Cleaning up at the end of 2020
While taking a break over the new year, there was a perfect opportunity to reflect on the year gone by with my Fiancé and our friends. We talked about the year past, our achievements, disappointments and our hopes for the following year. I thought I’d take a moment to share the outcome of those conversations and the thinking that followed up to set myself up for 2021. This is also a commitment device for myself, splitting it out in to three segments as a framework you might want to use too:
Review 2020: Goals and performance
Self-reflection: Check-in on mission and purpose
2021 goals: Setting up for success
This level of reflection is rarely shared in my experience so please consider it as a working document and a tool used to arrive at next steps for committing to a great 2021 and bringing it to life with the more immediate next steps that follow. Let me know in the comments if this helped you to find your own path for 2021.
2020 in review:
I like to break my goals in to 4 categories: Work, Relationships, Health and Fun. I set them as high level objectives, some more measurable than others given visibility at the start of the year. I ask: What am I doing to get closer to achieving that objective and what threshold is good enough? Sub-goals would arise from that and it’s not always particularly helpful to guess how that objective might be reached at the beginning of the year (ref. COVID). The pass/fail (✅ vs ❌) question at the close of year was “do I feel I did enough or carve out time to advance each objective?”
Work
✅ Be the chaos pilot - Support your team through organisational transformation by being comfortable with uncertainty (this turned out to be particularly relevant through COVID)
✅ Grow change making capability - Improve speaking and story-telling to bring people on the journey
✅ Grow your salary - Changing industries/careers is tricky. Express the value proposition of my experience and strengths in a new context now established at Synergy.
Relationships
❌ Holiday overseas with my girlfriend (flights booked but then COVID happened. Holidayed locally and now have a Fiancé 😊)
✅ Refine photo collections and retain the stories - What do you look back on when you’re old and grey?
✅ Catch up more with core friends
Health
❌ Do a triathlon
✅ Cook/eat more than 3 dinners a week at home
✅ Run to work more than 5 times in summer
Fun
✅ Become a video production master - Don’t just capture videos of concerts, do something great with the footage and streamline the approach.
✅ As treasurer, achieve Giovanni Consort Deductible Gift Recipient status and minimise tax risk
❌ Monitor power consumption (a tricky one when I moved in to my Fiancé’s place!)
Memories from the COVID kick-off
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the outcome with good growth in each area. The only one that I feel really slipped through was the triathlon, having tried to get in to an annual tradition of doing an Australia day triathlon each year at Pt Walter.
The achievements were significant at work. From kicking off the tribe model to establishing a prioritisation system across multiple tribes and to leading a ‘way of working’ response to COVID which enabled remote working for our people then transitioning back to hybrid working with a split workforce. This year played to my strengths of working with uncertainty and finding ways to experiment and adapt. I was fortunate enough to be rewarded for this behaviour by winning the 2020 Annual Award for Innovation.
Professional self-reflection
Would 2021 be more of the same? Is this all on track and ‘mission aligned’? My Fiancé and I thought we’d get a little deeper with the pathfinding from 2020 and took a little survey together. While these sorts of reflections are often kept confidential, I use this blog as catharsis and as a practice of transparency in my practice of being a more authentic leader so will share it with you. Doing this felt a lot like a job interview mixed with careers counselling. If it’s too much, consider this as a placeholder for your own self-reflection with these 11 questions and look for trends to help you define your work goals.
Key points that have impacted your professional direction and why
Choosing Engineering/Science over Advanced Science
After spending a year in UWA’s premiere course for accelerating high-scoring scientists in to lab work, I realised I was more interested in applying the science to create direct effect for people. I added an engineering degree to add pragmatism to my course.
Energy as an opportunity to impact quality of life
I was selected for a course called Introduction to the Upstream Business, sponsored by Shell. This helped me appreciate the role of Oil and Gas in bringing about economic prosperity and development over the 20th century. I did my thesis in ‘flow assurance, worked with Chevron then General Electric to understand the industry and contribute.
Leaving Oil & Gas to get closer to renewables
I chose to leave the Oil & Gas industry in the appreciation of it’s decline in the 21st century and the unhealthy behaviours it promotes in a geopolitical sense in light of alternative energy sources. I wanted to be part of a more sustainable way to bring life-giving energy to the world. I moved to Synergy.
Favourite positions and why
General Electric & Baker Hughes - Tender Manager
The Tender Manager is the centre-point for the creation of tenders in response to requests from oil & gas companies to provide equipment to harvest fluids from under the seabed. I got to liaise with engineering, manufacturing, tax, legal, planning, finance and maintenance specialists within GE and engage sub-contractors in order to build proposals that we knew would work if we were awarded the job. I got to cost, price and evaluate the risk of all of these elements and present the business opportunity represented by the proposal by executives. I loved how much there was to learn about each of the specialties I consulted with and was able to build very strong commercial acumen. With my first-principles approach to challenging our cost base, we won our first projects in the region for 3 years and they ran within budget following execution years later. I learned to build and pitch good business cases and appreciated the autonomy ability to reinvent what was a system for pricing that hamstrung sales by the business unit.
Value Delivery Consultant - Synergy
A 2017 report in to Western Australian Government projects (the Langoulant report volumes 1 and 2) indicated a distinct lack of business case and governance quality at Synergy. I found myself at the heart of a group of people who were charged with ensuring we didn’t keep delivering stuff that wasn’t what we thought we were investing in. We started a movement to deliver valuable outcomes rather than widgets that someone shouted the loudest for. I worked with teams to understand their definitions of value and built the framework for prioritisation of opportunities based on proposals of value to be delivered that would be refined as more effort was invested in them. I loved the opportunity to co-create the approach with many teams and lead design, refinement and scaling of the framework to beyond the original ‘tribe’.
Positions you liked the least and why
Continuous improvement team - Synergy
What I didn’t know at the time I started at Synergy was that a business efficiency program had recently left some pretty deep cultural scars in the organisation and it’s conclusion had left the role of it’s continuous improvement quite unclear. My boss resigned only two weeks after and having not had many contacts in my new industry, it was a tricky place to start. While there was some latitude to redefine the strategy and role of the team but without commitment from senior leaders on what relationship they would form with the team, team leadership became a revolving door that lead to my finding a way to a more productive role outside of the team. I learned that without a clear connection to purpose and strategy at a business I feel rudderless and struggle to build good foundations that are key to my style of working.
Two of Four Graduate Engineer Rotations - General Electric
While the content of these roles were interesting, the management style was less constructive. In these roles, I learned that I am more effective when I try to solve an audacious problem rather than when I am instructed to perform much smaller tasks that may or may not solve the audacious problem at hand.
Your greatest work-related accomplishments over the last 5 years
General Electric Flexibles Proposals Pricing Approach Refresh - Unlocking project wins in China
As a system for going from customer request to approved proposal, my greatest achievement at GE was accelerating our team’s response to requests for tenders of flexible pipelines. By combining this with a challenge made to the assumptions of our business around logistics and shipping risk, we were able to start winning projects in China, breaking a three year drought on sales in the Asia Pacific region.
Prioritisation framework in the Operational Performance Tribe (OPT)
As mentioned above, as the Value Delivery Consultant, I orchestrated workshops, designed prototypes and tested the framework for enabling the OPT to compare almost 100 initiatives over 7 teams to arrive at a prioritised list. It continues to evolve as new information changes initiative ratings and forms the basis of stakeholder alignment on the priority of the tribe. What I loved about this accomplishment was and is the licence to tackle a big and hairy problem with an incremental approach, appriciating that the solution will not be perfect or solve all stakeholder needs perfectly from day 1 but that all stakeholders would be committed to refining it as we learned from the early iterations of the framework. This has been noted as part of my 2020 Innovation award and has lead to efforts to scaling the principles used to org-wide prioritisation on the basis of value delivered, beyond just financial parameters.
Greatest work-related disappointments or difficulties
Leaving General Electric
As noted above, I chose to leave GE partly to leave oil and gas in favor of a sustainable alternative - my mission changed, prompted mainly by more frequent requests to tender for equipment on gas fields in China-contested territorial waters of Thailand and Vietnam. It was disappointing that I was starting to perpetuate an oil and gas operational machine without contributing to a transformational agenda of increasing sustainability. The second part was that there was very little progression available within the region. I had learned the role, cracked the egg on how to present winning proposals to large Chinese customers but at that point, there was little scope for growth if I chose to live in Australia. My disappointment there was that I was unable to secure a role in the GE Renewables tendering business on the basis of limited experience with renewable equipment and my leaders were only interested in keeping me performing as I was rather than nourishing new opportunities for growth.
Typecasting at Synergy
Once winning the 2020 Innovation award, I realised I might be in the same cycle of cracking the egg on a big challenge and being expected to do more of the same rather than developing the business towards a more sustainable version of itself. While I have continued to express an interest in becoming more more directly involved in Synergy’s role to deliver the Distributed Energy Resources (DER) Roadmap, I’ve been unsuccessful in three role applications, being quite disappointing but also driving me to revise my approach to aligning my work more closely with my mission.
Three areas of strength or work-related competency?
Building logical models of systems from first principles (pricing tools, prioritisation frameworks)
Playing detailed scenarios forward to uncover the next riskiest assumption made. Derisking and forming the next experiment or scenario until an acceptable level of risk is achieved.
Adapting quickly to changes in in the environment when an assumption changes.
Stepping back from the current environment, noticing assumptions made in a room and playing those back more objectively to peers.
Targeted learning to solve problems. Not assuming a problem is insurmountable without taking a crack at it.
What do you consider to be your three areas of challenge?
Moving too quickly
I often have to remind myself to bring people along for the journey if my ideas are going to yield effective results.
I sometimes dive in to detail briefly to find the next deal breaking assumption associated with a high level design and have limited patience continuing when I already know where the high-level design will break. I find it hard to suspend my disbelief but I do it unless a path faces too much proven risk.
Wanting people to connect their work to strategy
I often assume my peers are acting in the company’s interest over their own and forget that people will often form an emotional connection with an investment even if not aligned with business goals. (I’m never worried by the prospect of automating myself out of a job.)
Having a high threshold for alignment
I often watch people agree that they are aligned on some topic, knowing that they are holding very different meanings to the words they use in their agreement. Some simple questions often help me bring stakeholders to new levels of agreement but sometimes there is not as much appetite to get on the same page in reality. I need to watch myself when stakeholders are already prepared to accept the risk associated with their high level and sometimes unsubstantiated agreement.
What motivates you in life and/or at work?
List positions and/or jobs that you feel interested in exploring.
Common elements over all - these roles enable integration of 70%+ renewable power generation and involve some connection to physical hardware or solution design, connecting directly to electricity customers. More work is nessisary to
Synergy or Western Power - Strategy feasibility analysis
Synergy or Western Power - Commercial analysis and strategic advice
Western Power or Synergy - DER Roadmap implementation
Synergy - Project Symphony or Smart Energy for Social Housing - DER hardware scoping, installation and integration, DER operations support and software integration
Western Power - Project Symphony or Smart meter leveraging
Service providers - tendering and solution design or delivery in support of DER Roadmap and aggregator support
EV charging infrastructure (Tritium - Brisbane, Gemtek, Tesla, EVSE)
EV charging network operators (EVbox, Chargepoint, Evie, Chargefox/Jetcharge, EVUp)
EV manufacturing (Tesla)
Edge network control (SwitchDin, reposit)
Embedded network metering (Gemtek)
Utility network control technologies (Itron/Silver Springs)
Carpark owner/operators (Wilson)
Distributed electricity market enablers (Powerledger, Greensync, reposit)
Battery manufacturers/distributers (Tesla, Senek, Sonnen, Redback, Energy Vault)
EV fleet owners (Fleetcare)
DER agregators (Infinite energy, Plico, PowerLedger)
Start-up environment
Mine electrification technologies (3ME)
Demand response integration technologies (VPP enablers)
Battery primary materials
Anode mining processing (Talga)
Energy consultancies (Energetics)
Advising businesses on how to invest in energy efficiency or market participation opportunities
Generalist consultancies (Bain, McKinsey, BCG, IBM, Accenture)
Advising energy companies on how to innovate towards more sustainable business models
Competing aggregators in the event that regulation opens to competitors to Synergy
Alinta, AGL, Shell, BP, More mature USA players?
House/building designers/builders
Preparing homes for a new era of energy distribution, orchestration and self-sufficiency
Home automation enablers
Various electric contractors
What are your ambitions and plans in relation to your career
I would like to find a place in the electricity industry where I can make a real difference to accelerating a transition to 70%+ renewables penetration and be challenged along the way.
What are your ambitions and plans in relation to your career? Where do you see yourself in the next three to five years?
Three years: I am established as a leader and public contributor to the distributed energy resources space in Western Australia.
5+ years: Go beyond Australia. Share learnings, advise and consult with other countries/businesses on their plans to increase DER penetration.
These questions are great fodder for identifying trends. They ask, where do I want to go and who do I want to be. I saw four trends that I can use as criteria for my work goals in 2021:
My previous career challenges have arisen when there is no more room to grow or develop at a satisfying pace. The limit is sometimes geographic or related to an organisation’s culture and values not aligning to my own. Be sure to check corporate culture within an interview process, asking about career path and available development opportunities.
My favourite roles have been where there is some latitude to design, build, improve some operational state and to learn from subject matter experts around me as I go. Search for these aspects in new roles. In my current role, find the SMEs that I can learn more from.
Ensure your next role is core to the organisation’s corporate strategy. If DER proliferation isn’t part of their agenda, give it a miss. Widen my network to find more companies and more options to make this possible.
I have a default to detail and I need my next role to nourish a willingness to deep dive in to a technical area that is harder to grasp.
2021 goals
With those work-related pointers in mind, it’s time to set some high level pointers for next year:
Work
Move to a more strategically impactful, mission-aligned role or one that nourishes a thirst for energy transformation subject matter expertise
Take on an office bearing role at the Australian Institute of Energy or their Young Energy Professionals subcommittee
Connect to the startup community to connect early and large organisations
Relationships
Plan a wedding
Improve the regular coffee catch-up rhythm with colleagues and friends
Health
Get to a 3 day per week gym habit
Keep walking 5 mornings a week
Find new, balanced vegetarian favourite dishes
Fun
Set up the Home Assistant automation platform at home
Monitor power consumption
Master multi-cam streaming of concerts and events
Next steps
Next actions in relation to goals I want to move on immediatly:
1.1: Move closer to DER related roles at Synergy and Western Power.
Help my supporters to help me see the next role.
1.2: Reach out to current AIE treasurers to increase familiarity with the role
1.3: Go to meetup.com and connect to the startup community via networking events
4.1: Order key equipment like a Home Assistant server, mains power meter and RS485 interface
