Let's be Fwends #148:

Systems, Action, Work and Interviews (and Birds)

"People - and, I'd argue, the sort of conscious machines which would happily cooperate with them - hate to feel exploited, but they also hate to feel useless."

~ Ian M. Banks

Hi! And welcome to issue number 148 of Let's be Fwends. Today, we have just two work related items (but one is really good news if you're not the person who likes to work all the time), and most of the other stuff is dealing with the climate, so, really depressing stuff. But then there's a really great interview with a really interesting person, and a study about the calming effects of nature's call (so to speak).

It's quite possible that this is the last edition for 2024; If that's the case then enjoy the festive season and see you in 2025!

The Four-Day-Work-Week Works

Working less simply works. The latest example is Iceland. There is now overwhelming evidence that reducing working time does not reduce productivity. On the contrary, if anything, reducing working hours seems to improve productivity. The conclusion is that sticking to "full time employment" (40 hours or more per week) is mostly ideologically driven; Employers accept not realising an increase in productivity to keep employees busy. I wonder why?

An Unexpected Benefit of Value Stream Mapping Exercises

In the last part of my series on value stream mapping I try to highlight an unexpected but very important benefit of any value stream mapping exercise: The people who are part of the workshop.

Any meaningful change in an organisation is tied to real people. Processes, protocols and tools might be more visible, but in the end, all those processes, protocols and tools are used, abused, or ignored by people. It's just another incarnation of "culture eats strategy for breakfast". So, if you want to break down silos and change something at work, make sure you take extra care of the people who will own and drive that change.

Looks like "Maybe The Real Treasure Was the Friends We Made Along the Way" applies to workshops as well.

Matt Stephens Rides with Pippa York

I'm not particularly interested in cycling-related media these days. Too much complacency, too much shoulder-patting, too little interesting reporting.

So, I was incredibly happy when I stumbled upon this interview with Pippa York, one of the more interesting characters in cycling. If you're interested in cycling at all, or have any opinion whatsoever about trans athletes, make sure you watch it.

If you wonder why I have to link to archive.org instead of the original place of publishing: The producers had to pull the video from YouTube because of all the hateful comments it received.

Yes. That's the world we live in.

Industry-Wide Scenario-Based Pre-Mortems

The fashion industry is one of the biggest contributors to climate change and pollution: It is responsible for roughly 10% of all carbon emissions (more than maritime and air travel together), and the washing of clothes by consumers relases up to 500.000 tons of plastic microfibres into the oceans. All while 85% of all textiles is thrown away. Every year.

And the emissions from the fashion industry are projected to rise another 60% by 2030.

The "Fashion Futures 2030" project set out to develop possible scenarios of how the contribution to fashion (and especially fast fashion) to the world could play out. You can read the four scenarios on their website. What I found particularly interesting was the approach of developing the scenarios from their culmination backwards - projecting yourself into 2030, assessing a status quo, and then trying to understand what led to this outcome.

(Thanks to Miriam for the hint)

It's Systemic, but it also Isn't

What happens when you put your plastic cup into the recycling bin inside a Starbucks? I guess you'd be right to assume that it gets recycled. Given that the bin says "Recycling", that would be a reasonable guess. Yet, according to an experiment run by CBS, the chances of your cup to actually end up at a recycling plant are not particularly great: Only 11% of all cups equipped with a GPS tracker (4 out of 36 cups) showed up at such a plant. The other cups were incinerated or put into a landfill, sometimes thousands of miles away from the recycling bin they were thrown into.

Overall, we don't look too good when it comes to dealing with plastic. And as it is so often, painting the problem as "widespread" or "universal" doesn't do the real situation justice. Of course, there is no reliable data (as there seldom is in such cases), but some experiments suggest that just five companies are responsible for 24% of global plastic waste.

Here they are:

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Danone, and Altria.

Contrary to what people want to make you believe, you do not have to talk to thousands or tens of thousands of producers and consumers of plastic goods to make a change. Convincing just five CEOs to take action would have significant impact in the fight against plastic waste (because recycling - see above).

Yes, we need systemic change. But no, that doesn't mean that the biggest polluters shouldn't be held accountable for their inaction.

The Calming Effects of Natural Soundscapes

A recent study found that natural soundscapes can buffer the negative effects of human-generated noise:

We found that natural soundscapes were strongly linked with the lowest levels of anxiety and stress, with an increase in stress levels associated with mixed natural soundscapes with the addition of 20 mi/h traffic noise and the highest levels with 40 mi/h traffic noise.

The best days of my year are in spring, when the birds come back and you hear them sing for the first time. Only then I realise what I've been missing the months before.

A dozen birds for every inner-city street. That would be an urban-planning concept that gets me fired up for change.

That's it for this edition of Let's be Fwends. Thanks for opening it, and sticking with me. Please forward it to someone if you think they might find it useful or interesting. This is a strange pigeon metaphor my subconscious just came up with. My brain is weird sometimes. 🕊️

(Header image found on the Internet many moons ago)