IECA EC13 Keynote Address OUTLINE
Introduction – personal connection (who am I and why would you want to listen to my story)
What is/tension – sets up the story, gives background. (moves from me to we – at some point in our lives we have all…) making the case for continual improvement, discuss where to focus change efforts, introduce the connection economy.
[change happens...] Change happens with us or without us. Change happens whether we like it or not. Change happens whether we choose to adapt or choose to wither in today for the rest of our lives.
Think about dirt and water, or at least our understanding of them.
Think about how we operate – the business environment, the regulatory environment, the look of your construction site. Technology is changing, priorities are changing, expectations are changing, traditional answers and solutions are no longer acceptable.
I learn and pay attention in order to get better every day.
Getting better every day means changing every day. Reid Hoffman calls this living in a state of [permanent beta].
Change is much easier to accept when you are the one causing it. Change is a choice. Getting better is a requirement.
There is no one that matters on this planet that expects us to be perfect, but there is an expectation that we get better. That expectation may come from a number of places depending on the topic, but for us, it comes from the people who pay us, the people who trust us, and the people we share our community with. It also comes from the Clean Water Act. With sediment being one of the top impairments of our nation’s waters and stormwater runoff being one of the top causes of those impairments, how else are the goals of the Clean Water Act going to be met. If this group can’t make it happen, who can?
There is tremendous value in incremental, continual improvement.
The act of getting better every day earns us benefits beyond measure. It shows a level of caring, and when people think you truly care, they tend to give you a break. They begin to trust that your heart is in the right place and they and offer grace. Trust and grace are two things that we desperately need. We need a level of understanding of our work that shows up when things go wrong… and things go wrong a lot in our world.
Change for the sake of change causes confusion. We must be focused and engage change where it matters.
We must work hard to understand what reality really looks like. If we don’t it will be almost impossible to know if our solutions will fit.
We are finding ourselves responding rationally to a world that we understand and recognize but does not exist. Eddie Obeng
Old trick, new game (Optical Illusion – brain overrides what it sees because it thinks it knows the answer.)
We worry about some of the silliest things. While at the same we can be completely oblivious to real threats.
[REAL THREAT: regulatory compliance] We should know by now that mere compliance will not get us to where we need to be and living on the edge of a C minus is no way to go through life.
Regulators love compliance and so do factory managers. Compliance is safe, its steady, its predictable.
Problem - we don’t work in a factory. Mere compliance gives the impression that we do.
Traditional factory and production work and work that looks like factory work are on the way out.
Factory work can be automated. It can be outsourced.
Factory work can be specified and programmed. Its output can easily be measured. Factory work follows a manual and checks boxes.
SWTools blog post - Toolboxes, Manuals and Handbooks. Warning - be careful as we prioritize the creation and promote the use of cookbook type solutions. We have allowed EPA and other regulators to go from results based regulation to methods based regulation.
A lack of leadership in our own house caused someone else to have to lead us.
Fear for our profession - being required to install products and implement practices in the name of regulatory compliance without regard to the true benefit to water quality. Being reduced to an industry of installers and become check-the-box-compliant.
There are elements of our work that can be taught with manuals and specifications and checklists. I’m ok with us creating these tools for those areas of our work, as long as it isn’t a part of an effort to keep us in some imagined zone of safety.
So if manuals and checklists can free us pursue the changing world; if they free us professionals to spend more time leading and creating and moving ourselves and our profession forward; I’m ok with them.
In addition to distracting us from water quality protection and giving us a good feeling of having checked a box, compliance makes us average. And our market will not support average anymore.
Our market is defining value differently than it did five years ago. And when we promote mere compliance as our standard, our work becomes less valuable.
Regulatory compliance is bad for the environment.
We are creating an illusion that anyone can do it. We are making it safe, at least we think we are. We are applying a factory mentality to a world that is in reality not at all like a factory. We are shooting for and promoting the average and we are lessening the value of our services and our professions
We cannot fool ourselves and others into thinking that the world of stormwater can be simplified, summarized, minimized and dumbed down to a point where thinking and creativity are no longer required. We cannot allow regulators and well-meaning advocates of compliance-minded practice to fool us or anyone else into thinking that our work is cookie cutter and it’s anything other than true art.
Because true art is valuable. And its valuable because it’s scarce.
[Scarcity = value] Scarcity defines value in any market. And in most markets today, quality is no longer scarce; competence and compliance are no longer unusual.
· There are too many good choices
· It’s too easy to find average
· Today, average no longer makes the cut.
[trust, extraordinary, connection] Seth Godin lists trust and the extraordinary and connection as things that have become scarce.
[connection] Our market is no different. Our market is looking for someone to connect them with solutions, with ideas, with innovation. They need to be connected to others for their benefit. They need to be connected with the last generation and with the next generation
Our market is looking for people and companies that will be the cause of and at the center of connections.
The new economy is being referred to as the Connection Economy. But don’t automatically think you know what that is.
The name of our meeting – IECA’s Environmental Connection, was chosen to indicate that this meeting is about more than just erosion control and that there are all sorts of ways to connect here.
We see this as a social connection and we see it as being about me.
An opportunity to connect me with people; me with knowledge; me with new products.
The connection economy is not about you and not for the benefit of me.
It’s about others seeing value in our ability to connect. Our ability to connect them with ideas, solutions, ideas, people, it’s about our market. And its about our ability to prove to our market that they need us and our products and services.
What could be/truth – presents the drama and the truth (what does connection look like?)
The truth is – [sometimes we do connect.] Our world is sticky, it’s messy, its complicated. And being able to navigate through and manage that messiness and stickiness makes us valuable.
We run to the messes. Sometimes we find ourselves being downright remarkable.
[connection] A lot about connecting is what you have been doing for years but thought about in different terms. It gets what you do and how you do it more in alignment with WHY you decided to do what you do in the first place.
If you choose to be that connector, you can be.
· Contractors –You have an opportunity to help connect theory with reality and to make sure our designs are successful.
· Vendors –You have an opportunity to connect us with options that just might solve our problem of the day.
· Researchers –You have a platform that can connect us (and every young/old person that enters your classroom) with new and best information available.
· Regulators – You have a unique position of being able to reconnect us with why we are doing what we are supposed to be doing when the true intent of regulation gets lost.
· Consultants and stormwater inspectors – you can connect us to the truth and connect your client with security.
Connectors are trusted. They have our permission to step on our toes. We allow them to get in our business.
Connectors change things. They change us. They change others. They change processes, they change concepts, and they change history. They are innovative. They don’t fill known needs. They fill the need before we even notice that the need existed. And once they do, we can’t, or choose not to live without them.
Today is an amazing time for innovation and technology. We get excited when our world of dirt and water crosses paths with the current world of technology.
For some reason, we see innovation and technology of the today as being separated from technology of our world. But it doesn’t have to be. And I’m afraid that because we see our profession as being somewhat stagnant, we limit ourselves.
Webinar – I sat in Montgomery, Alabama, being interviewed by Jimmy Eanes somewhere in Texas during a webinar being facilitated by Natalie in Denver, Colorado. Sitting in on the webinar were people in Arizona, and Ohio, and Calgary, and British Columbia, and Alaska, and Hawaii, and Maryland and Caracass, and Wisconsin and Colorado, and Texas, and sitting in offices just down the hall.
We have seen innovation and technology in stormwater. We have seen our operations become more effective and more efficient because of innovation and technology. Remember, the internet isn’t the only place you can find innovation and technology. Its all in how you define them. Innovation just means that its new. Technology is simply an application of scientific knowledge. We do that all the time.
I asked for help from a few LinkedIn groups and StormwaterTools.com subscribers to help identify these connections that have changed our world.
· Mulch was a technological innovation if you think about the impact of our realizing that we had to cover it up… with anything. Researchers connected us with that knowledge.
· The rolled erosion control product – another game changer. Who would have imagined 20 years ago that anyone would be willing to spend more than the land is worth in order to keep it from eroding? Vendors and ECTC have connected us with that technology.
· Ellis family in Centre, Alabama connected us with a hydraulically applied erosion control product that made use of a waste product of cotton processing and at the same time challenged the rolled and hydraulic erosion control industry to rise to a higher level of effectiveness.
· Roger Singleton in Georgia connected us with a product that addressed a weak link in our construction stormwater plans and forever changed the face of our projects.
· The act of evolving through and the five pillars of construction stormwater management changed ALDOT. We moved from sediment control to managing sediment to managing water, to work and finally ended up declaring out loud that communication is the BEST management practice.
· Mclaughlin – baffles, Faircloth – skimmer
· Geotechnical fabrics, polymers
Bill Gates is certainly a remarkable connector, Bill Gates - “The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competitors, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose.”
· We have learned that having the best information possible leads to better communication and better decision making.
· Ted Sherrod – Sedcad
· What if - input real soils data, real topographic and real rainfall parameters into a single tool that more accurately and completely models hydraulics, hydrology, erosion and sedimentation rates estimating both real and predicted upland and instream impacts.
· GSSHA - What if - create more accurate and complete information than you currently get by using SCS methods and rational methods and RUSLE? What if - look at your 200 acre project on a 10’x10’ grid rather than by region or subwatersheds? Have you heard of distributed modeling?
· Gridded Subsurface Hydrologic Analysis modeling, or GSSHA is a two-dimensional, physically based, watershed model being used on a few of our projects today.
· What if - calibrate that model with continuous monitoring of stream quality and stage data and tie it all to actual rainfall at any one point or several points on your project as you would like to not only learn the frequency of the experienced storm event but also to understand the frequency of the experienced discharge event?
· We are doing all of this today.
· Working with Hydroengineering Solutions connecting to all of this – to GSSHA, to Rainwave, and Raingraph. They decided that rainfall data was too important to us to be left in the hands of a laborer with a supermarket rainguage. They developed Rainwave, a rainfall monitoring service and connected us to the very best rainfall data available.