Processing Feedback and Refocusing On Items Important to Decision Makers

In this third blog entry, I’d like to spend a short bit of time to discuss two topics.  First, I’d like to share some feedback on my Final Project from my TA and what my next steps are to strengthen my final project.  Second, I’m going to elaborate on the decision making processes and business and finance aspects of my organization to better illustrate how these systems impact the success of my project.

After presenting my project plan to my TA, I received some very valuable feedback on how to best proceed for the remainder of this class and moving forward.  I’d like to share a few of the most helpful points here that will help me to strengthen my project moving forward and may also be of use to you if ever you decide to become an agent of change within your own organization.  First, start with your co-workers and middle management to gauge interest.  This will allow you to understand if the general population of your organization is amenable to your project.  These front line individuals will also be able to provide you with valuable information and feedback that may assist you later on in the approval stages with upper management.  Second, creating the business case for the project is essential.  Understanding the feasibility of the project will be invaluable when pitching your project to the decision makers.  If you don’t have a firm grasp on why the project makes sense financially, neither will the decision makers.  Finally, make sure to have a Plan B.  Sometimes, despite our best efforts and intentions, our plans may fail.  Having a scaled back version of your original plan or an alternate plan in place will allow you to continue on in your efforts to drive change within your organization.

The decision making process in my organization unfortunately is a bit of a complicated one.  However, that doesn’t mean a change project shouldn’t be attempted.  One just needs to understand which key decisions have to be made by the organization for the change project to be a success and how to best approach them.  For my project of installing a green roof, the major decisions will revolve around the feasibility of the project, the upfront and ongoing costs, the payback period, and the amount of resources that will be needed to complete the project.  For a project with the scope and size of mine, this is a project that will need to be made at the level of the president of the company.  This fact in itself means that gaining access to the president to gain approval will require gaining the support of many other company leaders below that level as well.  Once my project process plan and initial feasibility is complete, I plan to enlist champions for my project by first pitching the ideas to the middle management first.  Once I have them on board, I hope to have them help me pitch the plan “up the line”.

On the business and finance side of things, the project continues to grow larger and more complicated.  Upfront costs, ongoing maintenance costs, the need for local green roof experts, and the need for significant maintenance time efforts from my organization is growing significantly the more I learn what is involved with a green roof.  While the costs continue to rise, I’m also finding out more about the return on investment that my organization can reap from the undertaking of the project.  Additionally, a large part of my project pitch to my upper management will revolve around the non financial benefits that we will receive as part of the green roof installation.  Ultimately, I hope to show how this project will be able to make sense both from a financial standpoint as well as an environmental one.

Competing Commitments

Often times with many issues and topics we find ourselves intensely committed to creating change.  However, even in spite of our best efforts and intentions, many times we fall short.  Millions of Americans vow every December 31st that "starting tomorrow" they'll get in shape, lose weight, quit smoking, and scores of other various commitments.  Many people stay staunchly devoted towards their pledges for weeks, months, yet rarely permanently. 

Why is it that so often we fail to make the changes we commit to?  When we allow our commitments to fail, it is usually due in large part to competing commitments that we unknowingly have stronger allegiances to.  In the case of New Year’s resolutions, we may have competing commitments to not embarrass ourselves through failure, commitments of time that get in the way, or commitments of self satisfaction that end up being too much to overcome.  Sometimes this may be conscious or subconscious.  The key in overcoming these competing commitments is to become conscious of our competing commitments and to assess why the complimentary assumptions aren’t necessarily relevant and can be overcome.

In my first blog post I detailed my desire to research the possibility of and potentially implement a green roof at my employers main manufacturing facility.  As part of the process to garner the change necessary to implement this commitment, I’ve gathered data, researched the costs and benefits of the project, and begun to put together a presentation to pitch the idea to the leadership in my organization.  Despite the progress I’ve made on the project to date, I’ve hit a road block and have somewhat stalled currently.

I’ve realized that many people in my organization do not share the same environmental standards and goals for sustainability that I do.  Because of this, I’ve also come to realize competing commitments of my own that are preventing my progress in moving forward on the green roof implementation.  On an informal level, I’ve discussed the project with certain leadership members of my organization and have received subtle resistance to the ideas for the project.  Because of this, I currently hold the assumptions that others within my organizations leadership may also hold resistant opinions.  Due to these assumptions I understand that I hold a competing commitment with my fear in wasting my political capital within my organization if my idea is rejected.

Revealing my competing commitment and big assumptions may serve to help me in my work going forward.  By identifying these issues, I may better be able to see the missteps of the commitment to the competition.  By being aware of these assumptions and alternate commitments, it helps to start to identify measures that may allow me to overcome fears associated with the assumptions.

In efforts to move past this road block, I plan to foster thought partnership through active listening.  I plan to try to once again meet informally with the individual who was resistant to my idea for change.  My plan is to ask what reservations they may have towards my change initiative and find out all of the potential issues that they believe may not be in the best interest of the organization.  After actively listening to the individuals issues, I’ll relay back to them what I heard from them to ensure we are on the same page and then after the meeting I’ll put together the list of issues and begin to work towards a solution to address each.  Fully understanding these issues is the key to finding measures that will help me to overcome the fears associated with my competing commitments and will help me to help others move past their assumptions that hold them back from change as well.

Project Introduction - Greening Oil and Gas

I'm going to let you all in on a little secret.  Well its not a secret per se, but in my time pursuing a Master's of Sustainability and Environmental Management it's been something more of a selective disclosure.  I work in the Oil and Gas Industry. *Que sound effects* DUN DUN DUN!

Alright fellow environmentalists, don't stone me just yet.  I know I'm working for the enemy, but just try to think of me as a double agent (one true to team mother nature, of course).  But how do I live with myself you ask?  Just think of me as an agent of change working from the inside to push our point of view to help green the industry.  Let's face it, renewables are well on their way but it's going to be a while before they can shoulder the load of the world's energy needs.  In the mean time, we need resources to lead change in the "dirty" industries so we change perspectives and push for green innovation in today's technologies.

As part of my current class; Catalyzing Change: Sustainability Leadership for the 21st Century, I will be investigating the potential for and writing a proposal for my employer to install a green roof system atop our main manufacturing center in Houston, Texas.  I will be documenting the different steps of the project here in this blog and you'll be able to follow the progress every step of the way from conception to implementation of the green roof.

So what is a green roof you ask?  In general, it is a roof that has been adapted to facilitate the growth of vegetation on it.  One of the most widely known and best documented examples is the City Hall of Chicago, Illinois.  Urban areas contain 82% of the population in the United States and along with that mass of people comes billions of square feet of underutilized roof space.  The benefit to "greening" these areas is not just to the environment, but also economically and aesthetically.  Green roofs work to absorb rainfall, provides wildlife habitat, building insulation, reverses urban heat island effects, filters pollution, extends the life of the roof itself, and just generally looks great.  These outcomes help to fight run off and pollution while simultaneously saving significant cooling costs.

The above diagram shows the simplicity of a green roof system and helps to paint a picture of how straightforward implementation can be.  The company I work for is actually in the process of putting a new roof on the manufacturing building as we speak so like most every roof, the bottom two components are already in place.  Now I just need to sell them on adding the 7 layers from insulation up to vegetation.

Here is how I plan to do it:

Step 1:  Research similar installations throughout Houston and prepare a green roof installation plan for our manufacturing plant based on the existing structures in the area.

Step 2:  Prepare a cost - benefit analysis.  Nothing gets the attention of the decision makers like the benefit to their bottom line.

Step 3:  Identify and pitch the idea to my company's stakeholders to gain buy in and approval to examine the feasibility of the project.

Step 4:  Design a sustaining engineering project to test / prove the viability of the project to company management.

Step 5:  Gain approval for the project by presenting test findings and by showcasing the estimated annual savings and benefits to the company.

This project is certainly no small undertaking and knowing my organization it may be a drawn out process, but as an agent of change I'm ready to take the first of many steps.  Please feel free to provide your advice and feedback on the project and thanks for reading!