The Power Of Knowing: It's All About Metrics
Monday, March 17, 2008 / KW
Last summer, when my wife bought her first Prius, I wrote elsewhere about how the new car had affected her driving:
Of course, both the automative and home examples simply illustrate the old management principle, "You get what you measure." Whenever you develop a metric for tracking some activity, that act of measurement tends to affect the volume of that activity. So if, for example, you start providing daily reports about the number of defective products coming off your assembly line, within a few days it's likely that the number of defects will start to fall, just because people are suddenly thinking about and noticing defects more than ever. There's no reason to think the same can't apply to energy use, waste production, and other environmentally-sensitive activities.
Two lessons related to sustainable business:
1. A big, usually unremarked obstacle to green behaviors is the lack of reliable, easy-to-obtain feedback about the impact of our activities. (In most homes, even the traditional electric and water meters are located in an out-of-the-way corner of the basement or a closet and are hard for the average person to read and interpret. This is silly, and represents a big wasted opportunity.) Conversely, there's enormous value to be realized in the development of products, like Owl and Wattson, that don't save energy or reduce pollution directly but that improve human environmental behavior indirectly simply by making it transparent.
2. On a corporate level, the powerful impact of simply knowing what you are doing is one reason the reporting movement promoted by GRI and others is actually more important than many people realize. When a company is "forced" to report on its environmental, labor, and social practices every year, it has an automatic impact, subtle or marked, on the way its employees tend to think and act. The impact would be even greater, of course, if sustainability reporting were quarterly or even monthly rather than annual, but having any metrics at all is valuable in its own right.
In one sense, of course, just knowing what you are doing isn't terribly meaningful. Standing on the scale every day doesn't, by itself, make you lose weight. But buying a scale and using it regularly--along with a full-length mirror!--is a pretty important first step in any weight-loss plan. It's all about metrics.
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Add a comment - As you may know, the car's dashboard features a touch-sensitive screen that displays various kinds of information and can be used to control the sound system, the air conditioning, etc. Mary-Jo normally keeps the screen set to show fuel economy, and the effect is quite fascinating. The display shows the current mileage you are getting (ranging from less than ten miles per gallon to a maximum of a hundred), the mileage you've achieved in five-minute travel increments, and your average mileage over any period you want--the current trip, the last week, whatever.Turns out I wasn't the only person to notice this effect. According to a recent article in The Economist, some smart companies are trying to apply the idea to another big energy guzzler, the average home:
As a result, driving becomes a kind of video game: How far can I get the current mileage bar to extend? How high can I get my mileage rating for this trip? Can I beat my score from my last trip? And Mary-Jo is clearly driving differently. Her foot on the gas is much lighter, she avoids fuel-draining accelerations and needless braking, and she uses cruise control on long straight stretches of highway.
These are significant changes for a woman who used to get antsy when stuck behind a slow vehicle. Now instead of changing lanes she smiles serenely as her speed drifts down toward 50 mph and her mileage bar stretches up above 50 mpg.
What if you did the same thing to houses? A variety of products can provide real-time information about electricity consumption. Working out how much energy a house is using is harder than with a car, because electricity meters are generally hidden away in cupboards or cellars, and many people find them hard to understand. So an easily understood real-time read-out, akin to a car's fuel-efficiency gauge, could make a big difference.The Economist articles goes on to describe two gadgets, the Owl and the Wattson, designed to make such energy-usage measurements easy and routine.
Of course, both the automative and home examples simply illustrate the old management principle, "You get what you measure." Whenever you develop a metric for tracking some activity, that act of measurement tends to affect the volume of that activity. So if, for example, you start providing daily reports about the number of defective products coming off your assembly line, within a few days it's likely that the number of defects will start to fall, just because people are suddenly thinking about and noticing defects more than ever. There's no reason to think the same can't apply to energy use, waste production, and other environmentally-sensitive activities.
Two lessons related to sustainable business:
1. A big, usually unremarked obstacle to green behaviors is the lack of reliable, easy-to-obtain feedback about the impact of our activities. (In most homes, even the traditional electric and water meters are located in an out-of-the-way corner of the basement or a closet and are hard for the average person to read and interpret. This is silly, and represents a big wasted opportunity.) Conversely, there's enormous value to be realized in the development of products, like Owl and Wattson, that don't save energy or reduce pollution directly but that improve human environmental behavior indirectly simply by making it transparent.
2. On a corporate level, the powerful impact of simply knowing what you are doing is one reason the reporting movement promoted by GRI and others is actually more important than many people realize. When a company is "forced" to report on its environmental, labor, and social practices every year, it has an automatic impact, subtle or marked, on the way its employees tend to think and act. The impact would be even greater, of course, if sustainability reporting were quarterly or even monthly rather than annual, but having any metrics at all is valuable in its own right.
In one sense, of course, just knowing what you are doing isn't terribly meaningful. Standing on the scale every day doesn't, by itself, make you lose weight. But buying a scale and using it regularly--along with a full-length mirror!--is a pretty important first step in any weight-loss plan. It's all about metrics.
Labels: GRI, Measurement, Prius, Reporting and Transparency
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