Footsie
November 7th, 2008
Posted by Chris
Update: we were shortlisted for Social Innovation Camp.
Footsie will help larger businesses develop a carbon-reduction strategy through a game experience of pledges and prediction markets.
It’s a collaborative tool which will engage all staff in planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating change strategies – all with a few minutes of engagement a week. Staff will create and sign up to pledges such as “Switch off the TV equipment at night”, see their current and future impact, and bet on their ultimate success or failure to take hold in the organisation.
Feedback on progress will shape a live strategy document showing executives and participants the challenges and unexpected opportunities in reducing the corporate carbon footprint.
Need
Many businesses are seizing the moral imperative to reduce their carbon footprint, and while the general advice on how to do this is straightforward, applying this to your organisation is often not.
Large organisations face particular challenges in translating general principles into specific strategies, as the complexity of multiple departments, floors and locations make general rules inappropriate or difficult to enforce.
A lack of understanding of the office ecosystem by executive staff means that real opportunities for change are also missed.
At the same time, workers in large companies may not identify with the organisation, or see limited impact in their own behavioural changes when others are not doing likewise. This creates a sense of powerlessness and inertia.
For businesses to move towards carbon neutrality they need sustainable policies and practices – emails demanding people print less can be seen as ignorant and bullying.
Social software offers the opportunity to give staff a key role in determining sustainable practices within the organisation – these ideas need to be raised, explored and advocated before they have a chance of becoming part of the company culture.
Approach
On joining Footsie, you can see ‘pledges’ such as “I will switch my computer off at the end of every day” or “I’ll avoid the lift”. Each pledge has a target, such as “50% of the company” switching off their computer. The carbon impact of each pledge is visible, both currently and for when the target is reached. You are free to sign up for these pledges, as well as to bet on whether they are realisable (see below).
Having signed up for a pledge, you’re given carbon credits, which will be redeemed when the pledge is realised. Periodically you’ll be asked how you are doing with the pledge. Did you switch off your computer every day this week? If not, what was the difficulty? If so, what made it easy? Replies are collected with the pledge, so that everyone can see the challenges involved in realising it.
Predicting
When a pledge target is reached, everyone involved wins credits – with the people who committed early winning more. But as well as committing to a pledge, or refusing to join one, you can bet for or against the likelihood of the pledge target being reached.
This prediction market provides a litmus test of the confidence or scepticism individuals have about changing behaviour within the organisation. It is also a playful way for people to engage, and stay engaged, with everyone’s efforts to make changes.
Engaging
We want to engage everyone, even those people who hate their company. Allowing them to bet on failure and express their black hat thinking in return for personal kudos is, we think, a novel approach. Using a prediction market to manifest staff attitudes to corporate change is a new idea, and some of the details should prove innovative, such as giving all users online anonymity.
Why anonymity in a social web application? Because we don’t want this to become a tool of monitoring and coercion by executive staff. Each user will pick an avatar from a list of 8-16 types representing different personality types and attitudes to climate change. The avatars can be changed at any time, and there are no visible usernames. This will give another (fun) view on the connections between attitudes and behaviour in the company.
Dashboard
Your dashboard will give you an overview of the pledges, how people are doing, and what the impact is on the company’s carbon footprint. You’ll see the spread of the betting, and be able to look at how different groups in the organisation behave and think (“How many techies signed up to switch their computers off?” “Why is the Accounts department more sceptical than the rest of us?”)
As for a trader, this information will prove valuable in deciding which pledges to support and how – but the real benefit is tapping individual workers and executives into the subtleties of the company hive mind.
Lifecycle
How long does Footsie last? For some companies, it may be a valuable medium-term tool in effecting corporate change. They may choose to incentivise staff by convert carbon credits into cash or other rewards.
For other companies, the honour system underlying Footsie may break down after a month or two – but even in that time they will have collectively identified key ways to reduce their carbon footprint, and articulated the challenges in doing so. Footsie will give them the foundations of a carbon-reduction strategy.
Inspiration
Edenbee is an excellent site which helps individuals improve their carbon footprint. It’s focused around completing goals, and has a great timeline view of their impact on your footprint.
For micro-companies, Edenbee could work well. Footsie is focused on bigger companies (100+ staff) where efforts to create co-operative change are more challenging, and where neither a top-down nor an ad hoc approach can fully work.
The pledge concept was first articulated (we think) by Pledgebank. We admire (and would steal) interface features from Get Satisfaction, which very effectively corrals discussion threads into specific, useful responses. We won’t be facilitating open discussion, but will ask for quick explanations of why a user will/won’t sign up for a pledge and why they found it difficult (or easy) to meet that commitment this week. This will highlight the challenges in creating lasting change.
Next steps
We need seed funding to develop the idea and scope the development. After that, we will look for a corporate sponsor for the development of the project.
7 Responses to “Footsie”
This reminds me a little bit of Actics.com – as far as I understand, they are a sort of ethical self-improvement tool for companies. Their staff define ethical values, others can agree and say how they’ve supported that.
As I say, I’ll be very interested to see how you make this game-like, as that’s something we’d really like to do with EasyEthical, too, to encourage people to contribute more research.
I do think that Footsie is an interesting idea, but I have to admit that I’m not entirely convinced how applicable it is to reducing carbon emissions for larger companies (100+ staff). It would be a really useful tool to encourage recycling and reduce resource use (ie paper use) in companies, large and small, as recycling / paper use is down to individual behaviour.
However, I have to say that I don’t think that significantly reducing the carbon footprint for larger companies is as simple as you make out; as it’s much more influenced by better management of building services (heating/ventilation and cooling control), so it’s much more influenced by facilities engineers than by the behaviour of general staff members.
Individual responsibility and behaviour change does still play a key part, but the actions suggested need to be targeted actions which will significantly reduce energy use in buildings. I don’t know if you’ve come across CIBSE (the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers), but they run a ‘100 hours of Carbon Clean Up Campaign’, with suggested activities designed by sustainability / building services management consultants. http://www.cibse.org/index.cfm?go=page.view&item=1102 Their campaign obviously doesn’t have the staff interaction that yours does, however.
I suppose what I’m trying to say (from my point of view as an Environmental Consultant specialising in resource efficiency), is that you need to first identify the actions that really will make a difference. The level of staff involvement won’t alter the fact that a insignificant action was chosen in the first place. Campaigns which target less effectual actions can switch the attention (and staff energy and involvement) away from much more pressing concerns. I speak from personal experience – it’s really frustrating visiting companies to find out that they’ve focused on ineffectual actions, while ignoring the huge potential energy savings that are staring them in the face. Furthermore, ineffectual actions can then backfire, when projected savings aren’t made, and staff become disillusioned in the whole process.
Abigail makes some really relevant points – how can large companies identify the actions that make a real difference and what is the role of general staff in this process?
We considered how companies might identify effective action and could see that there may well be a need for a company representative to act as games master. They’d be responsible for coordinating action between general staff, facilities engineers and management, and help work out how effective a given action might be.
We considered the following scenario – it may be an extreme case, but the principles are widely applicable.
A staff member puts up the idea to ’stop using the company jet’. Surprise surprise, it proves popular with the majority of the staff. It’s going to save a lot of carbon emissions, so on the face of it it looks like effective action and should be endorsed.
The games master takes this idea to the people who are directly affected by this action and a few of the jet users agree, yes this is a good idea and are happy to sign up to this pledge for 3 months for example. So far, so good.
The games master talks to the accounts department and they provide a breakdown of costs of running and using the jet – this thing costs a lot of money to use – no surprise there.
Then the games master works out the carbon emissions for using the jet using one of the many available carbon calculators.
However, when the games master talks to the Client Services Manager, it transpires that the company’s most lucrative client really likes been flown around in the jet and they see a significant risk to the relationship if the jet is ditched. So, although the action is effective in reducing the carbon footprint and it has significant purchase among the staff, there’s a big risk at stake if the action is adopted company-wide.
The point isn’t that the crazy people needing in-flight entertainment are wrecking the world, it’s that problems are more complex than they may first appear. Until you understand all the variables in play, you can’t make an informed decision. Does that mean that we should restrict idea submissions only from those who are directly affected by an action, the ones who are informed? For example, if I don’t use the jet, should I be able to put forward a motion to stop using it? It’s a moot point, but in the above example crowd-sourcing the idea led to a discussion about usage, an awareness of the role the jet plays for the company and maybe some reduction in it’s use. It all sounds like positive change…
What else might a company gain by using Footsie? In an ideal world, a company actively listens to its employees and understands that frontline staff have a unique and informed understanding of the problems they face and some possible solutions. In the real world, a forum that facilitates this can be difficult to organise – yet another meeting where the same old personalities dominate will have limited appeal to the group. A process that allows ideas to bubble through in a democratic manner and bypass office politics may well be a welcome and refreshing approach that could bring real value to any group. However, the key to its success lies in the ideas being evaluated seriously. If staff realise their efforts are ignored, then it’s bound to fail. If they are taken seriously, then staff are going to feel valued and see that their voice really can make a difference. That’s got to be good for everyone – once we feel we’re being listened to, we’re going to feel more inclined to do it again, and perhaps more boldly.
I may well be being naive, but I also wonder if lots of small changes add up to big changes? When we were on the train from Brighton to London to present Footsie to SiCamp, we passed through East Croydon. We went past numerous office blocks that had all the lights on, on every floor even though they were completely empty. A large proportion of computers and printers were still on too probably, likewise the heating. This is a real problem and it begs the question ‘why are all the lights on every night?’ Is it company policy – we have to keep all the lights on to advertise our company, to show that we’re a player? Or is it an effect due to not having a policy? As individuals, our personal awareness may tell us to turn off our own computers, but it doesn’t extend to the printer nearby (someone else might want to use it after we’ve left) and it certainly doesn’t extend to turning off the lights on the whole floor. Consider this simple two-rule policy:
turn off all the devices and lights that directly effect you whenever you leave
if you’re the last one leaving your dept/room/floor, turn off the lights
It’s likely that there would be security and personal safety issues to resolve, but the instructions are simple enough that I think most companies could adopt a version of it. I think I must be missing something as I find myself reiterating the question, ‘why are all the lights on every night?’
Pledgehammer is an interesting addition to the increasing amount of pledge-based applications.
The twist here is that if you don’t stick to your pledge, you have to donate money to your chosen charity.
Climate Culture is a virtual world that combines guidance, community and games to help consumers reduce their energy consumption.
[...] Footsie, our idea to help businesses reduce their carbon footprint, has been shortlisted for the Social Innovation Camp in December. [...]
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Posted By Ian November 10th, 2008 at 1:56 pmPossible funding avenue – Defra launches £6 million Greener Living Fund – November 2008.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/news/2008/081103b.htm