internetwork Communications. We called it Internet and the year was 1985.

Why were there regional systems in those days? Because the cost of connection--via dial-up--was prohibitive way back then...as in $25/hour. That's right, $25 per hour, or, if you worked a package, $22.50. (Now go complain about your montly cable-modem or DSL fee..)

For those unfamiliar with the term, a computer conferencing system was the ancestor of bulletin boards, discussion forums, and even the much-tossed-about term-du-jour, wikis.

Point of all this is that in order to install the hardware for this enterprise, we had to build a room outfitted with its own power system, air conditioning, raised floor and what I recall as a zillion other things we had to become quickly expert in. Transporting "the computer" (a VAX 11/780 plus racks and racks for the modems) to our second-floor office in Waltham, Mass., required hiring a crane. And as soon as it was operational, our power bill went through the third-floor roof.

I've been sensitive to the power needs of computing ever since and go to some effort, i.e. crawl around the floor turning off power strips, to reduce the drain on electricity when my machine is off (this in my home office).

All of which leads to a good post today that goes a bit deeper into what server farms and the like require in major operations centers, like hospitals. CareGroup's CIO "geekdoctor" John Halamka, a low-carbon-footprint kinda guy, sheds some light, so to speak, on the tradeoffs that he and his folks think about when adding MIPS. They've even hired a full-time power engineer:

Power consumption and heat is increasing to the point that data centers cannot sustain the number of servers that the real estate can accommodate. The solution is to deploy servers much more strategically. We’ve started a new “Kill-a-watt” program and are now balancing our efforts between supply and demand. We are more conservative about adding dedicated servers for every new application, challenging vendor requirements when dedicated servers are requested, examining the efficiency of power supplies, and performing energy efficiency checks on the mechanical/electrical systems supporting the data center.

"(We) will reduce number of layers from ... 11 to about 7"

The new CEO at BP is shaking things up, or perhaps better said, taking things out. CNNMoney.com quotes Tony Hayward in BP Shares sinks as CE0 warns on results:  "'There is massive duplication and lack of clarity of who does what,'" the [Financial Times] quoted Hayward as saying. "'We will reduce the number of organization units. (We) will reduce the number of layers from the workers up to the CEO from 11 to about seven.'"

Is that the right number, Mr. Hayward?  How do you know what the right number is? Using OrgScope, we found 11 levels at one of the energy giant's competitors--and its shares are not sinking.

How do you determine the right number of levels in an organization the size of BP, with in the neighborhood of 100K employees and perhaps 10x that number more in contractors? What number allows the chief executive and senior leaders to "spot weaknesses and areas for improvement," as one energy executive said to us.

The deeper question here is not about a target number of levels but about whether the structure optimizes strategy.

"New light bulbs in plain English"

Common Craft Show, encore, this time a short online video on why to buy compact flourescent light bulbs. It would be hard to buy the old kind again after seeing New Light Bulbs in Plain English, their latest spoonful of common sense. Producer Lee LeFever explains:

Switching the types of light bulbs we use at home is a small but impactful way for nearly everyone to save money and help reduce pollution. We made this video because compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs make sense and we want people to make the switch.

This video is an obvious departure of our web-centric ways. We're still web-at-heart, but the Show may veer into foreign territory from time-to-time.

And they list their sources:

• NaturalGas.org - Comparison of Fossil Fuel Emission Levels
• EPA - Electricity from Coal
• National Coal Council - Source of US Energy (PDF)
• Popular Mechanics - Comparison of Light Quality
• Popular Mechanics - Reality of Compact Fluorescents and Mercury
• ConEd - 100 Tips for Energy Conservation
• Energy Star - CFLs

See other "in Plain English" posts below:
Google Docs
Social Bookmarking
Web 2.0