Vague Goals

A vague goal allows specialists in different functions to collaborate across rigid silos.

This seems to fit the process of building a goal and a team for your next or first green project. Can you keep the goal vague enough, for instance, let's build out this space using a "green philosophy" instead of saying we are going to achieve LEED Gold? Do they both hit that mark of goal setting? Are they similar goals? Does it matter?

When you put a green team together to work on an interiors project you have so many opinions and expertise to consider. But like any healthy relationship, every one's opinions matter and every one's input is potentially useful assuming we all keep to our boundaries and fulfill our part of the puzzle. I noticed this happening in two meetings recently, both were incredible but the content of each was really different.

Meeting 1 - Interior Designer, LEED consultant ( part of GC firm), PM/CM, Furniture dealer, Client/User. Clearly this was a sub-team of the overall project scope but this meeting was truly amazing. The interior designer talked about wanting a specific design and aesthetic. She/he was not working in a vacuum but instead pointing out what the overall intention was to be and not truly obsessed over how to get there. There were points in the intent that were taking green into consideration like quality of goods specified, green rated products specified ( GreenGuard, Greenseal etc ) but there was no plan on how to get to the goal of a green interiors project. The LEED consultant was not really concerned with the design intent or aesthetic at all, but really wanted the execution of the design to hit the LEED points needed. So there was a discussion brewing already from one player to the next. The CM/PM was schedule and price concerned, as if that is a new idea. How the project was executed and how much the greening cost. The Furniture Dealer added in options to hit the needs of the aesthetics, the points, the schedule and the costs, and then the trade offs among these decisions. The client watched over the whole discussion and determined the ultimate wins for their company. A vague goal with many aspects being considered collaboratively.

Meeting 2 - CFO, VP of Operations, VP of Sales, CEO, VP of Strategy all discussing a company initiative. Each sitting around a table and the conversation moved from one to the next for their point of view. Succinctly, each presented their own opinion as it related to their discipline. Finance talked about the financial ramifications of the decision, no cross talk about someone else's piece of the pie, just their part. This continued around the table and when you accumulated the information, it was fascinating to see the facts all at the table to decide upon. I have been in countless meetings where people accuse one another, trump one another, distrust one another etc. When you really give a vague topic, it does allow for collaboration, assuming everyone is functioning and trusting of one another.

Green building of interiors requires honest communication and collaboration to fulfill every ones needs otherwise, something gets lost in the shuffle. The budget is blown or the LEED rating is thrown out the window and so on.

I have heard numerous people say that green building and paying attention to the environment is a pain. But what about this; An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Is Money the Demotivator

There was an interesting article in the Washington Post this week about money and motivation.   Psychological experiments say that money is not the best instrument to use to motivate behavior and that it actually demotivated people because it devalued their "internal drive".  Hmm.  If you want to motivate behavior offer meaning, not money.  

We have spent years weighing the value of green building.  Is it more expensive?  Hundreds of studies proving one way or the other.  It is if you do this, it is not if you do this.  But if you look at the early adapting people that built green, they were all motivated by something other than money.   The collaborative process of green building demands conversation and healthy conflict to resolve monetary decisions and how they impact the building process and product.  Woven into this is the LEED process and the "buying of points" that can occur.  But the drive for green building originated out of meaning, not money.  Now it seems that money is becoming less of a barrier for green building and the delta between building green and non green has shrunk.

For me personally, I decided long ago that I have only one thing in my life and that is time.  If you boil it down to the least common denominator, that is what I have to give.  So, I work with that thought and make decisions based on trading my precious commodity, time.  I go to work every day knowing that I trade my hours that day for money and then in turn I trade that money for food, gas, housing, clothes, Reese's Pieces and Ruffles.  I think about who I am with and what I am doing with my time and make sure that I am making a good trade.  So, working in this context, I am pretty particular about how I trade.  

If you take this philosophy and apply it to building or whatever you want to apply it to, you will find it creates a puzzle that demands solving.  Going back to the study of motivation, Edward Deci, a psychologist, studied students who were solving puzzles for him.  He offered half of the group monetary rewards for solving puzzles and the others continued to solve puzzles for fun.   The group that was offered a financial reward were less interested in solving puzzles on their own time than the group that was doing it for fun.  The external rewards were actually demotivating a group.  I found this fascinating at first but then totally understandable.

Maybe that is the same trigger that comes into play when someone offers me a cheaper solution to a problem thinking that money is the driver in the decision?   I don't think that green can be the only driver in a decision either.  I think you have to think and weigh out the reasons for your decision.  However, having said that, decisions I see being made on green furniture are pretty simplistic.   Is it Green Guard or not.  Is it Cradle to Cradle or not.  Is it the same price or is one less expensive.

I watched several presentations recently by different manufacturers.  They were amazingly similar in that they all said the same buzz words.  Our product is cradle to cradle.  Our product is filled with recycled content and is recyclable.  Our product has been designed using green materials.  It appears that the price of admission has changed and it is no longer unique to have a green product.   So coming full circle, if you are trading dollars for furniture, what is the motivator?  

LEED recaps

I was rooting around in the case study part of the USGBC website.  If you haven't been there in a while or ever, check it out - www.usgbc.org.  I found that looking at how other people have designed their spaces opens your eyes to the creativity in the world of green building.  The project approaches vary, the way the project accumulates points vary and the purposes of the projects are really quite different, other than the part that they are all green projects.

One of the projects obtaining LEED-CI stated that they used movable walls to "reduce financial and environmental costs of churn and reorganization".  The case studies are all about a page long so there really isn't a lot of room to talk about the project details so the fact that this company chose to talk about the strategy of their space stuck out in my mind.   Very different from the other case studies which concentrated more on why they chose to build a LEED project and then how they obtained points and what decisions they made along the way.  

Of course there was a pattern in the LEED-CI case studies.  Day lighting and views were talked about by all of the projects.  They all obtained the openness of the offices in a similar way.  Put the offices in the core of the space and workstations around the window walls.  Or, eliminate offices all together and stick to low panels/low workstations.  Maybe it was me but it seems like this was all stated like it was the newest idea in the world, eliminate the private offices around the exterior of the space.  Well, not to date myself but the first time I saw this design layout it was stated as revolutionary too, and that was for the Quaker Oats project in Chicago designed by GHK in 1986 or so.   I guess if you think about it, culturally those perimeter offices are still highly coveted by the executive C-suite crew and therefore are prolific in space design making this still a revolutionary or at least controversial design concept.

The other couple of ideas I found employed by others were to eliminate trash can liners in the office building.  Thomas Properties talked about this as it relates to their LEED project in Sacramento for CAL/EPA.  For some reason, I found this to be wonderful.  So simple yet I know that my Irvine Company building puts trash can liners in our trash cans and now even in our blue recycling cans.  It makes me crazy.  The leadership and learning that would need to accompany a change like this is astoundingly high.  And it seems so simple, but alas I think that it would be quite an effort.  I wonder if I can get The Irvine Company to change, HA.

Lastly, lose the lawn!!  Using native landscaping for water conservation here in San Diego is a no-brainer.  But the case study about our local LEED project mentioned satellite irrigation technology that automatically schedules irrigation based on the needs of the landscaping and local weather conditions!  How cool is that.  I always love the scene of the building watering their landscaping when it is raining outside.  Unbelievable.  

So check out the projects, you might get inspired.  

It's Coming Up Everywhere

I personally think that the amount of information flying at all of us is incredible.  What to read, what to believe, what to think, what does it all mean, when is enough enough?  I have to let it sit in my brain and distill for a while and then it all seems to take shape.  Staring at the ocean helps too.

Paul Goldberger wrote an article for The New Yorker this past week talking about a new building by Daniel Fisher.  Dr. Fisher has designed a building using Dynamic Architecture creating an 80 story skyscraper in which every floor rotates independently of the other floors.  He calls it "flexible for life" able to morph for the user today and tomorrow and everyone can have the mixture of views from the building.   To make it environmentally friendly, each floor is separated by a few feet of space to accommodate wind turbines which make the building self powered.  

Deloitte and Charles Lockwood released a study The Dollars and Sense of Green Retrofits.  Lots of statistics that I have seen before and heard about for years supporting green building.    There were a couple of highlights I pulled out that were interesting.  Deloitte states that organizations that forego green building for whatever reason ( usually ROI ), should reconsider because they are predicting that within the next three years they will be at a competitive disadvantage due to higher operating costs, lower productivity and declining attraction of skilled workers - and don't forget a potential of negative brand image.    Then there are the dollars and sense, LEED building are commanding rent premiums, have a higher occupancy rate and sell higher on the market.  My personal favorite statistic is the movement of the younger workforce where 80% are saying that they are interested in a job that has a positive impact on the environment and 92% want to work at a company that is environmentally friendly.  

The quote of the week in The Week magazine is about how the person could not afford to drive their Land Rover anymore due to the cost of gas.  She goes on to say that she used to laugh when drivers of small cars honked at her and she would think Go ahead, make my day.  I could crush you like a bug.  Oh, how have the mighty fallen now.

Harvard Business Review has a host of articles about people, alignment, motivation, leadership and high-commitment, high- performance CEOs.   There is a list of companies that are lead by this leadership - a whole bunch of environmentally aware companies appear.

And last but not least, the USGBC announced earlier this month that they will release a huge revision to the current LEED systems that includes realignment, consolidation, updating and streamlining the process.   The drivers for this change are nested in the input from the users of LEED that criticize it for being too rigid, cumbersome and demanding - and too costly.  

So if you link all of these together, the message coming into my head is that the individual is the common denominator in these readings.  The individual wants a view no matter where they are in a building, the individual wants to work in a environmentally friendly building,  the individual is making decisions about their behavior and mindset, companies want to influence individuals in multiple ways and individuals are demanding change in benchmarks.  So, bringing it back to the almighty adaptable workspace, doesn't it make sense to think before you act and bring attributes of environmentally friendly ways of building into your workplace to accommodate the diversity of the individual?

It is all in how you look at things

I have marveled at the word "stress" for many years.  It is a huge dumping ground for emotions and perspectives that could be called something else.  We quickly just say that we are stressed out, or that a situation is making me stress out or that certain things are stressful.  I am certainly not discounting that there is indeed stress in our lives but I started to look at the word and how it was being used several years ago when I read about a parking lot attendant talk about how stressed out she was everyday.  She was sitting in a booth in an underground parking lot, alone, stressing out.  It dawned on me that stress is increased or intensified by your own perceptions and your own thoughts.  If you decide you are going to be overwhelmed then you usually are getting what you fear the most - what if you change your mind?

G.K. Chesterton wrote a great couple of passages about looking at things differently.  One is about being at a train station and hearing adults complain about having to wait for a train.   He makes us sit back and think about whether you have ever heard a little boy complain about having to hang about the station and wait for a train?  Probably not because the station is a place of wonder and "poetical pleasures" to a child.  Isn't this the same situation for both people with different views on the experience?  His second passage I loved was about an adult trying to open a sticking bedroom bureau drawer.  Every day it was jammed and completely annoying to have to pull open.  The frustrations were coming from a perception that the drawer was supposed to be easy to open, it should be easy to pull out.  What if you imagine yourself pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, then the struggle becomes exciting instead of exasperating.  Or what if you are tugging up a lifeboat out of the sea or a climber in a crevass in the Swiss Alps.  Does that make the experience different?

I find myself getting "stressed out" when I get overloaded in a quick period of time - when things come at me so fast that I cannot process the information, organize the information or when it is just over the top too much.  Maybe too much is just too much.  

Why get stressed out in traffic?  It does not help to reduce the traffic or the time spent sitting in traffic.  Stress does not make you not late for a meeting - it just makes you stressed.  Apologize for being late and then leave earlier the next time and don't be late again.  It is disrespectful.

I certainly won't say that the world is not feeling a little "stressful" these days with the price of oil, the crazy markets, the unemployment rate etc.  I don't think I have a panacea for all of those factors but I can say that you can change your mind and that is a very powerful thing.  

I have been concerned for a long time that I don't have a favorite saying that sort of sums up my life or my favorite spiritual saying to guide me.  A bible passage, a quote from Aristotle, an I Ching saying - something to put it out there.  This was actually a bit stressful to me because I felt pressure to have some profound statement in my life.  Well it turns out that I do have one, it just is not what you would call sophisticated - 

"there ain't no Coupe de Ville hiding in the bottom of your Cracker Jack box" - Meatloaf.

Incremental Changes

I am a big picture thinker thinking about things while looking for trends and patterns that show a path or a movement and I am watching one develop right now.  In our pluralistic society, the change is coming from all places.  It is all integral to our little world of green interior construction / furniture.  Less waste is a good idea.

My neighbor bought a brand new Prius last week.  They traded in their old car, inclusive of the Condi Rice for President sticker on the bumper.  I heard that when you buy a Prius they give you an Obama for President bumper sticker as a standard issue.  I know we are what we drive around here but can't we all just decide that good performance is good performance?  

The Vatican issued a statement that pollution would now be considered "a sin".   Along with nature's demise comes ours - so who is the sinner?  ( Marketwatch.com) The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary says that destroying God's creation was akin to tearing a page out from the bible. ( The New Yorker, June 30, 2008 ).  I would rather have a less garbage/toxic filled world to live in regardless of your views on global warming.

And nearest to my heart is the start of the integration of the interior construction world.  The divide between purchasing/procurement and design/facilities/construction seems to be healing.  Slowly but moving that way.  Large corporate procurement people and large unified school district procurement people are calling for information, learning about what they are buying and wanting to know what they need to know about sustainable approaches to building.

Whatever happened to the commercials on TV with "don't be a litterbug"  and the American Indian on horseback looking at the trash on the ground with a teardrop in his eye.  Clearly had some impact on me - I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday but I remember commercials from 35 years ago....  There are 2 movies that I find interesting from a trash and garbage perspective - Wall E and Idiocracy.   Wall E is left on the plant cleaning up garbage for 700 years after the earth has so much consumerism that it cannot support life.   Idiocracy is a world with garbage everywhere and commercialization everywhere.  Society is completed dumbed down and individual responsibility and the consequences break down.  Futuristic like Sleeper but garbage plays a part in what the world looks like in the future.

The organic society.  Able to change, adapt and grow.  Designed to integrate.  The organic workplace, a manifestation of the same ingredients - adaptable, changeable and expandable.  The little steps are happening everywhere to reduce consumption, reduce waste and build differently.  Take notice.

Behaviors and Green Purchases

You can't prescribe something green and then become green. Specifying a green chair does not mean you are green - it just means you bought a new chair that has sustainable features like recycled content or non-horrible toxins. If you want to be greener, it is probably better to not buy a new chair at all and therefore you are using less virgin materials or throwing away more old stuff into the landfills.

There are several points in LEED that have an intent around impacting the environment less. In Sustainable Sites, you can earn a point by locating your building on a brownfield site. The intent is that you are cleaning something up AND putting less pressure to use undeveloped land. In Water Efficiency, you can earn a point by using high efficiency irrigation technology or using captured water to irrigate. The intent is to limit or eliminate the use of potable water for irrigation. In Energy & Atmosphere, you can earn a point for increasing your energy performance to reduce environmental impacts of using excessive energy. In Materials & Resources, you can earn a point for recycled content of building products with the intent on boosting the demand for products with recycled content and decreasing demand for products that extract and process new virgin materials. See a trend? You can earn points by selecting things that preserve land, water and resources.

According to Cornell University, an average of one pound of drywall ends up in a landfill for each square foot of drywall built in initial construction. The EPA estimates that 155 lbs of material waste is generated for every square foot of built out space - and we demolish 1.75 billion square feet of existing building space a year. So how can the USGBC not acknowledge movable walls, or plug and play power or removable access floors or modular carpet tiles or sound masking or indirect lights as terrific strategies?

The manufacturers call these behavior - changing tools. If you use the products, they are actually probably more effective for the second time around LEED process because you would be reusing a huge portion of existing building materials, diverting scads of trash from landfills etc.

I found it wonderful that DIRTT, KI and Haworth joined forces as manufacturers to work on the USGBC to recognize behavior changing tools as huge parts of green building and green using of buildings. Good for them! Collaborative, innovative, sustainably focused and interesting.