WorldChanging Austin

Sustainable Shoppers Ball A Ball

2007-12-02T23:05:28Z

Caveat emptor: I'm not a fan of emu oil, bison steaks, or formerly McDonalds-owned Chipotle . And, shopping is not high on my list of things to do with my free time.

That said, one simple rule made yesterday's Sustainable Shopper's Ball a, well, ball:
"All our vendors must grow or produce what they are selling."

With this premise, everything becomes much more interesting. When the guy behind the booth designed what he's selling, your conversation can hold a lot more meaning. Some of my favorite participants:

Alien Electric Scooters: convert your bike to battery-assisted power or get a cleaner, cooler version of a Vespa from an Austin original. Unlike your friendly Wal-Mart associate, they'll also discuss the latest innovations in continuously-variable transmissions.
Bicycle Sports Shop: hub-integrated gears and other innovations on display, by the guy who'll fix your bike when you break it.
Cobrahead: a vintage farm tool, redesigned to work more efficiently and incorporate recycled materials.
Dhaba Joy: a vegan dessert bakery, located next to Toy Joy. I'm not a fan of the oatmeal ice cream, but everything else was tastier (and probably healthier!) than the Dunkin Donuts alternative.
Katz Fair Trade Coffees: Nobody can honestly claim anything at Starbucks compares to Katz's Black Diamond Double Dark.
Mr. Natural: Mexican health food. Think Taco Bell, invert, and add in free yoga classes.
The Purple Fig Cleaning Co-Op: houses cleaned with all-natural products, at competitive rates, and sharing profits equally among employees. Disclaimer: my girlfriend just started this business, so I have no journalistic neutrality in talking about it
Tears of Joy Hot Sauce: the hottest thing on Austin's 6th St., it burns so nice...
Austin Green Art: turning parking spaces into environmental retreats, greener corporate art installations, and everything in between.
Austin Electric Vehicle Club: from home-brews to a factory-built Ford Ranger EV, your Prius doesn't compare. And these guys can explain the exact technical reasons why!
Dog CPR: seriously: somebody demonstrated how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation on one's canine friend.

I'm still not sure what emu oil is or why anybody would buy it, but I did come away from the day with a couple pounds of really dark coffee beans and 2 bottles of one of the best hot sauces I've ever tasted.

And a lesson: not shopping is great, but shopping isn't always the enemy. Make a marketplace local, and it ceases to restrict itself to just commerce. Face-to-face with people who care, exchanges of ideas get mixed in with the dollars.

Then, you have a deal better than any Black Friday sale.

Newthinking and Sustainable IT in Berlin

2007-10-31T19:18:13Z

In Berlin recently, I had an opportunity to drop in on the local Web Montag event, held monthly at an interesting outfit called the Newthinking Store. The Berlin event is one of many Web Montags held for web professionals regularly throughout Germany and Austria (and one in San Jose, California) as a forum for showcasing notable projects, networking, and idea exchange related to Web 2.0.

Two Newthinking stores, in Berlin and Cologne, play host to workshops and speaking events related to Open Source issues and technologies. The Berlin store has a comfortable feel, with places to sit and drinks available, and anyone in the community is welcome to come in and enjoy the free wi-fi (a rarity in Berlin, where all the networks appear closed). Standard and custom preloaded Ubuntu Linux boxes are for sale, and there are some fairly well-stocked shelves of O'Reilly books.

The stores form a part of the Newthinking Network, which includes the award-winning German-language Netzpolitik blog and podcast, and Newthinking Communications, a Web and networking consultancy.

This mid-October the Network co-hosted (along with the Amina Initiative) the first annual Sustainable IT conference, to discuss "open questions surrounding sustainability and IT," according to co-founder Andreas Gebhard. "This is just the beginning and we are starting very small, but we wanted to recognize this growing market," Gebhard told me.

Sessions in the conference addressed issues of natural resource protection, social equity issues in Web 2.0, ethics for large business, open formats and Creative Commons, and the real costs of the IT industry. The conference was primarily German-language, and through the efforts of volunteers, all of its proceedings are viewable online.

Memo to Vinod Khosla: Every Little Helps.

2007-09-20T01:55:48Z

Consider the subtitle for this entry "Disagree with Vinod Khosla at your own risk." Khosla, in case you're not aware, is a titan of Silicon Valley (he cofounded Sun Microsystems) and one of the most influential venture capitalists in the world. In particular, he's a dedicated proponent of green business, working less from a moral standpoint than from the intellectual conviction that there's a lot of money to be made in alternative energy sources in the coming years. So as I take issue here with some of his recent public comments, it's with the acknowledgement that he's likely to play an important role in the solution to our current fossil-fuel woes.

His problematic comments come from the interview quoted in this VentureBeat item:

Vinod Khosla: Hybrid-electric cars won’t make a difference

You have to pay $5,000 more on a Prius in order to save half a ton of carbon a year, which is more than most consumers will go for, he explained. Buying hybrids “is mostly about personal guilt trips.” It’s like wealthy investors giving money to “art museums instead of to starving people” in Africa, he said.

“Are electric cars going to make a difference any time soon? No. Are they going to be material? No. If something costs $2,000 more, nobody buys it.” He said these cars are likely to get a one percentage point market penetration. [...]

Khosla also singled out wind power, saying it is in the same camp as electric cars. Utilities are dabbling in the sector, using wind for between one and two percent of their grid capacity. “But they think of it as a tax,” Khosla says.

Let's work from back to front here:

● Is it better for utilities to dabble in wind power, or not? The answer: it's better. Period. High-wind areas like West Texas represent an attractive place to build wind farms, as the recent spate of wind project development there -- by giant banks and utilities, no less -- makes clear. Austin Energy's residential and commercial ratepayers have consistently bought up every available watt of wind energy that the utility has been able to provide. And even that's small potatoes compared to the wind boom in Denmark, which derives one-fifth of its electricity from wind power. Demand for wind power is there, and not just at the margins. So even if other sources like solar or cellulosic ethanol draw more interest, that's no reason to scorn wind power.

● One percentage point of market penetration for cars equals a huge economic opportunity for car makers, simply because the automobile market is so vast. As Khosla well knows from his work with high-tech startups, converting one percent of a huge consumer market into a new market niche that your company can exploit -- it's a huge opportunity, and one well worth pursuing. Surely Khosla doesn't think that Toyota -- not just the biggest and best-run car company in the world, but maybe the best large manufacturing company of any type -- is wrong-headed to step up its production of Priuses?

● Khosla might be right about guilt trips, but so what? Sure, on a moral level, I wish that more rich people would channel their donations toward Partners in Health rather than the local art museum. But is that to say that art is bad, or that no one should donate to support the arts? That argument is a non-starter. Besides that, if someone gets in the habit of steering their purchases in an environmental direction, is that a bad thing? I will love it if the Prius serves as a beneficial "gateway drug" toward more deep-down forms of environmentalism.

● There are plenty -- plenty -- of well-to-do folks in the United States and other rich countries who happen to have that extra $5,000 to spend and who might be convinced to pay it to save that extra half-ton of carbon each year. For a lot of Americans, an extra five grand isn't much when you amortize it across a 36- or 48- or 60-month note. So let them. In an ideal world, we'd stop buying new cars altogether so we could stop burning the fossil fuels that go into making them. But in the real world, we keep making and buying new cars. Lots of folks pay a substantial markup for luxury SUVs, whose high profit margins have been the cash cow of the automotive industry for the past decade. Why not convince them to pay a modest markup for the superior technology in a hybrid-engine car?

Put it another way: setting aside market percentages, is it better in an absolute sense for someone to buy a new Prius or a new Escalade? The answer is obvious, and it's not even close -- the Prius wins hands-down. And if it's a drop in the bucket, so what? It's a useful drop in the bucket.

Which leads me to the short version for all of this: If it helps, it helps. Or, to put it colloquially: Don't be hatin' on the 2 percent solutions, Mr. Khosla. Given the environmental challenges facing the world, We need every iota of better solutions that we can muster.

Tim Walker blogs about business at hooversbiz.com.

National Park(ing) Day

2007-09-20T01:39:27Z

This Friday is National Park(ing) Day, "an opportunity to reclaim public parking spaces for parks and open spaces - places for people to enjoy." Austin Green Art will be building a short-form version of Enchanted Rock State Park in a parking space in downtown Austin, on Congress Avenue - watch for 'em! [Link]

Offset Locally

2007-08-09T22:38:13Z

TreeFolks, stewards of urban forestry and treeplanting programs in and around Central Texas, recently announced its new Carbon Offset program.

You can use the the TreeFolks Carbon Calculator to get an estimate of your carbon output, or you can go straight to checkout to purchase the offsets.

The TreeFolks program works like a sponsorship program - your offset is tied to specific tree plantings.

Every ton of carbon offsets you purchase represents the carbon that will be sequestered by actual trees TreeFolks plants in public spaces around Central Texas. Next May (after the end of the planting season) we'll send you a report on EXACTLY which trees were made possible by your purchase.

Boost a "Green" Business

2007-08-09T13:26:55Z

I’m always on the hunt for businesses that are genetically predisposed to being green. This quest recently took me to Forbes.com where I learned about a new contest in progress called “Boost Your Business”. The contest gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to pitch their ideas on the Forbes.com website and win some much needed capital for their businesses. The contest began in late March and over 1000 people entered. Now the contestants have been cut to 20.

I scanned the list of contestants for the genetically green and out of the 20 two leaned toward green and two were green through and through, Recycline and The Happy Gardener. Here’s the scoop…

Simply put, Recycline takes trash from other companies and turns it into high quality long-lasting household and personal care products that are recyclable. Eric Hudson, founder of Recycline, wanted to start a company that reused earth’s resources more effectively, particularly recycling. He focused on developing high quality goods made from recycled materials. To date Recycline products, sold under the Preserve brand, have used nearly 100 tons of recycled plastic and have won awards such as the Organic Design Award for their Preserve Toothbrush.

A little over a year ago, Stonyfield Farm, one of the largest producers of yogurt today and a company known for its green practices, approached Recycline about using its used yogurt cups as feedstock. It took a while for Recycline to work out a process for using the yogurt cups, but that hurdle has been passed and so far 2 million yogurt cups that would have ended up in a landfill have been used to make products such as the Preserve toothbrush. At present, 65% of the plastic Recycline uses for its products is donated by Stonyfield Farm.

Recycline has its sights set on getting its products into the hands and homes of mainstream consumers. They have just launched their Preserve product line in Wal-Mart stores nationwide as part of the retailer’s initiatives to “go green”. Even with the Wal-Mart deal, this genetically green business has an uphill climb when it comes to drawing business away from the better known brands.

The Happy Gardener is a direct sales company that promotes organic gardening. Their garden consultants will come to your home and educate you and your guests about organic gardening and their line of environmentally safe products. Think Tupperware for the organic gardener. Annette Pelliccio, started The Happy Gardener because she was passionate about organic gardening and wanted to stay home with her kids. She was concerned about the negative effects of chemical pesticides and fertilizers on children and pets. S he researched what it would take to create her own line of organic products to use with her family. After completing her research, she decided to “make my passion for environmental products a home-based business”. Since she began in 2003 she’s grown The Happy Gardener from 0 independent garden consultants to a force of 200 and was named an AOL "Top 10 Work from Home Job" in 2007.

Annette would like to use the $100,000 to register The Happy Naturals products with OMRI (Organic Measures Research Institute); develop more healthy products for pest and weed control; purchase better online e-commerce services for customers/reps; move into a warehouse; and hire a distribution staff and a customer service rep.

The two other contestants leaned green were Freight Wing and Idle Free. Freight Wing develops and sells aerodynamic attachments for semi-trailers to reduce fuel consumption and emissions in the trucking industry. Idle Free System is a patented hybrid tractor trailer system that produces energy when the unit’s engine is running. The energy is transferred to sealed batteries (inside the truck) and the reserve power can be used to run heating and air conditioning for the driver when the truck is stopped.

Now back to the “Boost Your Business” contest. An interesting part of this contest is that you can vote for the businesses that you believe should or should not win the contest. The winner will receive $100,000 to boost their business. Voting for the five finalists continues until August 31, 2007. This is your chance to help some green entrepreneurs. Take a few minutes and check out the finalist in the Boost Your Business contest. Then vote for the ones that are working to lighten the load on the planet.

Bill Oliver: "Taking Our Stand"

2007-07-06T13:01:30Z

This song by Bill Oliver is a bit of viral-video consciousness-raising about development along Town Lake's shores.

Austin Leads The Charge For Electric Vehicles

2007-06-28T04:09:58Z

The City of Austin is crafting a holistic approach to the implementation of solutions to the challenges of global climate change. Part of that work is being carried out through the leadership of Austin Energy's Plug-In Partners National Campaign. The good folks at Plug-In Partners are garnering support for the mass production of Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs).

PHEVs are greener than today's hybrid automobiles through the addition of a rechargable battery pack. This battery pack can power the vehicle all on its own with comparable performance and much better gas mileage (since you aren't burning gas!). Current battery technology will keep you quietly moving around for 20-60 miles all on its own before you have to turn on the gas. PHEVs are recharged using any standard 120-volt power outlet. You can replenish your car while you sleep at night to take advantage of all that surplus west Texas wind capacity. Since the average commute only puts about 25 miles on your car, you might never have to switch a PHEV over to burn stinky old gas.

What's the catch? Well, PHEVs are not being mass produced by the major auto manufacturers - yet! Sure, there are folks who have built PHEVs, converted current hybrids into plug-in hybrids, and you can buy a battery pack to convert your car today. Are the auto manufacturers still not convinced a market exists for these new-fangled transportation devices? That's where we come in, with the help of the Plug-In Partners National Campaign.

You can help the Plug-In Partners quantify public interest in PHEVs. Here's how:

Sign the Petition!
Find out why Google is building PHEVs!
Tell the auto manufacturers your company wants PHEVs!
Plug-In "your city name here"!

The auto manufacturers are listening to the market. Let's send the message loud and clear: we want PHEVs!

P.S. - If you can't wait any longer, get your City of Austin rebate for your electric car, scooter, or bike now!

Cool House Tour

2007-06-25T05:03:54Z

We took the 2007 Cool House Tour, sponsored by the Texas Solar Energy Society (TXSES), and saw some pretty great examples of green building, solar photovoltaics, rainwater collection, and well-integrated design and building. All the homes were impressive, and there was a huge turnout (one homeowner told me he'd had 2,000 people through his property throughout the day).

Greener In Texas?

2007-06-14T15:05:28Z

There’s a saying: “everything’s bigger in Texas.” Usually applied to SUVs, exurb-dwelling women’s hair, and tex-mex dishes, it’s starting to look like a lot of the biggest initiatives to green a metropolis are being born in Austin, Texas.

Will Wynn is not just Austin’s mayor with a politically auspicious name: he’s also Al Gore with a Texas twang. A Worldchanger much more literate than I has already provided an excellent summary of Wynn’s speaking points , to which I have nothing substantive to add. The truly curious can also read the full current version of the Austin Climate Protection Plan .

A short list of not-so-little ways in which Austin, the capital of the most polluting state in the most polluting country in the world, is giving most other locales a run for their money at the slowly starting race to think big about being green:

1. Transportation Is Becoming Less Insane
Yes, our highways are still as clogged as last time you visited. However, the vehicle in front of you seems increasingly likely to be practical in size, maybe even a scooter, perhaps even an electric one . If you’re really lucky, you’ll catch a glimpse of one of the increasing number of electric vehicles . With a small new subsidy on electric vehicle purchases or conversions and a campaign to encourage automakers to create plug-in hybrids , Austin’s air will begin to smell more like barbecue and less like smog. Add in plans for an expansive light rail system and Austinites just might stop thinking Hummers are cool rides.

2. Local Conservation Alive and Well
What good a little salamander can do! The endangered Barton Springs Salamander serves as a mascot for Austin’s efforts to protect our natural resources, with groups like Save Our Springs Alliance serving as watchdogs on even the largest companies that want to build in our backyards . From Whole Foods to Alamo DraftHouse , Keeping Austin Weird entails buying local for both better experiences and less carbon.

3. Energy Policy Approaching Sensibility
Austin currently gets about 35% of our electricity from coal, 30% from natural gas, 29% nuclear, and 6% wind. Wynn showed intellectual honesty during his presentation by mentioning the need to think about more nuclear capacity for long-term energy needs.
The city’s wholly-owned utility, Austin Energy, is putting its money where the (other) green is: Austin Energy customers can get free fancy thermostats that help prevent brownouts , rebates on energy efficient appliances and solar cells , and sell back any excess energy generated to Austin Energy .

Lastly and probably most importantly:

4. Embracing Clean Tech Capitalism
To quote Austinite and Worldchanger Bruce Sterling: “It’s about a bunch of start-up companies asking rich people for money” . Love it or hate it, capitalism is getting the innovation job done slowly but surely in Austin. We’ve got an established innovator or two arround town, and the city is trying to attract as many fresh innovations as possible . Wynn’s roadmap plan to allow local spend and purchase of carbon credits just might let Joe Sixpack join in on the fun.

It’s said that Janis Joplin first took the stage at Threadgill’s, an Austin restaurant with enough grease per chicken-fried steak to power a biodiesel from here to Big Bend .

It’s also rumored that Joplin had some wisdom about this big old state: “Texas is OK if you want to settle down and do your own thing quietly, but it’s not for outrageous people, and I was always outrageous.”

Janis would be surprised by Austin today, and her wisdom should serve as a big, cowboy-booted kick in the derrière to the rest of the country to giddy on up at green innovation. Start thinking Texas-sized or bigger.

The Red Line's On Time

2007-06-11T14:00:00Z

Working on the assembly of a MetroRail car (All photos courtesy CapMetro).

You can't take the Red Line Downtown yet, tapping away at fancified-commuter wi-fi interwebs (perhaps sippycup of mocha latte in hand?), but you sure can start dreaming about it, can't you? Here's some material to add fuel to the fire. Or not -- those puppies are zero emissions.

CapMetro recently published the All Systems Go Community Newsletter (PDF). The All Systems Go Long-Range Transit Plan is a regional transportaion plan evolved with citizen input, covering the next 20 years of rapid population growth (Central Texas' numbers are expected to double).

The newsletter is a supplement to recent ASG website updates. It's got news about the Capital MetroRail (on time and on budget, due to start service in 2008), new Park & Ride facilities, and a new intiative to supply Wi-Fi internet on Express buses.

In November 2006, Capital Metro launched Mobile WiFi service on Express buses to provide internet access for passengers. The pilot project began with service on nine MCI coach buses serving express routes. The buses are white with a red stripe down the middle. The WiFi-enabled buses, numbers 9301 through 9309, feature Capital Metro “WiFi To Go” decals to let boarding passengers know they are riding buses with WiFi capabilities. Capital Metro is now exploring the possibility of expanding this service to additional routes. Free WiFi also is offered at TechRidge, Leander and Pavilion Park & Rides. Capital MetroRail will also have WiFi upon opening in 2008 (more).

The newsletter also highlights CapMetro's "Clean Air Committments" -- outlining efforts in four major areas: Fleet, Fuel, Facilities/operations, and Rail.

The Public Education Materials index is a good place to start if you're interested in learning more about the ASG plan. (Note that the newsletter link on that page is incorrect, but you'll get it if you click on the newsletter image.) It's got links to presentations, maps, facts sheets, and artists' renderings of the MetroRail.

You'll find MetroRail news and info -- including station maps and plans -- here.

Here are some ways to get involved with CapMetro planning and development.

Check out the ASG Future Connections Study web, its public meetings and workshops, and its feedback form and mailing list. According to CapMetro, the Future Connections Study looks at "improving transit connections between the University of Texas , the Capitol, the Central Business District, the Seaholm redevelopment site, and the Palmer Events Center , in addition to connections to the 700-acre Robert Mueller Redevelopment."

CapMetro public meeting schedules and agendas are posted online

A CapMetro general newsletter, On The Move can be read on the web or delivered by email

For the geeks: Take the free CapMetro GIS Geospatial data and Google Transit Feed Data out for a spin

Readers familiar with the Austin Convention Center may recognize the site of this planned MetroRail station (click to enlarge).

Soul meets Solar

2007-06-08T03:03:54Z

I was fortunate enough to catch a set by the Caesar Brothers Funk Box early last Saturday as the last rays of the sun were caught by two large panels parked beside Opal Divines on West 6th in Austin.

Solar activist and sometimes music promoter Brad Massingill has teamed up with Armadillo Solar Outfitters to bring a concert series to various venues around town powered by a 500W, 30 Amp mobile solar rig capable of delivering 500 W. This Sat. June 9th the series moves on to Freddie's Place on S. 1st Street. Keep an eye out for Friday happy hour shows at electric car dealer Shock Value (2711 S. Lamar).

Brad has close ties to the New Orleans community and aspires to get production capacity for mobile solar rigs started in New Orleans - both for use in rebuilding and as an economic development boost for the still reeling wards devastated by Katrina.

Energy-wise, We're on the Racks

2007-06-07T05:20:17Z

Tom Keller, who leads the Power Aware computing group at IBM's Austin Research Lab, gave a talk at the monthly Austin Forum on the problems and emerging solutions surrounding power consumption in data centers, the engines of net traffic, search, and commercial transactions. Highlights:

Across the nation, there are around 10 million servers in 10 thousand data centers.
In year 2005, estimates of the fraction of overall power used nationwide by data servers range from 1.2 (just the computers) to 2% (including cooling and other infrastructure). By 2010 this figure is projected to increase 40-70%.
In Austin, 2.5% of Austin Energy's power is used for standalone data centers. This is projected to increase to 10% of Austin's power usage. This figure does not include mixed use sites (like IBM, where thousands of servers and workstations are employed for simulation and design tasks).
One server rack consumes the power equivalent of 13 average Dallas homes (15 average California homes): 20-25KW
If present trends continue, the lifetime energy costs to run a server will soon exceed the cost of the server.
Many regions and municipalities are tapped out, and really can't support expansion. Difficulties in California led to an explosion of data centers in the Pacific Northwest, which is now threatening to saturate the available hydro based power system. New data center proposals in New York City are meeting with resistance from utilities.

What can be done? Here's a bit of what Tom had to say.

Newer processor designs since 2004 have decreased the rate of growth in power usage. Some communities (California's Pacific Gas and Electric) have instituted rebate programs to replace servers with more efficient models. Austin Energy was said to be considering a program modeled on the one pioneered at PG&E. (See this Q&A with the PG&E data center market manager.)
Virtualization, in concert with more efficient designs, can consolidate applications onto one heavily utilized high computer per watt server running emulators of the replaced systems.
Software efficiency gains could reduce wasted power. However, today, the typical Intel-Windows machine runs at about 10% CPU utilization, with the rest going to waste.
A surprising amount of waste is due to obsolete servers, applications, and storage devices which are not identified until a data center move. After a move, Tom says anecdotal evidence suggests 20-30% of machines are taken offline. Typically the daily grind in a big data center prevents the discovery of such moves, but research is in progress to assist with this.

One source for keeping track of relevant news nationwide in this topic is http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/power-index.html

Being Creative in a Pressure Cooker

2007-06-06T14:04:17Z

Today, the organizations most of us work in are coming more and more to resemble pressure cookers. We all feel it. More demands to produce better results faster, more people in a team environment to whom one has responsibilities, more meetings … and, oh, by the way, if we want to be in business a few years from now, everybody needs to be much more creative to come up with the innovative products, services and process improvements that will enable us to survive in today’s ruthless marketplace.

Unfortunately, creativity doesn’t flourish under high pressure and cannot be summoned under the crack of a whip, according to Harvard professor Theresa Amabile. She also happens to be one of the world’s leading researchers on creativity in the workplace. Working with colleagues from the Harvard Business School and Yale School of Management, Amabile conducted a study recently about the effect of time pressures on creativity, involving nearly two hundred employees from seven different American companies representing chemical, high tech, and consumer products sectors.

The employees participating in the study were all highly-educated knowledge workers; 85 percent were college graduates, and many of these had additional graduate-level training. To be included in the study, the study participants also had to currently be on a project team identified by their company’s senior management as one where creativity was both possible and desirable. Clearly, if any group of employees can be expected to exhibit creativity, it is these kinds of workers.

Amabile’s study team e-mailed each participant a brief daily questionnaire for over six months (or the end of the project team’s life, whichever came first). The questionnaire included Likert, or numerical-scale, items about the tasks and the organizational environment the participant was dealing with. Two key questions asked each participant to rate the amount of both (1) time pressure and (2) creativity experienced on a particular day.

About 75 percent of the questionnaires were returned completed, an excellent, even astonishing, rate of return for a research project of this type. This rate of return translates into over nine thousand completed questionnaires.

In addition to this quantitative information, each participant was also asked to provide “qualitative information” by briefly describing one event that stood out from the rest of the day’s events. The event could be anything at all related to the project or the team or the work. Creativity was not mentioned, so as not to bias the responses. The researchers coded each narrative response so that a creative thinking measure could be derived from the data. Responses that were related to creative thinking -- whether directly (such as mentioning “brainstorming”) or indirectly (such as an event that resulted in a significant flash of insight) – were counted as being creative. Those items not related to creativity were coded under other categories.

After reviewing all of the information, the researchers concluded that, in general, time pressure was detrimental to creative work. So, to begin with, you can toss aside the delusion that you do your best (creative) work under pressure. You don’t. But don’t be too hard on yourself: this is a common misperception.

But the researchers identified other factors that complicate this simple picture. One key factor, where time pressure could play a less detrimental role, was the “meaningfulness of the time urgency.” This “meaningfulness” is indicated by two features. First, the management of a company must be able to convincingly explain how a particular urgent project will make a significant difference to the company’s future. Either it makes sense to most people that the company’s future prosperity or even its survival hinge on the outcome of this project, or it doesn’t. This sort of explanation is difficult to manipulate.

Second, given this real urgency, management is obligated to temporarily provide a work environment where the team members are shielded from the normal distractions of organizational life (e.g., reports and routine meetings) and other work assignments. Not only does this environment establish conditions where creativity is more likely, the very act of establishing this environment validates that management is sincere and serious about the nature of the opportunity (or threat) confronting the company.

Amabile uses the data and travel metaphors to develop a matrix of the relationship of time pressure to creativity.

In the upper left corner of the matrix, the amount of time pressure is low, but the expectations for creativity work are high. Thus, workers feel like they are on an expedition where they have the luxury of generating and exploring new ideas.

In the lower left corner, time pressures and creative expectations are both low. As a result, little creative output is anticipated from an organization with this profile. The workplace feel here is as if one’s work is on autopilot.

The quadrant in the upper right corner is the one that was described earlier where management has identified a crucial project and provided the workers with the time to focus mostly on this one issue. In this instance, people feel that they are on a mission.

My hypothesis is that most of the people reading this article will identify with the lower right column. Here, the time pressures are high, but the expectations for creativity are low. Amabile aptly terms this the “treadmill.”

The difficulty for many organizations and for many leaders and employees is that they are caught between the demands of a fading production-oriented industrial culture and the emerging realities of the new Creative Knowledge Economy with the constant need for creativity-led innovation. The industrial culture demands constant busyness (or the appearance of busyness) to get the last ounce of productivity out of everyone.

The Creative Knowledge Economy demands the production of new applied knowledge in the form of innovation. This can only come from creativity. It bears repeating that, unlike productivity, creativity cannot be ordered by management. Creativity can only be made more likely to happen by management through developing an organizational environment where it is OK to think and to explore new ideas. Truly creative thinking is very hard work. But it is different from the exhausting, harrowing, fragmented work many of us experience in being pulled in several different directions at once.

Our goal must be to help people understand the new realities of the emerging Creative Knowledge Economy, and to encourage them to create the organizational mechanisms where people can find the time to think.

Mayor's Presentation on Climate Change

2007-06-02T08:00:00Z

Will Wynn, the Mayor of Austin, publicly presented his homegrown adaptation of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" slideshow for the first time on Thursday May 31st to an audience in City Council Chambers. This was the first of many presentations Mayor Wynn is scheduled to make as one of 1,000 citizens trained by Mr. Gore's Climate Project. The Mayor's presentation includes graphics, information, and rhetorical styles drawn directly from the hard-earned successes of Mr. Gore's internationally-honed presentation.

The Frost Bank Tower by Wylie Maercklein

Wynn is able to poignantly bring the realities of climate change disconcertingly close to home with examples drawn from the everyday city environment. While talking about an image taken from the International Space Station which shows the troposphere as the merest thin protective shield about our planet, Wynn says, "...it's only twelve miles from here where I'm standing straight up to the top of the sky. That's from here to the Arboretum." Or again, when helping his audience visualize the massive height of the (now collapsed) Larsen B ice shelf: "...as tall and half again as the Frost Bank Tower."

Wynn draws upon the audience's still tender experiences of the Hurricane Katrina disaster to reinforce the importance of listening to the warnings of the scientific community. He is persuasive when he points out that scientists were not heeded when they specifically warned that the New Orleans levees would not withstand a category three hurricane. After thus establishing the credibility of the scientific establishment in matters of weather prediction and disaster avoidance, Wynn draws out his point that the scientific community now stands in unanimous agreement about climate change: "...there is NO peer reviewed study which debates the reality of global warming. There may be religious debate, there may be political debate, or there may be bullsh*t debate."

The need for action has not been lost on the Mayor of the City of Austin.

Wynn spent a comparatively small amount of time on the still liquid details of the Austin Climate Protection Plan, though his enthusiasm for the Plan was apparent. The Mayor recognizes a unique confluence of cross-interest political will, primed economic factors, and an absence of leadership; this opens a window of opportunity to shift Austin into a position of national and international municipal leadership, embracing local responsibility for the global challenges of climate change. Wynn outlined eight points to show the time is right:

Austin is the capitol of the worst carbon emissions polluting state in the worst carbon emissions polluting nation on the planet. Although it might seem counterintuitive, there is great potential for leadership after being saddled with such an unlucky designation. Some might even say there is a moral obligation.
The city owns its energy utility. The city and utility can thus act in a more agile, concerted fashion to implement radical change.
Austin is the fastest growing metropolitan economy in the nation (4.1% growth last year).
Austin has one of the fastest growing metropolitan populations in the nation.
(I will leave this point as an exercise for the reader to discover!)
The Mayor is uniquely positioned as the Chair of the U.S. Conference of Mayors Energy Committee [pdf]; he is gaining an international reputation as a leader in shaping the power of local municipalities to take responsibility for their contributions to global warming.
Austin is an international technology hub. With the potential for new fortunes to be made in Clean Tech, Austin has the technological and intellectual infrastructure to become a leader in the new wave of innovative global warming solutions.
Last and most certainly not least, Austin's environmentally conscious citizenry is ready and eager to support concerted action for change.

Although much of the material Wynn presents will be familiar to those who have witnessed Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" (particularly the lengthy sequence on the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf), it may be worthwhile to bear in mind the diverse audience the Mayor's presentation is intended to reach and the long-term goals of his presentation. If you are already part of the choir, now is a good time to harmonize in chorus (albeit while asking very tough questions about the implementation realities of the Plan). Mayor Will Wynn cannot take credit for the long-term work of the many environmental advocates who have made Austin a leading green city, but he is certainly up to the task of helping take things to a new level: Austin can become an international example for what a committed municipality can do in this great work before us.

If you cannot make one of the public presentations listed below, the video recording of the May 31st presentation will be available in the Austin History Center for viewing or copying by Wednesday June 6th.

The Austin Climate Protection Plan
http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/council/downloads/mw_acpp_points.pdf

Presentation at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, June 10th 4pm & 7pm.
http://www.originalalamo.com/Show.aspx?id=4640

Presentation at the Frank Erwin Center, June 12th 6-8pm. RSVP required by June 4th.
http://txgreens.org/drupal/node/76