| Going Green Maximum Velocity through AI’s Sustainable Design Factory
By David Cooperrider
Why are ‘firms of endearment”—rising industry leading
stars that have created huge emotional bonds with the world such as Toyota,
Whole Foods, GE, and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters—generating
investor returns at a rate of some 1,026 percent over a ten year period
compared to 122 percent for the S&P 500; more that a 8-to-1 ratio!
It's because going green is a magic. It's a productivity
engine. What happens, in a nutshell, is a leap in human energy. What
happens is an eruption of human imagination. What is generated
is a culture of innovation,
hope, and a powerful sense of purpose, meaning, and value.
The untold
story about the companies embracing sustainability is really an HR
story. It is all about the kind of super-charged employee engagement—heart,
mind, and motivation—that every C.E.O wants. Truth is going
green doesn’t pay off this way all the time; but new insights and
business tools are dramatically raising the odds of success.
How,
for example, did Fairmount Minerals do it? Imagine it: you are a
loader-operator in the sand pits of this dirty, hard-core mining
and manufacturing company, and yet you are on fire with pride, and the
company has realized a sizzling 40% annual earnings growth for the past
two years, ever since it decided to harness the sustainability advantage
to “do good and do well.”
Let me tell you Fairmount’s
remarkable story, and some of the leadership lessons you can take
to the bank.
Fairmount Minerals, headquartered in Chardon, Ohio, is one of the
largest producers of industrial sand in the United States. Primarily
serving the metal casting and fracture sand markets, Fairmount Minerals
supports the foundry, oil and gas industries as well as turf and
landscaping, water filtration, commercial glass manufacturing, construction,
industrial, and filler and extender markets. With two basic operating
divisions – Industrial Sand and Manufacturing – the
company runs nine mining and mineral processing plants, four manufacturing
coating plants, and two toll manufacturing operations in Mexico, Denmark
and soon China.
Sound like a place for award winning eco-innovation?
Read on.
It so happens that Chuck Fowler, CEO of Fairmount Minerals,
received his Executive MBA from the Weatherhead School of Management
at Case Western Reserve University, the birthplace of Appreciative
Inquiry, something that is creating a positive revolution in the
field of change. Following the strengths-based leadership philosophy
of Peter Drucker, Appreciative Inquiry says that “the essential
task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths in ways that
make a systems’ weaknesses
irrelevant.” It says that managing and leading change is ALL about
strengths: elevating strengths, magnifying strengths, and creating
new combinations and chemistries of strengths in ways that propel innovation.
Appreciative Inquiry—or “AI” for short-- has two radical
but exciting premises. First, is says forget everything you learned
in change management 101—organizations are not problems-to-be-solved—and
that all the deficit based change methods, from gap analysis to organizational
diagnosis, are in fact creating an exhausting treadmill and barrier
to real innovation. Appreciative inquiry turns the problem-solving habits
of the field on their head, and shows that change is more powerful,
energizing, and effective when we inquire into the true, the good, the
better and the possible—everything that gives
life to a system when is most alive and at its exceptional best.
Do you really think one more survey into low morale is going to generate
the energy and new vision of a company filled with people alive with
passion and high commitment? AI theory says no: all the studies in
the world of low morale will not tell us one thing about “high
commitment work systems.” If we want to know
how to create a high commitment work system we would be better off
doing 100 interviews—a real study—of “high point moments” in
people’s
career in the organization, times when they were most committed and
alive in their work and when they were going way beyond their job
descriptions. So
AI is about the discovery of life-generating strengths and instead
of SWOT it is built on an analytic model called SOAR, that is, the
systematic study of signature strengths, opportunities, aspirations,
and results.
The second idea AI promotes, beyond the idea of strengths-based
inquiry and change, is the principle of whole system in the room.
There are endless arguments over the relative merits of top down
change versus bottom up change. AI theory says both are increasingly
obsolete, and so is the idea that the most effective sized group is 6-8
people, for example 6-8 people at the top doing strategy work and then
doing the famous “communications rollout.” Indeed some of
the most exciting AI strategy work happening today is starting to answer
the most perplexing and challenging question every CEO faces and
that is: “how do
we really change at the scale of the whole?” AI responds
and in turn raises its own compelling question: “Could it be that
the most effective size group, for significant and major strategic
issues, is 500 people or a 1000 people, interactively visioning, designing,
and creating vis-a-vis a true alignment of the strengths of the whole?”
This
was Chuck Fowler’s daring approach to going green. He in fact helped
pioneer the next generation AI Summit method. It is called the “Sustainable
Design Factory.”
What’s involved? First, it is based
on an innovator’s mindset.
It insists on a mindset that says “every single global issue of
our day is a business opportunity in disguise.” Second, the
Sustainable Design Factory is multi-stakeholder savvy. It is all
about collaborative, high engagement innovation. Fairmount’s summit
was a model: 300 people from every level of the company—loader
operators and truck drivers to the chief financial officer and the head
of marketing—together
with key external stakeholders including customers, suppliers, community
citizens, investors, external sustainability experts, best practice
companies, and critics of Fairmount (yes the summit included NGOs and
even regulators in Fairmount’s strategic planning session!).
Does
it sound like a formula for chaos, that is, bringing together 300
of the most diverse stakeholders you can imagine for three days of
planning where no-one has a pre-set plan or blueprint ahead of time?
The CEO Chuck Fowler put it best: “yes
we were nervous to co-create from scratch, with such a large group,
but do you know what we discovered…we learned that the very best
in human beings comes out when people experience the wholeness and
entire sum of strengths of the system they work in.”
Using an intense,
quick-turnaround, brainstorm-and-prototype process the sustainable
design factory was buzzing. Groups were formed to design ways to
reduce social and environmental risks; to create models for radical productivity
increases in energy use; to invent green products; to open new market
opportunities to help eradicate extreme poverty; to build brand strategy
around sustainability and a new set of guiding principles; and to
use the 3-P’s—the
people, planet and prosperity mantra-- to help the whole industry
shift.
Today the company is off and running with solar power and biodiesel,
new packaging, a whole line of green products, new collaborative
tools to engage communities and restore old mines into beautiful
parkland, and much more. Talk about going green with velocity and
early payoff: one of the ideas generated at the summit resulted in
a six million dollar savings. And one of the employees’ favorites—a
source of great pride-- was the design of an ultra low-cost sand
water filter to create clean water in parts of the world where billions
of people live on less that $2 per day. Working with the Aqua Clara Foundation
the project now works in 35 countries providing clean water to over 1
million people while at the same time opening up whole new, unexpected
markets for the Fairmount Minerals business.
Just two years after the launch of their sustainability journey
Fairmount Minerals was selected by the US Chamber of Commerce and
the #1 corporate citizen in America. Today Fairmount’s people
are being asked to speak everywhere—most recently on a world
stage at the United Nations Global Compact. At one of the forums
the CFO of the company, Jenniffer Deckard pounds the podium with
excitement: “We can do good and do well.”
This is what going green at maximum velocity is really all about.
To read more on the Fairmount Minerals story see Chris Lazslo’s
new book on Sustainable Value; and to see a the video of the
Sustainable Design Factory in Action go to the Fairmount Minerals website
at www.fairmountminerals.com
|
Commentaries
Going Green Maximum Velocity through AI's Sustainable Design Factory
March, 2008
Aiming Higher with Appreciative Inquiry: Building
on our Collaboration with the United Nations Global Compact
February, 2006
David Cooperrider's Foreword to Appreciative Intelligence: Seeing the Mighty Oak in the Acorn
November, 2005
High Hope in the Himalayas: A 2005 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee and Her Work With Appreciative Inquiry
September, 2005
The United Nations Global Compact Leaders Summit
February, 2005
"Blessed is this peacemaker"
January, 2005
New Publications on AI: Forewards by David Cooperrider
February, 2004
Business as an Agent of World Benefit - Replay video
October, 2003
Peter Drucker’s Advice for Us on the New Ai Project: Business as an Agent of World Benefit
March, 2003
The Birth of the AI Commons
October, 2001 |
