The AIA 2030 Commitment: Set Audacious Goals

Who said “If you fail to plan you plan to fail”? Winston Churchill? Ben Franklin? Not sure.  But the real question is: do you believe it?

I do.  

We architects LOVE plans – floor plans, of course! Floor plans reveal all: the flow of space, the order of form, the organization of function. But how about those other plans? Strategic plans? Business plans? Do we love them less?

And what about sustainability action plans?

When your architectural firm signs the AIA 2030 Commitment, you will have one year to develop a long range plan that aligns your firm with “the stated 2030 benchmarks for achieving carbon neutrality”.  In other words, you will be asked to tell the AIA what – specifically – your firm will do to help us all get to those 2030 goals. That’s a sustainability action plan. It’s the next big step for us at Bergmeyer.

And on this requirement, the AIA wisely advises “action plans will differ from firm to firm.”  That means the sky is the limit! Shoot for the moon. Go for broke. Have fun with it. It’s an entirely open-ended assignment. Like an extra-credit essay question, you can’t fail.

A famous architect once said “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood . . .”

In my very first blog post about the AIA 2030 Commitment, I recommended avoiding audacious goals. I was just kidding.  Audacity is good. When it comes to sustainability planning, your firm needs what Jerry Portas and Jim Collins described in their very influential business book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies as “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” or BHAGs. A BHAG is an ambitious, compelling, but achievable target that serves to unify firm-wide effort and catalyzes action.

Go ahead. Set audacious goals for your firm. Think five or ten years out. Extend your reach. Strive for national or global leadership. Do research. Create your own design criteria. Be generous. Strive for exemplary performance. Document your findings and publish the results for free on your website so we can all bask in the glow of your success.   

And to help you out with this, the AIA has put links to several completed sustainability action plans on the AIA 2030 Public Reporting Template.

Wanna see ‘em? Sure you do.

Mithun’s sustainable action plan is here. It’s one of the more graphically sophisticated documents. It has a good, clear outline. Their Design Process goals include doing a “payback analysis’ on every one of their projects and a detailed lifecycle cost analysis (LCCA) “on selected projects where fee allows.” I especially like that they have a section of their plan devoted to Advocacy, Policy & Public Education. (You can bet Bergmeyer’s plan will have one of those, too!)

Lake Flato’s plan is here. Full of BHAGs, this firm is going to buy carbon emission offsets, host an office wiki to record sustainable design achievements, do internal “sustainability reviews” of every project, and create a customizable client education kit. The sustainable action plan for one of our Boston firms, KlingStubbins, is here. They’re making sustainable design criteria part of their Quality Assurance process and have a very long list of Staff Training and Education activities. Very good stuff.

Sustainability action planning. It could be the most important, most meaningful, most gratifying part of the whole AIA 2030 program.  Because, as the Cheshire Cat may have said, “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there!”

The AIA 2030 Commitment: 2030 Fever

Strange things can happen when your architectural firm gets 2030 fever.

I was in my office the other day fuming about Canadian tar sands or something when Bill came busting in with both hands full of paper. He was livid. Since 7 AM that morning, he had been watching unclaimed 8-1/2  x 11 prints pile up in our office printer. The pile in his left hand said “1 PM yesterday” right hand said “7 AM today”. Clearly, some people at Bergmeyer were not taking our AIA 3020 Commitment waste reduction goals seriously.

Without letting me ask why he was at work at 7 AM, he exploded: “We oughta do something about this, Mike! We need a serious all-office e-mail. Or a meeting. Or maybe we can just pin all this wasted paper up somewhere so people will realize what they’re doing?”

In a flash, I saw the genius of Bill’s suggestion. A presentation would be much more effective than another reproachful e-mail. But not a pinup, we needed a bit of performance art. We needed an installation. This called for something . . . spontaneous.

We discussed an idea. Spontaneous behavior authorized, Bill flew into action. Starting at the printer in question, he began to lay sheets of paper on the office floor one at a time like little white carpet tiles. The trail of paper three sheets wide stretched down our main corridor, past the reception desk around the corner to the kitchen, by the bathrooms and into the main conference room. 

We all got the point. The offending parties were served. Printer waste dropped dramatically.

But that’s just one of the many strange goings-on at Bergmeyer since we signed the AIA 2030 Commitment. It’s as if the whole firm has gotten itself behind the idea of reducing our environmental impacts. It’s almost like . . . we have seen the light!

Since that blog post about dumpster-diving, our Twitter feed has been off the hook about how to recycle almost anything. The road warriors are now into it as well. A recent intranet message made this astonishing claim: “more than two million partially used bars of soap are discarded at hotels every day!” The post linked to the Global Soap Project.   Another post began “whenever I stay in a hotel, I always think about all those half-used bottles of shampoo and conditioner that end up in landfills . . . “ and – boom – the warriors have rallied to save soap and shampoo containers from the housekeeping trash by salvaging the stuff.

And this breaking news from our Information Technology department: Bergmeyer’s new external website will be hosted by a company that’s entirely powered by wind energy.

Food for a lunch and learn was brought in the other day by an eco-friendly caterer. I complemented the sales guy doing the presentation, but he confessed. He was required by us to show up with recycled-content paper products. Our Human Resources department now promotes paperless forms. Our accounting department has stopped giving us paper pay statements. We even have yoga lessons twice a month. OK, maybe the AIA 2030 team can’t take credit for the yoga. But still.

So what does all this craziness have to do with architecture and climate change, you may ask? Does salvaging hotel soap reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

Wrong question. Think of it this way: It’s about change management. It’s about organizational transformation.  One of my sustainability gurus, Barbra Batshalom, wrote recently in her blog about Dr. John Kotter’s “8-Step Process for Leading Change”. This theory describes a holistic, systems-thinking approach to making good stuff happen in a corporate setting. Dr. Kotter’s step number five is “Empowering People and Removing Barriers”.  All the funny stories in this post are evidence that this kind of change has started to take hold at Bergmeyer. It can happen in your firm, too.

We architects know that none of us can make our profession carbon-neutral by ourselves. We need empowered, enlightened teams of people with crazy, contagious energy to make it happen. That’s what AIA 2030 fever does for you. When your whole firm gets it, the power – and the ideas – just flows.