On Tuesday, March 30^th, a standing room only crowd packed the meeting room at the Howes House.  At stake:  seven new LEED platinum houses at Eliakim’s Way off State Road in West Tisbury. There was a mix of nervous applicants, expectant children, public officials, and housing advocates.

In the front of the room David Vigneault and Terri Keech of the Dukes County Regional Housing Authority,  lottery administrators, explained the process.  A complex matrix of preferences and qualifications was so arcane nobody could actually understand it.  The crowd chuckled when David finished his explanation and said, “Is that all clear?”

But everyone understood the real meaning.  Qualified applicants would drop their tickets into a slot in a gaily painted cardboard house, and public officials would draw them out one by one to determine whose future would change in a heartbeat.  A large easel in front of the room showed, for each house, the qualified applicants.  After each drawing Terri, decked out in a leopard skin hat, would flip the sheet with a flourish to reveal the next house and its applicants.

Philippe and Maddie Ezanno, and their 11-year-old daughter Juniper, embraced as their name was drawn.  Future on Martha’s Vineyard:  assured.  George Drew and Krissy Kinsman sat eagerly in the front row.  Their name was drawn.  They were silent, sat back, and breathed deeply before collapsing into each other’s arms.  Future on Martha’s Vineyard: assured.

It was all done in a half hour.   Lives had changed.  Others hadn’t.  Some slipped out, disconsolate, wondering when the next one would be.  As the glow wore off, others remained.  They realized they would soon be neighbors.  They hugged and congratulated each other.

This is the fourth time I have witnessed one of these lotteries.  They’re bittersweet – I’ve seen plenty of tears of both happiness and sadness.  The sad ones – they’re the reason we do it.  Again and again, despite the trials and tribulations, which are ample. And also because we may be able to look back sometime soon – perhaps in 5 years, perhaps in 10, perhaps in 15, and say, “Amazing.  We had a problem – a big knotty complicated problem – and we truly solved it.”  How rare.  How wonderful.

But for now – cheers and tears.

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This weekend the chosen families moved into their new homes. Here they are at move-in time.

It’s an especially poignant moment for all of us at South Mountain, as we have poured heart-and-soul into this project for the past two years – through design, permitting, and construction.  It has been a wonderful collaboration with the Island Housing Trust (the property owners), the Island Affordable Housing Fund, the Cape Light Compact (who provided funding for solar and energy efficiency through the Mass Renewable Trust’s Green Affordable Homes initiative), Habitat for Humanity of Martha’s Vineyard (who built an eighth house using our design), and others. The Town of West Tisbury and a number of private donors were generous, providing the funding to fill the gap between the sale prices and the cost.  Our crews and subcontractors were nothing short of spectacular – efficient, effective, and passionately devoted to quality.

Recently Island Housing Trust director Philippe Jordi, SMC designer/project manager Derrill Bazzy, SMC energy sales manager Rob Meyers, and I met with the eight excited families to review their new Owners’ Manuals and teach them how their houses work.

We also unveiled a new contest!

The houses are designed to be super low-energy users, and we told the new homeowners that any household that is able to get through the first year using ZERO energy (or being a net energy producer!) would win a prize:  a one year membership to the Whippoorwill Farm CSA, or an equivalent gift certificate at the Net Result fish market. If everybody does it, they each get the prize.  If nobody does it, the lowest user gets the prize. As Rob said, “These houses are net-zero possible.  It all depends on how you live in them and operate them.”

Below is an article that will appear in the MV Real Estate Guide about a “zero-energy possible” spec house we’re building on West Spring Street in Vineyard Haven that uses an enhanced version of the Eliakim’s Way design.

Will the Eliakim’s Way houses make zero energy?  Will the West Spring Street house?

Don’t know.  As the headline says, “We’ll find out.”

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For now.

Four years in the making, this long-term plan for the future of Martha’s Vineyard, initiated by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission,  engaged hundreds of people in the collaborative process of its production.  To quote from the plan:  “ The purpose of the Island Plan is to chart a course to the kind of future the Vineyard community wants, and to outline a series of actions to help us navigate that course.  The Island Plan is both a blueprint and a call to action.”

I served on the Steering Committee and chaired one of the nine work groups – Livelihood & Commerce (the others are Development & Growth, Natural Environment, the Built Environment, Energy & Waste, Affordable Housing, Transportation, Water Resources, and Social Environment).

I spent more time working on the plan than I wished to and less time than I should have.

The Plan is not what I hoped it would be when we first began work.  I hoped we could create something that would knock our socks off – a plan that people would embrace wholeheartedly because How Could You Not?  So compelling it didn’t even seem like a plan but a great never-ending story.  A truly inspiring plan.  A mouth-watering five-course meal.

That was unrealistic, of course.  It’s not one person’s dream meal; it’s a stew, added to and stirred by many.  At times, during the process, I found myself somewhat heartbroken, because the opportunity was so great and I felt we were falling short, but toward the end it got better, and I got better, and it’s not a bad stew.

Here are some important things about the Island Plan:

• It has created a new lexicon and new awareness – obscure terms like “multiplier effect”,  “economic leakage”, “ecosystem services”, “minimum viable landscape”, “undevelopment”, and “carrying capacity” have become commonplace.

• It’s an iterative plan, not a Final Solution study that’s going to sit on a shelf collecting dust.  There is a commitment to implement, to measure, to assess, to re-work, to “freshen up” the plan and add ingredients as the years go by, and to make alterations as conditions change in our rapidly changing world.

•  People are thinking about it as 50 year plan.  In a way it really isn’t.  Early on we started saying “We need to think long term” – not a five or ten year plan but a 50 or 100 year plan.  The local papers started writing stuff like  “these guys must be nuts – you can’t do a 50 year plan” but the idea tickled peoples’ imagination.  Now people say, proudly, we’ve got a 50 year plan.  And the papers refer to “the island’s 50 year plan.”  So what if it isn’t?  As long as we think we’ve got a 50 year plan we do.  And in many ways it really is.

•  The 207 recommended strategies are a wealth of possibilities that we can dig into over time, each as its time comes.

One of these – a community owned electrical cooperative that uses local renewable resources to generate a large fraction of the Vineyard’s energy – has become the most immediate and visible direct outgrowth of the plan.  A small group of people got so excited about the idea that when they got done with their work in the Island Plan Energy & Waste Group they went right to work on Vineyard Power and now, less than a year later, the cooperative has formed and begun to assemble a membership, create financing opportunities, and consider sites for an offshore wind farm.

It’s a bold idea and a challenging project that will take years to implement.  It combines the need to create a membership of thousands, and manage it, with the goal of completing the biggest development project in the history of the Vineyard.  Big job.  But as the nascent membership approaches 500, I’m beginning to think it may be possible.

If the Island Plan stimulates nothing else, it will have been a success.

Here’s something I wish about the plan.  I wish it connected the dots more.  It is good at recognizing interdependencies, but less good at making them come alive.  Here’s the kind of thing that’s not in the Island Plan that I now wish was.  It’s an idea – which I’m going to call Hogtied Brewery for the moment – which could work just fine here on the Vineyard:

•  People like beer, especially local beer from a place they like.

•  So an MV brewery (like Offshore Ale, our local brewery) produces beer & the process produces waste mash.

•  The waste mash is used to feed pigs.

•  The pigs make meat and manure.

•  The meat feeds people hungry for local food – everybody loves that – and the manure powers a bio-gas digester.

•  The bio-gas digester makes electricity.

•  The electricity is used to run the brewery.

Round and round it goes.  Makes sense, doesn’t it?  An unbroken circle of synergies.  There’s no reason we can’t do things this way.  There’s no reason we can’t keep making improvements to the Island Plan.  There’s no reason we can’t implement its most promising strategies.

The result?

As Jim Athearn, who chaired the Steering Committee says,

“ In many ways, the Island Plan’s proposals for the next generation will help keep the Vineyard much as it is today – characterized by carefully protected open spaces, vistas, and historic neighborhoods, and provided with great services and recreational opportunities.  In many ways, however, it will be different and greatly improved.  Although tourism and construction will still be important parts of the economy, many people will have transitioned to well-paying, year-round “green” and knowledge-based jobs, encouraging young people to stay on the island.  Farming and fishing will be expanded and feeding more of the population.  Our energy will come from a community-owned offshore wind farm.  There will be an Island-wide greenway and trail network.  New buildings will fit their neighborhoods.  It will be an even more vital year-round community, as our families can live here affordably.  The Island Plan is a guide to keeping the Island safe, beautiful, healthy, and culturally rich – the best place it can be for our children and grandchildren.”

Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

All it takes is insisting on the future we want instead of settling for the future we get.

My family and I (wife, kids and grandkids) visited my parents in Palo Alto, California over New Year’s.  We stayed at the Stanford Faculty Club in the middle of the very quiet – on recess – Stanford campus.  The Stanford Bookstore – one of my favorite bookstores anywhere, and I rate bookstores like food critics rate dinner – is a three minute walk away. 

So I decided to spend time in the bookstore every day, and carefully evaluate books for reading. I looked at a lot of books.   I was trying to look at each one carefully enough, and read enough of it, to determine whether once I got it out of the store, it would grab my attention deeply enough – and for long enough – that I would actually read it.  The goal is to get my percentage up, way up.

Among the books I spent time with were:

• Tracy Kidder’s most recent book, Strength in What Remains, an against-all-odds story about a kid fleeing to New York to get away from the genocidal war in his native Burundi;

• Kurt Vonnegut’s new collection of previously unpublished stories, Look at the Birdie – I don’t read much fiction these days, but I love Kurt Vonnegut;

• Journalist Amanda Little’s book Power Trip, an account of a cross-country road trip to discover the impact of fossil fuels (and the need for alternatives).

• Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s latest intellectual tour-de-force full of radical solutions to our current economic predicaments;

• Glimmer, written by Warren Berger and subtitled How Design Can Transform Your Life (and Maybe the World), in which he collaborates with celebrated Canadian designer Bruce Mau to explore the power of design to solve business and social problems.

• The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs, Michael Belfiore, a look under the hood of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—the maverick and controversial group whose work has had amazing civilian influence in addition to its impact on the military.

There were many others, too, and I would like to read every one of those books listed above, but in the end I only bought one, and it was an odd choice.  It was written by Tina Seelig, a professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford, and called What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. The book was written in response to the coming-of-age of her son Josh.  Wondering about how he would make his way in this world, she looked back at her life, and her teaching methods, and produced a provocative manifesto for the young.

The reason I chose it is because my daughter is grappling with the same issues – where does her true passion lie and what kind of career and life will she develop?  I thought it might be a good read for both of us.  She hasn’t read it yet – she left two days ago for a winter of wildlife research in Costa Rica with Global Vision International, which will surely be more life-changing than any book her father could toss her way – but I have, and it was worth it.

What sold me – as I sat at the bookstore with a pile of books stacked on the broad arm of a comfortable chair – was a story at the very beginning about an assignment she used with her students.  She gave them an envelope with five dollars of “seed funding”, granted plenty of planning time, and then allowed them two hours, once they open the envelope, to generate as much money as possible.  She says, “Most of my students eventually found a way to move far beyond the standard responses.  They took seriously the challenge to question traditional assumptions – exposing a wealth of possibilities – in order to create as much value as possible.”

The teams that did best didn’t use the five dollars at all.  They realized that the money framed the problem way too tightly, and that five dollars is essentially nothing, and that the assignment is really to figure out how to make money when you start with nothing. .  They identified problems they experienced or noticed others experiencing – problems they might have seen before but had never thought to solve and became very inventive.

One group set up a stand in front of the student union and offered to measure bicycle tire pressure for free.  If the tires needed filling, they added air for a dollar.  They had the uneasy feeling that they were taking advantage of their fellow students, who could go to a nearby gas station to have their tires filled for free.  It turns out their first few customers were grateful and that they were providing a convenient and valuable service.  Nonetheless, after the first hour, they stopped asking for a dollar and requested donations instead.  Their income soared.  Experimenting along the way paid off.  The iterative process, where small changes are made in response to customer feedback, allowed them to optimize their strategy on the fly. Afterward the students agreed that they would never need to be broke, since there is always a problem at hand waiting to be solved.

What a lesson.

“Being in business,” says Seelig,  “should be like traveling in a foreign country.  Even if you prepare carefully, have an itinerary and a place to stay at night, the most interesting experiences usually aren’t planned.”  You meet someone who leads you to an extraordinary place, you have unexpected encounters, and the most memorable parts of the trip are the surprising parts that happened into your path.

Come to think of it, I think I knew all that when I was 20, and the reason I read the book is that I’m now re-learning it.  It’s about resilience, which may be the successor to the idea of sustainability.  Since change is inevitable the impacts may be dependent on our ability to harness the unexpected.

And there’s more.

Rodney North of Equal Exchange (the Massachusetts-based worker owned co op fair trade coffee company)   made me aware of an article on the New York Times Economix blog by Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at University of Massachusetts.  In “The Case for Worker Co-ops” she says, “Since many of our most prestigious economic institutions have embarrassed themselves at our expense over the last year, maybe it’s time to look around.  Worker-owned and -managed businesses combine the romance of entrepreneurship with solid family values and commitment to community. What’s not to like?”

In addition to the Mondragon/US Steelworkers agreement and the worker co-ops featured in Michael Moore’s new movie, she says, “Rousing examples abound.  CNN Money recently profiled six worker-run businesses including Pelham Auto, whose mechanics have cheerfully fixed every car I’ve owned for the past 20 years.” One of the companies CNN profiled, by the way, is South Mountain.

But all this attention being paid to worker co-ops makes Folbre, the economist, wonder what the economic research says.  Not much, according to her.  Worker owned and managed companies are “largely ignored in economics textbooks.”

I have found that even the socially responsible business movement, to my ongoing surprise, pays little attention to true workplace democracy.

But she does, at least, find a little research – or maybe it’s just opinion.  Mostly it’s about the troubles – or potential troubles – with employee ownership.  One of these is that worker-owned and managed companies, with more complex goals than maximizing profit, tend to be less growth-oriented than other companies.

“Don’t tell Wall Street,” says Folbre,  “but that could be a good thing.”

I want to say more about the USW/ Mondragon agreement.

The Mondragon initiative is not the first innovative Steelworkers alliance.  In the 1990s, the USW helped found the Blue-Green Alliance together with the Sierra Club  and other environmentalists and they have been involved with Van Jones’ Green For All.

And now, if this new alliance works, it might make a system of worker-owned enterprises assembled with the purpose of a green restructuring of the U.S. economy. That  could be a powerful force.

The USW-Mondragon collaboration grew out of a ‘green industrial revolution’ project that created a partnership with Gamesa, a Spanish wind turbine firm, to retrofit abandoned steel plants in the U.S. (40,000 U.S. manufacturing facilities have closed since the beginning of the current economic crisis) and produce wind turbines (there are 200 tons of steel and 8000 moving parts in every large wind turbine).  Gamesa’s connection to nearby Mondragon brought the USW and the co-operative giant together.

While this historic business alliance gives hope to the possibility of reviving manufacturing (and the communities that have been devastated by the losses), there is also congressional activity coming along to support employee ownership.  According to the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont will introduce two new bills that would seek to expand employee ownership in the United States. 

The first, the Worker Ownership, Readiness and Knowledge (WORK) Act would create an Office of Employee Ownership and Participation within the Department of Labor to promote employee ownership and employee participation in company decision making.  The second bill, the U.S. Employee Ownership Bank Act, would provide loans and loan guarantees to employees to purchase a business through an ESOP or a worker-owned cooperative.

On the eve of the Copenhagen meetings, this collection of related activity is heartening.  Perhaps the most important thing about the expanding co-operative business movement, in the long run, may be  as an avenue to the large-scale collaborative alterations to the architecture of the economy that will be necessary if we are to successfully tackle the challenges of climate change and the post peak oil transition to come.

Brown is a proponent of Design Thinking – every problem, in his view, is a design issue and can only be solved with Design Thinking.   He says, “I want to challenge designers to transform design practice.  There will always be a place for the artist, the craftsman, and the lone inventor, but the astonishing pace of change in the world demand new approaches to design:  collaborative, in a way that amplifies, rather than subdues, the creative powers of individuals; focused but flexible and responsive to unexpected opportunities. . . The next generation of designers will need to begin looking at every problem – from adult literacy to global climate change – as a design problem.”

He recently published a book called Change by Design. Reading the book reminded me of my own brief encounter with IDEO two years ago.

As a Stanford undergrad Deb Meisel worked a summer at South Mountain as an intern. She did some great work helping us develop a manual of information and company practice for new employees. When she left she was looking forward to an exciting opportunity: working at IDEO.

Not long after I was in Palo Alto and Deb took me for a whirlwind tour of IDEO.  It was unlike any other company tour could possibly be.

The Palo Alto offices (there are now additional offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York, London, Munich, and Shanghai) are a campus that has developed over time in a sprawling set of old commercial buildings and back alleys near downtown, the ultimate “low-road” facility.  Outside they are unimposing and unremarkable.  But open any door and watch out!!  Walk in and it’s truly psychedelic.  Everywhere you look there’s stuff you want to examine, touch, read, explore.  It’s like a carnival, a bazaar, and a museum rolled into one.  Overwhelms the senses.

Here there’s a glass cylinder piled full with crude foam prototypes of computer mouses.  Then there’s a graphically beautiful poster meant to hang in a hospital room that says “Here’s what’s going to happen to you while you’re here and here’s what it’s going to be like” and elegantly explains each step and tells you all the things you never know in hospitals until they rudely happen to you.  Bikes hang everywhere on cables up in the high warehouse-like ceilings (One of the IDEO designers, years ago, got tired of tripping over all the bikes clogging the passageways every day.  He invented a cable system to raise and lower them, built it that night, and the next day bikes began to hang from the ceilings).  There’s a beautifully appointed employee eating and gathering space.  A curving glass showcase displays the various iterations – about thirty of them – of Palm Pilots.

We walk into buildings, out of buildings, down alleys, and into other buildings.  We come to the Toy Lab.  This is the only place at IDEO where people are not working on projects for clients.  Here, a team of creatives spends all their time making new toys.  The Toy Lab is out of this world.  I want to take a picture.  Not okay.

And then to the Kitchen, where test cooking is done and food products and packaging are developed and on to the shop.  Oh, the shop.  Huge, cluttered, and organized. Rows of Bridgeport Millers, bandsaws, and every imaginable kind of metal and woodworking tool.  This is where prototyping happens, where people make things over and over, trying different versions, experimenting.

It’s 6 in the evening, and all the buildings are semi-occupied and busy.  Deb says people work at all hours.  They work when they want.  People look purposeful.  At the same time, they look relaxed.  Some have their feet up on their desks.  Some are munching.   Some are hunched at computers; others are engaged in animated conversation.

All this happened in 15 or 20 minutes.  I kept wanting to stop and spend an hour or two here, there, and everywhere.

It’s an intoxicating place, a collaborative Mecca, the reflection of an ethos that knows, as Brown says, “that all of us are smarter than any of us.”  The long-term global transformation ahead will require more than political will and appropriate investment; it will also require collaboration, the kind Tim Brown refers to, but possibly of a type and scale heretofore unknown.   We will need new tools, new abilities, and new ways of working together. New forms of governance and business.

I read a few passages from Change By Design at the most recent meeting of our Design Group. I am convinced that the future of our industry – and our business – is the fusion of Tim Brown’s Design Thinking and Stewart Brand’s Planet Craft (see Whole Earth Discipline).  Seems like a vast virgin forest of opportunity . . .  and necessity.