« It has become difficult for contemporary man to imagine development and modernisation in terms of lower rather than higher energy use.»

Ivan Illich

A collaborative energy savings platform initiated by an energy operator?

The apparent contradiction challenged so many held views about the purpose of an energy company, yet Services Industriels de Genève (SIG) asked us to structure the reflection as part of a pilot study to co-design the platform.

The stakes were also high: predicted energy shortages in Switzerland, mobilising multi-sectorial actors and competitors at a national level, and collaboration without market monopolisation. Fraught with complexity, we facilitated eight different workstreams to frame the reflections on what would constitute the features of the new platform, before synthesising the platform’s final form in a virtual workshop with 30 participants of differing profiles and sectors.

Key in framing the work was co-elaborating the future to which the platform would contribute. It reminded us that the desire to change a situation or make something new is a process of problem-creation as opposed to problem-solving. An analogy is useful here. If your goal is to go to the moon, the problem of how to get there is irrelevant prior to setting that goal. One has in effect created ‘the problem’ because it is contingent upon the vision. In the case of Switzerland, this doesn’t deny that there are problems because an energy shortage could be one, but mobilising multi-sectorial actors and competitors at a national level, and collaboration without market monopolisation was indeed contingent upon the desire to create the platform.

Conceptually, this is an important shift from problem to purpose. The so-called problems in creating such a platform are in fact, not problems at all, but features of a desired state that one is calling into being.

The corollary is that the concept of problem-solving is turned on its head because we’ve created the problem. This is an exciting change in thinking because it puts people on the front foot. Rather than people focussing on fixing a problem which suggests that the system was already working fine and will work again if we just fix it, we are saying that people are participants in a creative process to transform something. As SIG’s Energy Savings expert Cédric Jeanneret observed:

“Make Tracks was able create a collaborative dynamic with multiple actors in the Swiss energy sector by shifting their thinking to a future-based transformative mindset, motivating the project stakeholders towards a vision they want to create.”

If you’re currently thinking about a future project, you may want to reflect for an instant on the questions you are asking yourself. Are you asking questions that are limited by a problem-solving mindset or by purpose-based reasoning that broadens possibilities? For example, if your navy’s deep-sea divers are getting cold during their dives, the question ‘how do we design a better wetsuit?’ is already limiting the parameters for the solution. That is, the question suggests that a wetsuit is the solution when in fact a more expansive question would be ‘how do we keep our deep-sea divers warm?’

A follow-up question is all the more challenging: how does our purpose motivate our people to elicit their participation? If you’re going to broaden possibilities and create problems, you’ll want your people to be motivated to bring it into being.

More information on the Energy Savers initiative in Switzerland can be accessed here: https://www.fr.energysavers.ch/.