Scalable Social Innovations | nuPOLIS

Some Domestic Manufacturing is Alive and Well

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:13:51 -0500

Small Firm Shows How a Relentless Pursuit of Innovation and Continuous Improvement Can Lead to Success, Even in Tough Times

We read with interest a recent article about GR Spring and Stamping, a privately-held mid-sized (250 employees) precision metal forming company in Grand Rapids, MI. The article noted that GRS&S had been chosen as the sole North American supplier for the 2.3 million parts needed to fix Toyota’s accelerator defect that led to its large recall. Toyota praised GRS&S, saying: "They are a very valued partner to us, and they've got a proven track record in supply and quality and on-time delivery. We needed it done very expeditiously, and GRSS was able to say, 'Yes, we can do that,' and they have been."

The fact that Toyota, in its moment of crisis, turned to a small, privately held domestic manufacturing company to solve its recall problem led us to thinking about the state of manufacturing in the U.S. – how important it is, and what it takes to be successful in it.

We got to know Jim Zawacki, the CEO and founder of GR Spring and Stamping in the early 1990’s when we were living and working in West Michigan. Jim helped lead the creation of the West Michigan Manufacturing Council and was one of the early pioneers in continuous improvement and lean manufacturing. We worked with Jim and other Council members on the development of a model of world class manufacturing. What made GRS&S different from thousands of other U.S. manufacturing companies was that he not only understood the concepts of world class manufacturing, but he had the focus and commitment to actually live them and make sure they got implemented over multiple decades. If you go on their web site, you will still see those principles repeated there – Workforce Culture; Continuous Improvement; Innovation; and Responsiveness.

When you walk through the plant, you can “feel” the culture in the day to day metabolics of the company. Visual displays are everywhere; the plant floor is impeccably clean, not anything like your vision of the typical “dirty, dark and dangerous” factory; team spaces are sprinkled throughout the plant; people and their accomplishments are praised effusively; and everywhere you see measures, measures, measures.

We think the characteristics of serious and successful entrepreneurs are the same – whether in the private sector or the social sector – and Jim Zawacki exemplifies those characteristics: powerful vision; strong personal values; boundless curiosity; obsession with continuous improvement and disciplined operating systems; a deep commitment to unleashing the potential of the human talent in the organization; and a willingness to take risks to be on the leading edge of innovation.

We applaud Jim and the multi-decade work he has done to show it is possible to succeed as a manufacturer in America.

Let's Fire All the Teachers!

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

A school district in Rhode Island holds a supplier accountable for performance--and all hell breaks loose.

Say you're a member of the local school board and you find out that only 7% of your district's 11th graders passed the state math test. What should you do? First answer: Insist on improvement by the school.

But it turns out the school's low performance has been going on for years; the school is mired in failure and there doesn't seem to be much prospect of improvement. What should you do?

Next answer: Hit the reset button and start anew. But hold on! Reset what? What has to be changed?

The answer depends on your view of what's causing the mass student failure. Blame poverty and immigration: The students don't care about learning and many start behind because they don't speak English. Blame state education regulators: Their curriculum and testing requirements overwhelm the school day and result in shallow learning. Blame the legislature and taxpayers: They are unwilling to put more money into public education.

But, of course, you don't have control over those factors. And besides, there are schools all over the country that produce much better performance working with low-income and minority students, with the same regulatory burdens, and no more funding. So what should you do?

Next answer: Hold your suppliers accountable. Fire them--the school administrators and teachers--and hire new ones who you have reason to believe can do the job.

This decision-logic is far from unusual. If, for instance, you were having a house built and the general contractor and work crews kept screwing up, you wouldn't offer to pay them more to improve their performance, you'd fire them and get someone more competent to finish the job. But the world of education has a logic of its own. You can follow it in the case of the Central Falls, Rhode Island, school district.

After the district got the dismal math test results, the superintendent looked for ways to improve the school's performance and started negotiations with the teachers union. But the talks broke down when the union said that if the district wanted to add 25 minutes to the school day, teachers would have to be paid more. In other words, what teachers were already being paid was disconnected from the student achievement results. So the superintendent, backed by the school board, fired all 93 teachers. Unheard of!

The drastic move is likely to be repeated in more and more school districts--as pressure rises to "fix" failing schools and to hold teachers accountable for at least some of their students' performance. Unfortunately, the only sure way to fix failing schools is to break them up and start new ones; their chronic failure gives rise to a "school culture"--the hearts, minds, and habits of teachers, administrators, students, and parents--that defeats improvement efforts. At the same time, while there may be many factors to blame for a school's failures, it's also true that the quality of teaching is widely regarded as the single most important factor in student success. If teachers want much of the credit for success, why shouldn't they take much of the blame for failure?

As accountability for performance creeps into the education system, the people who control whether schools live or die--local elected school boards and authorizers and boards of charter schools--will increasingly realize that the more options they have for suppliers who manage and staffing schools the better. Why limit yourself to a teachers union's offer or to a particular charter school operator when you can shop around for the best performing suppliers and the best deal? And if there is lots of competition among lots of good suppliers in the education "marketplace," then it will be easier to look a failing supplier in the eye and say, "You're fired."

“Community Transformation” – What Are We Talking About?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Cities and towns are changing all the time, but how do they intentionally become better places?

Detroit is a community transformed. In the lifespan of some of its residents it has downshifted from being one of America’s largest, wealthiest, and most innovative cities to one of its fastest shrinking, poorest, and sclerotic places. A recent study found that a third of the residential parcels in the city—roughly 100,000 lots—are vacant or abandoned buildings. And Mayor Dave Bing, strapped with huge budget deficits, has committed to divide the city into neighborhoods that will get city services and investment because they are still viable and those that won't because they have emptied out.

In the same 50-60 years of Detroit’s steep decline, San Jose grew from a community of fewer than 100,000 to a city of more than 1 million (bigger than Detroit)—and a global center of the computer industry. It, too, is a place transformed.

Detroit is not without its bright spots and San Jose is not without its problems. But by any measure, these places are not what they used to be in some fundamental ways. It’s not just their fortunes that have changed; some underlying capacities—the things that make a community what it is and what it can become—have changed.

It can be argued that the transformation of these two cities was more accidental, a matter of circumstances, than intentional. San Jose boomed thanks to the presence of university researchers and entrepreneurs who invented the computer industry. And Detroit deflated due to a combination of racism that led to “white flight” from the city to the suburbs and the competitive failure of the automobile manufacturers concentrated in the city. Sometimes, you might say, transformation just happens; it results from the dynamic ebb and flow of social relations and the creative destruction of capitalist economies, especially driven by the arrival of disruptive technologies.

But the “transformation just happens” explanation is certainly not the full truth. Intentionality also shapes every community’s arc, even if only in the form of willful neglect. Local public policies may aid or combat racial segregation and may support one industry’s presence at the expense of others. Civic leaders may choose to invest their influence and funds in, say, the arts and not in education. The heads of local systems, such as transportation or education, may ignore the fact that their systems produce mediocre results or they may push for dramatic improvement. Outside entities—the federal government or absentee corporations—may decide to steer investments in ways that deny or provide important resources to a community.

What does it mean to say that a community seeks intentionally to transform itself? How does intentional transformation happen? And what does it have to do, if anything, with social innovation?

These days the advocates of community transformation have as many as four things in mind that should be transformed:

A community’s economic capacity and performance—transformation to succeed in a globally competitive, “flat” Knowledge Economy.
A community’s energy and environmental sustainability—transformation to dramatically reduce consumption and production of carbon that contributes to climate change.
A community’s level and concentration of persistent poverty, especially that of “vulnerable” children—transformation to dramatically reduce poverty and bad outcomes for poor, minority children.
A community’s role within a larger region of communities—transformation to increase collaboration and equity among places within regions.

These are transformational matters because they require communities to change their underlying culture--the way people in places think, feel, and behave. A community with an "old economy" mindset perceives and interprets the world differently from a community with a "new economy" mindset--and therefore acts differently too. The same is true about consumption of energy and natural resources, or poverty within the community, or relationships among communities: certain ideas, attitudes, attachments, and habits pervade in the community and generate certain actions, but when they are changed, different actions occur.

Changing the fundamental culture of a community depends on unleashing three dynamics in a place:

Shared vision and goals. The creation of a new collective wish/vision/hope for the future of the whole community.
Social engagement. Development of new and/or strengthened social relations—bonds among group and bridges between groups--based on awareness of interdependence within the community, caring about other parts of the community, and trust/reciprocity across the community.
Systemic improvement. The expression of high standards for the basic needs/competencies/opportunities for people in the community to become self-sufficient, productive, and generative--and the continuous improvement of systems toward those standards.

"Early College" Schools Can Be a Game Changer, But...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Obstacles are still in the way of this education innovation.A year ago I was working with a Michigan school superintendent who wanted to accelerate high school learning so that many students got college credits while securing a high school diploma. The "early college" model, in which high school students also matriculate at a 2-year or 4-year college and graduate with as many as 2 years of college credits, has been tried around the U.S. for many years. It offers several benefits:

Students who can learn at an accelerated (college-ready) pace get a chance to do so, rather than being forced to sit in less challenging high-school classes.
Students get experience learning on college campuses, taking college-level classes with college students--so they are less likely to stumble when they make the full-time transition from high school to college life.
A portion of a high school's students take college classes at college, so the cost of operating the high school can be reduced.

Seems like a "win-win" for students and for education systems: the kids get more educational choices suited to their capacities and the schools get to fulfill an important part of their purpose--produce college-ready students--at a lower cost. Think: good customer service meets productivity increases.

No wonder eight states just announced that in fall 2011 they will start letting 10th graders in dozens of high schools take so-called "board" tests and, if they pass, enroll in community college with a high school diploma. Each state plans to sign up as many as 20 high schools.

There board-test model is one version of an "early college" HS. Another allows students in the HS to take college courses for college credit, with the class also counting toward HS requirements. Some of these high schools are located on or next to a college campus and are closely linked to that higher ed institution. In a different model, a community college in Dallas, Texas, started its own charter high school enrolling 10th graders into a full-time course load at the college.

What these models have in common is that HS students do not have to fulfill "seat time" requirements--specified courses students have to take in order to accumulate enough credits to graduate--that are typically imposed by state law. Instead of having to spend a semester in the class, they can "test out" of the class and/or take a more advanced college class. “We’ve been tied to seat time for 100 years," says Kentucky’s commissioner of education, Terry Holliday. "This would allow an approach based on subject mastery—a system based around move-on-when-ready.”

Decoupling students' credit acquisition from seat time in classrooms is a revolution, for the reasons listed above. (Supporters also say it reduces the amount of remedial work that HS graduates have to do when they arrive in college.) But every revolution has its resistance.

Back to the superintendent I was working with. She wanted to design an early college high school especially for "vulnerable" students who would be the first in their families to go to college. The idea was to start students in 9th grade taking selected community colleges from community college professors. But we ran into two roadblocks, one legal, the other cultural:

State law required school districts to pay for college courses their students took, but only starting in 11th grade. A 9th or 10th grade student ready and willing to take college-level classes has to pay for them out of pocket and still has to attend high school (or be branded a truant). For most families this is a prohibitive barrier--a vestige of the seat time approach that artificially increases the need for high school classes and teachers.
High school administrators and teachers were reluctant to "let our kids" take classes outside of the high school. They didn't want to "lose their best kids," an assistant principal explained. So much for doing what's best for the customer! This is a vestige of the public school monopoly mentality that remains strong in schools.

These and other barriers to accelerated learning through the early college innovation will gradually fall--as parents, students, and taxpayers realize the potential benefits of the change. Many of these same issues are also holding back the spread of so-called "cyber schools" that go even further to demolish the seat-time model and accelerate learning-at-your-own pace.

Can We Reform Health Care from the Inside Out?

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Colleague Kent Bottles at the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement works to fix the health care Mess

I had a minor surgery last fall and was once again reminded about how stunningly dysfunctional our health care system is – especially for people like me with high deductibles who basically pay for their own health care. For a $4,000 procedure, I got 14 invoices from 4 different providers spread over a four month time frame. And no one in the system could give me any idea what the (very standard) procedure might cost – even though they offered a 20% discount if I paid within 48 hours. Paid how much, to whom??? I think Franz Kafka is still behind the curtain…

Our colleague Kent Bottles runs the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI). I got to know Kent in Grand Rapids, MI where he ran a center that coordinated graduate research and internship placements across multiple health care systems. Kent is a physician who is also a brilliant systems thinker – not a typical pairing of skill sets in our experience. (Physicians seem to get the idea of the body as a system, but usually don’t apply that same thinking to the business ecology that they operate in.)

ICSI brings together diverse groups to transform the health care system so that it delivers patient-centered and value-driven care. It is comprised of 56 medical groups and sponsored by six Minnesota and Wisconsin health plans. Minnesota has benefited and leads the nation in many quality rankings. However, even Minnesota is not delivering the kind of coordinated, high quality, low cost care we all deserve and need.

We wanted to let our friends and colleagues know that ICSI is hosting a conference (http://bit.ly/Ws7IE) on May 3-5 which is targeted at people who want to help co-create the health care system we need and want. Right now, it is unlikely that innovative solutions are going to come from the federal policy level, so innovators are going to have to figure this out on their own.

The two keynote speeches reflect the three tracks that participants can choose from. ePatientDave, who has been featured in the Boston Globe and Time Magazine, is a leader of the Participatory Medicine Movement. Dave is a kidney cancer survivor and Personal Health Record (PHR) pioneer who just want doctors and hospitals to “give me my damn data.” Dr. David Shulkin, a perennial member of the 50 most powerful physician executive lists, has done it all: Chief Medical Officer at Penn, founder and CEO of DoctorQuality, CEO of a hospital in New York, and quality guru.

The ICSI conference will cover a wide variety of topics – use of social networking media for health care improvement; development of Accountable Care Organizations; patient health records; evidence based medicine; shared decision making and new emerging business models for hospitals and medical practices.

Check it out. Or you can twitter Kent at @kentbottles; email him at Kent.Bottles@icsi.org; or even call him on his cell phone (610-639-4956). Our experience is that every transaction with Kent is an interesting one!

Building a Supply Line for More Good Urban Schools: Could Detroit Be Showing the Way?

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Big city school districts and charter schools aren't getting the job done well enough or fast enough. Here's an alternative.

How do you create more good schools in cities?

The Metropolitan Detroit High School Accelerator, a project of the nonprofit Michigan Future Inc, funded by an alliance of foundations, offers an alternative to reforming school districts and starting more low-performing charter schools. Launched in 2009 with the goal of creating 35 new small, open-enrollment, high-performing high schools for around 14,000 students, the Accelerator has an even more ambitious agenda:

"The ultimate goal," notes its business plan, "is to create an alternative system to large failing high schools operated by the Detroit Public Schools and its inner ring suburban counterparts. The accelerator will act as a third-party intermediary; that is, it will provide financial support, training, and direction to founders, principals, teachers and board members who wish to launch new, high-performing high schools." An alternative system. Brilliant!

Of course, if you want to start 35 schools you have to have a "supply line" of founders, funding, buildings, principals, teachers, student achievement assessments and data bases, and more. Where will you turn for these inputs? Louis Glazer, president of Michigan Future, concluded that the Accelerator would have to build its own sources for what its schools will need. Thus, the need for an alternative system custom designed for high-performing urban schools.

That's why last week the Accelerator issued an RFP looking for a college of education that wants to partner with it to prepare teachers. Glazer wants "to design and implement a program that will develop the skills a teacher needs to be successful in a small innovative high school." Of course, the college's prospective teachers will do their learning and student teach in the Accelerator's high schools, much like medical students do at a "teaching hospital."

The Accelerator contends that teachers could be better prepared to most effectively teach in small innovative school environments. They should possess these characteristics:

Possesses strong content knowledge
Implements multiple instructional strategies
Teaches the “whole” child
Works collaboratively
Contributes to school culture
Builds community relationships
Advocates and practices commitment to lifelong learning
Integrates new technologies into teaching and learning

This is the beginning of articulating a new set of standards for what education colleges should be producing. In other words, new performance criteria for a supplier to schools.

It will take years for the Accelerator to create its alternative system, but once it can supply what its 35 new high schools need, why stop there? Its new standards and capacities for supplying schools may become its most important innovation.

The Accelerator is already supporting development of two high schools--one started by the Detroit Public Schools, the other by a charter operator with a successful K-8 school. And as I describe the Accelerator model to innovation-minded educators outside the Detroit area, they all have one response: "Why can't the Accelerator be operating here too?"

Barr Announces $50 million Place-Based Climate Change Strategy

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:35:58 -0500

Nupolis's USA partners were proud to support development of a major new climate initiative.

The Barr Foundation in Boston recently announced that it is committing $50 million to the fight against climate change. The Barr Foundation is the largest environmental grantmaker in New England and has a history of making grants in the areas of open space, water resources, environmental stewardship, environmental justice and smart growth. It was a difficult decision to narrow the foundation's focus, but the urgency of the situation demanded it:

"As we refocus our environmental work on climate change, we have to gradually phase out other strategies. There are hundreds of deserving environmental programs in our community, many of which we have been proud to fund for the past decade. The decision to narrow our focus to climate change was not an easy one. But the urgency of the problem requires swift action. It is the defining issue of our time, with a clock that is running out." (Pat Brandes, Executive Director)

The Barr commitment will be a significant new resource for the climate change field, and one of the largest commitments to date to local, place-based climate action. It will make Barr one of the leading climate change funders nationally.

USA partners John Cleveland and Pete Plastrik of the Innovation Network for Communities were privileged to support the Barr initiative with background research and market scoping that helped them frame their strategic choices. Cleveland and Plastrik produced two sets of analysis:

· An assessment of opportunities for local climate action impact, based on interviews with over 40 players in the Boston region, and a exhaustive review of climate action strategies, particularly those that take into account the need for social equity in mitigation and adaptation strategies.

· An assessment of opportunities for national climate action grant making, based on interviews with key national funders and larger national NGOs engaged in climate change.

Barr choose to focus its work at the regional level, in the areas of building energy efficiency and transportation:

“The Barr Foundation is committed to mitigate climate change by supporting work locally and disseminating successful approaches nationally. Our goal is to significantly reduce Metro Boston's carbon footprint and to do so in a way that distributes costs and benefits equitably. It is our intent to demonstrate how other metros can do the same. Our investments are focused on achieving emissions reductions from the two largest producers of greenhouse gasses: buildings and transportation.” (http://www.barrfoundation.org/Making/index.html)

We wish Barr well in this important work and look forward to tracking how this investment takes climate work in the Boston region to a new level.

For more information, check out this Boston Globe article on the Barr announcement.

The Long View of Education Innovation

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

About two decades into the gritty work of reform, where are we heading?

Charter schools, teacher quality, mayoral control of schools, upgraded curricula and so on: change after change, and more on the way. What will the next two decades look like? Will all the changes reach a "tipping point" that radically improves education performance?

When David Osborne and I wrote 10 years ago about the spread of the "reinventing government" movement & practice field, we said it had been underway since the mid-1970s and still had many years to go to reach full impact. These efforts take decades and cross the generations. What you look for is the formation of what complexity analysts call "buttons" and "threads."

In the case of education reform, the buttons are the various new ideas, practices, and institutions. The threads are the linkages among the buttons--at the governance, management, and operational level in communities, school districts, schools, and classrooms. In other words, threads that link buttons create "ensembles of innovations" that have a transformative effect that no single innovation can have.

The state of education reform in 2010: There are many buttons, though not all the buttons that are needed, and far too few threads, far too few integrating efforts that amass the power of change. The Obama administration's Race to the Top is a thread-making exercise: it will reward states that push a set of specified buttons such as charter schools, nationally shared standards for student achievement, teacher quality efforts. Thus it may accelerate the shift toward new ideas and practices far more than the last federal push, No Child Left Behind.

But there's little evidence that any time soon we will reach a tipping point in which the education system's results dramatically improve. It's the old adage: when you turn the rudder of a big ship it takes time before the direction changes.

Here's how the view from the slowly turning bridge looks:

Gradually the politics of reform, hotly divided for the first 20 years, will converge around a regulated market (not monopoly) model in which:

There is national agreement on the performance results for which education is responsible and accountable.
Traditional districts become authorizers rather than operators of schools (they steer instead of rowing).
Performance contracting with operators/schools becomes a norm based on national standards for performance (above).
A wide variety of suppliers are in the operator market (district managers; district/union collaborations; charter chain operators; charter mom & pops) and they offer a range of school models.
New capacities to build the “supply side” (building leaders, teachers, facilities, performance management systems, etc.) are scaled up, in collaboration with existing suppliers such as ed schools and through new “alternative” suppliers.

Consumer demand/choice & policymakers will focus almost entirely on student/school performance. We are still at a point where:

A great many parents are uncertain, uninformed or unconcerned about school performance and, therefore, do not exercise their consumer authority all that well.
Far too many policymakers still bow too often to ideological or special interest preferences--proclaiming and protecting, rather than passing the policies that will help to drive the education system's performance.

New disruptive innovations will drive large-scale changes in teaching and learning, including:

Remote (cyberspace) and competency-based, rather than seat-time, learning.
Accelerated learning in high school (expanded dual enrollment, especially with community colleges) leading to reduction in cost of K-12 education.
PreK/early childhood development models, especially around literacy readiness of students.
Career/college readiness credentialing (e.g., ACT WorkKeys certificates that link employers/schools/higher ed into a single, aligning mechanism) that will force tighter coupling/coherence of K-12, employer, and higher education systems.

This is, of course, an optimistic view of how tensions in the system will be resolved in favor of “live and let live” and innovation. I think this is a sensible projection, though it will continue to be slow progress.

This Old House: Making Energy Audits Work

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

National certification and training that takes into account the benefits of maximizing the use of existing materials would be a step forward.

Buildings and the appliances within them account for 40 percent of America's energy use and a third of our global warming emissions. A home energy audit is often the first step in making a home more efficient. But getting an audit done properly is not necessarily an easy process.

The result of all audits should include a list of specific recommended improvements and a payback analysis. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a mid-size city, our energy provider offers a low-cost inspection of the thermal shell of a home but not a comprehensive energy audit that would include a Home Energy Efficiency Rating (HERS) with a blower door test (a diagnostic test designed accurately measure the air tightness of a home and locate sources of air leakage) and thermal imaging analysis. For this, we are on our own to look elsewhere.

Finding a qualified and ethical auditor is not a straightforward process. With the growth of the green building market, it is surprising that there is neither a national standard for an energy audit nor a nationally recognized certification for energy auditors. These gaps put customers at a disadvantage. There are many instances of companies that use the energy audit merely as an entry point in order to sell other products or services. A true energy audit should stand on its own and advocate for the homeowner's best interests.

A mishmash of entities certify energy auditors (but it’s unclear if standards are the same among them) and building performance ratings (a different and more comprehensive process). For example, the Energy Star website has a link to locate an “Energy Star for homes partner” which leads to a new homes partner locator tool for either builders, performance raters or lenders. Not much help for an old-house owner.

Doing a local search turned up a list that was hard to navigate - many providers cited years of experience as inspectors or builders, but that told me little about their training or qualifications to assess and recommend appropriate fixes to my old house. A significant problem is finding someone who will not recommend replacement products over fixes that are more appropriate. I experienced this with a very capable carpenter we hired to fix the framework around a bank of windows. He insisted that replacing the 14 windows in the entire room, which would take him a day, was a much better value for me than his spending 2.5 days in repairs. While I believe he sincerely felt that new windows were a superior product, it seemed apparent to me that his cut on the sale of the new product had to be better than the 12 extra hours of work involved in repairs. The potential benefits of reusing and improving, rather than replacing, facilities are covered in a report on building reuse I released.

Speaking of windows, extensive studies by the National Parks Service indicate that changes to windows should be based on factors other than energy savings; they estimate the "payback" for window replacement is in the range of 90 years. The studies affirm that the most cost effective and practical improvements are often the least expensive: adding insulation and air sealing. This adds another level of difficulty to the energy retrofit - finding qualified insulation and HVAC installers. Many are not knowledgeable about effectively and safely insulating buildings or increasing heating equipment performance efficiency, primarily because until very recently, there was little training available. If we are serious about scaling up energy efficiency retrofits, building owners need a better way to assess the qualifications of both inspectors and installers. An oversight body for a national certification would be a good step forward. But it should build into its specifications the vast amount of data showing the benefits of maximizing the use of existing materials, for example fixing and reusing windows and other parts of older homes. Reuse also avoids the negative impacts of sending usable materials to the landfill, as well as the energy and emissions costs in producing the new products.

Can Massachusetts Make Cold Cool?

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:37:12 -0500

Massachusetts Takes Leadership on Energy Efficiency

The rain was falling sideways when I landed last week at Logan Airport from Colorado, where I live. The January thaw had arrived in the guise of a major tropical storm, with high winds and temperatures near 60. Dressed for winter, I was sweating as soon as I got off the plane. For the two days that followed, I spent most of my time asking people to turn down their thermostats. Though the weather was balmy, the places I visited, from a Boston restaurant to a business in Waltham to the friends’ house in Belmont where I was staying, were still being heated as if it were freezing outside. That it was in fact nearly thirty degrees warmer didn’t seem to matter.

Which is why I was heartened to see that also last week Massachusetts launched one of the most ambitious energy efficiency programs in the country. Part of the state’s 2008 Green Communities Act, the new initiative puts energy efficiency front and center as Massachusetts’s “first fuel,” dramatically expanding consumer outreach and incentives for conservation measures like home insulation and efficient appliances. With $1.6 billion committed to the program and a target reduction of 2.4 percent in electricity use over the next three years, the state is positioned to overtake California as the nation’s efficiency leader.

While this is great news for energy conservation, the Massachusetts program also highlights a lingering gap in the debate about energy consumption in the U.S. For the most part, policymakers and energy advocates have focused on technical or economic solutions like energy audits, weatherization and product rebates. Each is important, but ignores the most obvious conservation challenge: human behavior.

What I experienced during the thaw last week was neither a technical nor an economic problem; it was a behavioral one. Nobody was turning down the dial on their thermostats. Simple actions like this by U.S. homeowners and property managers could result in energy savings of between 25-30 percent. This is the equivalent of the energy produced by 240 medium-sized coal-fired power plants and would prevent the emission of 500 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, even when high efficiency technologies are installed, 30 percent or more of the energy savings that could potentially be achieved through such technologies is lost because of human behavior.

But the challenge isn’t just about adjusting our thermostats. It’s about our expectations for comfort and relationship to nature itself. Most of our buildings in cities like Boston, New York and Chicago are very warm in the winter and very cold in the summer; we tend to inhabit extreme indoor environments, even when outdoor temperatures are moderate. Our homes, offices, hotels and airports are often their own micro-climates, with little resemblance to ambient conditions, let alone operable windows. We have become the victims of our own clever engineering. HVAC and other modern building systems have conditioned us to expect extremes of hot and cold in our buildings. This has resulted in a variation on what the journalist Richard Louv calls “Nature Deficit Disorder.” We’ve lost our connection to the outdoors while becoming dependent on technology to make us comfortable.

Thirty-one years ago, President Carter donned his famous cardigan sweater in a speech in which he urged Americans to conserve energy by turning down their thermostats. Unfortunately, his message fell on deaf ears. Carter and his cardigan simply weren’t cool. But Massachusetts has the opportunity to succeed where Carter failed. Public awareness about energy use and climate change has never been greater. Nor has people’s desire to take action. Governor Patrick and civic leaders across the Commonwealth should take a page from Carter’s sartorial strategy. They should start wearing their beefiest fleece pullovers to work and, come summer, their lightest cotton knits, adjusting their office thermostats accordingly. The Governor and others can help make cold cool and warm hot.

Just a few degrees up or down in the State House and buildings across Massachusetts could make a big difference, not only in energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions, but our relationship to the environment which, after all, is why we’re doing this in the first place.

A former Cambridge resident, William Shutkin is a Founding Partner of Urban Sustainability Associates and a Visiting Scholar at the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Accountability in Education: What's So Hard About Making Schools Perform Well?

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Anger, frustration, and opposition are the norms when it comes to judging schools. Yet another opportunity for innovation?

After eight years of making education systems use a one-size-fits-all, simplistically linear model for judging a school's performance, known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the federal government is searching for a new form of accountability. The Obama administration recently said it wants to ditch the AYP provision in the No Child Left Behind law, which judges annually whether a school is succeeding or failing based mostly on achieving pre-set targets for student test scores. AYP has been the target of endless complaint and opposition. According to a New York Times report, the administration concluded the AYP system "fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students. Instead, under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools."

That's good, because AYP was grossly inadequate. But solving the problems of performance accountability in education won't be easy. Imagine that you are a charter school authorizer with a portfolio of, say, 50 schools, or the superintendent of a school district with a similar number of schools.

To what performance standards should you hold schools accountable?
Should all schools be held to the same standards?
What should happen when a school fails to meet the standards?
And since even a failing school has some students, teachers, classes that are meeting the standards--"islands of success"--what should happen to them?

Let's tackle just the first two of these questions to get a sense of the complexities involved in designing a new performance measurement system for education.

Which performance standards? States are beginning to converge on a set of college- and career-readiness standards that mostly will involve test scores, perhaps on the ACT sequence of three aligned tests beginning in 8th grade. So let's use those. With trepidation--since right now perhaps only a third of high school graduates actually achieve those standards.

Add other standards if you agree with people who argue that test scores in subject matters simply doesn't measure enough of a student's college readiness. Add even more if you think (I do) that rates of high school graduation, enrollment in post-secondary programs, and college completion also are part of a school's performance picture.

What about elementary and middle schools--how will you measure their performance? If a middle school is supposed to prepare students for success in high school, how is high school readiness measured? If an elementary school is part of a three-school feeder system, can it be held accountable for whether its students do or don't go to college seven years after they leave fifth grade?

Finally, recall that schools increasingly exist in a competitive "market" environment. Unsatisfied parents can move their kids to other schools--or home school with a link for a cyber school--at the drop of a textbook. So it seems important to measure parent and student satisfaction with the school--and this won't necessarily hinge on the school's academic performance. Parents and students care about many other characteristics of a school.

Universal or variable standards? Should an urban school system with 70% of its minority, immigrant students living in low-income households be held to the same performance standards as a suburban school system with 90% white students living in middle- and upper-middle class households? Consider the track records of these two schools. The city schools graduate 40-50% of their students, maybe 10% are college ready, and maybe 20-25% enroll in post-secondary programs. The suburban schools graduate 80-90%, 30-40% are college ready, and 60-70% enroll in post-secondary programs.

With this starting point for measuring performance, should we say that a 90% graduation rate is the standard for both systems? If not, what is the lower standard for the low-income school? And what's the explanation--e.g., "poor kids can't learn"--for holding a lower standard?

But if all schools have the same performance standards it seems obvious that even if the low-performing school improves its performance substantially, it will take a number of years to achieve the same performance that the suburban school already achieves. How many years should it take? How can you tell if it is making enough progress fast enough? How can you even tell if the school has a good plan and enough capability to make progress?

As Foundations Seek More Impact, Their "Green Consciousness" Blocks the Way

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Why big professional foundations have trouble being rigorously strategic and innovative.

We've spent much of the last few years working with foundations--and whining about them (with our partners and with many of the people we know who work in foundations). From time to time we have reflected on what it is about the foundations that often makes them frustrating to engage. Our conclusion is that usually it's not a particular individual or an irrational process; it's a particular type of modern organizational culture. And, we've learned from philosopher Ken Wilber, the culture reflects a certain level of consciousness (the "Green/Consensus" level) that impedes strategic decision making. We thought our friends in Foundationland might be interested in this analysis of the "power and pathology" of foundation culture.

The Meeting

Let's plunge right in. Wilber describes a meeting run on green-consciousness principles. See if it sounds like an experience you've had with foundations:

Everybody is allowed to express his or her feelings, which often takes hours.
There is an almost interminable processing of opinions, often reaching no decision or course of action, since a specific course of action would likely exclude somebody.
Thus there are often calls for an inclusionary, nonmarginalizing, compassionate embrace of all views, but exactly how to do this is rarely spelled out, since in reality not all views are of equal merit.
The meeting is considered a success, not if a conclusion is reached, but if everybody has a chance to share their feelings.
Since no view is supposed to be inherently better than another, no real course of action can be recommended, other than sharing all views.
If any statements are made with certainty, it is how oppressive and nasty all the alternative conceptions are. (This is why one of pluralism's main activities is not advancing its own constructive conceptions, but criticizing and deconstructing everybody else's.)”

Seems familiar? What drives the meeting behaviors is "Green/Consensus consciousness"--a way of being that is one of more than a dozen "levels" of consciousness through which people and societies evolve. (For more on the levels, click here.)

Green Consciousness

Green/Consensus culture, says Wilber, is "aware of the many different contexts and numerous different types of truth (pluralism)." Thus, "it bends over backwards in an attempt to let each truth have its own say, without marginalizing or belittling any. As with the catch words 'anti-hierarchy,' 'pluralistic,' and 'egalitarian,' whenever you hear the word 'marginalization' and a criticism of it, you are almost always in the presence of a green [worldview]."

The power of the Green/Consensus worldview is that it represents a significant evolution in human consciousness – as Wilber notes:

“It has acted with sensitivity and care in attempting to redress social imbalances and avoid exclusionary practices. It has been responsible for basic initiatives in civil rights and environmental protection. It has developed strong and often convincing critiques of the philosophies, metaphysics, and social practices of the conventional religious (blue) and scientific (orange) memes, with their often exclusionary, patriarchal, sexist, and colonialistic agendas.”

The culture of many large, professional foundations is deeply grounded in the “Green/Consensus” worldview (not to be confused with traditional environmental “greens,” who are, however, also part of this world view). Green is the dominant worldview of most charitable, philanthropic and non-profit organizations. And it is the core of traditional “liberal” political ideology.

The dark side of the Green world view (and the source of much of its pathology in foundation culture) is this: Many participants in this worldview have engaged in a vicious “transcend and dissociate” strategy and seek to deny the validity of any other world view (and their associated competencies) and end up in a self-destructive and unproductive “group grope” approach that finds it difficult to actually do anything useful. This works against being strategic or innovative, which requires making choices, ruling out certain options, on the basis of analysis.

The Problem With Being Green

Recognizing this underlying worldview--both its power and potential pathology--helps us to understand both “why thing are the way they are” and what one might do about it. A dyed-in-the-wool Green/Consensus culture leads to a predictable set of behaviors. We have seen these in many different organizations of all types. They include:

A focus on feelings, inclusion, participation, representation and “voices.”
An aversion to making qualitative judgments (unless they are linked to judgments about the bad qualities of repression/exclusion and the good qualities of inclusion/empowerment).
An aversion to serious strategy and intellectual discipline (the “inclusion ethic” extends to strategic options, not just people; statements of strategy are usually so broad they can encompass virtually anything rather that express choices made).
A preference for talking and engaging over doing.
An avoidance of tools for measurement and performance.
An aversion to many kinds of hierarchies (both good and bad)
A valuing of intentions over results

Another problem with the Green/Consensus world view is that it dismisses the strengths of the Orange/Strategic worldview (the dominant capitalist business worldview) as well as the Blue/Authority worldview (the dominant conservative culture worldview).

What This Means in Practice

Using this consciousness framework to assess one foundation's strategies, we provided a top executive with this analysis of the strategic weaknesses caused by the foundation's Green/Consensus point of view:

Several consistent characteristics of your strategy materials reflect what we would call the “green pathology syndrome.”

Strategy becomes so broad that it verges on being meaningless. Good strategy is also clear about what you won’t do, and allows you to make choices about what is in/out of your “target zone.”

There is an effusive “aspirational” tone to much of the material that makes one inherently distrust its seriousness and objectivity. This, of course, reflects the beauty of the moral aspirations of the Green worldview: social justice, equity, de-marginalization, inclusiveness, access, diversity, participation, capacity building, opportunity. The problem is that this eloquent discourse on bad things that have happened (and the alternative good outcomes that should happen) somehow obviates the need to have serious, detailed, complex and disciplined strategies to move from one to the other.

There is a tendency to value relationships over results. Listing who is engaged, connected, linked, enthusiastic, etc. takes precedence over describing what was actually done, how it worked and what the results were.

There is a tendency to mistake root cause analysis for solution analysis. For instance, much of the analysis of structural exclusion uses words that refer to “a lack of access.” The strategy is then posited as “increasing/securing/creating access.” The difficulty is that there is no real hypothesis about how this might happen – i.e. what the innovations are that can reverse the structural forces that create exclusion in the first place.

Why These Green Tendencies Matter

For foundations to gain more impact, they must develop strategies for systemic change and for scaling up. The process of large-scale systems change requires several steps:

Understanding the system and its dynamics
Identifying leverage points for change
Creating hypotheses for how you might “move” a leverage point
Developing the competencies required to move the leverage point
Trying out repeated experiments
Developing scaling strategies

This process requires serious analysis, differentiation, measurement, clarity about what impacts are sought, and more--all of which are anathema to Green/Consensus consciousness.

Transcending Green Culture

The solution to this problem is what Wilber refers to as “transcending and including”--meaning embracing the positive side of the Green worldview, while also not disassociating from the powers of the Strategic and Authority worldviews, and ultimately transcending Green consciousness to move to the next level (what he call an “Integral” worldview).

In practical terms, this means making sure there are people in the organization who embody these other approaches and bring their skills to the table. You can do this in several ways:

Deliberately bring people who reflect these other skill sets into the organization.
Make these other competencies core parts of your organization.
Continuously push the organization's culture to transcend its limitations.

Evolution of Consciousness/World Views

Wilber’s approach is based on the work of Claire Graves and Don Beck, who wrote the book Spiral Dynamics. (They worked with Nelson Mandela in the design of the post-apartheid governance design.) The basic idea is that the evolution of human consciousness proceeds in waves of development:

The waves represent fluid, living systems rather than rigid, hierarchical steps.
Each subsequent wave is more inclusive of other consciousness than the previous ones, and capable of responding to higher levels of complexity.
Each prior wave is a fundamental ingredient of all subsequent waves, and thus each is to be cherished and embraced (“transcend and include”).
We all have all these waves of consciousness in us. Each expresses a unique dimension of human need. Healthy individuals and societies satisfy the drives of all waves.
The imperative is to care for the health of the entire spiral of waves – and honor the unique contribution of each wave.
Each new wave/world view tends to discount the ones before it (“transcend and dissociate”), and deny the ones that emerge, believing it is the only “true” world view.
Social systems must match the developmental level of the population to be successful.