John Carrier

Colin Beavin, aka No Impact man, posted today on the problem of air travel and its impact on the environment.

I don’t consider myself an environmentalist, per se, and I’m not proposing to start the horse-and-buggy revolution in business travel and bi-coastal commuting (I’m talking to you, Schouweilers).

I do consider myself a “mental environmentist”: I believe that our mental environments our cluttered, principally by outmoded assumptions that no longer serve us.

Colin talks about the significant and growing impact of air travel (largely business-related) on the health of our atmosphere and suggests we look at alternatives like high-definition teleconferencing and other advances in telecommunications. I’ll take it a step further…and a step closer to home.

This is a special case of something I’ve been thinking about for a while: people hanging on to old ways of doing business despite new information (or technological progress) because the cost of change — questioning your own assumptions, admitting you were wrong — exceeds the perceived benefit of switching.

More prevalent case than air travel, but related: Where I live (Minneapolis) people commute an average of 45 minutes per day (round-trip) so that they can gather in the same building to work, even though they spend 80% of their time or more isolated in their own cubicles. Furthermore, they usually commute by driving alone in an SUV (by my observation, at least).

The assumption? People work better when they congregate in a central location. The reality? This model gained acceptance and solidified as a best practice well over a hundred years ago, sometime after the great urbanization of the US but decades before modern communication technology.

I haven’t seen updated numbers lately, but I heard JetBlue and Best Buy were doing quite well with homesourcing and reducing their employees’ impact on the environment, to boot. If you care about that sort of thing.
A lot of people will fight to the death for the idea that business requires facetime, by which they mean guaranteed access to physically observe and interrupt their coworkers during a fixed interval totaling 40+ hours per week.

I think it’s a combination of clinging to outmoded assumptions and lack of trust, which begs the question, if you don’t trust the people you work with, why do you work with them?

Please share your opinion in the comments below. I’m dying to know if I’m wrong about this.

Tags: assumptions, environment, homesourcing, telecommuting

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 6:00 pm and is filed under contrarian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.