Off Topic: Infographic - Just shut off your stinkin' car already

What a week.

SHRM Annual for the first half of the week, then a really gripping and emotionally wringing NBA Finals Game 7 last night. I am pretty much done I think.

But not so much that I can't spare 5 minutes to share the infographic below courtesy of iturnitoff.com about the costs, and really wastes, of excessive automobile idling.

I can remember back in the day being told something about how starting a car uses as much gas as a couple of minutes of idling the car - a calculation certainly invented to justify a few Dads of those times wanting to keep the heat or air conditioner on while sitting in the car listening to the end of the ballgame on the radio.

Check the below inforgraphic for the details of the costs of idling, then I have some comments after the jump:

From iturnitoff.comThe one element of the infographic that really stood out to me, and the only reason I decided to post it today, is the call-out of the Drive Thru lane as a leading cause of engine idling, and the corresponding pollution, cost, and wastes associated with the practice.

I hate the Drive Thru lane.

You have to talk into a clown's mouth, there is almost no chance the person on the headset is paying any attention to you, and chances are pretty good your order will be messed up - but you won't be able to do anything about it because by the time you realize the error you'll be 5 miles down the road.

I often stop at a local Bruegger's shop near where I live to get coffee and bagels in the morning. Invariably, there is a line of cars snaking around the shop, clogging up the Drive Thru lane. 

I always park and actually enter the shop, where there is never more than one or two folks in line ahead of me, and since I know all the workers in the shop so well, (from actually going in the store and talking with them so frequently), my order is often already being assembled before I even have to ask for it.

I am in and out of there in a couple of minutes and meanwhile the line of SUVs and Minivans has maybe, collectively, inched forward a car length or two. Look, I get why people like the Drive Thru. We sometimes have kids in the car, the weather is nasty, or parking is not convenient. But most of the time it is just an excuse to stay in our little cocoons by ourselves a little longer.

And that is cool, that is a valid reason. I don't always feel like talking to the guys in Bruegger's either. But that decision, that choice to remain tuned out, well that comes with a price measured in wasted gas, wasted time, and wasted opportunity to get to know the folks that live and work in your neighborhood.

Ok, that's it. Rant off. Time for more coffee.

Have a great weekend!

Just Five out of a Thousand

Often we underestimate the power of a small change or the potential for a tight but empowered collection of individuals to effect significant change to a level far more enduring than their small numbers suggest, or for seemingly minor but well-positioned and targeted interventions to have massive impact.Look familiar?

Case in point - studies of traffic congestion on German expressways have determined that a modern, real-time, and networked traffic monitoring system, that feeds information from cars on the road to each other and back to a central traffic monitoring center, can successfully and meaningfully reduce congestion, waste, and the associated societal angst that comes from incessant traffic jams with as few as five cars out of a thousand actually connected to the network, and providing traffic and road condition information back to the base.

More details from the Fast Company article that described the study:

The project consists of automobile-mounted, Wi-Fi-enabled sensors, which relay traffic data from car to car until they reach a roadside base station that sends the info to a control center, where engineers can monitor traffic jams, accidents, and construction zones and mount responses in the form of radio alerts and text messages. The surprising discovery is that even when such an automotive web is loosely knit and full of holes, connecting as little as .5 percent of cars on the road, the information it provides can help traffic managers ease congestion, potentially saving hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel costs--not to mention reducing the stress and anxiety of drivers, whether their rides are Wi-Fi-enabled or not

It seems like a simple, yet powerful mix of ingredients - a problem everyone would agree needs to be attacked, the smart application of technology and brain power to address the issue, and a solution flexible enough to realize that it won't be feasible or practical to get even a majority of drivers on-board to successfully implement, much less every driver. To me, that is the key to the story - the potential to effect change and likely significant improvement for all the actors involved, (drivers, businesses, families, the environment), while only recruiting so-to-speak a tiny minority of the players that in theory are engaged and passionate about the problem to be solved. 

Other potential lessons to take from the 'Five out of a Thousand' story? How about to reinforce the idea that in any complex, multi-player system consisting of a collection of individual motivations, attitudes, capabilities, and desires that effecting change or even incremental improvements might not always require a kind of universal buy-in and commitment in order to succeed. I think sometimes we can get caught up in making sure that every new system or process improvement reaches all the far corners of the extended enterprise or ecosystem, and can often spend enormous time and energy 'selling' to a portion of our constituents that are never going to come on board, and quite possibly won't even impact the overall success or failure of the initiative all that much either way. Perhaps you can think about using the precepts of Social Network Analysis inside the organization to better focus change initiatives and more quickly determine the right 0.5% for your efforts to target?

Admittedly most organizational or societal transformation projects will need more than 0.5% participation to be connected and engaged, but certainly 100% participation is usually not needed (or even possible).  

The trick is of course, finding the right 'Five out of a Thousand' that will make your project or passion come to life.  It's too bad people are more complex and harder to read than cars on the expressway. 

Aren't they?

Anyone have a power strip? A spare iPhone Charger?

Have you ever asked or heard those questions asked at an event or conference lately? 

I know I have scrambled around trying to inject some life into a dying BlackBerry on more than one occasion.  It is not that big a deal for most of us, a minor annoyance at worst,  after thirty minutes or so plugged back into the grid we are back in business.

Electricity is everywhere, it is such a critical part of our day to day personal and professional lives, we take it for granted, get spoiled by it, and mostly are incapable if dealing like adults in the occasional power outage.

I was thinking about this when I heard about the latest tragedy in an American coal mine, this one in West Virginia.

The demand for energy in the United States is astounding.  From the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) we learn that total U.S. energy use in 2008 was nearly 100 quadrillion (=10¹⁵, or one thousand trillion) British Thermal Units (Btu). One quadrillion Btu, often referred to as a “quad,” therefore represents about 1% of total U.S. energy use.

The chart form the EIA shows the primary energy sources in the US for 2008:

Coal, supplies about the quarter of all the country's primary energy supply. That may come as

a surprise to many of us, (it was to me), as our most common interaction with 'primary' energy sources is when we fill up our car's gas tanks, and run over to the local Jiffy Lube every few months.

We are constantly aware of and informed about the ebbs and flows in the crude oil market, since the fluctuating prices of a barrel of oil seems to be reflected in the price at the pump almost instantly.

We hear and think much less about coal mining, (mainly only when there is an accident and tragedy).  Since the predominant use of coal in the United States is used to supply electricity generation, we as consumers don't interact with the primary source of the energy at all.

When we are out searching for an outlet for our iPhones no one I know of makes a kind of mental connection back to the coal mines in West Virginia or Wyoming.

But the coal mines, or rather the coal miners of these states and others are the primary source of that electricity that we tap into every day.  Again from the EIA, when we look at the primary sources of energy in the US and how that energy is consumed, we see that 91% of the coal sourced in 2008 was used in the generation of electric power, making coal the largest primary source of electricity in the United States.

Coal is not exciting, coal is not all that sexy.  Getting all jazzed up because you just got a new Prius and don't have to gas up as much is about as close as any of us will get to really impacting the use of primary energy sources.

Although I have to believe it takes a heck of an amount of energy to manufacture all those Prius batteries, but that is another story.

Today I am thinking about electricity, thinking about our never ending pursuit of more.  More gadgets, devices, ways to stay in touch, informed, connected 24x7.

We so casually talk about getting unplugged once in a while, or going 'off the grid'. But we think about that only in terms of how it affects us, we brag in a way about having such remarkable mental ability to go off line for a weekend or on a vacation like it is some kind of achievement. Look, I think it is important to put down the phones, laptops, iPads more often,  I need to do more of it myself, but when we do, stop being so proud about it.

How about this, the next time you do 'unplug', think for a minute about all the costs associated with providing us this incredible abiltiy to interact, connect, create, and build things.  Everytime we send an email, write a blog post, send a tweet, download or upload a video (and on and on) we are tapping in to the efforts of many brave men and women who are willing to put themselves in danger to extract resources from deep underground. We all fall over ourselves in praise of designers from Apple, or creators of the next 'killer' app for Twitter, we should try to at least have the same respect and admiration for the miners as well.