In my last post about the fragility of the waste industry, I wrote about how attempts from the waste industry at resource recovery make for fragility, or at best, robustness (as used by Nicholas Nassim Taleb). This means that the best the industry can hope for is that major shocks ("black swans") do not cause too much harm.
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| Black Swans (with local Perth skyline). Source: PlanBookTravel |
Looking to minimise harm doesn't really lend itself to thriving. To truly thrive, resource recovery needs to become antifragile. That is, to establish itself in ways such that it is strengthened by black swans.
Taleb (as summarised in John Hagel's review of Antifragile) gives a handy 12 point list of elements that go toward creating antifragility.
1. Pursue barbell approaches
A barbell approach is playing it safe in some areas to mitigate the potential impact of negative black swans, and at the same time taking a lot of small risks in other areas to enhance the benefit of positive black swans.
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| Barbell approach - playing it safe at one end, and taking lots of small risks at the other |
In resource recovery, "playing it safe" means making sure that there are a range of solutions at play, building a network of suppliers and customers, hedging against catastrophe. It is creating a system that doesn't just absorb shocks, but in the mutual sharing of the shock throughout the network, becomes stronger.
Taking lots of small risks is where many little, low cost, unproven approaches are taken to test them out, looking for the upside in something untested. These are many little businesses, trying new approaches, new ways of thinking. Founding new businesses with the smallest feasible investment, an investment sufficient to let it begin and show its potential, but also small enough to be lost without heartache.
2. Focus on options
Options are a little counter-intuitive for the waste industry where the thinking is geared around plant and infrastructure that is heavily optimised. Looking at options would mean doing things that are pretty good, but not perfected.
It is not about investing in fleet of big, sole purpose trucks that then force your customers to fit their needs, but instead in developing a network of multi-purpose vehicles (within reason).
Or more importantly, it is about investing in people, in richly valuable networks that include customers, suppliers and competitors. Creating scalable learning. Things that can be rapidly retooled for now opportunities. By creating a continual flow of ideas, options continue to bubble up.
3. Be curious
An antifragile resource recovery sector would be forever wondering how particular wastes can be recycling. Instead of glancing, seeing an obstacle and then shrugging the shoulders, it would look over, under, around, whatever, until that obstacle was gone. It is forever wondering how things might be done better.
It is refusing to accept that all of that stuff in the tip, in the incinerator, needs to be there. It is looking around for different ways to solve that problem, particularly using approaches from outside "the industry". It's not going to waste conferences only, but instead going to entirely unexpected ones. You never know the insights you might glean.
4. Get out of your comfort zone
For resource recovery to become antifragile, it's going to have to become a little less comfortable. No, a lot less comfortable. It can't just go looking for some government intervention before it decides to move. It can't refuse to act until there is a plum, long-lived contract.
Resource recovery needs to hustle. It needs to propel itself into the void. It needs to be forever out there, thinking thoughts that are heretical, reading from disciplines that are hard to absorb. Believing that, just because things seem to be working, they are not necessarily the best we can do.
5. Focus on the edge
The real opportunities in resource recovery will, I believe, begin around the edges. The edges where an activity no longer looks like it is waste management, but is instead developing raw materials for others, or farming, or mining, or big data, or building some crazy, irrelevant, irreverent community.
The edges where an activity looks trivial. These edges will pull the centre outward, turning the whole fabric inside out.
The periphery where unrelated disciplines can exert their influence, shifting thinking, disrupting.
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| Explore the edge. Source: Wikimedia |
And as Clayton Christensen writes, that disruption initially looks like somebody is helping you out by taking away a niggling detail. Until they return for everything else. Disruption rarely looks like a threat initially.
More on Christensen, marginal thinking and waste management in Marginal thinking and waste.
6. Conduct lots of experiments and tinker
Again, resource recovery struggles with this idea. It is now almost received wisdom that the only recycling plants that can be built are those which have been proven. Taken at face value, this means that there will be no innovation any more, and a whole lot more incinerators. And resource recovery will grind its way to some sort of solution.
It's not good enough. There need to be a lot of punts taken, a lot of different things inspected, given a try. Tinkered with. A sense of wonder, testing out whether this works or that. What happens if this or that is changed. Diving on ideas and putting something around them
A lot of the cleverness will be in designing experiments that give good data without significant costs. The point is to test out theories, first by researching what others have done and then giving something a go. Learning, adjusting, trying again until the idea either thrives or dies.
7. Don’t get consumed by data
Resource recovery is enamoured by data, especially the regulators who like to point to "diverson from landfill" graphs. These graphs show how well their policies are working (when diversion increases) or how there is a on-off blip in the market (when it doesn't). The data let people think that they know what's going on. In fact, the opposite is true. The data hide the problem.
Instead, the sector needs to be focused on monitoring itself, collecting instantaneous feedback to enable continual fine-tuning of what is happening on the ground. This is not data in the abstracted, distilled, valueless sense, but instead very grounded, detailed and value rich in its particular context. It is less data and more electrical impulses travelling around the system.
It doesn't presume a top-down analysis, but instead assumes a bottom-up route making which requires continued, high quality data to enable continued course corrections.
8. Focus on building/accessing tacit knowledge rather than rationality and explicit knowledge
Resource recovery seems often to be about the wise heads, the consultants and the experts who know the answers. This is information that can be written down, reported and acted upon. It is also wildly out of date.
To become antifragile, there needs to be a much greater space created for that tacit knowledge learned in the day to day. This knowledge can't really be written down, because it becomes out of date on writing it. It is the "know-how" which resides in any workforce, but is generally squashed through policies and procedures. Resource recovery needs to access this knowledge, the "word on the street", and so short-circuiting the usual months and months before it can be heard by decision makers.
This might be as simple as everybody working in all aspects of the business for some period of time. It might be the Friday afternoon drinks. The space for people to tell stories and play jokes which often reveal immense truths (and thus opportunities). Or it might be a whole lot more.
9. Focus on subtractive knowledge
Resource recovery tends to fixate on what might be termed "positive knowledge", that which works. It doesn't like to get things wrong, especially where it is driven by local government. Sure, there's a whole heap of justifications rolled out to back up this, but at core it is sticking to an increasingly eroded headland of "truth".
To really become antifragile, resource recovery needs to become comfortable with subtractive knowledge, that which doesn't work. Not to ensure that a mistake is never made again, but to ensure that the lessons are learned from what didn't work. For this to be remotely useful, there need to be a lot of experiments. Invariably, every failure contains a clue for future success. And it is particularly bad form to let a failure go to waste.
10. Collaborate and trade
You would think that resource recovery could, at a minimum, work together to achieve greater outcomes. And this does happens, but nowhere near often enough.
There are vast opportunities for the resource recovery industry to collaborate in, for instance, building value-add industries for their products. Building a depth and breadth of knowledges. Doing away with the "secret squirrel" and simply sharing - an idea shared always grows for having been shared.
The gift economy of social media is a particularly strong place to start. That is, the founding principle is that information deserves to be free. That people deserve to be helped out where you can. That the reward for helping people is a greater good that is, somehow and in an entirely unpredictable way, far better than you could have ever planned.
11. Respect the old
In among the drive for creating something new and bold and earth-changing, antifragility demands a substantial respect given to the old. The time tested. The battle worn. Because this has withstood many crises.
So its less a matter of inventing some incredible new, highly optimised piece of technology, and instead taking old approaches and reinterpreting them. Repurposing them for a new application. This is tough for resource recovery to hear. It is less about sexy, fandangled new toys and more about the tried and true used in unexpected ways.
There could be some tension with the need to experiment and tinker ("if it ain't broke, don't fix it"), but I don't think so. Rather than dreaming up the perfect techno-fix, it is really about taking a whole host of good fixes and cobbling them together.
12. Beware of wealth, debt and reputation
Ah, the kicker comes at the end. It is very difficult to take risks when you have a lot to lose.
Resource recovery needs to be able to make mistakes. It probably can't operate in that space if it is run by government or transnational waste companies, as these entities fear a political or shareholder revolt. The irony is that these entities could best absorb a mistake financially.
Resource recovery needs to be mobbed by people who have a reputation for taking risks, not cutting corners, but having a healthy disdain for the status quo. People who aren't watching over their backs for the detractors.
Of course, the irony is that the many seeds sown by these people are a much safer bet for the industry at large than the few "safe bets" of the majors.
Will these steps make for an antifragile resource recovery?
I don't really know, but it can't hurt.
It can't hurt to undermine the complacent self-satisfaction of the establishment, replacing it with a restless searching for better ways of doing. Ditching the facade of a bit of resource recovery around a core of wasteful landfill disposal. Getting real.
It's worth a go. In fact, it's worth a whole heap of goes.
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