An Element that changed the world

I have just finished John Browne's new book, 'Seven Elements that Changed the World". It was the last section, on silicon that really struck me. That humble element has changed the world in four different technological areas; three of which are still having a profound impact today.

Firstly there is glass, whether it is the highly decorative ornamental glass from Murano in Venice or a common window we tend to take it as a given. However, it was only in 1845 that the window tax was abolished in the UK and the use of glass started to transform our built environment. This was given a kick start by the Great Exhibition and its Crystal Palace which contained 300,000 panes of glass. Glass hasn't just changed our homes and cities, it also changed our view of the whole universe when Galileo looked through his telescope and realised that the Earth wasn't at the centre of the Universe. 

Secondly, we have the use of silicon in photovoltaic cells to produce electricity. The scientific breakthrough came from Chaplin, Pearson and Fuller working at Bell Labs in the mid 1950s. As Browne puts it, this discovery was so important because " in one year, more energy reaches the earth's surface from the Sun than will ever be extracted from all the sources of coal, oil, natural gas and uranium. In one day, the earth's surface receives 130,000 times the total world demand for electricity" Whilst in the UK solar is still only a niche product it is revolutionising the lives of people in sub Saharan Africa who don't have access to mains electricity.

If that wasn't enough then silicon forms the base material of the integrated circuits that are at the heart of all modern computing, including the iPad I am typing this entry on. The forerunner, the transistor, another product of Bell labs, won for its creators Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain a Nobel prize and after a period of development up until the mid 1960s "the exponential rate of increase in computing power and the consequential reduction in the cost of that power has been going on ever since." As a result, Browne points out, the typical smartphone contains more computing power than at the whole of NASA when men landed on the moon.

Silicon is transforming one last part of our lives; communication. The use of fibre optic cables is the backbone of the internet which connects more of us everyday to more and more data and information. I can be half way round the world and download vast reams of Board papers in seconds. At times this doesn't feel like progress! But when you stop and think of the revolution in communications we have seen in our lifetime it is incredible.

If the 18th to century were the Carbon age then the 21st century certainly feels like the silicon century.

The Missing Chapters

I have just finished a book that should be required reading for all Government Ministers: "The Blunders of our Government" by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. They describe the differences between mistakes, errors of judgement and blunders and arrive at the following definition of the latter; "an episode in which a government adopts a specific course of action in order to achieve one or more objectives and, as a result largely or wholly of its own mistakes, either fails completely to achieve those objectives, or does achieve some or all of them but contrives at the same time to cause a significant amount of 'collateral damage' in the form of unintended and undesired consequences".  

They then go on to analyse an impressively frightening list of blunders of the last thirty years; the poll tax, personal pensions, the child support agency, the ERM, the Millenium Dome, individual learning accounts, tax credits, the asset recovery agency, payments to English farmers, IT procurement (particularly the NHS debacle), the London Underground PPP and ID cards. The second half of the book then describes the author's views of the reasons behind these blunders dividing them in to human factors such as cultural disconnection, group think and prejudice and then system failures. The following quote sums up this second group of factors "the weakness, despite appearances, of Number 10 [Downing Street], the speed at which ministers are moved from post to post, the pressure on ministers-and ministers own desire- to be constantly active, the lack of effective individual accountability in the system, parliament's near irrelevance and the absence in Whitehall of sufficient quantities of relevant and essential skills. But there is another feature of the British system- or rather a non-feature- that is worth noting. There is at the heart of the British system a deficit of deliberation."

I have to say that my experience of dealing with Governments over the last decade or so is totally in accord with the analysis and conclusions of the book. Here is just one illustration; in my nearly eleven years as an energy company CEO I dealt with nearly eleven Ministers of State for Energy (nearly as the last one was shared with the Business Department). In fact my only negative reaction to the whole book is that two chapters are missing; one on the two energy efficiency schemes, the Green Deal  ECO and one on the whole electricity market reform process. I am sure they will be in the second edition!

The age of big data and collaboration.

I was sent an interesting article by Ron Kasabian about big data. He talks about the stages in typical technology developments where, after a 'peak of inflated expectations', we usually enter something called the 'trough of disillusionment'. He argues that, as far as  big data is concerned, "there is fact substance behind the hype". I would agree. The amount of data that is available is growing every day and we are finding increasingly creative uses of it to change our perceptions of how things can or should be done. Kasabian offers four useful tips to avoid disappointment.

1. Think even bigger. He argues that the more data sources you have the better and that increasing the data by a factor of ten is the answer. I suspect he is right, the key is to think bigger rather than smaller. 

2. Find relevant data for the business. The key is to know what data will make the biggest business or societal impact.

3. Be Flexible. As he says "we are in a phase of rapid innovation" and, as in any field of endeavour, that requires pilots, trials, rapid learning and multiple iterations.

4. Connect the dots. I believe that a real prize in the big data revolution will come from exactly this. It will be about combining data from different sources and different organisations to give insight that would elude the individual silos where that information currently resides. This points to increasing cooperation between organisations in both the the public and private sectors. 

We are entering the age of big data but also the age of collaboration and together these two themes can offer us a path to more sustainable economic development. 

C-: Could do Better

The road to true sustainable development really depends on two things; what we build (the engineering challenge) and how we behave. It is this second one that many of us struggle with. Last week the Scottish Government published its report on the ten key behavioural areas that should be addressed. There is a wealth of data in the report and it can be accessed through this link.  http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2013/10/3267. The behaviours cover four topics, energy, transport, food and waste. A few of the statistics I picked out were:

- 47% of people in Scotland monitor or, in simply keep an eye on their home energy use which means that over half of us don't.

- only 66% of homes with cavity walls have actually insulated them and only 45% of lofts have adequate insulation in them. 

- less than a quarter of Scots turn off heating on unused rooms.

- 57% never turn the TV fully off overnight. 

- around 30% either walk, cycle or use public transport to get to work. That proportion has stayed pretty constant at that level over the years. 

These society level statistics are all very interesting but what really matters is what we do as individuals. So I decided to do a little thought experiment. I scored my personal performance on each of the ten behaviours out of ten giving me a theoretical maximum of 100. I scored 48. What was interesting was that on a few areas I scored well, we do, for example, keep our thermostat low, but on other areas I was hopeless. I scored myself 0 out of 10 on healthy eating, my love of curry and chips beats apples and carrots I'm afraid. I don't do well about dependence on the car but I have significantly improved my MPG by both car choice and less speed. 

I shared this with a group of leaders in the Scottish public sector and two things emerged. Firstly, we all recognise that we aren't perfect and our individual performance is mixed. Secondly, what counts is gradual and incremental improvement. So my challenge is to get 48 up to, say 60 in the next year. If we aim for perfection we might as well give up but we can all aim to get better.

Risky business

Having read the raw material from the UN's IPCC 5th assessment report I also had a look at some of the comments that various people have been made following its publication. Generally, the majority of the comments were supportive.  A good example would be the Scotsman's editorial which in a lengthy and thoughtful piece said "Even if not totally convinced by the scientific evidence, surely the prudent course of action for us all is to act to counter global warming because it is just to big a gamble. Living on our planet in a sustainable way is the only path that makes any sense." On a similar theme I also liked this one from Professor John Shepherd of Southampton University. He said "Uncertainty is a reason to be cautious, but not a reason to do nothing. On the contrary, uncertainty is a reason for taking action to avoid possible serious risks."

Taking a business perspective has always led me to the same conclusion. The risks of doing nothing are just too high because both the evidence that climate change will continue is strong and because the consequences of that change are so serious. If you were plotting a heat map of global risks then climate change has to be near the top right corner given its likelihood and impact. Boards rightly focus on these top right risks and so should Governments.

Simple science sound bites

At the end of last week the UN's IPCC fifth assessment report on climate change started to see the light of day with the publication of the Summary for policy makers. During an idle hour or two I decided to try and read it. I'm afraid I struggled with some of the science. One issue that strikes you, however, is that even the scientists have struggled to get across the concepts of levels of certainty and uncertainty. I guess events around the War in Iraq and then the debates around the Syrian crisis have shown us all that we need to better understand the basis on which claims are made.

This means that each statement is accompanied by caveats around the degree of certainty. Here are some examples.

1. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal". This is about the most definitive statement in the whole report.

2. "Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850". This statement has 'medium confidence" attached to it.

3. A bit later the report states, this time with high confidence that "Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost world wide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent". 

The report then goes on to look at some of the 'whys'. It says "human influence on the climate system is clear" and that "human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes". This seems a pretty long charge sheet and the IPCC say that the evidence has increased since their last report. The key sentence is therefore "IT IS EXTREMELY LIKELY THAT HUMAN INFLUENCE HAS BEEN THE DOMINANT CAUSE OF THE OBSERVED WARMING SINCE THE MID 20th CENTURY". I understand that in the last report a few years ago it was just 'highly likely' so extremely is an attempt to show an increase in confidence.

That seems pretty clear to me. The report then tackles forecasts and as with any forecast the range of uncertainty is obviously much greater than that around explaining past behaviour. I decided to focus on the global mean temperature forecasts, over the last 120 years or so it has gone up around 0.6 degrees. The report details four scenarios for the next 60 years and they all have ranges of temperature increases as follows:

Scenario 2.6.    0.4 to 1.6

Scenario 4.5.    0.9 to 2.0

Scenario 6.0.    0.8 to 1.8 

Scenario 8.5.    1.4 to 2.6

By my reckoning even the lowest estimate of the lowest range shows warming quicker than we have experienced in modern times  (my maths says about about 30% quicker) and a sort of completely unscientific range in the middle of the four scenarios would suggest it could be around three to four times faster. Given the changes in the various ecosystems we have already seen that ranges from the extremely worrying to the postively frightening. 

And finally one more quote which neatly summarises what has to be done. "Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. ". My sentiments entirely although I would add one more S. Soon.