Think Different: Integrative Design & Negawatts (with a Side of Stick Maps & a Star Compass)
This is the first of three posts on different ways to get to better answers faster.
Part 1: Integrative Design, a methodology, and Negawatts, a framework for assessing benefits across value chains
Part 2: The metaphors of Peripheral Vision and the Theory of the Adjacent Possible for assessing and leveraging insights
Part 3: The 7 Characteristics, a heuristic, and the Circular Dividend, the transformational impact of doing different
Being able to see a challenge from different perspectives is always a competitive edge. At a time of accelerating climate change, it is essential. I looked out at the crowd in a large conference space on the 7th floor of a Honolulu hotel to gauge the interest in my talk. It was another perfect day in Hawaii, yet rather than head to the beach, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, we were inside, fueled by coffee and cooled by air-conditioning, talking about the future.
Not the whiz bang, AI-infused, thumpy music future conjured up by Silicon Valley billionaires. No virtual worlds, pricey neck-bending headsets, or trips to Mars on our agenda. The future we imagined was one that looked an awful lot like the present, only more so: a future where weather gets wilder, sea levels rise, everything that’s supposed to be frozen melts and tipping points collide.
The conference-goers, a mix of Pacific Islanders, military personnel, political and religious leaders, teachers, technologists, aid workers, scientists, an architect and me, the resident outlier, shared ideas on how best to live in a future a good deal more challenging than the present or the past.
Before diving into a couple of ways to “think different,” the focus of my talk (hat tip to Steve Jobs), a digression into stick maps and the star compass, two indigenous, ancient, low-tech, highly effective ways to understand the world, the cosmos and our place in the greater scheme of things.
Stick Maps | Star Compass
Imagine yourself aboard an ocean-going canoe 3,000 years ago, one of dozens of passengers on a walap sailing off into a vast expanse of blue. You won’t be returning. This is the voyage of a lifetime, an inflection point that will define not only your future, but the future of all your descendants.
You become one of the first settlers on the Marshall Islands after a nearly 1,400 mile journey from the Solomon Islands where the voyage most likely began. It may seem like a miracle that in the middle of the world’s largest ocean, your small band of seafarers managed to find 70 square miles of land, most of it only a few feet above sea level, made up of five islands and 29 coral atolls spread across 750,000 miles of water. And it was a miracle. It was also a technological triumph.
Long before sextants, chronometers, compasses and GPS, sailors navigating the Pacific used stick maps constructed from palm ribs, coconut fibers, shells and coral pebbles to guide them across vast distances—something that even today’s mariners equipped with every digital advantage still consider a significant challenge.
Along with a star compass (a mental construct providing both cosmological context and guidance that required formidable memorization skills), stick maps were an essential part of a navigator’s tool kit, used to identify patterns in swells, waves and wind. This was low-tech, highly effective data analytics for predicting weather, proximity to land and determining the fastest, safest routes.
“These charts describe dynamic moving water, not static land or distances between points. They describe the real world that you experience sailing a ship.”
—Victor Gerard Temprano (“Mapster”)
Another Kind of Voyage
Today, we are on another kind of voyage into the unknown, all of us together on an Earth-size walap, with no turning back. The 2020s have been called “the decisive decade” for climate change, the make or break years, the inflection point that will define not only our lives, but the lives of our descendants. With a little more than five years left, we are hanging on by a thread.
In July 2024, atmospheric CO2 readings, a proxy for how much and how fast the planet is warming, continued to break records hovering between 425 and 427 parts per million (ppm). That’s a long way from 350 ppm, the level considered climate safe, and perilously close to 450 ppm, a point some have pegged as a point of no climate return.
Adding to the drama, the rate of annual increase is speeding up. In July 2022, the number hovered at 419 ppm. In July 2023, it was roughly 421.5 ppm, an increase of 2.5 ppm. Today, in July 2024, it’s averaging around 426 ppm, so at least a 4.5 ppm increase. We are racing up the Keeling curve made famous by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth,” heading off into uncharted territory.
“If this much on the cold side is a mile of ice over our heads, what would this much on the warm side be?” asked Gore in 2006 (CO2 @ 381 ppm). Eighteen years later, we have an answer: lethal heat domes with wilted crops, wilted infrastructure, wilted people, fried coral, turbo-charged hurricanes and a world set on fire.
It isn’t only the Keeling Curve flashing red. Johan Rockström, the director the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research and part of the team that developed the famous chart detailing “nine planetary boundaries,” has alarming graphs for just about anything you can think of.
Slide from Johan Rockstrom’s TED / Bloomberg Green Festival 2024 talk (click here or on the graphic)
Different Kinds of Stick Maps
Clearly, some stick maps would be helpful to navigate such perilous waters and that is what my conference talk was about: methodologies, frameworks and metaphors provide a different ways see and approach challenges. (The talk also covered six companies “doing different,” mostly in the materials space: LanzaTech, On, Windfall Bio, Nth Cycle, Mycocycle and Sway.)
Integrative Design
The first of new kind of stick maps is integrative design, a methodology developed by Amory Lovins, co-founder of energy consultancy RMI and an architect of the Energy Transition. Although used by Lovins primarily to make buildings more energy efficient, integrative design can be applied to almost any kind of challenge, at any scale.
I was introduced to integrative design when I interviewed Lovins for a story on microgrids. Many years and conversations with him later, my admiration for his clear-headed approach to solving problems has only deepened. I use it all the time and, in fact, have tweaked it a bit.
Let’s take it step by step:
Start with a list of outcomes. This sounds obvious, but too often people start with long lists of good intentions collected in group-think Post-It® fiestas where ideas for incremental improvements tend to dominate the conversation. Or they create action plans, “to do” lists based on costs or needs. Both approaches provide useful insights, yet can miss strategic opportunities to leverage impact. The order, timing and combinations of actions are important. Outcomes are big picture results. They are how you know you made a meaningful difference.
I added the part about listing outcomes to avoid. The best way to limit unintended consequences is imagining what they might be. This automatically triggers systems thinking, the dynamic heart of integrative design. It isn’t enough to know the parts that make up the whole. What matters is understanding how each part affects all the others. That is the only way to understand how to avoid or reverse an unwanted outcome.
Just as stick maps put the focus on the experience of sailing, systems thinking shifts perspective to functionality, providing a deeper, more nuanced understanding of challenges and opportunities. For example, knowing you don’t want bad acoustics in a meeting space (and haven’t we all been there?) means limiting hard surfaces such as concrete floors, unfinished concrete ceilings, brick walls and glass partitions—all hard, sound-reflecting surfaces. Knowing what you don’t want is absolutely critical to creating what you do want.
Systems thinking makes it easy to spot ways to amplify and expand impact. For example, Lovins’ home, nestled high in the Rocky Mountains, has no HVAC system. Instead of spending lot of money on duct work and a furnace, he spent it on insulation, triple pane windows and other “passive house” design strategies, creating a space that requires considerably less energy and money to heat and cool.
In our home, for example, I didn’t start off by asking, as most engineers would, how much insulation I could add and still save enough money to pay for it. Because that’s methodologically wrong, even though it’s in all the textbooks: It leaves out the avoidable capital costs of the heating equipment.
Instead, I asked what integrated combination of insulation and many other technologies would save the occupants the most energy and capital costs—and discomfort and illness and dismay?
We ended up with a house that creates delight when entered, pleasure and health when occupied, and regret when departed. A house that takes nothing. Wastes nothing. Does no harm…” —Amory Lovins
Use an ever-expanding array of technologies. Everything good can almost always be improved. New technologies are constantly being added to the mix. Perfection is an ongoing process, not an endpoint.
I added the part about “business and financial models,” but the list could easily grow to include distribution networks, sales channels, marketing campaigns, regulations, incentives and policies—anything that helps improve a desired outcome.
Multi-disciplinary combinations can lead to dramatically more impactful results. For example, chemical company LanzaTech developed a process to brew ethanol by using carbon sourced from smokestack emissions to feed carbon-loving microbes that generate ethanol as a natural byproduct. This is in contrast to ethanol made from corn or sugar cane in a process that requires heat and emits CO2. Heat kills microbes, so the LanzaTech process is low heat, which means low energy and also low emissions.
With some clever chemical tricks, ethanol can be turned into ethylene, a key ingredient in EVA, a type of plastic used in many products, including running shoes. On, a Swiss running shoe company, partnered with LanzaTech to make shoes from this fossil-free EVA, adding a circular business model, “shoe-as-a-service.” Instead of purchasing a pair shoes outright, customers pay $30 per month to use them. When the shoes wear out, On sends another pair along with packaging to send back the old pair for recycling. “Shoe-as-a-service” also functions as distribution model and a marketing channel to deepen customer relationships.
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It is liberating to know even good outcomes can be improved. It encourages due diligence as on ongoing practice because there is always something new to know. Inspiration can be found almost anywhere, not limited to technical journals and business pubications.
Avid reader (and occasional colleague) Brian Collins, is famous for the 5,500+ volume library in the Brooklyn office of COLLINS, a branding design / business transformation consultancy he co-founded. He encourages designers and strategists to thumb through books on mythology, pop-culture, science, science fiction, business, poetry, graphic design, product design, biographies, fairy tales and fiction to look for insights relevant to their projects. As writer / director Nora Ephron famously noted (quoting her mother),“Everything is copy.”
From the indigenous genius of stick maps and a star compass, to video games and even trips to the beach, there is almost always something to learn, a perspective that can inspire new ways of thinking. This is the genius of biomimicry, an approach to design that takes its cue from nature, which is constantly evolving, constantly improving.
Janine Benyus, found of the Biomimcry Institute
Make sure every part of a system serves at least two functions. This is efficiency at its most elegant. The trunk of a tree holds up the tree. It houses the xylem and phloem layers essential for transmitting water and nutrients. Its protects the tree from attack and disease and also serves as a substrate for lichens and mosses whose photosynthesis sequesters carbon. As the tree ages and dies, the trunk can provide shelter for animals, food for fungi and firewood for humans.
In Lovins’ home, a large steel beam holds up the building. Its placement is strategic. During the summer, it blocks the hot summer sun. In winter, when the sun is lower, it allows light to reach deep into the building. All told, Lovins tallies up a dozen function for that single beam.
Amory Lovins
I tacked on an addendum about improving processes. For example, LanzaTech’s process for making ethanol from carbon-loving microbes fed a steady diet of smokestack emissions offers several benefits over ethanol made from corn or sugarcane:
It requires less energy
There are negative carbon emissions (smokestack emissions are removed).
It has the potential to scale, which would cut into demand for the fossil feedstocks (oils and gas) used to make conventional EVA plastic.
Bonus, once the gluttonous microbes have eaten all the carbon on their all-you-can-eat carbon plate and expired, they become a rich source of protein that can be turned into livestock treats.
Negawatts
“Negawatts” is why AI-enabled auto-correct isn’t always such a good thing. What began as funny misspelling of “megawatts” in an article that made Lovins laugh, soon got him thinking.
Negawatts are the energy you don’t need and also don’t pay for thanks to efficiency. Collectively, the impacts of reduced demand could lessen the need for central power plants. (At least that was the story before AI entered the picture. It takes 10x the energy to do an AI search than an old-timey Google search, though it is far from clear whether the results are 10x as good.)
A dozen years ago, Lovins and a team from RMI helped cut the energy demand of the 102-story Empire State Building by roughly 40% using range of high tech and low tech strategies guided by integrative design. All 6,514 windows were remanufactured on site, converting them into “superwindows” that let in light, but keep out heat. Baffles were put around the vents at the perimeter of the building to keep heated or cooled air inside. Regenerative brakes such as the ones used in EVs were added to elevators to capture energy.
Such a dramatic reduction in energy demand meant that a second “chiller” (a cooling system that uses fluid instead of air) that been budgeted for was no longer needed. This is a huge, expensive piece of equipment that would have required shutting down 5th Avenue for its installation.
The negawatts included reduced demand and reduced utility bills, but also the cost of a chiller that didn’t need to be purchased and the cost of a city permit to close down 5th Avenue that didn’t need to be bought. The capital costs of the project were recouped in three years, after which all those operational cost negawatts—the checks not written to the utility company—just kept piling up on the bottom line.
Negawatts are about presenting the full, cascading, expanding range of value unlocked by doing things differently; a way to compare and contrast the benefits against the benchmark of business-as-usual.
There can be “nega” anything.
For example, savings from “Nega-PET bottles” include not having to dredge rivers, lakes and oceans because they are no longer filled with plastic garbage. Non-existent PET bottles also don’t need to be burned by poor women in Fiji who have nowhere to put them. PET bottles that aren’t there to be burned also don’t release cancer-causing dioxin into the air. They don’t break down into microplastics that get into absolutely everything, including us. They don’t cause health problems with high medical bills.
The many benefits of “nega-deforestation” include a reduced risk of catastrophic flooding because forests that haven’t been clear-cut to make room for farms and ranches are better able to soak up heavy rains.
These are not “co-benefits,” a term often used to sell nature-based climate solutions. Predictable weather, clean air, clean water, healthy soil, thriving corals, bountiful fisheries, bumper crops and biodiverse forests are not “free gifts with purchase,” a pleasant bonus for buying carbon credits. They are the business case for nature.
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Carbon credits, of course, are much easier to quantify, commoditize, bundle, package, sell and even trade. They can be tallied on spread sheets, celebrated in corporate reports and leveraged for branding and marketing campaigns.
It is business canon that if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed—a pearl of economic wisdom credited to W. Edwards Deming. But that isn’t what he said at all. In fact, Deming said the opposite:
“It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it—a costly myth.”
Make no mistake, data are essential. Data on atmospheric carbon levels collected daily from Mauna Loa in Hawaii since March 29, 1958 (the Keeling curve), combined with data sourced from ice cores, fossils and geology, are how it is possible to know with a high degree of certainty just how dangerously close Earth is to a climate tipping point. Data are how it is possible to connect the dots between human-generated greenhouse gas emissions and a rapidly warming planet.
Emissions must be slashed to slow climate change. Yet it is entirely possible to reach net zero and still end up with a trashed, unlivable planet because there is more to the story than counting carbon.
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To sell systems change, paint a systems picture. For example, take the story of Beryl, the earliest category 5 hurricane ever: In less than two days a tropical storm explodes into a major threat fueled by record hot ocean temperatures. Beryl then tears across the Caribbean shredding entire islands, then slams into Yucatan Peninsula, then recharges in the balmy waters of the Gulf of Mexico, then hits Houston, leaving three million people without power in the middle of a searing heat wave (some for more than a week), then soaks the South and parts of the Midwest, spinning tornados all the way east to Vermont. In its wake, Beryl leaves a trail of death, shattered lives, broken buildings, wrecked businesses, uprooted trees, flooded fields, drowned cars, trashed infrastructure, dwindling FEMA funds and the home insurance industry in the cross-hairs.
So how much is a cooler ocean worth? Or a cooler planet? Make the case in “negawatts.” Then build a stick map to navigate a way out of this mess.