IQ + EQ + Hope = The Water Trifecta
By: Stephanie Zavala, CEO and Co-founder of Rogue Water
Day Two. The Imagine H2O Innovation Forum — March 15, 2018.
I have to admit that after the gala and learning about the incredible water technologies around the room, Arianne and I were beginning to feel like incredibly tiny fish in an ocean of data, finance, and engineering. (IQ)
Paedocypris progenetica. The world’s smallest fish. Go ahead — Google it.
Undeterred — we were determined to find our place in this world of water innovation and technology.
Nobody puts baby in the corner.
Now, in San Francisco it may be normal to mingle with giants like Google, Facebook, and IDEO on the daily. Not so in Fort Worth, Texas — so I did geek out a little when we walked into a real life Google Community Space. You walk in and instantly feel like the coolest nerd ever. It’s a thing.
We sit down, front row of course — this is our rock show, the podium is the stage. When the opening act is George Hawkins, you know you’re in for one hell of a show. Before we know it, we’re catching up with the Hawk and getting to know Joone Lopez, general manager at Moulton Niguel Water District. This was our first time meeting Joone. She was a member of the upcoming panel titled Overcoming Barriers to Deployment.
“I believe, that we are at the day when the water technologies that are available in the marketplace will in fact change the game of water, drinking water, and enriched water services. — George S. Hawkins
So enters the Hawk.
If you’ve never heard a story about a main break, you need to hear one told by George Hawkins. You will feel like you were there. I’ve heard the “Snowpacalypse Main Break” story several times now, and I still find myself on the edge of my seat.
More importantly, and why George is so sought after as a speaker, is he excels at communicating the challenges of our industry in the most upbeat, hopeful manner. When you are speaking to a room full of water technology entrepreneurs, you can’t just drop a line like;
People in our industry are risk averse for the right reasons. In the water industry you have to be right the first time and every time — all day. If you’re wrong your reputation and public health can be harmed. — George Hawkins
You have to come with a possible solution. George reminded us that the reason we were all there was to learn how to encourage and pilot change within a system where we can’t be wrong — ever.
One way to tackle this challenge is through developing our EQ skills. The other side of the equation — the human side of the equation — is how we communicate and engage with the people we need on our team to truly drive change in the world.
Communication! We have arrived. Our little Paedocypris progenetica was growing up so fast.
You can’t swing a stick at a conference without hitting a panel session. They are usually hit or miss. We weren’t aware we’d signed up for the water industry’s rendition of a Grand Slam Tournament. With the four panelists, the bases were loaded, Tom pitched the questions, and each took a turn hitting them out of the park.
The title, as I mentioned before was, Overcoming Barriers to Deployment. The panel questions related to human capital, incentivizing innovation, funding, storytelling, and the role of ideas from outside the industry. The panelists were Joone Lopez, general manager of Moulton Niguel Water District; Catherine Ricou, senior vice president at Suez; Clifford Chan, director of operations and maintenance at East Bay Municipal Utility District; and David Neitz, chief information officer at CDM Smith. I’ve spent all day today going through my notes preparing for this blog. It would take another blog just to touch on the highlights from the panel.
Here are just a few that resonated with me.
Whether you call it leadership, or whatever you call it, change happens with people. That is the heart of innovation. — Joone Lopez
The fear of failure is a mindset that we, as leaders, create. We have to look at what we can do to create a failure friendly environment. It’s ok to fail — if you’re going to fail, fail cheap and fail fast. — Clifford Chan
You can’t say to utilities, well your neighbor is doing it, this is how they did it, now go. You have to tailor your approach and restart the process. — Catherine Ricou
Don’t create a to-do list. Create a stop-doing list. What should you not be doing because the most precious thing you have is time. What is taking time away from you that isn’t adding value? Value creation is what it’s all about at the end of the day. — David Neitz
The psychology and emotion behind what’s driving innovation often doesn’t get talked about but, to me, that’s really been the foundation of everything. — Joone Lopez
You have to trust in your staff to come up with the ideas. Some will be good, some will be bad, but the point is that they’ll be willing to change. The more change, the more comfortable people become with it. — Clifford Chan
Disruption cannot be measured by an ROI. It’s something we don’t know what the end result will be completely. Do small investments, see what works, and either kill it or invest more. Adjust and target to the right outcome. — David Neitz, on tackling the funding issue
If you’re a rock star, I’m not going to bind you to an org chart. You don’t have to wait until someone retires or dies to move up. Let’s blaze a path. — Joone Lopez, on using job development as an incentive to innovation.
Strive for diversity. Don’t just engage wtih people who look and think like you. If we don’t get involved in the community, we won’t be representative of the people we serve. — David Neitz, on the role of outside ideas.
I could go on for days ya’ll. Seriously, I have seven pages of notes. This conversation only brought us to 11 am!! We still had the rest of the day ahead of us. My brain hurts just thinking about it. #mindblown
As communicators, Joone’s message really resonated with us. Have any of you read the book Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull? Ed is the founder of Pixar Animation. The book is his amazing story of innovation, leadership, and creativity — in fact, it is a leadership book. It’s essentially a step by step guide on how to create a culture that fosters creativity and innovation. I read the book a couple years ago and I remember telling Arianne;
We need to (finger quotes) Pixar Mansfield Water Utilities!!
After the panel discussion, we told Joone about Creativity, Inc. We let her know that she has fundamentally (finger quotes) Pixar’d Moulton Niguel Water District. It felt sort of like stumbling upon empirical evidence that heaven does, in fact, exist. Tom Ferguson had invited us down the rabbit hole and all of our dreams were coming true.
After the panel we got a break to dab the sweat from our brows and to re-caffeinate before we jumped right back into back-to-back break out sessions. I’ll give you one guess which breakout session we went to.
Mary Ann Dickinson from Alliance for Water Efficiency walked us through some of the top myths of communication in the water sector including one of our favorites — if we can’t afford a Nike level marketing budget, we therefore can’t afford to do anything related to marketing and communication. Then George swooped in to break down the IQ/EQ equation.
IQ is the financial, technology, engineering side to innovation — all of which is very important. However, if you don’t hone in on your EQ side and practice it like an Olympic athlete or Broadway star you will lose your audience and fail. You first and foremost begin by listening. Listening is the canvas on which all over EQ elements reside. Listening teaches you the language you need to speak for your audience to hear you. It teaches you the body language and the stories that will resonate most with your team.
The EQ side — the manner in which we communicate, the degree to which we can touch people’s values and their lives — if they can feel and believe in the things we are doing, it’s amazing the degree at which that changes everything else. — George Hawkins.
Breakout sessions were followed by lunch that was followed by a showcase of the 2018 Accelerator companies. Everyone had the opportunity to round table with the companies during two, 25-minute Q&A sessions.
The afternoon ended with Jason Rissman, managing director for OpenIDEO — the open innovation arm of IDEO, the iconic design thinking company. Open innovation is similar to the idea of open source technology, a sort of crowd sourcing of ideas to solve real problems. Jason taught us to lead with questions like, “How might we….” but he warned against taking it home. The spouse may not appreciate, “how might we better load the dishwasher?”
He taught us that “yes, and” was a better catalyst for “meh” ideas than “yes, but”. Similar to how you sit on your butt, a but, can sit on an idea’s ability to evolve and potentially become better. A few other takeaways below:
Build diverse teams. Diversity drives divergent thinking.
Share your ideas to get feedback so you can improve. Inclusion and openness accelerate iteration.
The Hawk closed the forum with his own reflections on the day. I’ll end with those in a moment, in his own words. I just wanted to give context to the picture below. The forum was followed by a little impromptu after party — as every good event should. On a patio on the bay, waves lapping behind our backs, conversations ensued — about water, about changing the world, about bringing water’s sexy back, about robots, about sensors, about engineering, about communication. But above all, about doing it together. For all of my non water nerds, if you made it this far in this journey of a blog, I salute you. Most importantly, I hope you know that the future of water — the simple molecule responsible for the existence of civilization — is in good hands.
Add up those two things as I see today — the incredible IQ of the people in this room……..match it with the ability to communicate and grab the customers and the people we serve in a place close to their heart — that to me, and together, is how you spell hope. — George Hawkins
