The Living Grid story so far: what we’ve learned and what’s next

It’s been a privilege to set-up the Living Grid over the past two-and-a-half years. With a progressive design and theory of change for the project now established — and with the momentum of a growing community of interest around it — the time has come for me to hand over to colleagues at Forum for the Future to scale up its impact in the next phase.

It’s been a journey of ups and downs to develop the Living Grid in its present form. I thought I’d share a few things I’ve learned that I’ll be taking with me on my next adventures in systems change — and I don’t just mean metaphorically either as I’ll be working and travelling overseas for the next few months (hurray!). I hope they’ll be helpful for those of you who, like me, love problem-solving in situations where there’s no blueprint to follow.

In case you’re wondering, the Living Grid is a community of pioneering people and organisations who are transforming the dynamics of our energy network by changing how they participate in it; shifting their role from being passive users to active players in an ecosystem.

Plus, I can’t possibly move-on withut saying a huge THANKS to everyone who’s given their time, support and creativity to nurture the beginnings of the Living Grid! A special thanks to @heidihauf for injecting her mojo, pragmatism and incisive thinking to take it through its latest metamorphosis, to @gilesbristow and @jonathonporritt for being the project’s champions and to our visionary partners — @SmartestEnergy and @openenergi — without whose funding the Living Grid wouldn’t exist and who’re reinventing corporate sponsorship to give it a chance to grow.

A big shout out to @AnnasQuestions for introducing us to a ‘living systems perspective’ and also to communications aces @joaniekoh, @launshae @GHardingRolls @ZahraDavidson @_annasimpson and @KinAndCoTweets who’ve brought beauty and substance to the Living Grid message and brand.

I’ve been driving the Living Grid on behalf of Forum since its inception: first as Head of Innovation and, over the last six months, as Freelance Affiliate. Thanks to Forum’s experiments in new forms of collaboration for systems change, I’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to pursue my passion for the Living Grid beyond the usual ‘cut off’ at the end of my employment contract. I’ve continued to represent Forum as my role has transitioned out of the organisation and, working in this radical way, we’ve laid the roots of this ground-breaking initiative: all hail the future of work!

Three pivots we made to evolve the design of the Living Grid

When the team started out in 2015, we knew the Living Grid (originally the Virtual Power Plant) would evolve as we learned more about the systemic challenge we were tackling and about what an effective response consisted of, but we didn’t expect three pivots in two-and-a-half-years! In retrospect, all this pivoting shouldn’t have been a surprise. According to the fab RSA report From Design Thinking to Systems Thinking, the Living Grid is a Type III situation that requires adaptive ways of working because the problem and the solution are unclear so both require learning to understand and resolve.

We hear a lot about businesses pivoting to survive and succeed, but it’s not a word we typically use to describe impact initiatives. Twitter started out as a network for finding and subscribing to podcasts until iTunes started taking over the podcast niche and it was forced to morph into the personal, micro-blogging platform we have now. Wrigley chewing gum started out as a freebie that Mr Wrigley gave away to boost sales of soap and baking powder, until he realised it was more popular than his actual product.

In a similar vein, the Living Grid started out as the ‘Virtual Power Plant’: a project to show that demand-side management can reduce our reliance on fossil fuel generators by proving it can perform the balancing function of standby power plant. At the end of 2015, we hit the limits of this concept and expression of our goals so we reinvented the project as the ‘Living Grid’. We loved the ambition of creating a virtual power plant, but it limited us to reproducing old ways of balancing the grid and, anyway, why were we aiming reduce our reliance on fossil-fuels when we could be enabling the evolution of our energy mix? Oh, and only energy experts ‘got’ what it was.

This first pivot was the easiest to navigate. We knew exactly why we wanted to change tack and what direction to move in. Our goal was to showcase an energy network of symbiotic relationships in which demand was controlled — not just predicted and met — and in which the supply and demand for energy stayed in balance through lots of communication and interaction in real-time. A packed event with biomimicry expert and architect, Michael Pawlyn, confirmed that the concept of an ‘energy network inspired by nature’ ignited people’s imaginations and got them thinking about about energy in a systemic way. On this basis, we launched the first phase of the Living Grid in April 2016 with partners Open Energi, Aggregate Industries, Sainsbury’s, Tarmac and United Utilities.

A summary of how all three pivots shaped the trajectory of the Living Grid is in Fig. 2 below. By ‘pivoting’ I mean a moment of reorientation when your understanding of your goals, and what it will take to meet them, shift to a more mature form in response to feedback and learning. At each pivot to develop the Living Grid we: (1) refined our understanding of the challenge we were tackling, (2) upgraded our theory of how the project could respond effectively to it and (3) adjusted the project’s objectives, scope, activities, relationships and so on, to reflect these these new understandings.

The second pivot — in March 2017 — was the most difficult. We knew we needed to reorientate the project again, but we couldn’t consolidate a more advanced version of the project without a new funder. Was it time to draw a halt to the Living Grid? If not, how we could we marshal the resources to open a new phase of development? Here’s why the project had to change:

• Our understanding of the role demand-side management could play in driving the energy transition had altered

Since launching the Living Grid a year ago, conversations had moved-on from the lack of uptake of demand-side technologies, to their disjoined roll-out across the network and the limiting effect it was having on opportunities for transformation. The low carbon energy mix that’s viable is determined by the management capabilities of the network, but they’re being approached in a disconnected way. The decision to build Hinkley Point C nuclear plant was a case in point. Our static network isn’t responsive enough to handle intermittent supplies of energy so — rather than build more renewable energy generation — we were going nuclear to provide a constant flow of power. If energy demand could flex up and down in sync with ebbs and flows in supply, that constant flow wouldn’t be necessary: more flexible patterns of demand would mean the network wouldn’t be threatened by variability because it would be able to stay stable in the midst of it. Yet, digital service providers told us the design of energy markets was holding back the development of demand-side flexiblity.

To unlock the full potential of renewable energy, it seemed debates about improving the network and our energy mix needed to be better integrated. Our new hypothesis was that demand-side management could only drive the energy transition as part of a whole system approach to decarbonisation.

• Demand-side management was changing and, unless the design of Living Grid changed too, it would cease to add value

When we’d launched the Living Grid the previous year, intelligent demand-side management was little-understood. The Living Grid had played a part in raising the profile of demand-side management and, since then, it had become a more familiar aspect of energy management. Lots of organisations were now offering technical advice to corporates to help them sort out which demand-side technologies and applications were best for them, and the National Grid’s Power Responsive Campaign was drawing together case studies to encourage market participation, as the Living Grid had done.

Now, as we pitched the Living Grid to potential partners, we redefined its goals. We wanted to catalyse a more integrated approach the roll-out of digital technologies in order to make the capabilities, design, behaviour and interactions of the entire network compatible with a renewable energy mix. We argued that a fast, efficient energy transition meant evolving the system as a coherent, low carbon whole and that digital technologies could enable this by making new relationships and dynamics possible in the network. We said the best precedent for the decentralised, decarbonised, interactive and democratic future energy system we’re all talking about already exists in the living systems we’re part of — so that’s where we can learn how to transform our network. This article by Michael Pawlyn starts to draw-out insights from bees and termites to help rethink the design and behaviour of our network.

We set about finding a new partner that shared our interest in the role of digital technologies in driving whole system change in energy. It was the summer of 2016 and Forum’s fundraising efforts with trusts and foundations were concentrated on launching the (brilliant) School of System Change and developing our global operations. Who else would be keen to fund research to challenge accepted ways of thinking about energy? We talked to research institutions, philanthropic arms of organisations in energy and those invested in the future of renewables, but we couldn’t find enough alignment to move forward together. What we needed was a collaborator who could push the boundaries of sponsorship and purposeful brand communications to explore and act on our diagnosis with the #livinggrid community. Luckily, SmartestEnergy stepped-in.

Step-in SmartestEnergy and a revolutionary new approach to sustainability communications

To make it possible for us to showcase relationships between issues in the energy system, rather than treating issues in isolation, we invited Living Grid partners to go beyond the usual approach to sustainability communications. A good, impact-driven communications initiative hinges on a tangible story of environmental and social impact that matches the attributes — and drives the purpose — of a brand or business. For commercial reasons, the brand or business in question is usually the sole architect or ‘owner’ of a story that’s unique to them. But this wouldn’t work for the Living Grid, so we asked:

Instead of being the master storyteller, could they convene and support a journey of learning and discovery amongst a community, to curate a shared story? Could they be the steward of that story; allowing it to emerge over time by picking up the baton of support from Open Energi and passing it to others? Rather than advocating for particular technologies, could they align their communications with a bigger picture story of how digital technologies can interact together to transform the dynamics of our network? Could they collaborate to open up new markets and ways of organising that wouldn’t be possible using same thinking that created our fossil-fuel grid network?

This is the progressive basis SmartestEnergy joined the Living Grid and it made the third pivot the most fun! Through a global, digital conversation, we identified five shifts to begin a new story of energy and realised the energy transition was as much about people — and life — as technology. Homes and organisations have always been integral to how the network functions it’s just that, until recently, we had no choice other than to play a passive, isolated role because we couldn’t communicate with the network or one another in real time. Today, we can play diverse and active roles in the network that could help to transform it, but we aren’t exercising our agency. We’re too used to the idea of ourselves as powerless, passive users of energy and too used to thinking about the energy transition as happening ‘to us’ and ‘for us’ by industry and institutions, rather than ‘with us’.

The Living Grid began by talking about transforming a mechanical energy network that’s separate from our lives — as this radio interview shows — but we now see this very idea as something that needs to change: part of the cultural fabric of our static, fossil-fuel-powered network. That’s why the Living Grid is now focused on challenging the ‘passive consumer’ mindset that dominates the static dynamics of the network we have now. We’re encouraging people and organisations to embrace more responsive, cooperative ways of managing their energy supply and use and to participate creatively in the evolution of the network.

We’re inviting corporate energy users to ‘come to life’ in the network so that it behaves as a dynamic, living system — and to see this as a vital part of climate leadership. Can a central mastermind craft a perfect evolutionary process for our network that anticipates and adjusts to all eventualities? As our energy network gets more complex, its ability to adapt and change is becoming more important. By inviting organisations to ‘come alive’ in the energy network, we’re not only inviting them to participate in cycling energy as part of a distributed system, we’re inviting them to actively help shape the options available to us — rather than simply choosing from what’s on offer.

Again, we’re taking inspiration from living systems. What makes a living network ‘alive’ is its ability to self-generate: each component of the network helps to transform and replace other components and so the entire network continually creates, or recreates, itself. The Living Grid Explorer has more.

Three things I’ve learned that won’t leave home without on my next adventure

When you’re designing initiatives that respond to complex challenges, you know that both your understanding of the challenge and the nature of that challenge will alter, over time. Thanks to the rapid pace of change in demand-side management and digital technologies, the Living Grid team has been on a steep learning curve in this department! The key question is how to navigate these shifts pragmatically; avoiding unhelpful ‘scope drift’ and managing relationships, risks, resources and so on. Here are three things I’ll do next time to pivot in a more efficient and transparent way:

1. Keep an eye on what kind of project it is (it may change): the Living Grid started off as a fairly straight-forward initiative to increase the uptake of smart, demand-side technologies and evolved to be a learning, community-orientated project. If we’d taken stock of these changes in the nature of the project, it would have helped us to innovate to meet needs. For instance, if we’d twigged that collaborative learning was becoming a core value and path to impact sooner, it might have speeded progress.
2. Develop and evolve an architecture for learning: investing time in delivering a structured, disciplined learning approach can seem frivolous on a tight budget, but I’ve (re)learned that it’s vital. A ‘family tree’ of interrelated questions that we were seeking to answer would have helped the project team show our intentions, share our discoveries, invite critique and be more accountable for the decisions we were making to pivot the project — at times when it was in flux.
3. Use your learning architecture to engage others in decision-making: part of the art of innovation is knowing when to stop and how to exit an experiment ‘well’. Forum paused development of the Living Grid in early 2017 because — despite its promise — it was stuck. As it turned out, the outlook for the project changed not long afterwards. I wonder if we could have handled that decision better. At the time, the absence of a forward funder was clear, while the direction for the project was opaque. A well-developed learning architecture could have offered colleagues an effective window into the subject matter of the Living Grid, and an opportunity to make a nuanced decision about if and how to proceed.

What the Living Grid has taught us about systems change in energy

If I had to sum up what we’ve learned on the journey so far, it’s this:

• the key to using digital technologies to affect whole system change lies in using them to do fundamentally better things rather than repeat the past;
• this will happen more quickly and efficiently — and is more likely to add up in the interests of bill-payers’ and citizens’ interests — if we actively and consciously participate in the process of evolving our network;
• so what’s now most critical for driving the energy transition is social and cultural innovation, alongside technological innovation;
• a new mindset is emerging amongst the community of corporate energy users, technology providers and others who’ve been part of the Living Grid that could help to drive this;
• and a new wave of sustainability communicators is creating the space for social and cultural change in energy by convening a community and by enabling a conversation about energy that’s much-needed and doesn’t seem institutionally possible: qualitative, systemic and empowering.

I’m excited to see how a community of organisations ‘coming to life’ in our energy network might affect its evolution and not only this: the idea of humanity embedding ourselves consciously as part of living systems has awakened something in me. I’d love to chat if this strikes a chord in you too.