I've been watching 'the corporation' lately (site, youtube) and it got me thinking (a lot).

The documentary starts with observing that legally - in court - corporations are largely equal to humans. Then they ask the question, if we would make a psychological profile of these 'humans', what would we diagnose? It would be psychopaths. You can easily make the exercise for yourself, by comparing the symptoms of that illness as describe in the Wikipedia article with what you know about corporation. The documentary goes a long way at fleshing this out. It is at the very least an interesting approach.


Sustainability

One of the things that struck me most was the description of our production system in comparison with early airplane experimentation. Watch yourself standing on a clip and throwing yourself down with your invention. At first you might think, this is so wonderful, this thing is flying. I'm flying! But then - and it might take you a while - you'll start realizing, this is not flying, this is falling down!

The system we have is not sustainable. We know this. We can't keep driving our fuel based cars, we can't keep producing chemicals and spreading them over the whole planet, we can't keep on plundering our resources, etc. We have a system that is not sustainable. We're not flying, we're falling down. If you think about it, about everything we make, sell and consume cannot be made forever.


Metric

I was thinking, how could you measure in how far something is 'sustainable'? It's not that easy (I didn't research it though, and I'll most certainly will not be the first one to ask the question), but I think that a reasonable answer will start from the cost of creation of a product (in material and energy) and will extrapolate this cost taking into account time and population. This will then basically tell us how long and for how much persons we can produce the good. We could simplify it and make a constant of the persons to 'all' (1). This gives us a simple metric that tells us how long we can continue producing a given good for all of us, before we fall down.

So for instance, the T-shirt that I'm wearing, what would its figure be? If we’d all be wearing this same T-shirt, all of us, how much generations would we be able to go on with it? I have no idea. Years, months, days?

Another interesting question would then be, supposing that we have this figure, how much better could we make it? By adapting the production process, the life-cycle of the product or maybe the good itself. Could we turn our 1 year shirt in a 10000 year shirt? Nudism is clearly our cure :-)

It's also interesting to take a historic perspective on it. As we go back in time, it looks as if the metrics are improving. There was less 'plundering' a couple of centuries ago, probably even less a couple of thousand of years ago to make the equivalents of T-shirts (2).

We could also think about how our society would be different if we’d have been using sustainability metrics for decision making. For starters, what would be the threshold? 300 years? 10.000? For as long as the sun shines? And how different would our society be? Would there be cars? (probably not, but trucks e.g. might exist). Computers? The internet? Obesities? Cholera? Democracy? Corporations? 40-hour work weeks? 4 hour work weeks? No idea.


Tax

But we are now of course, and we are stuck with the system that we now have and - especially - our dependency on it (imagined or not). Can we transform this system in a more sustainable one, a system in which all of the goods that we produce have acceptable sustainability metrics? The only way I see to combine both (current production system and sustainability) is by (artificially) incorporating the sustainability metric into the price of the goods. And the only way I can think of doing that is via some form of taxation. If all play by the same rules (which implies an international approach) the price mechanism will ensure that the players on the market start behaving sustainably - even the psychopaths (3).

I know a nice example of a similar undertaking that was quite successfully implemented in Belgium. A number of years ago government stated that all companies remained responsible for the industrial packaging waste that they produced and that they should be able to proof given (high) percentages of that waste got recycled or otherwise 'valorized'. In order to be able to cope with this regulation, Belgian companies voluntary created a nonprofit organization (Val-I-Pac) that bought recycling and valorization rights on the markets. Participants of to the nonprofit financed it pro rata their production of industrial packaging waste. A system of statistical, on-site and other checks ensures that all involved play by the book. The whole endeavor has been quite successful. Within a couple of years recycling percentages rose substantially.

Of course this example is not the same as a sustainability tax, but it shows that something similar could be possible and could have similar effects as in the Val-I-Pac case (4). Key to the success of such a system is not the 'tax' as such, but the fact that more attention is focused on waste production itself, on measuring waste, on analyzing waste streams, on preventing waste production, etc. And this is exactly what a sustainability tax should do, but then more broadly.

The money that it raises can then be used to correct situations (globally), or where possible, to make ‘platform investments’ that can bring series of sustainability metrics to better levels. Think building new types of transportation, or housing, or energy projects or basic research.


Yes we can

I don't know of course. I don't know if such a tax would have a lasting effect or if it would be possible to implement one. But I think we should at least try to do something fundamentally. It's more and more clear that we're not flying – we're simply falling down. As a father, this is something that I simply can't accept.

Other suggestions anyone?


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(1) This is not entirely correct of course; the population has and will change over time. There are also other issues with the metric. What is the threshold against which we measure? A 'late' candidate can be: until we are unable to produce the good any longer. We could get earlier with: until it has x 'damage' on a number of threshold parameters that we measure against. Maybe: until it starts impacting its own price. Note that, for all three ways of measuring you'll be able to come up with examples of goods that will produce a negative metric (i.e. it's too late already). Another issue with the metric is that you'll have to take the whole production and life cycle of the good into account (similar to TCO). The material with which e.g. T-shirts are created might be shipped all over the planet and will induce transportation and packaging 'costs' that have to be taking into account with the metric. Later on we wash and maybe iron T-shirts, producing another set of costs that have to be taking into account. And finally we throw our T-shirts away and they'll be burned or recycled (and transported again).

(2) I write 'probably' as the ‘all persons’ 'constant' might impact things here (making shirts of animal skin for 7 billion persons e.g., might be not very sustainable).

(3) The corporation documentary will show that that doesn't solve all issues with the psychopaths. But hey - let's solve one world problem at a time ;-)

(4) It’s hard to find exact figures though. Here you have them for 2005 and 2006 (Dutch).

Wow! Somebody has discovered this blog! And he left a message! And it was (drums) Matthew Cornell! Un-be-lie-va-ble! I saw it in my mailbox just before going to bed – I don’t think I’ll sleep much in the next couple of hours ;-)

And well, Matthew gave me a spanking. And yes, he was right in doing so. I owe him an apology. So Matthew, should you read this: big sorry.

What went wrong
Let me give you some background should you be new in here. About a day ago I posted a Workers of the world, unite! article, in which I started introducing one of the themes I’m thinking about currently (multiple selves in productivity and communication between these selves). I did it mainly by relating some personal events to it. And I tried to hook it up to the previous story. And here I made a mistake.

I wrote: “Matthew Cornell’s implicit reasoning is basically this: you can compare the performance of productivity systems by quantifying the output they produce. More is better (or less of course, depending on your metric).” And, as Matthew notes in the comment, this is indeed absolutely not the case. Matthew never implies in his article that systems can be ranked by output and he definitely doesn’t say that more is better.

How it went wrong
I knew this – I reread the article before writing the smart and connected one – yet still I wrote it. I should have written something similar to: ‘examples of productivity measurements as mentioned in the article of Matthew Cornell could imply that …’ Cause these examples got me thinking (about my own experiences).

It’s some kind of shorthand that fits in another context. Previous to this blog, I was writing mails about these subjects to the Toni that gets mentioned at places. He motivated me on starting a blog and after some 6 months of him nagging at it I finally started experimenting. I’m actually still in this experimental faze. And at this very moment, Toni isn’t even aware of it. He’s expecting a baby boy, and all of this was meant as some kind of present. A joke.

Why it went wrong
There’s a difference between writing mails and posting to a blog. The reader of my mails (Toni) knows what I think about Matthew Cornell (my bottom line has always been: read the man, he’s maybe not always giving the answers, but he’s asking the right questions – and he’s seriously ahead of us). The readers of this mail don’t necessarily know what I think about him. Well now they do.

Conclusion: when linking to an article, be very careful when positioning and introducing it.

P.S. to Matthew: thank you for the help with the surprise ;-)

Have you read the previous post? What nonsense: “measurement of productivity gets produced by measuring achievement of hierarchies of specific objectives and by measuring connectedness to them, both in action as through time”.

Or is it? Remember that we applied it to the context of comparing productivity systems. Matthew Cornell’s implicit reasoning is basically this: you can compare the performance of productivity systems by quantifying the output they produce. More is better (or less of course, depending on your metric).

It holds nicely on first sight. The productivity system I used prior to engaging in GTD for instance, weekly produced half a dozen of conflicts in my agenda and at least as much forgotten commitments. After implementing the basic GTD process both never ever happened again. Likewise, by working in contexts, there were always next actions available to plug up some free time. Net result was more things done. More is better.

After a while I took this quite literally and started to count the amount of tasks I completed. Results were impressive. While I completed 50 to 70 tasks during the first weeks, after a couple of months of counting I completed 50 to 70 tasks a day. Consistently. There’s a lot more to tell about this, but suffice to say that I actually made a lot of real progress during this period.

So then, did I discover a better system? It was producing more of the goodies at the various levels and I felt very well connected with this output. So indeed, by all measures, this new system had to be superior. But today I’m suffering deep procrastination. The system crashed one and half months ago and since then, I refuse to start it up again. My basic systems are still running (in terms of collecting and processing and reviewing), but I’ve literally shut down the system that produced the extra.

What is going on? At first I thought I no longer felt connected to the targets I’ve been aiming for, and to some extend this will hold on. Yet on the other hand, the refusal – as this is how I feel it – is more on an action level. I literally refuse to start it up again. This is a wildcat strike. This is insubordination.

This is a worker who is saying: this is enough. It is a worker talking to a thinker. The worker or the doer is supposed to get the things done. The thinker or planner is preparing it all. Most of the attention in the theories goes to this thinker and to his communication of ‘actions to be done’ to the doers. Even a fairly practical book as Getting Things Done almost exclusively addresses this thinker (with one small and rather funny exception – the two minute rule). Even worse, things that are difficult for the thinker (detail planning) are left to the doer. We’ll dive deeper into this in our next post.

In this post, we simply conclude that maximizing production is not enough. Productivity systems are not merely about efficiency and effectivity. They’re about sustainability as well.

The Toni we talked about in our last post, is wondering in his last post How to Measure Productivity. He’s approaching it via a layered vision on (personal) productivity (L1 task, L2 process and L3 purpose level) and observes that measuring is easier at lower and harder at higher levels. At L3 only a feeling remains.

Specific goals
Extending these ideas, we should ask ourselves how we try to achieve ‘vague’ goals. Classically by (1) crystallizing and by (2) elaborating. We set a clear goal. We define a general approach. We decide on midterm objectives. We distill short term objectives. We plan next actions.

A simple example from the ‘health dimension’. Suppose you want to get serious about your condition. A vague goal. What do you really want. Where would you like to be in one, two, three years? What would ‘wild success’ be? Run a marathon. Which one? The Antwerp Marathon. When? April 2009. A measurable goal. Then we work this up in intermediate goals (Brussels 20K in May, be able to run 3 hours non-stop in September, loose 8 kg of weight by December, etc.) – very measurable intermediate goals. And we detail it further in morning routines, training schemes, etc. Very specific next actions.

This way measuring productivity is translated in measuring achievement of hierarchies of SMART goals and execution of specific actions. As such we are answering the question that Matthew Cornell raised ; yes, productivity can be measured, you only need to specify what you want to produce.

Goals we connect to
However, in his post, Toni is also discussing a feeling, a direction, a ‘subjectivity’ that is hard to measure. The idea is: a marathon will be a ‘wild success’ in the health dimension for one specific person, for another it will be something completely different. This is self-evident. It becomes more relevant if our own goal changes or – worse – becomes blurred. The I-want-to-run-a-marathon looses its magic, demands too much or is outshined by other goals. In this case, the measurements will simply lose their relevance.

Consequently, measurement of productivity should additionally check connectedness on two levels: (1) do I still feel connected to my (smart) purpose? and (2) can I still connect to the translation of purpose into approach and of approach into action?

Measurement of productivity then gets produced by measuring achievement of hierarchies of specific objectives and by measuring connectedness to them, both in action as through time.

Well, at last. I have been promising this for a while. And now I’m just rushing into it. First do, then think. Ready? Fire!

So what are we aiming for? Productivity is the passion, a word with quite a number of hooks. I’m mostly interested in the system-side of the story, the process. The larger thing, but in its empty form. So not as much the why of it all.

GTD is the example. A story of buckets and of a flow – into the buckets and out again. The totality of this system intrigues me. The minddump. Not as much the why of it all – that’s personal. Or the exact how – that seems to be personal too.

I fear that there’ll be little coherence in what will pass through here. Blurps. Thoughts triggered by personal events. Read something here, had this discussion there – and it got me thinking.

But as limited as my ambitions are with this writing ‘as a blog’, the larger they are as a ‘thank you’. Toni, merciekes ;-)