Monthly Archives: April 2014

A Sustainable Volunteering Relationship

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In this post I describe a relationship between a third sector organisation and a volunteer and what factors lead to its sustainability. I characterise this relationship as more one of partnership than of hirer / contractor.

In such a partnership, I assume that both parties want:

  • A productive and satisfying relationship, which will achieve both own and shared outcomes and so promote a relationship which endures
  • To make effective use of scarce resources from both parties
  • To provide  good experiences which encourage third party recommendations of the organisation by the volunteers and so grow the organisation’s volunteering base
  • To enable qualitative assessment of value created by the volunteering activity, based on a rounded view of all the stakeholders in the volunteering activity
  • To promote ongoing development of the capabilities of both parties and organisational learning

Some volunteering relationships are specific and short in duration, whilst others last over many years. The lifespan of the relationship is often created and terminated by external events beyond the scope of the partnership (e.g. the volunteer moving away). A sustainable relationship is flexible and resilient to such factors, whilst being respectful to the needs of either party to terminate the relationship when they decide.

The Nature of the Partnership

A sustainable volunteering relationship is entered into and viewed as an ongoing partnership by both parties. Starting when both parties bring their needs to the table and home-in on a core activity or series of activities which meet their current needs and focus the partnership. If the experience is positive and the partnership’s external context continues to be supportive for both parties, then the core activity may, over time, become broader and grow to cover a wider range of activities which are valued by both parties. Alternatively the focus of the relationship may move, or be clarified and scoped down to deliver a narrower and more precise activity, or be terminated.

This highlights the need for ongoing shared review and learning about how the relationship is progressing and how it needs to change, including both external and future concerns and opportunities.

There is also a need for effective operational co-ordination, so that volunteers working beside other volunteers or employees  can co-operate and collaborate around shared purposes and share their learning. The same is true for volunteer groups working beside other volunteer groups or employee groups.

As with any flourishing partnership between two organisations which are taking part in a joint venture, both parties:

  • Focus on the common activities they are both motivated to undertake
  • Identify with the purposes they share and own them, as well as their own other purposes
  • Resource the activities at the level required to deliver the shared purposes that they agree to address
  • Jointly steer the relationship so that it continues to meet their own needs and so that they can continue to resource the volunteering activities adequately, as the nature of the partnership evolves

The outcomes and measures enable both parties to distinguish successful strategies and identify what are appropriate types and levels of resources needed to achieve the desired outcomes.

The Viewpoint of Third Sector Organisation, its Purposes and Activities

The organisation identifies its overall purposes and identity at any point in time, aligned to today’s external and internal stakeholder needs and those of generations to come. This is reflected, for instance, in a publicly accessible vision statement or statement of stakeholder based objectives.

The organisation has different purposes aligning to different types of stakeholders. These purposes are understood at appropriate levels of detail, up and down the organisation, focused on the outcome responsibilities and related activities of the departments or teams involved. The organisation also has support and management functions, which enable the teams with outcome responsibilities to operate effectively.

The organisation, at all levels, identifies the ways in which volunteers could address (directly or indirectly) their purposes and so identifies suitable types of volunteer role(s).

Some roles are well understood and constrained to work in existing teams, whilst others are defined as a need to achieve an outcome, where the organisation needs the capabilities of the volunteers to help find ways to do it.

The organisation has its own strategy for attracting and deploying volunteers effectively. This strategy both constrains the strategies developed jointly with individual volunteers and is also informed by learning from the outcomes of such relationships.

The Viewpoint of the Volunteer

The volunteer assesses their own purposes and how volunteering fits into them.  They match these against the organisations purposes and stakeholder needs and so identify the opportunities to contribute in different parts of the organisation. They consider their current capabilities that they can offer and areas of capability they wish to develop. They decide from this whether to and if so, how to engage with the third party organisation. They identify particular roles of interest, also taking into account how much flexibility is necessary to meet their own specific needs.

Innovating using Technology

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If a technological advance is to play a significant role in an innovation, there is a tendency to create a project to develop the technological component and then to fit people in around it. This can lead to loss of focus on the stakeholder’s objectives and inappropriate use of people and technology.

Where local innovative improvement is concerned, the team may find it best to get the new process working first with only the absolutely essential technology support and then gradually add in further bits of automation where technology can be seen to provide a significant benefit. Some new processes may need to be developed with embedded technology to be able to work at all. Even if this is the case, the human / technological process needs to be designed, by the team that will use it, or their representatives, before the automated process components are designed and integrated. This ensures that the best use is made of both the technology and the people.

Where innovation has a much wider scope than a specific organization’s process, the innovation context may be, for example a complex real world system, involving many different organisations and many connections to the world-wide environmental context. The first question is then, how will the changed system need to operate to deliver to the needs of its stakeholders. Answering this question can help identify fractal process components for projects to develop. The second question is what types of organization will be required when the innovation is in place and how will the system be managed to ensure its longer term viability. This second question will help identify the sorts of market, governmental and public initiatives required for the innovation to be delivered. Only when this thinking is in place, is it appropriate to think about how the innovation can be initiated and start to emerge, through a number of projects which deliver both changed processes and technological components.

Though technological prototyping projects are very useful, they need to be seen as support for innovation, not its main driver.

Comment for Government Consultation on Competition in the energy industry:

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 This post is based on collaboration with Roger Duck uk.linkedin.com/in/rogerduck/ and comments on the issues from the viewpoint of the European and UK electricity system

In April and May 2014, Ofgem consulted on a proposal to make a “market investigation reference” to the newly formed CMA in respect of the supply and acquisition of energy (electricity and gas) in Great Britain.

We start by quoting advice to policy makers from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT):

‘For all interventions, it is important that a wide range of costs and benefits are considered. Failure to address indirect costs and benefits and possible spill-overs can result in a less effective policy and unnecessary economic costs across a range of markets.’

We take from this, that the scope of the question referred needs to be broad enough, to enable possible interventions to be examined, compared and evaluated.

On competition OFT also say:

  • Effective competition in properly regulated markets can deliver lower prices, better quality goods and services and greater choice for consumers.
  • Competition can create strong incentives for firms to be more efficient and to invest in innovation, thereby helping raise productivity growth.
  • Policy makers should aim to protect and promote competition in markets in order to capture the benefits of markets for consumers and society as a whole.
  • However, markets if not adequately regulated can potentially harm consumers.

We note that the consultation document is restricted to retail and wholesale markets, rather than the whole of the energy supply chain, and focuses on price competition. Price is clearly an important factor. However, there are other factors which consumers may wish to exercise choice on. Here are some examples based on the advice of OFT above:

  1. Qualities of the product ( e.g. generation type, security of supply, impact on the environment of the whole generation and supply system, availability, flexibility)
  2. More suppliers to choose from
  3. Belief in supplier trustworthiness
  4. How suppliers put the consumers own generated power to work to add value to society
  5. Level of innovation being funded and delivered – both through low and high technology to address potential future shortages
  6. Commitments and follow through, to phase out fossil fuels contributing to world wide society and planetary benefits

To broaden the focus to this wider range of factors on which competition could be offered, we are of the opinion that the scope of the referral to the CMA needs to include generation and transportation (transmission and distribution) in addition to retail and wholesale.  This would enable any resulting study to determine to what extent consumers have the opportunity to exercise this wider range of choices.

There is significant new technology coming down-stream from smart grids. One of the authors of this response has been engaged in the European FINSENY project, with specific focus on the role of regulation in the provision of electricity, which led to further work by both authors on the systemic structure of the electricity market in particular. They have also presented their conclusions to the European Commission Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content & Technology (DG Connect). Developments in smart grid technology could potentially support a new sort of energy marketplace which is much more like the marketplace for more tangible products. Such a market could enable real consumer choice on both the qualities of the power and its price, with a wide range of small and large suppliers to choose from. It could also allow ‘prosumers’ access to a range of back-up suppliers for when their own generation is not sufficient for their needs, and enable them to sell excess power to others. This sort of market place has the potential to be vibrant with real competition and to help move consumers out of their current state of passive disillusion and into proactive investment and choices.

The potential opportunities raised by smart grid technology (as well as smart meters) makes it paramount at this time to consider the needs of future users, and changes in the market and regulatory structure required to facilitate this, not just consider the market as it operates today.

Taking the previous three points together implies broadening of the referral to address the opportunities for competition generated by the whole system, today and tomorrow.

The whole electricity system can be characterised by five core and inter-related functions:

  • generation,
  • transmission / distribution,
  • storage,
  • consumption
  • cleaning up

 

A system (such as that for electrical power supply and consumption) can only be assessed for current and future viability by understanding its intrinsic abilities to manage its inter-dependencies on its environment, e.g for access to raw materials, weather, investment, skills, and new technological opportunities. Also for its intrinsic abilities to manage its environment’s dependencies on itself, such as its ability to take action to resolve the negative impacts it has on the planet’s ecology, climate etc.

The five core inter-related components above create a system-in-focus, which needs to be set in context within a whole environment. We tend to consider the environment in terms of six domains: Economic, Societal, Technological, Ecological, Ethical and Material.

Broadening the referral in the manner proposed would expose far more of the complexity that needs to be considered when evaluating the impact of possible interventions on the viability and competitiveness of the overall power market. There are, however, useful design and modelling techniques which can be used to counteract this increase in complexity, being inherited by the resulting solution.  One such technique involves discovering repeating patterns (or fractals) in the solution and developing components which can be implemented, regardless of the level of detail at which the pattern is detected.   This would not only reduce complexity for ongoing maintenance, but would lead to more efficient market development plans. Over-restricting the scope of the redesign can lead to lack of recognition of these repeating patterns and paradoxically create more rather than less complexity in the overall solution.

For example, there is a need for a management activity to ‘balance’ supply and demand across the system. Doing this locally can enable efficient use of electricity. So the balancing of supply and demand, internal to a house or office or factory is one example of the ‘balancing function’ where the prosumer may also need to access local back-up supply, from a local supplier of their choice. The same balancing pattern would repeat amongst local suppliers. Then perhaps for a region and a country, then for Europe and for the world.

The same approach enables operational efficiency, in activities such as change of supplier, as the inherent complexity of the change is encapsulated within each instance of the balancing component, allowing for standardised interfaces, automation and self-management by the component of its internal structure. Such a geographically based layered solution could create significant opportunities for public engagement and investment in the local power marketplace, increasing local resilience / power security, choice and other competitive benefits.

There are techniques for managing the complexity generated in the solution, and such an approach would enable competition at all levels.

The concept of multiple organisations operating at different scales, would open up opportunities for mixed markets, extending consumer choice further. They could range from private enterprise based, social enterprise based, cooperatives, voluntary sector through to public sector. In such a climate, organisations and individuals could if they wish, choose to donate their spare generation to, for example, charities addressing fuel poverty.

There are opportunities to take investment decisions today which will move the industry forward into a more competitive footing, if the scope of the decisions on the effective competition in the market place are based on the whole electricity system and possibilities for the future.

Does Technology Innovate?

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You often hear people talking about process automation, as if hence forward, people will no longer take part in the process. This can be the case, but in most situations, its more a matter of identifying what things people are good at and what is best done by technology and how they can both work together in a coherent way. I would describe a ‘process’ as ‘the way a team agree to work together to achieve a set of outcomes’. So, the team need to identify which bits of their process will be done by humans and which will be done by technology.

Innovation means doing new things or doing current things differently, to achieve a desired set of outcomes, in completely new and better ways. Technology never delivers innovation alone; the innovation is delivered by the new process. Technology can, however, often play a crucial role, in enabling such a change.

Technology is frequently useful for doing repetitive tasks reliably, speedily and precisely, whilst humans are better at providing judgement and dealing with new and unexpected situations.

So taking innovation in reliability, one example of benefit from technology is improved quality. To take an example: a process requires three things to be done after finishing speaking to a customer, or the customer will receive a poor service.  This process is currently the best way of doing it, so an improvement in reliability will be an innovation.  A human service deliverer can on occasion get distracted and forget to do all three. Technology can ensure that all three are done automatically or if requiring input, that the service provider is reminded, resulting in an improved level of customer satisfaction. Improved reliability innovation was used in warehouses with early stock control systems and just-in-time ordering, so that whenever a stock was depleted past a certain level, technology automatically placed the new order, avoiding dependence on a human noticing and making time to place a new order. Then the purchaser’s computer system and the supplier’s computer system were linked for automatic repeat order transmission, enabling lower levels of stock to be held by the purchaser. This innovation created major improvements in sunk capital in assets and more reliable supply for the purchaser.

Opportunities to innovate in this way often occur around co-ordination points between individuals, teams or organisations. Things that frequently go wrong, and lead to difficult or dangerous service failures, often stem from a trivial mistake in a mundane task, or more often just forgetting to tell someone.

Next, taking innovation in speed, some things were not possible till technology came along. Take the example of the search engine replacing manual searches. A human could not search millions of documents in a fraction of a second to find relevant information. The skill of the human to see a similar pattern in, say, two very different problems, can lead to them finding a tried and tested solution to what on the face of it is a new problem, however without a search engine, they would never be able to assemble that knowledge in one lifetime, let alone be able to find the repeating patterns that they need.

Opportunities to innovate in this sort of way occur when a new process can be envisaged theoretically, but is impractical because of the amount of human effort required. Such opportunities occurred in the past after manual filing systems were replaced by computerised filing. The sheer ability to locate information and retrieve it speedily made new process forms possible.  Similarly computerised filing enabled new processes based on concurrent access to the same data and significant paralleling of previously sequential tasks.

Taking innovation in precision, lasers can allow delicate surgery to be performed at a level of precision, beyond the capability of a human eye.  Similarly computerised DNA matching enables police to exclude unproductive lines of enquiry.

These types of innovation occur in situations where significantly enhanced precision, will enable new and valuable outcomes.

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