RallyDev.com
In my last post I discussed the awesome workshop I attended called Leading and Learning for Sustainability and why I think it was so beneficial. It changed me. This post is about how it changed me.
While at the workshop, I learned from deep reflection that I get things done by example. I also learned that I like to work with my team and my customers. In other words, my strategy for leadership is “walking the talk” and sharing it. (It only took me a year of blogging to figure out why I blog and to whom I am writing. I feel my best posts are the ones written to my team and customers that are based on my own personal experiences.)
As a result, I have learned to articulate my strategic roadmap toward sustainability and restorative economies in these steps:
- Get Rally and our customers effective at Flow, Service and Lean in software and product development
- Get myself and my family to a zero carbon footprint lifestyle
- Mature the software & hardware development practices as a highly valuable, joyful, respectful and humane profession
- Get Rally to a zero carbon footprint
- Get our High Technology industry to a 80% carbon reduction in total footprint
- Grow High Technology as a leading sustainable industry and critical enabler of green technologies and as an 80% carbon reduction in other industries
Step 1. Back in 2002 when I was working on the initial concepts for Rally, it was Paul Hawkin’s Natural Capitalism book that really shaped my long-term vision for Rally. We basically committed to to bring service and flow, and lean to the high technology industry. I would declare our first 6 years as a success. We have succeeded at introducing the concepts of Flow, Lean and Service into the software and hardware development industries. In addition, we have made many of the worldwide leaders in this space very successful by realizing the benefits of enterprise agile software development.
New Baby Goats this Spring
Framed Greenhouse on Barn
Step 2. We have been incrementally investing in solar-based solutions to make our personal life more sustainable. It was PV’s, hybrids, chickens, goats, an e-bike and now this year a new in-ground greenhouse. A solar hot-water and pre-heater is up next in 2010. (Hopefully, I will even get a cool Tendril home monitor from one of our customers for Chirstmas!.) I think our home life will be over 80% of the way to zero carbon footprint by 2011 with the final addition of electric vehicles.
As a well paid worker in the executive in the High Technology field, I figure it is my role to help these new green technologies move down the marginal cost curves. In addition to actually doing something about this problem, I am learning about living in close-loop, sustainable value chains. (I will tell you there is something very grounding and joyful about starting the day by feeding animals who provide for you. Even on a day like today that was -1 F outside.)
Step 3. Through our 1% volunteering model, folks at Rally have been involved as members, volunteers, speakers, sponsors and board roles at the Scrum Alliance, Agile Alliance, Agile Product Leadership Network and the Project Management Institute. Our work in growing this industry is just beginning. In 2009, we hit our 1% goal with 2,800 hours of volunteer time and won the Best Company to work for in Colorado and a top 10 ranking from Outside magazine. In early 2010, we hope to announce a number of clear steps at helping to grow our industry though more educational partnerships in Agile and Lean.
Step 4. In 2006, we started a green team with the help of Boulder’s Be Climate Smart audit team. In the last three years, we have continued to benchmark our climate impact as well as the community impact of our volunteering hours. We know that our SaaS application currently puts 8 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year for every 100 users. More importantly, we know where that carbon comes from and we are conscious of the impact and thus the opportunities to curb this for Rally and our industry.
Step 5- 6. These steps will come as we share our experiences based on our own relentless pursuits of steps 1-4. Right now I learn a bunch from work shared by Interface carpet’s mission zero, Google.org’s RE<C and as a member of NRDC’s E2 program.
It was as a direct result of this workshop that I learned enough to articulate my choices, what to conserve, what to let go of, my leadership approach, who I need to do this with and ways to bridge the creative tension between my personal vision and reality. It was a very powerful workshop.
In closing, I would like to share two of my favorite quotes:
- Edward Deming: “The prime requirement for achievement of any aim including quality is joy in work.”
- Humberto Maturana: “Emotion is the bedrock of all that we do and love is the only emotion that expands intelligence.”
Thank you again Peter Senge, Sherry Immediato, Darcy Winslow and all the other great folks who attended the SOL workshop on Leading and Learning for Sustainability in DC.
About the Author: Ryan Martens is a trail runner, founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Agile Blog, alohafromSF. alohafromSF said: Walking the Talk – An Outline of My Strategy for curbing Climate Change http://ff.im/-crBjl [...]
When you consider the energy and associated environmental harm embodied in the hardware that runs our software I fail to see how the “High Technology industry” can ever be “sustainable”.
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital-technology.html
It seems to me that people the “Developed World” (i.e. you and I) need to radically change our lifestyles so as to massively reduce our consumption of everything. Secondly the World as a whole needs to stabilise and reduce its population to a level that can be sustained without further degrading the biosphere i.e. consuming the “Natural Capital” you mention faster than it can be replenished.
http://www.steadystate.org/
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/
Corporate Greenwash and more Green Consumerism isn’t the answer.
http://permacultureprinciples.com/principles.php
Anyway, its all academic. Everything we have is predicated on abundent cheap energy. Peak Oil will be along in a few years and it will be downhill from there. I’m afraid the writing is on the wall for Global Capitalism and “High Technology”. Maybe you should consider quiting the software business and start re-skilling for the post petroleum era?
http://www.energybulletin.net/start
Anyway, good luck. Whatever happens.
Adam,
Thanks for the thoughtful comments and links. I am going to respond section by section, but I want to respond your meta message around the need for me to re-skill. I spent a ton of time thinking about that as I was starting Rally. Basically the question I asked myself in 2002 was: “What was the best use of my skills to deliver to my family and help solve global climate change?” My answer came from writings by Paul Hawken and meeting Ray Anderson from Interface Carpet. I believe the engine of commerce is the most powerful mechanism we have to adjust our behavior. The question is how can you use and adjust the engine of commerce? The vision that shaped my thinking mostly is the pattern map of a conservation economy that balances social, natural and economic forces in a sustainable picture. It shows the patterns of life if our society operated in a manner to conserving life.
I choose to create a business to try and create that future scenario. So was born Rally, a company created to bring lean flow, service and social well-being to the High Technology industry. In that last six years, we have done that by offering a world-wide hosted services for collaborative development agile development. We are the #1 Partner for companies trying to achieve real success with software agility. Now as the lean concepts and Rally hosted and professional services help large scale enterprise achieve software agility success, we are being asked to extend those benefits up and out to create agile enterprises. To me agile enterprises are the kinds of businesses that can balance long-term important changes like cap and trade impacts with short-term needs as well. These kind of enterprise give me hope that business can help turn the ship toward an 80% reduction in carbon output in 20 years.
Of course, this is not the only global scenario that is possible in the next twenty years.
I can see status quo scenario that leads to place were the change in climate massively impacts the human population. I think the documentary Earth 2100 did a good job of telling this scenario. I would call that the failure pattern and I refuse to give up and just party hard, down the current path. I choose to work the other plan.
With regard to how High Technology Industry can change to become sustainable or net neutral in its negative impact on the planet, I see a scenario that goes something like this:
0. Global Climate Change legislation is passed in the US and we start a Cap-n-Trade program. The cap-and-trade program is critical to “getting the prices right” around the economic cost of carbon waste in our atmosphere. With that price signal to the market, we can unleash the entrepreneurial forces toward creating sustainable solutions, renewable energy solutions and ultimately solutions that are restorative. The EPA ruling today cleared some of the paths here.
1. The concept of RePower the planet works to move electrical energy generation to renewable sources by 2020. In that world, software as services companies like Rally, Ebay, Google can offer zero-carbon footprint solutions. They will be some of the first because they will differentiate with it. This is all provided these companies have buildings that do not produce carbon and employees that commute in carbon-free vehicles. Of course, many of these employees are not commuting a ton because virtual meetings, teleprecense and global collaboration systems from the zero footprint High Technology companies will allow them to work comfortably from anywhere. Hence my goal to get Rally to zero carbon by 2020 to enable this world. These will be the early adopters in companies that work with electrons or work on a small local scale. On the home front, conservation will be king as new renewable power solutions will have to build out and come down a cost curve.
2. Once you have firms that are close to zero and momentum towards an overall energy infrastructure that is based on sustainable sources, you can can start working on the harder jobs. By 2020, I assume take-back laws like we see in Europe will filter into a majority of countries and apply to a majority of hard-goods products. As a result, most product companies will start behaving like a service. They will rent you the product, but take it back for reuse and recycle. In a service world, using and disposing of toxic chemicals will be a very costly part of a business; thus most firms will shy away from the use of these toxic and non-sustainable materials. We will be on a path to 80% overall reduction in carbon output from the entire world. The goal required to keep the earth from warming by less than 2 degrees, on average. (See the C-learn simulation site.) To meet these food supply, energy supply, transportation will all have gone through a revolution and the High Technology firms will be there to help enable their transition to more sustainable, local and lean approaches. Where consumption is in a close loop cycle, not an open loop take-make-waste cycle.
These are the major steps I see. This story is very technology oriented, but many social justice and social equity changes will be have to happen during these transitions too.
In your second section, you bring up population reduction. Having been a student of Albert Bartlet of the University of Colorado, I was introduced to his exponential growth lecture, which he has done over 1500 times, back in fall of 1984. As Al points out only cancer and adolescents grow exponentially. It is not healthy to grow like that. We have clearly grown beyond the carrying capacity of the earth, with our current life style. A small population makes this transition easier, but I do not believe it is necessary. I believe we can find our way to a restorative place where our life and work makes the world more diverse and healthy. In that world, we should have more people.
Finally, as we talked about at the SOL Learning and Leading for Sustainability workshop, it is real easy for the world to work on symptoms and not the root problems. Green washing is result of not having the ability to work on the real root problems, but just the symptoms. I believe this is a short-term issue until we start to crack modes of working that are based on natural cycles and bio-mimicry. When we have a complete power system from supply, transmission, storage and usage based on renewable energy, we will be working on the root cause. This is where you are correct, the current industrial revolution powered by burning fossil fuels is unsustainable. We can kiss that approach goodbye.
Sounds like you have some great goals going there. Can’t wait to see how you progress!
A big thank you for your blog post.Really looking forward to read more. Much obliged.