Barriers to Innovation Rainwater Harvesting

Steve Moddemeyer

Introduction

Sheparding an innovation through a utility can be a challenge. As discussed below, a number of obstacles will be encountered and a number of strategies must be employed in order to be successful. These obstacles are not bad in and of themselves. They often represent rational and understandable resistance to making change – especially when the proposed innovation offers more uncertainty or risk.

While the specifics in this paper are based on experiences in Seattle, a number of the insights were informed by reading Clayton Christensen’s excellent business book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. His subsequent book, The Innovator’s Solution also offers excellent analyses of the structural obstacles that innovations encounter in the world of business.

Obstacles

Before new ideas get adopted, they must endure a gauntlet of obstacles and barriers.  Anticipating these obstacles may improve the chances that an innovation will be seriously considered.  Below are a dozen obstacles that are often encountered.

Obstacle 1: Time

Any new idea that doesn’t neatly fit into the current business practice takes more time.  And everyone operating and managing large urban infrastructure systems is busy - typically very busy doing what needs to be done to keep the pipes flowing and the services serving.  Who has time to work on something new – even if it is an exciting innovation?

Obstacle 2: Structure

Utilities and governments and most bureaucracies are not structured to support innovation.  Rather, they are organized to provide the services they currently provide.  If new services are proposed – who is designated to evaluate them?  Who has an official job description to do the research, test the concepts, and refine implementation strategies?  In most cases the answer is no one.  Also, many of these green techniques don’t neatly fit into the existing funding categories and rate bases that have been established.  In the United States, revenues from specific utility services are required to only be spent on that service.  These “enterprise funds” restrictions can stand in the way of new approaches.  For example, is rainwater harvesting system a storm water system or water supply system?  Who should pay: the private owner, the public, special interests?  Finally, it is said that middle management is where good ideas go to die.  The boss of bosses may like it, but for a middle manager, it is just another task on top of the existing tasks.  This means that new innovations become second priority.  They don’t fit, they take extra effort, and the normal work hasn’t gone away.  Something has got to give.  And it is the new alternative projects that get delayed, first a day, then a week.  Before we know it months have passed before an innovation is moved ahead or completely forgotten.

Obstacle 3: Priority

Busy managers, busy operators, busy elected officials must prioritize their time.  Budgets have priorities.  Is the new idea in the budget?  New ideas compete with real time priorities.  These new concepts can take away from real problems needing real time attention.

Obstacle 4: Not invented here

Sometimes new ideas are rejected for less than rational reasons.  We are, after all, merely human. Good ideas advocated by someone else may be rejected just because they come from someone outside the corporate family.  In this situation, time spent reviewing new ideas is oriented around why it won’t work as proposed, not on how to make it work or how to make it better.  That’s not to say that these new concepts are always right all the time - many new ideas should be sent back for further work or even abandonment. 

Obstacle 5: Conservatism of governments in general

Governments that endure tend to be governments that are stable.  In the United States, civil service rules protect workers from changes at the top.  A new elected leader may run the place, but every job is not handed off to political cronies.  This creates a very stable pyramid – where change comes slowly if at all.  Furthermore, the culture of government tends not to reward innovation or creativity so new ideas are often greeted with suspicion.

Obstacle 6: Conservatism of engineers in general

Engineering is an art and a science.  Engineers creatively solve complex problems for a living.  But they also place a stamp – their seal of approval – on their work.  With their stamp they provide guarantees that the project will function as designed.  The last thing anyone wants from an engineer is a design that doesn’t work.  Compare that to innovation of new alternative technology.  It is by definition new and therefore unproven in the local area.  Before an engineer suggests something new, there has to be compelling, reliable information and documentation of the alternative’s efficacy.  This places a great burden on innovations which often do not yet benefit from thorough research or documentation.

Obstacle 7: Inoculation

Fads come and go.  Many professionals have seen this time and time again. They have been “inoculated”.   Is this new alternative the real thing or just a fad?  It is hard to get too excited about another “brilliant” idea until it brilliantly proves itself.

Obstacle 8: Credibility of messenger

When confronted with new ideas and techniques, a professional will ask herself a number of questions.  Who is trying to talk me into this new idea?  Do I have a long and time-tested relationship of trust with this person?  Do their credentials match their proposal?  What do people I trust think about these concepts?

Obstacle 9: Discomfort with non-professionals

Some of the alternatives for decentralized approaches to rainwater involve citizens.  Regular people must participate for the program to work.  Professionals and engineers worry – what if everyone stops doing what they said they would do?  Capital spent on pumps and pipes is guaranteed to work.  But decentralized solutions that require participation by the public are suspect.  What assurances are there that we can safely down-size a facility if the public suddenly stops participating?  Will we find ourselves spending even more money than we had hoped to save if we make ourselves vulnerable to public participation?

Obstacle 10: Monopoly

Many utilities are monopolies.  They have a government franchise to provide the service and usually have no competitors. This can be an incentive for waste and a disincentive for experimentation.  Why experiment with something new?  And since many of these new green techniques don’t neatly fit into existing categories, why should the monopoly spend money for something that doesn’t quite fit?  And of course, since there is no competition, then who WILL look at alternatives?  Too often, no one will.

Obstacle 11: Vested interests

There is a lot of money in centralized sewer and water systems.  Large consulting firms make considerable sums designing and implementing these large systems.  What advantage do they have advocating for a system that they may not be able to design and build? 

Obstacle 12: Decision makers spread too thin

Senior executive and elected officials have huge responsibilities and must juggle multiple issues all the time.  They rarely have the time or the inclination to delve deeply into the substance of a matter.  They must rely on their senior staff and technicians for analysis and input.  New ideas often don’t make it to the top for consideration. 

Strategies for overcoming obstacles

The list of obstacles is daunting.  You could question someone’s wisdom in trying to bring forward new ideas through such a maze of countervailing forces.  Yet, innovations do get adopted.  Governments can change.  Utilities can start new lines of business.  Below is a list of 16 strategies for dealing with these obstacles.

Strategy 1: Hire great consultants and listen to them. 

In my experience there are some truly great consultants that are open to innovation, are aware of advances in other areas, and have the skill to help with the understanding and adoption of innovations. Other consultants may not be so open.  Find the ones who are.  And if you can afford it, hire them to work with you to directly address and quantify not only the concerns and risks presented by the innovation, but creative ways to adapt the innovation to address concerns.

Strategy 2: Honour your critics. 

The issues that critics focus on are gifts to make your innovation better. It is fundamental to listen to legitimate concerns and address them either by changing the proposal, or bringing expert analysis to bear to assuage the concern.  For example, it is common to run into a “devil’s advocate,” that is, someone who seems to always focus on the weaknesses of a proposal rather than on its potential.  This is a good time to pick up a pen or pencil and write down every objection and then systematically address each one.  This doesn’t mean solving each criticism.  Sometimes addressing it means just admitting that this is a risk that will need to be carefully watched.  Advocates can be more persuasive when they candidly admit not just the advantages, but  the shortcomings of the proposal as well.

Strategy 3: Identify sympathetic ears within organizations. 

Respected technical staff with an open mind and widespread credibility in the rank and file is the target here.  It can often be a good idea to meet one-on-one with this respected expert to test the idea and get feedback on it before any grand launch. These experts can add real value to a proposal and point to areas that need attention or must be addressed.

Strategy 4: Bring in outside experts and speakers. 

It is important to demonstrate that these ideas are being implemented elsewhere.  It is the rare administrator who prefers to be the first at anything!  They would much rather know that someone else has implemented the innovation.  This is a reasonable approach.  Outside experts and speakers can be tremendous messengers of change.  They typically have a broad perspective from their travels and studies.  This credibility that accompanies expertise can accelerate the consideration of alternative approaches.

Strategy 5: Borrow, rent, or steal staff from agencies that do good work. 

Governments, utilities and all types of human organizations seem to have a natural rhythm of growth or retreat.  The entities that are growing and innovating often have a pool of talented employees that have participated in developing the innovation and can be terrific problem solvers during implementation.  For example, Seattle Public Utilities was interested in developing a robust asset management approach for the city.  SPU had the foresight to borrow an executive from Hunter Water in New South Wales.  After six months this executive went home and another joined SPU for another six months.  Hunter Water and the staff were compensated by SPU.  Because these two envoys brought tremendous skill sets and expertise to bear in Seattle, their participation rapidly accelerated the adoption of asset management which has been proved to be a valuable service to Seattle ratepayers.

Strategy 6: Build modest demonstration projects with special funding that allows for experimentation. 

Ideas are good and can be compelling.  Beautiful drawings can create a mood.  But nothing beats an actual demonstration project to better understand an innovation.  Until one does a project, it is very difficult to anticipate or even understand the issues that one might face in implementing new approaches.  Demonstration projects give tangible proof that can be more easily understood by those new to the concept.

Strategy 7: Seek grants. 

Some foundations or special government programs are willing to supply grant money to build demonstrations of new emerging technologies with promise.  Securing approval for a grant is also useful to set a timeline for internal organizational commitment.  An advocate can truthfully say that there is a deadline that compels taking a position.

Strategy 8: Build a constituency! 

It is important to build a constituency for your innovation. For rainwater harvesting, several practitioners are doing it right.  Consider Professor Han Mooyoung of Seoul National University.  He has a clear mission.  He communicates with elected officials.  He has a blog.  He attracts and mentors college and graduate students.  He shares his knowledge freely with experts in other parts of the world.  He builds demonstration projects.  He offers information about the history of rainwater harvesting for elementary school children.  Professor Han hosts annual conferences and offers awards to new innovative projects.  Each of these activities is consistent with building a constituency.  The potential for success increases dramatically by ever widening the circle of people who are aware of the possibilities.

Strategy 9: Celebrate successes through ceremony, publication, publicity. 

As noted above, overcoming obstacles to innovation requires as much support as is possible.  Awards and ceremonies can generate good will and good news that benefits everyone.  Providing awards can stimulate competition. 

Strategy 10: Give it all away. 

Let others own the successes.  There is a saying, “You can accomplish much if you don't care who gets the credit.”

Strategy 11: Be persistent. 

Hold true to the essence, allow everything else to adapt.  For example, in Seattle we knew that we have a lot of rain and we knew that we had a shortage of water in our dry summer weather. We wanted to encourage rainwater harvesting at a residential level – but found that the amount of onsite storage that was needed for summer irrigation could not compete economically with our 100-year old mountain reservoir water supply system.  However, we kept at it.  In several areas of the city, the sanitary sewers are combined with the stormwater system, and during large storm events cause millions of gallons of overflows into our lakes, rivers, and shorelines.  By understanding the estimated costs to control that runoff, we were able to make a compelling economic case that decentralized rainwater harvesting could not only provide some irrigation needs in the summer, but help control peak flows in the combined sewers in the winter.  This was accomplished by placing a drainage orifice at the bottom of the cistern to slowly drain the rooftop water collected from a winter storm back into the sewer system – after the peak flows had already passed through the system. And because the storm season does not overlap with the irrigation season in our climate, we were able to close this orifice in April and refill the cisterns about five times a year on average for use as irrigation.  Because of the predicted cost-savings from combined sewer overflow control, the rainwater harvesting system may be provided with a hefty subsidy to willing property owners.  The system is still being tested and monitored. 

Strategy 12: Marketing matters!

There is tremendous competition for the attention of consumers.  Advertising covers packages, wall, and buses.  It is on the radio, on the television, in the movies, and in the stores.  With such a massive ongoing dose of messages trying to attract our attention, it is extremely important to be able to compete with our environmentally responsible messages.  We want people to understand the benefits to themselves, the city, and the environment that can come from thoughtful rainwater harvesting. To compete, we need to be as focused and professional as the private sector marketers.  These professionals use surveys, demographics, and focus groups.  They develop a media strategy where they identify the audience they want to reach, what they want that audience to know, believe, and do. During focus groups carefully selected to reflect the target audience, marketers test ways of talking about the innovation. These techniques can be very powerful because they are attuned to the audience.
Government, on the other hand, too often supposes that a new regulation and a new brochure are all that’s needed to inform the public.  But tell me, when was the last time Coca Cola handed out brochures?  Maybe they do.  But you can bet that if they did, it was integrated in a much larger media strategy that was tested before it was launched. 

For rainwater harvesting to be widely adopted, marketing expertise must be applied to make a space in people’s busy lives. An excellent resource is the book Social Marketing, by Philip Kotler, Ned Roberto, and Nancy R. Lee.  

Strategy 13: Don’t raise new money, use existing flows of capital. 

A lot of money is spent every year throughout a city to maintain and improve the infrastructure of the city.  Note Figure 1.2 below that maps six years of planned capital investment in Seattle from about a half a dozen agencies.  This money is typically spent for a single purpose specific to the agency that spends it.  But an astute approach to implementing innovation is to find ways to provide the same or better levels of service for a similar cost.  This requires sophisticated economic analysis with use of techniques such as net present value, various discount rates, and a “triple-bottom line” approach to quantify the economic value of some ecosystem services provided by the innovation.

Strategy 14: Recognize that a partial solution may be the complete solution.

 This is a key concept.  Don’t assume that the new way must totally replace the old way. Television didn’t kill radio.  Computers didn’t kill television.  Many times the innovations such as rainwater harvesting or other techniques, such as sewer heat recovery, will only provide a portion of the service that is needed.  But if that portion is significantly less expensive, or provides significantly superior integrated services (for example, not just water supply, but flood control, too), then it may be well worth the investment.

Strategy 15: Monitor demonstration projects- have a hypothesis and test it. 

There is a technique used in ecological restoration call adaptive management.  This is an approach to ecosystem restoration that realizes that it is nearly impossible to predict with precision the outcome of interventions into complex ecosystem processes.  So, using the scientific method, biologists develop a hypothesis, test that hypothesis, monitor the results, and then adapt their intervention based on the results of the tests.  Public policy – and indeed, rainwater harvesting can also be stated as a hypothesis.  The hypothesis is that capturing rain and using it on site can provide multiple benefits that when considered together, will outweigh the costs.  The “test” is a demonstration project and the results are monitored.  Once the information is available, then it is time to develop a new refined hypothesis to continue to improve the approach.  This simple approach provides a lot of rigor and can be very persuasive for those considering the innovation.

Strategy 16: Use triple bottom line.

Does your project make sense for the community, for the environment, for the local economy?  This is tried and true sustainability strategy – to recognize the whole of process and to look for integrated approaches that provide benefits across the spectrum of human needs.

Conclusion

Water is a wonderful thing.  It decorates our skies with clouds.  It fills our low places and makes them beautiful.  It nurtures life and quenches our thirst.  It seeks any path to be one again with the great oceans that make our planet such a blue pearl in the vast expanse of space. To be an innovator is to be like water – we must seek any path under, around, or over obstacles – and we must seek the low places that need our attention.  If we are persistent, then perhaps at the end of the day we can reflect on the beauty of our work and know that, like water, our innovations are designed to support life

References

Christensen, C. (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma. HarperCollins Publishers Inc. New York, NY. USA
Christensen, C. Raynor, M. (2003) The Innovator’s Solution. Harvard Business School Publishing. Boston, MA. USA
Kotler, P. Roberto, N, Lee, N. (2002) Social Marketing: Improving the Quality of Life. Second Edition, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA. USA.