NOW IS THE TIME!
Blog #13 Beyond Sustainability….
Advanced Release Dec 28, 2022.
You Really Oughta Wanna
What is wrong with us? As a global group of nations we should be able to get our act together and reduce GHG emissions. Simply put, it’s all about our collective behaviour modification to move away from very high energy consumption habits that started with the First Industrial Revolution fired in the beginning by coal and later by oil and natural gas.
As we enter 2023, much of the global population understands that coal, oil and natural gas are all different forms of Ancient Sunlight and that collectively they do not constitute an infinite resource that we can keep on burning without consequence to our own survival.
How to switch everyone to become part of the solution is the pressing issue before all of mankind! Or put another way …what is the most effective path forward to reduce our total consumption of fossil fuels? What can we do Beyond Sustainability?
Before getting into a switch in strategy from top down to bottom up localization that might well be a much better strategy to save more of us …..let me make a detour back to the most significant job experience of my lifetime.
It was 50 years ago when I first heard the phrase… You Really Oughta Wanna ..and what you can accomplish if your life depended upon it!.
It started in 1972 while living in Rochester NY, after being the Xerox Branch Manager in Ottawa, Canada during the FLQ Crisis. I was promoted into a new position at Xerox Headquarters as the head of the newly created Systems Planning and Performance Office for the Xerox Service Division of 10,000 employees in the USA and in Canada. I inherited some highly skilled staff, some formally educated in Education Technology; but mostly overwhelmed by senior management’s demand to do more, faster and cheaper. And, three of the staff were already Xerox shareholder millionaires and well entrenched in what they were doing.
As a corporation, we were growing so quickly we simply could not hire and train service techs fast enough to meet customer demand or even train enough trainers. From my sales and marketing background and my Branch Manager experience .. it looked like one hell of a classy problem to try to fix…I was all in!
We had piles of data to feed to field engineering, sales, marketing, and key operators to better relate to the customer. Following in the steps of the highly successful and world class Xerox PSS (Professional Selling Skills)… for Service we had Customer Management Skills and Effective Listening.
At Xerox, we knew what we had to accomplish then as we do now with respect to the Climate Crisis Emergency, and we had all the resources as we do now but we simply couldn’t get our act together. This is where I began my understanding of effective behavior modification and learned what you can do if your life depended on it!
We tuned in to the famous behaviorist B.F. Skinner. We passed out Robert F Mayer’s 1970 book with the sub-title You Really Oughta Wanna and as a department embraced my personal lifetime performance mantra that I picked up from a lumberjack I met in a bar in St John’s Newfoundland long before joining Xerox. In short we set out to change the expectations of senior management and redefined and reinterpreted what we could do to change our service behavior not because our life depended on it but because of the rewards of doing things differently.
One prime example will have to suffice…..rather than try to teach new service techs how the machines actually worked …. we taught them how to fix them when they broke down…..this was a switch to what is known as functional documentation. The passage of a new hire service tech was switched from a written exam about how the machines worked to their ability to fix actual machine malfunctions set up by service trainers. This simple behavior modification reduced new hire training from five weeks to three and increased service performance saving millions of dollars.
Think about it ..when computers first arrived, the training manuals were a foot deep and few could repair them. Now the functional documentation is programmed into the computer and your newly purchased computer comes without a training manual.
Let’s switch to the Climate Crisis Emergency which in my life experience is a huge behavior modification problem to drastically reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, precisely because everyone’s life does indeed depend on it! What would you do and how would you change your behaviour if indeed You Really Oughta Wanna and your life depended on it?
The Climate is changing more rapidly now as GHG emissions keep on rising! We have to move Beyond Sustainability, as it has been totally green washed by Big Global Corporations including Big Banks and Big Oil. The United Nations and the IPCC are frustrated and nullified by their own complicit behaviour in advancing Sustainable Development Goals with no equivalent functional documentation (effective methodology) to move the world to work together to reduce the burning of all fossil fuels. Indeed because of the Pandemic and the Ukraine War and the dominant human selfish gene often described as MONEY, the world is on track to burn more fossil fuels not less from now to 2050. Serious talk about shutting down the Alberta Tar Sands is now nothing more than a fantasy!
Soon it will be recognized that the unit of our survival during the Climate Crisis Long Emergency is our own community. It’s our communities everywhere on the planet that can solve the homelessness problems, reduce the length of food supply chains to increase food security, introduce permaculture regenerative farming practices, cutting the use of fossil fuels, setting up the municipal command structures to deal with the realities of all emergencies, and putting municipal funding towards incentives for its own citizens to move to point-of -use renewable sources of energy, and by all means protecting the community’s water supply.
Communities including where I live in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada will need to learn very soon that where the money earned by their own citizens is currently spent and invested is mostly outside their own community and counter productive to their own survival!
NOW IS THE TIME!
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