Watershed Event
Thinking About Working in Groups
It’s a wild and audacious idea, really.
Take 32 Californians who work on water issues. Put them all up in a hotel for two weeks at government expense. During the days, keep them busy with lectures and team-building exercises. Divide them into four teams of eight and tell them that, during the evenings, each team will prepare a management plan for a local watershed.For what?
To change the way they go about doing their jobs. To show them a different way to manage conflict. To train them in better methods for bringing together divergent interests.
What stuns me about this—what makes it seem so out of time—is to see the government pursue a goal by investing in people. I knew governments used to do that, once upon a time, but not since say, about 1980.
In particular, the government used to invest in smart, creative people who were driven to serve their communities. That the government would do that now, in these times, seems quaint. It harkens back to Progressivism and the Wisconsin Idea and FDR’s Brain Trust and JFK’s Camelot.
Nonetheless. There we were, a mix of state agency bureaucrats and NGO staff and local community activists along with a few scientific types, in the strange and wonderful Mission Inn hotel in the surprising old City of Riverside.
Perhaps these environs—the hotel is like living inside someone’s fantasy—helped us all suspend disbelief. In my own group, we all pitched in and, in a few evenings, produced a 50-page watershed management plan with, I think, a lot of good ideas. We had so much fun doing it that we’re all missing each other now, a little over a week later.
The 10-day seminar ended on a warm Friday afternoon. I drove north through heavy traffic, up over Cajon Pass and into the Mojave Desert, passing intense, sprawling development in Victorville, then skirting the town of Mojave and, as darkness fell, rolling down from Tehachapi into Bakersfield. All the way I was talking to myself, trying out ideas aloud, unable to type or scribble or even gesticulate freely and keep my hands on the wheel.
There’s no good time to leave a small business untended. I seem to have particularly bad timing. I’ve lost a major contract or maybe two just that way, by being out of town at the wrong time.
That Friday, I had only three days left to prepare the first of two all-day workshops on stormwater treatment and flow-control facilities for new development projects in Contra Costa County. I had some of the pieces—I could update last years’ presentations—but the main attraction was supposed to be a new, computer-based calculator for sizing the facilities. And that wasn’t ready, yet.
And I was feeling exhausted. I’d been on the phone or email with the other consultants—in Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco—at nearly every break and lunchtime during the seminar. I’d been exchanging emails in the wee hours, even after our group finished its nightly work on the watershed plan.
I worked through that weekend, preparing slides for two presentations I’d be giving and one for the client.
Monday, we got back to working on that computer-based calculator.
Every time the software engineer in Boston fixed a bug, another cropped up. The afternoon went by, and then we were into the evening. We were out of time.
About 1 am I sent an email:
It occurs to me we have the (unsatisfactory) option of bailing on the sizing tool tomorrow and just using the sizing factors.
It would also be good for our demonstration if we could show or use the formulae for adjusting the sizing factors for MAP [mean annual precipitation]. Tony may have.
Actually, the option wasn’t so unsatisfactory—it was a good idea. The sizing tool, or calculator, is really just a handy shortcut. It’s supposed to facilitate accurate calculations and an iterative, interactive design process. You could do everything just as well, but more slowly, by hand. There were even some advantages to doing it that way: you got to understand the calculations better.
But by the time I was figuring this out it was too late to rewrite the exercises in time for the next day’s workshop.
Tuesday, the workshop didn’t go so well. I mean, my presentations were passable. But some of my colleagues’ presentations were lifeless and too technical for this group of 100 or so municipal and land-development planners and engineers.
The exercises with the computer-based calculator were chaotic and disorganized. We had groups at each of 12 tables, each with one laptop computer, and the groups were getting contradictory instructions from different members of our consultant team. And the calculator kept crashing.
Afterwards, our consultant team convoyed over to a local bar. I sipped a martini and thought about what to do.
The lessons of the Watershed Partnership Seminar were coming home to me now.
Our consultant team didn’t have a shared vision of success and a common commitment to success. Each of us was doing just our own little piece and was expecting someone else to create the whole. That approach came up short. In addition, we didn’t access the best ideas within the group. There was a relatively simple solution to our biggest problem—but it didn’t get aired in time for anyone to act on it.
I thought about where to go from here.
Actually, I didn’t need to think about it, because around that little table—I have the results scribbled on a bar napkin—things finally started to gel. We agreed on some pretty big changes for the repeat workshop on Thursday. We moved the last presentation to be first, agreed how to rewrite the more technical stuff, and to have handouts with step-by-step instructions for doing manual calculations to size the facilities.
I slept late on Wednesday—I was beginning to catch up on sleep, for the first time, from the intense two weeks in Riverside. But I still had time that afternoon to do what I needed to do. Our team was exchanging emails late that evening, but this time we wrapped up all preparations around midnight.
Thursday’s workshop went much better. I have the participants’ evaluation forms to prove it.
Now I want to take these lessons a step farther: I want to get our municipal staff work group, the staff of the stormwater program, and our consultant team working together on how to get these stormwater treatment and flow control facilities actually implemented on development projects throughout Contra Costa County. I’m realizing the problem’s too big to be addressed with policy documents and presentations, however well-honed they might be. Somehow we’ve got to access the ideas and energy out there—behind the planning counters in each municipality, in the cubicles of engineering firms in office parks throughout the County, and among residents and environmental advocates—to help us get over the hump.