Terrible Bosses

The Farmer and his Horse

You have probably heard the Taoist story, often ascribed to Buddhism, about the farmer and his horse. Here is an excerpt from David Allan’s post on Medium, Who Knows What’s Good and Bad?.

The Farmer and his Horse
“One day his horse runs away. And his neighbor comes over and says, to commiserate, “I’m so sorry about your horse.” And the farmer says “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?” The neighbor is confused because this is terrible. The horse is the most valuable thing he owns.

But the horse comes back the next day, and he brings with him 12 feral horses. The neighbor comes back over to celebrate, “Congratulations on your great fortune!” And the farmer replies again: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”

And the next day the farmer’s son is taming one of the wild horses, and he’s thrown and breaks his leg. The neighbor comes back over, “I’m so sorry about your son.” The farmer repeats: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”

Sure enough, the next day the army comes through their village and is conscripting able-bodied young men to go and fight in [the] war, but the son is spared because of his broken leg.
[And this story can go on and on like that. Good. Bad. Who knows?]”

Good, bad, terrible, wonderful are all subjective. My highs and lows are subject to experience, perspective, mood, etc. As my life and career unspool, there is plenty of room for both better and worse.

Subjectivity aside, I know two things:

I have worked with some fucking awful people
This is when I have learned an incredible amount about myself

Terrible Bosses: The Dysfunctional Duo

To date, the worst people I have worked for were the Dysfunctional Duo, a direct manager, and their peer/mentor/manager. I could go on at length about their failings (honesty, ethics, transparency, communication, cronyism/nepotism, fear, pettiness, process, empathy/sympathy, maturity, and professionalism). Instead, I’m going to focus on what I learned about myself. We all know it takes two to tango.

Who & What You Can Change

There is only one person you can change, you. From there, you can change your thoughts, your beliefs, your perceptions, and your actions. That’s it.

This can get confusing because a small part of us wonders how we can change to get the outcomes we want. There is a fine line between growth/self-improvement and an abusive relationship. I will spend a lifetime learning and relearning this lesson.

Using the example of the Dysfunctional Duo, I was almost always in trouble. I don’t know if I could do anything right, even if we explicitly defined success. I don’t like being in trouble, and like a good employee, I was trying to figure out how to stay out of trouble. Work harder? Work less? Show my work? Hide my work? Over-communicate? Under-communicate? I explored all sorts of variations with no apparent wins. My actions assumed rational actors. Unfortunately, human relationships aren’t rational. What the Dysfunctional Duo didn’t like was me, regardless of how I was showing up. As obsessed as I am with self-improvement, I’m still me.

Finally, this is also the functional definition of Stoicism and one of the core principles of Jocko Willinck (personal page) and Leif Babin’s book/principle Extreme Ownership: How Navy Seals Lead & Win (Jocko’s TedX talk on the subject here). I study and follow both stoicism (highly recommend Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living) and Extreme Ownership, they’re game-changers.

Human Resources* Can Be Worse than Useless

*Caveat: There are some fantastic human resource (HR) personnel out there. I think we all know how it feels when members of your profession drag you down.

I think there is some confusion as to what HR’s role is in many organizations. My initial assumption was that HR exists to protect, nurture, and develop human capital. That they’d be looking out for the long-term health of the organization through the organization’s number one resource, staff. I don’t think I have experienced this yet… What I see most is that HR exists to protect the organization and comply with regulations.

In the case of the Dynamic Duo, I was getting into “trouble” a lot. Early in my career, one of the valuable lessons is that if you’re in trouble, you need to create an agreed-upon action plan as fast as possible, regardless of validity. This action plan needs to address the chief complaint in a measurable and verifiable way with an objective third party, and it’s also good to include some extra credit in the action plan. A senior HR representative is often the best objective third party. Unfortunately, HR reported to my manager’s manager. In business school, we called this “competing commitments.” Long story short, I wasn’t going to get the support I needed, much less wanted from HR.

Big picture, I was exploring the functional organizational chart. Org charts represent hierarchy as defined by title, class, and report structure. Org charts rarely represent the day-to-day functional reality of an organization. Trust, communication, and decisions often flow very differently through an organization than the org chart represents.

My Personal Life

Work and career are a part of my identity, for better and worse. The daily abuse, real or imagined, was taking its toll. There are three areas where I know I struggled:

Mindset

I can be very hard on myself. It’s a terrible habit that I’ve been working on for years. I can toil for hours on what I did wrong to create a lousy interaction or outcome. This has held me back in countless ways. Even with years of therapy, over a decade of yoga, and love of stoicism and Buddhism, I’ve got a lot of work to do here.

The underlying problem is that once I get going, I can keep going. Daily reminders of my shortcomings quickly turned into negative momentum and a negative mindset. This is where I made a huge mistake.

My tripod of stability is exercise, nutrition, and sleep. I immediately started to cut back on all three to dedicate more time and energy to address the surface-level feedback. As you can imagine, this is a negative feedback loop. Worse yet, I knew better.

Stress Management

I manage stress the way most successful people do: exercise, nutrition, and sleep. I also fail to manage stress the way most people do: skipping workouts, finding solace in food/booze, and ruining my sleep. As much as I think it can be productive to hit the self-destruct button on occasion, I was mashing that button way too often.

I was sleeping roughly 5-hours a night. I stopped going to CrossFit. I barely rode my bike. I was overeating. I was drinking too much too frequently (alcoholism runs in my family).

The result was that I was a physical and mental wreck. I was failing to take care of the basics, and it showed with the bags under my eyes, the 20lbs of extra weight, and my capacity to show up as my best self every day. I took it out on myself. Predictably, I wasn’t any happier or any closer to my goals.

Personal Relationships

All of this personal mismanagement made me a pretty miserable person to be around. I was grumpy, obsessed with the work problems, and out of shape. I was shitty company.

This phase was hard on my friendships and my family. It was the worst for the people closest to me, namely my wife. My ability to manage my lows was a direct threat to one of the most important relationships for me. Outside of obvious regrets, this created yet another negative feedback loop. Isolation and neutral/negative relationships only added more stress and prevented me from getting the perspective and support I really needed.

Accepting the Consequences

One of my strengths is tenacity (stubbornness). An element of tenacity/stubbornness is fear. Fear rarely helps perception and decision making:)

A huge challenge in this process was correctly identifying and weighing consequences. On the one hand, I was arbitrarily punished nearly daily. On the other hand, I was sure that the most significant consequence was leaving this “dream job.” (How I deluded myself into thinking this was a “dream job” is a story for another time…) What we’re talking about here is loss aversion. Loss aversion states that humans interpret losses much more intensely than gains. The kicker is that we also get to define what is a loss and what is again.

In this case, I defined loss as losing this job even if it was 100% my choice. I failed to identify the day-to-day abuse, stress, and all of the challenges it created personally as anything more than the status quo. Despite these perspective issues, the number one thing I had to work towards was wrong or right. I had to accept the consequences of leaving.

Tim Ferriss’s Seven Steps for Overcoming Fear is a great exercise and is mostly what I did. I had to sit down and write out what I was losing and what I was gaining. I had to step away from the human dynamics, the personalities, my emotions, and objectively look at the real consequences and accept them. Regardless of how I felt or what excuses I could generate, it was abundantly clear that I had to leave this job.

I drafted my resignation, slept on it, and handed a signed copy to my manager.

Engaging in Rumors

Almost six months after I had left this job, a member of the Dynamic Duo went nuclear on a nonprofit I was running, purely on rumor. As far as rumors go, we’re talking about the definition of defamation as well as ethics violations that should have ended at least one councilmember’s term. This was bad enough that I was talking to multiple attorneys to assess my exposure (none), recourse (limited), and my next steps (expensive). On rumor alone, I was in deep.

So what do you do? The short answer is nothing.

There is an excellent interview with Steve Jurvetson (Tim Ferris Podcast: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures #317). Steve was talking about media rumors and managing the blowback and cited that the best practice is not to engage. To paraphrase, the basic premise is that any interaction adds energy and validity to the rumors/crisis. The best practice, as put forth by public relations professionals, is to do nothing.

While I didn’t know it was a best practice going into this mess, this is mostly what I did. After I had verified what I needed to with attorneys here is what I did:

I included 3rd party individuals in all meetings and communications (I was fortunate they had clout)
All communication was via email or well-attended meetings
I operated transparently
I communicated promptly, professionally, and only on the tangible issues via written communication
Aside from a close circle of support, I said very little about what was going on and who was involved
I cut some key people out of my life permanently

I made it through this with most of my reputation intact. It strengthened some key relationships, destroyed some relationships, and I learned a ton.

Conclusion

As for the Dynamic Duo, there is a part of me that quips “fuck em” and there is a voice, a little deeper down, that is really sad for both of them.

Who knows what’s good and bad?

Acronyms & Jargon: How to Be Heard

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In 2015 I worked for a new mayor, and one of his first “executive orders” was an odd one. We couldn’t use acronyms anymore. He jokingly called it the AFA Policy or Another Fucking Acronym Policy. Making it a joke allowed him to enforce it with a wink and a smile (which has its own genius). The AFA Policy went to work right away. Anything we wrote had to have all of the acronyms listed and defined. For the first time in years, full names of various projects, programs, and groups were uttered out loud. Acronyms are a form of jargon, and they’re not always a good thing. I want to think that the government became just slightly more approachable.

Starting Here, Right Here: Experts in Excess, AKA e-in-e

I’ve made some solid contributions to the world of acronyms. Starting on this very page, I contract “Experts in Excess” to “e-in-e” because its brevity and aesthetic makes me happy:) Does “e-in-e” mean anything to you? Probably not. Does it make what I’m trying to do here any more approachable or clear? Definitely not. If there is any penance for making a new acronym, it’s hearing people butcher them…

Acronyms: Apathy and Approachability

Why do we use jargon and acronyms? It’s a quick way to figure out who you’re talking to and what they know. It also saves time and space. More basically, we contract businesses, team names, projects, and processes to acronyms because we’re cognitive misers (which is the polite way to say we’re lazy). Our brains take a lot of energy to run, and historically, calories have been an inconsistent resource. There is a ton of great research on habits, willpower, decision making, etc., and their cognitive impacts over time. While we may not have evolved to create and use acronyms, we definitely have a predisposition towards them.

Why is this a problem? Jargon and acronyms alienate your audience. Whatever short-term boost in ego, confidence, or exclusivity, you experience being robbed from the person you’re communicating with. Precious attention is diverted from your message into translating your jargon. Acronyms and jargon confuse and bore your customers, partners, friends, and especially your partner:) There is a huge cost of being unapproachable.

Fixing the Jargon & Acronym Problem

The genius in Mayor Thomas’s Another Fucking Acronym Policy was that it tore down a wall in our communication. After decades of comfortably letting our culture’s language drift into the realm of unapproachable, we had to change, and we had to do it fast. We had to change the way we wrote, we had to change the way we talked, and I’d like to think we had to change the way we thought. The government should be customer-centric, and I’d bet you’re trying to be customer-centric as well. So what do you do:

Listen to yourself and correct yourself
- Your friends or partner can help keep you accountable
Review your published materials
- Get rid of jargon or acronyms that don’t clearly help your audience
- If you don’t know, your audience definitely doesn’t, so get rid of it
- Can’t tell? I’m 100% guilty of this. Ask someone to read through your materials
Your word processor’s ‘Find and Replace’ tool is your friend
Double-check your emails

I’ve been working on this for a couple of years now and I’m still slipping up:)

Features vs. Benefits in Sustainability

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The Origin of Features vs. Benefits: Influence

Influence is one of the most critical skills you can learn as a sustainability professional. Influence speaks directly to features vs. benefits. Influence is a broad field, but its focus is on human psychology and behavior. There is a ton of academic research on this topic and some great authors to explore. Where the rubber meets the road is in marketing and sales.

I know, I know. Even with an MBA, it’s taken me years to see marketing as more than advertising and sales as more than a stereotype. You’ve probably got an image of a sleazy salesperson in your head right now! Guess what? Sustainability professionals are pretty easy to stereotype too:)

But really. Every single day the skills, strategies, and tactics of sales and marketing professionals influence you. Just take a second and look around you. I like to think of myself as something of a minimalist, and I’m surrounded! Beyond consumerism, my ideas are shaped by talented sales and marketing professionals.

Influence is a powerful skill set, and it will make your work better. Understanding features vs. benefits are one of the first steps in improving your influence.

Features vs. Benefits

One of the most basic mindsets is communicating benefits ahead of features. In the business publishing industrial complex this is called “features vs. benefits” (these are your keywords to Google a wealth of articles).

Features are factual statements (e.g., battery life, storage, fuel efficiency, dimensions, color, etc.) and benefits answer the question “What’s in it for me?”. Simply stated features = brain, benefits = heart. Good marketers and salespeople lead with benefits and close with features (if they need to). In many cases, the decision was made emotionally very early on, and the facts either support or undermine the final decision.

What we’re saying here is that you have to first emotionally and then intellectually appeal to your customers, whoever they may be. “What’s in it for me?” really is a rich question to answer, it asks you to define your audience, step into their shoes, and think about what they get out of what you’re selling. It also helps you get past the jargon.

Features vs. Benefits Case Study: LEDs

Let’s look at an example: LED lighting upgrades. At this moment in time, LEDs are a pretty easy sell. LEDs are cost-competitive, high quality, there is no ‘next best thing’ looming on the horizon, and many utilities have good incentive packages. With all of this momentum, it is straightforward to propose to your stakeholders that state the following features:

% efficiency gained
Projected utility savings in kWh
Projected operational savings
Total project cost
Utility incentives
Proposed timeline

Let’s pause. What do you feel right now? I’m sure there is a portion of your logical self that has a nerdy smirk. Are you excited? Are you engaged? What’s your state?

Now, let’s think of all of the benefits of a LED lighting upgrade:

Our teams can spend less time replacing light bulbs and more time on other priorities. We won’t have to change these bulbs for 10 to 22 years.
We will have fewer points of failure—one bulb vs. one bulb and one ballast.
We can manage less inventory.
We’ll have a safer organization—fewer trips up the ladder and less time on the cherry picker.
If we go with bulb X, no one will even notice the change.
We set ourselves up for the future by fixing this one simple problem.

Let’s pause again. What do you feel right now? What’s your state?

I’d bet, you’re thinking of how LEDs solve other problems for you or the organization. I’d bet you’re thinking and feeling differently.

You need to pull them in with the benefits, and you close with the features. It’s a small investment in extra time and framing that produces a huge shift in how people respond.

We’re emotional animals. Understanding features vs. benefits are one of the keys to getting the outcomes you want.

How to Talk About Climate Change

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“If information were the answer, we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” – Derek Sivers (#128 The Tim Ferriss Show)

Climate Change, Global Warming, and the Greenhouse Effect

Do you remember the first time you heard about the greenhouse effect? How about global warming or climate change? The greenhouse effect was first described in 1824, but it always existed. We had our first solid evidence of human-caused global warming in the 1950s. What was your “aha” moment? When was the first time that you internalized this information?

We have more information on climate change than we ever had and the mountain of evidence grows daily. Does all of this information change anything?

My Meandering Path Towards Sustainability

I was born in 1983. Just one month after my fourth birthday, the Brundtland Commission released Our Common Future. It offered up the first, clunky definition of sustainability: “meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

In 1995, Vice President Al Gore launched the GLOBE Program, which showed up in classes and curriculum that I don’t honestly recall. It took watching Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016 documentary Before the Flood with a flashback to Romeo + Juliet aged Leo talking about global warming next to (an almost lithe) Al Gore to realize that in +16-years of formal education, four majoring in science and two specializing in sustainability, thousands of hours of multimedia consumption, I had probably been hit over the head hundreds of times on the topic of climate change. Some of the best marketers in the world had taken a crack at me. It took until 2006 for me to “get” climate change.

I feel like I was put on this earth to work on climate change, and it took me 23-years to “get” it! It wasn’t the evidence, or graphics, or colors, or fonts, or even images. It was my emotional connection to food. Emotion leads intellect, every time.

My major required that I attend five guest lectures. One of the lectures was a paleobotanist presenting the future of food. She used the fossil and geologic records to look at the effects of regional climate shifts on the plants and animals that lived there. More fundamentally, she looked at millions of years of history to identify the coming problems and opportunities of global climate change. It blew my mind and connected a bunch of dots. Climate change was coming after my food!

I couldn’t replicate my “aha” moment if I tried, more importantly, I don’t have to.

Talking/Not Talking about Climate Change

As of this writing, climate change has been paying my bills for nearly a decade. I don’t engage in believer vs. denier conversations, and it’s not for lack of opportunity. I do hear people sheepishly ask if climate change is real, and I always say, “Yes. What were you thinking about?” My biggest hurdle is always other sustainability professionals. Nearly every campaign, no matter what project, program, or product we’re pushing, comes back to: “How do we talk about climate change?” Dollars to doughnuts, you’ve either heard or uttered this very statement.

There is a lot to unpack here. Here are a few digressions:

Waste of time… Sustainability and climate change professionals spend far too much time figuring out how to talk about climate change. Searching for that magical arrangement of words that will turn the masses and motivate lasting change. We’ve engaged think tanks, universities, foundations, famous ad agencies, filmmakers, pro-athletes, committees, etcetera, etcetera… Chasing this incantation is as close as you can come to investing in alchemy.
This is nothing new to science… It took the world a long time to hear Galileo (1564-1642) and Newton (1642-1727), and there are still people fighting the laws of gravity every day! People still challenge Darwin’s work on evolution (1809-1882) +130-years after it was first published.
Climate change is a scientific fact… It has been and will be a fact my entire life. My belief in it is irrelevant. With or without my vote, climate change is happening. Just like evolution. Just like gravity.
It’s all procrastination… It’s procrastination with some occasionally great byproducts, but procrastination all the same. We’re talking about, talking about the problem. We’re avoiding the real work.

But what it comes down to is Marketing 101. You need to communicate benefits ahead of features. Someone is lending you their precious attention. How does the program, project, or product benefit their life? Does it save them time, money, or energy? Does it help them make money or energy? Does it improve their health? Does it connect them with their neighbors? Does it improve or cement their self-image? Does it remove a daily frustration? Does it improve their quality of life? All of these are a better place to start!

Pretend we weren’t talking about climate change for a second. Can you imagine if Apple marketed its next product to you, starting with the engineering, computer science, and materials that went into its next iPhone? How about Google talking about their algorithms, origins of language, and data aggregation before letting you use their search function? As interesting as these stories might be, it isn’t why you’re buying an iPhone or using Google search. Origin stories reinforce pre-existing emotions. If there isn’t any emotion, any benefit, you’ve already lost.

If you need/want engagement, sell the benefits! Don’t punish your audience with a dissertation on climate change. Leonardo DiCaprio told them about it years ago:)

We have the best tools and information we’ve ever had, ever. Better still, we have each other. So let’s get to work!

Funding Sustainability Programs: Utilities 101

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“Don’t measure anything unless the data helps you make a better decision or change your actions.” – Seth Godin

Funding Sustainability Programs: Utility 101

Good sustainability work is like any other work. It all starts and ends with meaningful wins. This is a bigger challenge than it seems.

The first thing you should do in any organization is to look through the utility bills (electricity, natural gas, water, sewer, waste, recycling, and maybe a few others). Just the status of these bills will tell you a lot.

Are the bills orderly?
Are they paid in full?
How often are they switching vendors?
Have they been analyzed? Any spreadsheets, charts, graphs? Have these numbers been tied to sales, growth, revenues, or profits?
Any correlation or causation with the health of the organization?
At a both a logical and an emotional level, where is this organization at?
What questions do these bills bring up for you?

I see utility bills like organizational hygiene. If you’re having trouble brushing your teeth, keeping up on laundry, or pulling yourself together, it’s a pretty good indication that you’re struggling…

Why?

Utilities are an operating expense, and everyone understands the basics. Utility bills also have dollar figures attached, which is important. People speak in dollars. They don’t speak in kilowatt-hours, dekatherms, CO2 equivalents, or even gallons. Speak in dollars whenever possible, and use the units as a byline. For example, “we saved $1,000 by reducing our electricity usage by 10,000 kWh (10%).”

Most importantly, this is where you can start to identify your financial opportunities. There are two types of sustainability programs:

Passion Funded (insecure)
Sustainably Funded (secure)

I know there is a lot of emotion attached to the word “sustainable.” In this case, do you know where your next dollar comes from? If you don’t, your program is funded by passion. Don’t get me wrong; passion funding can be amazing. You can get a lot done with the money, clout, and political juice of a passion program, and you should capitalize on this. If your program has any hope of surviving, you need sustainable funding.

Utility bills are one of the best places to secure and expand your sustainability program funding.

This is a critical point, so I’m going to double-down. Many organizations see utilities simply as the cost of doing business. “We’ve got to keep the lights on” isn’t just a trite saying; it is an entire mindset. It’s just like you’re finances at home. You have a general sense of how much each bill is. Some bills tend to be the same (garbage), some bills increase or decrease seasonally (water, natural gas, and electricity), and you probably budget based on your general sense. You’d be surprised how many organizations operate exactly like this. They budget $100,000 for utilities, throw on % growth or inflation and readjust annually. If you can reduce these costs, you’ve found yourself a sustainable budget. It is much, much easier securing existing funding than asking for new funding.

How?

At a minimum, you should assess or review an organization’s total costs and total usage. It’s helpful to break out costs to include tax, demand/service charges, and any other fees you might be paying. I have helped organizations save hundreds of thousands of dollars in billing errors alone with this first step.

I use Excel ($). Numbers (free) is okay, and Google Sheets (free) is getting better and better. It is really easy to start shopping for fancy tools and I’d recommend holding off. You’ll know exactly when you’re maxing out the capabilities of one of these programs and you’ll make a better business case for an upgrade at this point. Struggling? Start with YouTube and Google searches, there is a ton of great (free!) material out there.

Not working for an organization? Try it with your utility bills; sustainability always starts at home.

Now what?

Apply the 80/20 Rule, otherwise known as the Pareto Principle. The 80/20 Rule states that 80% of outcomes are created by 20% of causes. For example, 80% of my costs are electricity; electricity is one of five (20%) utilities I pay. Look at your data. What are your biggest costs? What are the highest impact things you can do to address those costs? Does your utility offer incentives/rebates for any of these issues?

Applying the 80/20 Rule doesn’t give you the solution automatically, but it gets you looking in the right places. I worked with an organization where <1% of their total expenses are waste/recycling services, and the first thing they want to fix is office recycling. When we dug into their numbers, 56% of their energy spend is electricity, and the next segment is fleet fuel (22%). Translating this into dollars, we’re talking about $1,300,000 in electricity, $528,000 in fuel, and <$24,000 in waste/recycling. If your goal is to pay for yourself in savings, and it should be, you start with the biggest slice of the pie. The 80/20 Rule keeps you focused.

There are some ways to add more texture to your data, and we’ll get into those in future posts.

Sustainable Program Funding

Okay. So you’ve got your data, you’ve identified a problem, and you’re about to implement a solution. We will focus less on solutions here and more on how you secure sustainable funding for your sustainability program.

Let’s assume this solution is straightforward… let’s say the solution is a $10,000 piece of equipment, you’ve contacted your utility, and they’re providing a $5,000 rebate. The solution will save your organization $30,000 per year ($2,500/month). You’ve got a project with a 2-month return on investment (ROI), awesome! Your client/boss should be pleased with you! This is when and where you make your ask. You should have a concrete proposal that includes giving some money back to the organization and some money for future sustainability projects.

You need at least two things to be successful: #1 a way to measure this project’s success and #2 a list of future projects/programs you will use this funding for along with their value to the organization.

#1 should be addressed through either your utility bills or metering (which should be included in the project cost). Organizations are approached daily with “cost-saving opportunities,” and I’d bet most of these “savings” are either never verified or realized. This is where you prove your value and build trust.

#2 is where the real magic happens. It would be best to have a crystal clear plan for how these funds will be deployed and how the organization benefits in dollars and other intangibles. This is money your employer was already planning on spending; leverage it!

This is your sustainable funding, this is how you fund a program, and this is how you grow a program.

Behavior Change: “Doing the Right Thing”

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Behavior Change Programs

One of systems thinking principles is that humans are naturally talented at finding the leverage point in systems and then pushing the wrong direction. You, me, and every other person on the planet are guilty of doing this. One of the most frequent examples I see is behavior change programs. What is a behavior change program? It is a program that focuses on human behavior or habit change. In sustainability, we’re talking about programs like:

Light Switches
Recycling & Compost
Anti-idling
Double-sided printing
Reusable bags/containers
Ethical consumption (organic, GMO-free, etc.)
Many, many more…

What is the most consistent thing about each of these programs? If you’re relying on humans making the correct choice every day, you are failing. Or, at the very least, the effort isn’t worth the reward.

I am not against the intent of these programs. Each program is focusing on real and addressable problems. The methodology, a behavior change program, is wrong. The #1 symptom of a failure is something you will hear people say, an exasperated “Why won’t people do the right thing?“

Why People Won’t “Do the Right Thing”

While I like to think of myself as, what Kurt Vonnegut describes, a “bitter-coated sugar pill.” I honestly believe that people almost always want to “do the right thing.” As bad as our habits, planning, or thinking might be on a moment-by-moment basis, I think that every human wants to feel successful and good. Even the worst amongst us have it somewhere in their minds that they’re doing the “right thing.”

The limitation is that humans are cognitive misers. We evolved to save our mental energy, and there are only so many decisions we can effectively make in a day. It is a part of our biology and is supported by a substantial amount of research. We make thousands of decisions a day, and only so many of them can be categorized as “important.” President Obama famously reduced the number of minor decisions he had to make in a day to preserve capacity for all of the important decisions he had to make in his days as president (more at ‘Always Wear The Same Suit: Obama’s Presidential Productivity Secrets’). Ramit Sethi does a great job exploring this topic related to productivity in ‘How to apply the 80/20 rule to earn more, work less, and dominate.’

This is precisely where behavior change programs and “doing the right thing” falls apart… and why habit change is incredibly hard. Think of how hard it is to change your diet, or exercise more, or floss, or some other personal habit you’ve been trying to tackle. It can be a real struggle to establish a habit, and it is almost always something you care about and are personally invested in. Circling back to behavior change programs, I can almost guarantee that the habit you’re attempting to change isn’t a priority for the person you’re trying to change.

Design>Behavior Change: Design for the Behavior You Want

So is behavior change impossible? Absolutely not. We need to be smart about it and approach behavior change programs in sustainability the same way we’d approach them anywhere else. Design systems and environments that make the “right thing” easy and the “wrong thing” hard. If we are all cognitive misers, treat it like a feature instead of a bug and design for the behavior you want.

Looking back at our original list of programs, we can adjust our behavior change approach to design and drastically increase compliance (while reducing cognitive load). Here are a few common design solutions:

Light Switches
- Occupancy sensors
- Timers
Recycling & Compost
- Consistent bin layout
- Labeling
- Inconvenient waste bins (especially in areas where it is mostly recyclables, like copy rooms)
- Product control like 100% compostable products
Anti-idling
- Prioritize speed/access for active transportation (walkability, bikeability, etc.)
- Design for flow
  - Roundabouts
  - Adaptive congestion control
- Technology migration (electric cars and vehicles that automatically turn off)
- Public transit (fewer tailpipes)
Double-sided printing
- IT standardizes printer/copier settings
Reusable bags/containers
- This one is a tough one!
Ethical consumption (organic, GMO-free, etc.)
- Access
- Transparent labeling

As always, good design requires testing. Testing means taking things out of your head and into the real world, and you’ve got to eat your own dog food🙂 The good news is that there are examples of design, good and bad, everywhere.

Additional Resources:

If you’re interested in diving deep into habits, I highly Charles Duhigg‘s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business is great. I also love Atul Gawande‘s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.