A Learning History of Low Carbon Innovation in Local Authorities

Theme 3: Culture & Mindset - in a nutshell?

Asked what enables or inhibits innovating for carbon reduction, participants in the research brainstormed and clustered their responses into 13 themes that seem to be important. 

Of these 13 themes, by far the most populated was this one....

  

Theme 3: Culture & Mindset

I've been looking at this poster again these past few days as I prepare to do more work with Learning Histories at a local council. I wanted to get the essence of what was on there. What key learning message/action point did it convey about the culture for innovation? 

So, to start with, I listed and categorised all the stickies that were on there into enabling factors (+) and inhibitors (-).

This led to the following list:

Blockers

Risk

- Risk aversion (coupled with lack of knowledge) x 2

- Distracted, dis-interested & risk averse senior management

- Fear of Failure

- Fear of unknown territory - leads to inaction

- Lack of belief in making change happen

Competition vs Collaboration

- Competition by ego rather than co-operation/collaboration

- Too many egos (senior officers)

- Breakdown in political concensus

- Territorial silo mentality - competition

- Confused public : sceptics, behaviour change

Organisational Culture

- Habit, routine, institutional inertia

- Inward-facing nature of Local Authorities

- Limited conceptual framework (Organisation & Individual)

Action without Strategy

- Initiativitis: Lack of focus & priority

- Innovation for its own sake rather than doing what needs to be done

Enablers

+ A culture of innovation

+ Willingness to experiment

+ Identifying the 'can openers' - key leverage points

+ Outward facing - open to other ways 

+ Courageous decision making councils

+ sustainability as part of the corporate identity

+ simple easy to grasp elegant policies/projects

+ open management culture

From the light categorisation I could see that participants had identified more inhibitors than enablers. The blockers seemed to divide into 4 categories - risk, competition, organisational culture and lack of focus. The enablers seemed to be all about openness, courage and willingness to experiment IN COMBINATION with focus and discernment. I looked at the list for a while and tried to them come up with a sentence that would summarise the message from the poster. Here was my first stab at this summarising message of the kind of culture that would enable a local authority to innovate around carbon reduction: 

Theme 3: Its message in a nutshell? 

"'For an innovative culture that will help to address climate change, organisations need to be open and willing to embrace risk and change but to do so in a co-operative, discerning & thoughtful way; attempts to bring about change need to be framed as thoughtful experiments that are celebrated for their potential rather than their outcome"

Does this description ring true I wondered - for the message on the poster and more generally for any organisation asking what is the culture for change and innovation?

Story Set: Incensed by Sustainability - by R.U.Green

At the end of the story circle held at the Learning History workshop in Feb 2008, participants were asked to give each story they had told a title. And then each group (there were 5 in all) was asked if these stories were made into a book, what would it be called. This group called their imaginary storybook - "Incensed by Sustainability". Here are their stories.

Incensed by Sustainability - by R.U. Green (click to enlarge)

Pyrolysis parade tells of a new compact Pyrolysis system that could transform waste management in the future

The Green Team Challenge tells of how a team are currently trying to address waste in the offices of central government bodies and the challenges they face.

Policy on the hoof tells of how, by gathering key politicians into a facilitated workshop setting, a group were able to get comitted buy-in to ambitious targets for carbon reduction. The process normally would have taken several months.

Giving Local Heroes a Voice tells of how some wilful individuals with a keen interest in alternative energy got their voices heard by using the strutiny process.

Lime Mortar's the wrong colour tells of how a Local Authority led a restoration project to show that conservation and carbon reduction can co-exist....well almost.

What's striking about all these examples is how they echo many of the themes highlighted in the Learning Histories of the iconic examples featured in the research. In this set of stories the theme of champions and coalitions was particularly strong. Each and every example involved cross-department and partnership working beyond the boundaries of an individual's job. They also involved some passionate champions who were both technical (e.g. in Pyrolysis Parade) and political (Local Heroes and in Policy on the Hoof).

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Pyrolysis Paradise: A glimpse of a sustainable future

This story was told in a story circle at the Learning History workshop in February 2008. 

Read how one officer finds out more about a new compact Pyrolysis system that could transform waste management in the future.

Pyrolysis Paradise - A glimpse of a sustainable future.

a story from the Incensed by Sustainability story circle

So I am sitting at my desk late about 6 o'clock one night. I get a call from a guy who says he is an entrepreneur and he is developing a new type of pyrolysis system, which in theory should be able to eat our sort of black household binbags of rubbish. And he says, “I can't show you this thing yet, but would it be alright if I could phone you in about 2 years time when I have got it sorted?” So I say, “Yea, fine, ok whatever” and I forgot about it.

Then sure enough about 18 months later and again at the end of the day 6 o'clock in the evening he called me and I did remember him and he said, “Okay, I have got this machine up and running in Wiltshire and I am throwing crushed up scaffolding planks and plastic bottles and things into it and I am getting a good biogas flame out the other end, do you want to come and see it?”

So, I went down and saw it and thought “this is very-very interesting”. Then I took a couple of scientist guys down who looked at this and said “this is very interesting”. Then I took down the people who own a waste transfer plant, they crush up buildings and they demolish buildings and crush up the rubble and they pull out all the stuff that they can recycle. And they are still left with bales of compacted kind of manky wood insulation materials, scraps of plastic and that sort of thing. They are sending them to landfills and this is costing them huge amount of money each year.

So, they are looking for a pyrolysis system which can deal with this and I sent them down to look at this system. And they were so impressed that they are buying 2 of them and should have these things up and running by the end of May 2008. And then we are going to cool down the biogas methane coming out the back end and put it into bottles and ship it out across the other side of Mitcham common. They will be used as a fuel to drive the CHP for the Crest-Nicholson development: that’s 250 homes, a Doctor’s surgery and a community centre. That is the theory!

The beauty of this system is that it solves a lot of problems from the municipal deployment point of view. It is not like the compact power pyrolysis system which is great big Heath Robinson, inefficient, but hugely expensive machine, which can only pay its way by eating clinical waste which has a gate fee of £200 a tonne. This system is modular; it uses an electrical system to bake the waste…. and basically it is benign so you can deploy this quietly and discreetly around your Borough.

Storycircle Member: I was going to ask you about local opinion, they don’t know even know it is there?

Well they are going to have to go through the planning process. We have talked to the environment agency and as far they are concern there is no problem – it is just silent. No burning of flames - you just pull an electrical current out of the grid, and it bakes this stuff like an electric oven. It has got these patented systems in it, pulls off the methane gas, bits of charcoal things like that. It is 1unit electrical energy to run the process, 15 units of green electrical energy from the CHP driving assistant; If it is set up and running it goes 24/7 to the next 6 months, that’s the silver bullet.

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Giving Local Heroes a Voice

This story was told in a story circle at the Learning History workshop in February 2008. 

Read how some wilful individuals with a keen interest in alternative energy got their voices heard by using the strutiny process.

Giving Local Heroes a Voice - 

Using Scrutiny to translate 'wilful individuals' into effective climate change policy

a story from the Incensed by Sustainability story circle

Scene 1 of my story. It is at the back of the car park; it’s a leisure center in Woking. It’s a bit desolate. There’s a group of middle-aged men shuffling around. They have just got off their coach. They are a little bit sleepy, a little bit bedraggled, a little bit tired. They’re shuffling around the back of this leisure centre. They have a little root around inside - they go in the back door -come back out again. They’re wandering around the side, they are looking up the roof, they are looking up on what is going on the nice glittery photovoltaic tiles. And they’re having a poke around the Hydrogen fuel cell. That’s scene 1.

Scene 2 goes back about 6 months prior to that when I arrived at E. Borough Council which is a district not that far from Woking. It’s not that well known, and had not long started its own system of scrutiny. But there are a couple of heroes of this story really: there’s the hairdresser from W., there’s a keen recycler from L.B. and a couple of others who have also has got a key role in this. There’s a few villains as well but I’m not going to name them as they get kicked out of the story eventually anyway. So these heroes, they’ve been at E. for a long time as councilors and they have really been interested in alternative energy and sustainable energy. They’re backbench councillers, not necessarily doing very much but they’re really really keen to do something on alternative energy.

So I arrived at E. and my job was as scrutiny manager to set up some policy reviews of various areas such as antisocial behavior. And they came to me and said they wanted to do alternative energy, and I said you are the members and it is your decision, we’ll do it! So, we set up a little review and that led to the trip down to Woking on the minibus (described in scene 1), and we had a look around at what Woking were doing and asking difficult questions, some of which we got some answers to.

And we went back to base and we had some chats with other people and had some more meetings, and over time we managed to get a report together. At that time as well I heard of the Energy Savings Trust — it was pretty much the first time - and we got them to come in and do a pilot with us and we managed to get people like the housing director and the various facilities, people to actually come and sit in a room with the Energy Savings Trust and the Leader and talk about our energy use and our energy needs and what we are doing right, wrong and what the potential was.

After that came a scrutiny report which went through all the right processes and leads to the final scene of this, which was about the time I left when the various programs were getting into place. And E have since signed the Nottingham Declaration; it has made some progress on some of the issues; it has got a lot further to go. But, it really gave the voice of these few heroes that have been kicking around trying to get them selves heard - it gave them a chance to get their views out into the mainstream.

And we still haven’t got all the answers from Woking so at some point I like to have to Learning History that gives us the inside track of some of the Woking story.

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