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Rural System? Just Dreaming …
A For-Profit Conglomerate for
Meaningful Jobs
Healthful Communities
and Improved Natural Resource Management
by Robert H. Giles, Jr., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
2007
Chapter 11. Centering and Q Works
Dreaming: Strategic…crafty, careful …hidden…no, not evil…feint left, then arrive from …underground…mock, mock, mock … feint right and attack from… overhead! Gain the advantage… use your exponent …wait …at least for the moment … … but that is about all that there is……Just dreaming…
| Once called "System Central," now Q Works (with multiple meanings), this imagined group provides services to all groups and common services and activities for many groups. Major economies and expertise are shared. |
When I was doing " wildlife management," (Giles 1978) that esoteric, usually-hidden work of state and federal game and fish agencies, I was causing local population numbers to change in desired ways. That's all. It can be complexified with principles, " laws," special words, 100 techniques, hypothesized structural mixes of species, sexes, ages, and abundances, and 50 often-conflicting objectives. The bottom line remained: Within budget, make the animal population change significantly, or not, within an appropriate period. Simplicity reined: there are only three options for such change: make them increase, decrease, or stabilize.
There was more to the needs then, but I did not know them, and even if I had, I did not have the knowledge or power to engage them. The needs now are to isolate expertise and form Groups (separate enterprises or divisions of Rural System). The need is to use modern technology cost effectively and provide people in Groups incentives for good work, for working together, and for achieving clarified objectives. The work, as in the example above, is not to change animal numbers but to change benefits. We have to know the present production (e.g., the number of adult animals at the same time each year and their associated probable benefits), the desired production, and then only invest the minimum amount of money to make the expected change to get the desired level for now and the next few years … and reconcile that with the 150 year plan. This is little more than classical economics, and that is what Rural System needs to do …practice well classical economics, the economy of the firm, modern industrial design with dynamic teams and appropriate division of labor.
We created a Group called Q Works to help all Groups do their business cost effectively. We called it that because it had multiple meanings and within it there was major work with the Q Index, the work of addressing objectives for people within areas and their achievement and measurements. At first I liked to say that Q Works was in business of making money, but I was only learning. It was in the business of helping 80 or more enterprises make money. Staff within it got a proportion of the money that was made to use to develop more, more effective solutions that could be shared by several Groups. Q Works was a specialized business, the center for support and management of the total Rural System. It supplied what every group needed - marketing, accounting, computer aids, security, legal service - efficiencies and services which all needed but few could ever afford if they operated alone.
Q Works contained the following Groups:
1. Q Works Overview
2. Base (Marketing)
3. Insurance
4. The Law and Justice Group
5. The Knowledge Base
6. Rural Urticles (an e-publication)
7. The Rural System Inns
8. The Realtor Group
9. The Ebay Group
10. The Warehouse Group
11. Youth and Adult Camps (Codgers, Clachan, and Writers' Camps)
12. RuraLives
13. The Memorials Group
14. The Tours Group
15. EarthQuilt
16. The Safety and Security Group
17. Health System
18. The Rural System Foundation
19. The GIS Group
20. The Energy Group
21. Zeta (International Group)
22. Ranging
Management
Trying to boil down big ideas is difficult and usually spoils their taste, but it needs to be done to try to get people thinking and discussing the same approximate thing. I know that there are many meanings for "management" because years ago I tried comparative studies of those meanings. There are as many meanings as for "planning." Economics itself seems all-inclusive if it is the careful management of the wealth and resources of a community, or the assembled ideas about decision making for the proper allocation of scarce resources. When thinking about Rural System I began with management as trying to control a system. Control was a part of conventional management theory. The better the management, the better the control, the less the deviations from a path. Like driving a car, staying on the proper side of the centerline and off the shoulder is what is desired. There may be brief swerves responding to wind and falling rocks, but the progress of the good driver, the one in control, is smoothly straight down the road in the right direction at a safe speed. The analogy with the car may be useful but not sufficient. I used it for years in teaching. I elaborated for the passenger jet, suggesting it as the wild faunal population, and flying toward a destination with the pilot (the manager) making adjustments … click this switch, then twist that knob, then the other switch, this light, that steering column … all decisions and tactics to achieve the destination, adjusting to expected challenges and changes.
I liked the analogy of a jet or spacecraft with several people operating controls. Large, complex systems cannot be handled by a single "driver." We keep trying and failing, blaming the spirits, natural variability, and bad luck. Too many in control, like too many "cooks," can cause problems (simply due to insufficient time to take in information, turn it into intelligence, and communicate clearly separate actions that need to be taken). In most natural resource work, however, action is at walk speed. There are inadequate staff and no working capital; progress is made at the rate of the annual budgeting process. Even later, I felt that a better image was one of a power plant console over which several people worked, examining dials and flashing numbers, listening for sirens and waiting for the flashing lights that required quick responses within the well-monitored system. That imagined small group of people with their equipment were, analogously, in control of the faunal resource system for an area.
The jet analogy fails for rural resource systems because there is no destination. The objective generally seems to be to keep going, to "keep it in the road" as said in the farewell salute of the trucker. The objective has been not a destination but a process … like living. As discussed in Chapter 7, clear objectives are needed, but only if there are reasonable managers (for what will you do with objectives after you have developed them?) There is a place for objectives only when there is a managerial system and the manager. People working on farm areas may decide on a crop as an objective, but soon after that, it will be re-phrased as "just make a little money."
Controlling or making money is fundamentally future-telling and then decision making followed by action that works. There are 13 parts to the good decision-making activity. Failing any one can result in a poor decision. These are:
For the resource-agency person, for example, working for the wild faunal resource, there is no clear objective. Students, many with a religious or metaphysical bent, have questioned me about my suggested objectives and want to know why "control" needs to be considered. They tend to assert that natural conditions are best; that we should let "Nature" have is way. Young and never having experienced "Nature's way," they do not know what it can or will "serve up." We frequently do not like what we experience (infant mortality, predation, disease, catastrophe … even extreme surplus or shortage), find it totally unacceptable, and even develop passing thoughts of revenge for the worst events and yields. Control of Nature's effects (runoff, erosion, predation, insect attack, bacterial and fungal infection) as well as increasing Nature's production of foods and items for shelter are essential for human populations. As populations and their consumption increase, ever greater control is needed. The manager works "to gain control of the system" and how might we know when he or she has done so? What is the evidence? When objectives are being achieved! When the system is going "smoothly down the road, between the lines, in the right direction at a safe speed"! But where, precisely, is that and why? That has been the message of Chapter 7 and it still needs to be said.
The Centering Concept
In Rural System there is an alternative to control. It is called "centering" and it uses the profit incentive as rarely seen. It institutionalizes collaboration. It raises cooperation and collaboration over competition. The corporate unit for centering is Q Works. It provides broad and over-reaching common service and marketing. It deals with the difficult integrative modern decisions. It provides for all of the largely independent Groups office space, accounting, payrolls, insurance, health, retirement and other benefits, legal service, deeds and records maintenance, and transportation. It provides information. It benefits from the successes of the enterprises. It works for them and they, collectively, for it. From one perspective, there are really only a few parts to the Rural System idea that, when operating together, may make it new, at least notable. These parts are:
Q Works works for all of the enterprises, thus gaining efficiencies and reduced costs of business. It eliminates the duplications of expensive and often un-affordable office equipment in the many small businesses of Rural System. Small business entrepreneurs tend to be product- or service-oriented. They love what they do or make, but most do not like the business end of the operation. Most have limited business management skills, at least early in developing their companies … when most failures occur. Failure is a surprise? There may be a correlation! There are also wonderful people who love the "business-end" of work and these can be of great service and relief to the company founder, who is and must be intent upon raising capital, securing a firm legal status, improving service, making contacts for the future, developing delivery systems for products or services, and fending off competition.
Q Works contains equipment rarely available to any small business. Most office equipment or software is depreciating in quality or performance and probably losing resale value in the instant of its purchase. Equipment that is not working, like laggard workers, is costing the company money. People or equipment not working suggest financial investments that might be better made. By having diverse equipment and by computer-aided scheduling, the same equipment, well managed, can serve all needs without the waste of "downtime" and losses that would otherwise occur for the individual small business. Frequent equipment users can assist other users, thus reducing training time needed.
I imagine cooperative work or partnership with existing business enterprises, continuing to develop and update this office complex so that everything is linked, things flow smoothly, there are redundancies where needed, where there are many of the much-discussed home-site software workers in the beautiful countryside (Homys Group). They are all trying to conserve limited and very costly fossil energy in the near future, communicate via computer (email or other) with this central office. This is where data are stored and processed, where cleaning, updating, and backing-up is done, editing is improved, where rewards are sent, and where the whole is optimized along both financial lines (maybe using linear programming or expert system software). It is where scores of human satisfaction are developed and monitored and reported for the corporation and customers.
While having equipment may mean status for some people or groups, it means high investment, frequent periods of wastefully low or non-use, costly repair or replacement, and expensively trained and often-mobile operators, usually with a back-up operator(s). Planned packages, especially with a common vendor or fewest possible vendors and service companies will likely be beneficial. Shared equipment, familiarity, staff redundancies, and contacts with service personnel will all add to efficiencies.
Some have called my description of the office "package," Q Works, an "incubator" but that seems wrong to me. It is closer to being the heart, and lungs of an important work rather than some startup process. Just as farms exhibit the diseconomies resulting from being of too small scale (described in Chapter 3), the business component of small businesses also suffers. The computer is rarely used to full capacity. There is rare shift work that might exploit the available equipment and office space (and related expenses). Similarly, other office equipment is rarely used to capacity. Sharing large resources (e.g., special printers), (not the trivial personal office resources that would waste time in retrieval and use) can increase efficiencies both in access, assistance in use, and reduce direct cost.
The equipment needed is for digitizing, scanning, CD burning, producing CDs of e-books, faxing, storing data collected from the field, using SAS and other software to run programs and putting their computed results into pre-formatted documents (some of which are dynamic "plans"), publishing educational pamphlets or books on demand (or in small quantities) to avoid warehousing costs, maintaining email and network needs of widely dispersed workers, providing contract forms and related storage and recovery and security, working with an Internet provider, maintaining a server(s) for the data, and an unlimited and changing array of marketing and advertising tasks.
I imagine well-integrated software packages that will analyze the productivity of the total enterprise, a simulator perhaps, but eventually with optimization. Rural System needs an array of conventional office equipment such as computers and related software, printers, all with clear, designed connections … a single smoothly-running system. We need a designed "connection" so we can replace and re-connect new equipment and items when we invest after about five years. This is a "package," a set of equipment and connections and software that can be franchised or moved as a unit when Rural System is developed for another region of the US, later other regions of the world.
Understanding the past helps provide stability and reduces staff turnovers. Similarly, keeping in touch with the current organization and "what's going on" is needed for the proper functioning and inter-connectedness of this group. We need systems such as The OASIS project of REDF (http://www.redf.org/publications-oasis.htm), customized, comprehensive, social or entrepreneurial management information systems (MIS) within the organization. Such a MIS provides timely, accurate, non-punitive information by which managers can assess for themselves and report to others whether they are having the desired impact on all the people and natural resources they serve.
As we consider specific functions, we can imagine equipment and services for producing 8.5 x 11-inch color computer maps, a product that we will sell for framing. Large quantity production and alternative sizes are topics for later solution. We have links with the map developers, but we are likely to be the primary delivery group.
Other Dimensions of Q Works
Q Works is where software is developed to support each enterprise, then shared with others. It is where we capitalize on millions of dollars of tax-paid research findings already on file. It supports educational units, both for proposed enterprise staff and citizens, and the massive print and text needs that these are likely to have. It arranges for energy-efficient delivery as well as energy-efficient travel for staff to customers, working groups, and educational centers (least-cost path analyses).
Q Works first developed the hardware and software to serve developing rural businesses. This unit then developed other simulation and optimization systems including significant combinations of linear programming and expert systems, PERT techniques, Fibonacci searches over non-linear spaces, robust "heuristic programming" for tentative approximate solutions in the areas of
"Expert systems" have gained limited use for we in natural resource management have not have clear objectives but we do now and can use the power of those software units in capturing the knowledge available, especially among local experts. These programs assemble and organize knowledge (facts, rules, and inferences) and draw from them inferences. We see major potential uses of these processes when the wisdom of local people is augmented with 'facts' from the Internet within an expert system (e.g., ARV-Nexpert) and displayed within a Geographic Information System.
Sectors
Centering was an important concept - that of developing the structure and operating an administrative group that, at its formation, had the potential of achieving significant cost savings and efficiencies for all future developed enterprises within a corporation. It was the means to guide enterprises toward synergistic gains. It had a lowly service role but also one of collecting and reflecting the progress of all, together. Communicating the many related parts was difficult. Coordinating collaboration among so many groups was a task, not impossible because the objectives were unusually clear and new technology available where others had failed. People want simplicity and that may be all that they are able to handle well consistently. Complexity is well known, not well mastered.
The business and military concept of span of control (see "Smallness in the design" Chapter 3) approximately means that one leader may effectively control only so many people (so many projects). The rural resources may constitute a problem for which there are no known ways of dealing with the numbers and breadth of the control that is needed. The "span of control" needed for Rural System seemed excessively large, but "control" in that statement was given its modern revision by Internet communication, shared dependent services, shared financial incentives, and computer aids for making the decisions … always requiring tradeoffs… but always, finally, bowing to the precise objective, bounded expected long-term profit.
Employment
Rural System staff saw the need for a new pattern that they call The Line. It is a cascade over many years that includes meaningful work for high school junior and seniors during summers; co-op-like work for students in the college (work-study on campus); Master of Science and Ph.D. degree projects as requested and contracted with Rural System (especially for those having done co-op work); and contracted post-graduate employment for at least one year to test, prove, and make operational within one or more enterprises the thesis or project results from the contract.
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| A time line here suggests how The Line provides qualified youth of the City and region opportunities to engage in quality work experience on System projects. After work on contract research projects, students integrate their profit-producing concepts and thesis/dissertations products into the enterprise during the next year, then decisions are made about future work. |
The Line, an operation of centering, starts work with youth of the area, reducing their losses to "the outside" and increases the payoffs from early involvement in career choice, from active participation in desirable projects, and from having a meaningful base from which to work while in college. Staff was critical of "dusty books on the shelf" from past contract work so they provided graduating student a job. They would have incentives for good work for they would know their projects must "work." They would know that they could stay in place after project completion, or were free to pursue work elsewhere. They had the assurances that Rural System would try to retain superior workers.
Gains
It is important to the staff of Rural System to try to present forest information (and related other information) as clearly and as unbiased as possible. Some of the information is not pleasant and not supportive of work by others in the past.
We know we can make financial gains in the face of such information and risk little in asserting it. The cumulative gains are from expertise in:
"Controlling" Costs
Centering is developed to help each enterprise control costs. Interior to each group was the creativity and expertise to move ahead potential gains. Perhaps too general for the average worker within, for example, the Gardens Group, centering applies encouragement and computational aids to help the group control its costs.
Gardening is just a process of letting seeds express themselves. That's similar to the perceived work of Rural System because it is trying to let ideas emerge, plants grow, animal populations prosper, and accounts enlarge. Like "preventative medicine" it is more involved with reducing problems, avoiding conflicts, dodging natural competition, avoiding down-time, and leaping constraints than with curing, treating, or giving birth. Conventional gardening attacks the attackers, the insects, the fungi, the birds, mammals, drought, and poachers. Modern gardening within Rural System's Gardens Group concentrates on properly locating the fortress before the attacks begin. GIS allows specific crops to be planted in low-stress places. If selected well, then attacks will be few, the survivors healthy, and they will defend themselves well. Modern gardening encourages selecting the right seeds for the local markets, planting them in the right places and densities (to avoid between-plant stresses … the forerunners of insect and disease attacks), and in healthful combinations (e.g., legumes with corn and the combinations of agroforestry). Its emphasis is not only on the substances put down, but on the schedule of doing so. Much of the difference in modern gardening, like the proposed work of Rural System, is that it is more intent upon reducing costs, losses, and wastes and on adding value than on increasing production (for that may already be near the maximum).
Compounding
The gains from centering come like those from compound interest in investments. Left alone, but with clear objectives and policies and the well-known conditions for "joining-up," Groups have incentives for creativity, hard work, and on-going benefits. They can make unlimited profit. To do so and make extra gains, they will find it advantageous to get help from Q Works as well as from some other groups. Help from other groups tends to be synergistic, making much greater combined gains than those from the simple sum of their efforts. Helping other groups, at least advertising for them and encouraging them, will increase the total system profit, part of which flows back to them, the "helper." The staff of Q Works works hard to be of help in areas such as:
Q Works delivers service radially, not using top-down control or dominance. It provides the needs of each enterprise that no one of them is likely to afford alone. Q Works is responsible for the financial analyses and decisions about start-up performance and initiatives. Rural System Groups had irregular vehicle use. It established the transportation policies and those for the "motor pool." There were persistent challenges on optimum use of vehicles. Computers were typically located with each enterprise but large systems were maintained or contract service secured in this unit. All services and supplies were bought to achieve economies of scale. It developed a communication system, procedures related to fieldwork, developed the contacts for efficient contract reviews and approvals, and in the first year played a major role in recruiting staff. Safety programs were implemented early, especially with staff of The Safety and Security Group. The novelty and advancement potentials of Rural System, regional economic conditions, and looming political pressures made it very attractive and some of the best university natural resource program graduates and agency professionals were easily recruited. In financial compound interest computations, the principle is kept, then expanded by investment, and then the sum of the two becomes the new money total to be expanded, and about which decisions can be made. In Rural System work, especially that of centering, efforts are to retain and improve the principle, to concentrate on the basic resources, and to stay attuned to the profound influence of balanced time and rate in the compound equation…Pt = P0 (1.0 + r)t where some initial invested value becomes Pt after being modified by changes in rate, r, and the investment duration, t.
Feedforward
The feedforward concept (Chapter 6) is promoted within each enterprise. The collective work on predicting and estimating the future is a major task of Q Works. Preparing for the conditions estimated and held true is encouraged by them but the real changes made now to accommodate that future is largely in the hands of the Groups.
Accounting
Like other functions (legal, health benefits, advertising, publishing, marketing, transportation, general software development, and "decent work" (appendix )) Q Works had a major accounting and financial management role. This was fairly classical in form but advanced for most of the Group managers. As a trivial example, they developed a regional credit-card system for modest financial gains, sharing and trading resources, and local pride in shared activity.
The Q Index
Within Q Works was a unit with the general activity of defining and computing a quality of life score, called Q (Chapter 9, Quality of Life). This seemed to be needed to answer for the communities, "How are we doing?" That question was answered for Rural System itself in profits. Of course a high quality rural environment is required for a high Q to exist. Rather than persist in separating rural from other needs of people and failing to address increasing concerns of small towns and villages becoming cities, we compute an index, a means for quantifying the quality of life in terms of citizens' objectives and estimates of how well they are achieved. The sale of software and procedures for gaining citizen involvement, computing, and displaying the index had a small but lucrative market. It motivated an improved form of land use management (contra "zoning") in counties that learned of its potentials.
Q Works and Select Groups
"Floating" near Q Works are several independent groups within Rural System not easily classified with the other major groupings (listed with brief descriptions in Chapter 10). (Classifying the Groups seems to meet a descriptive but otherwise functionless need.) These include:
NatureSeen - A group with a web site where unusual nature and rural resource observations are collected. Modern journals no longer accept and report these observations and they are essential for building a knowledge base, especially about rare occurrences.
RuraLives - A company that collects, edits, and stores brief biographies of people of the region. It recognizes the importance of individuals, documents important life events and gives voice far beyond the depauperate obituary. Such obituaries are often the only written information about a person of the countryside.
Events Monitor -Publicizing and describing upcoming attractions: classes, field trips, scouting trips, BBQ's etc. Objectives are stressed and clarified, coordination encouraged and maintained, progress monitored, and feedback stressed and applied.
Software - Deciding where software to be developed was often in question … within Q Works, elsewhere within a group, or contracted? The answer was always…where the underbrush was thin and profits could most probably be turned for the long term.
E-Catalog - Q Works provides an e-catalog directing access to land, services, and products. With competent work from an aggressive sales staff, this may become a major site for coordinated forestry, fisheries, wildlife, and rural-related equipment, products, and services. It will link successful hunters and anglers, suggest "hot spots" for activities, and provide "bragging space" for some outdoor users who have been very successful. It will provide links to land purchase and sales to sophisticated analyses (for the realtor as well as the potential owners) (e.g., virtual (photo) tours with services) and sets the stage for cost-effective future land management involving the diverse units of Rural System. Advertising contracts will contribute to profits as will commissions on sales resulting from orders originating from this site.
Unlike within Ebay where bidding occurs, the prices are specific within the catalog or links are made for site-specific negotiated prices. The enthusiasm of one observer seeing the e-catalog, was uncontrolled. It could, she said, become the basis for cooperative extension program and virtually all educational presentations of all types, free, funded, or planned…and selected by the potential learner.
Communications raised old questions about whether statements should be made from enterprises or from a central voice. The criteria were generally "open, often, true, legal, and profit producing for the long-run." The Rural System web site provides major communication links among all employees and opened the gates to users, buyers, and several memberships within Rural System, and provides a creative space for presenting ideas. The web site also enabled listening to the ideas, interests, and needs of potential customers. Distance learning connections and sources were provided from the site.
The Education Strategy
"Education" is used so loosely and so variously in society that people within Rural System insist upon it being considered changed behavior in all discussions. They use the word "neodidactics" to suggest the differences in their meaning and understanding as they develop programs and projects designed to change or solidify the behaviors of staff, clients, and the public.
The staff tends to work with the concept that if the student has not changed his or her behavior, then learning has not occurred. If an effort has been made to cause a person's behavior to change and it has not, then teaching has not occurred. (Others claim that learning has not occurred … but that is an individual response and the attention of staff is on the investment in the total effort for a group, the educational system, that produces the desired change.
The change must be observable and "significant." For the individual for which the statistics of populations and the accepted meaning of "significant difference" has no meaning, we suggest measured differences of 15% over 5 years or an amount of difference agreed upon by the pooled opinion of three or more informed observers of that person's behavior. Answering a test question (item) correctly may be an index to having a desired behavior, but it must be compared to the prior behavioral condition (i.e., inability to answer correctly consistently). There are many ways to change behavior (e.g., fences, drugs, bonds and irons, significant threats, significant rewards). Laws and regulations tend to change behavior.
The difference, difficult to refine, is that within the Rural System concept, the desired behavior is known and specified, the present condition is determined, and a host of actions and tactics are involved to change present behaviors to those desired and specified. If a desired behavior already exists, it cannot be taught. It might be confirmed and certified but this action is not education, certainly not neodidactics. The behavior might be judged to be able to be "improved" (implying that the desired condition now exceeds the actual condition).
The needs for education about Rural System itself, about the work of the employees and the groups, and for staff efficiencies are great. A new school is a real potential, working in the natural environment and using distance learning concepts in concert with outdoor education can created a needed alternative for youth and significantly improved staff performance. Staff education needs will be great for they will be recruited from vastly different backgrounds, schools, and educational philosophies. The need is to bring the best of what traditional education has to offer, then to delete the barriers and costs. Costs for didactic structures, materials, and salaries can be high, but by concentrating on subsequent incentives and payoffs and on cost per unit of changed behavior per unit time, real gains can be made. Incentives and payoffs can provide students with net gains for their investments.
Neodidactics is a large concept. The key parts are:
An educational space and working group may exist for youth and adults to deal with a variety of corporate interests. Youth tutoring and classes will be a financial staple and adult education will be integrated with paid group activities in the area. A field museum and workshop in a high technology educational space may provide potentials for special markets.
Housing for participants in the education may be supplied by The Rural System Inns as well as existing facilities. The diverse outdoor events, the "get-away," the special educational efficiencies, and group-structure-building of The Wildland Crew will appeal to many corporations.
The Didactron (see Power Places) is a separate structure developed around the concept of optimal teaching-learning environments (room size, seating, color, training aids, audio-visual facilities, and optimal field plots and demonstration), i.e., maximum units of pre-specified behavioral change per dollar
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The facility, managed within Q Works is only one part of a complex, high intensity educational program, largely self-taught, to bring citizens into an advanced educational status. A for-profit educational system is to be developed. A key element of the program is to teach the teachers about optimal rural conditions. There is a major educational aspect to all parts of Rural System and all employees must understand the system. Work with the Competency Group is related. Q Works, as part of its educational and marketing work, sponsors the " Summit" at a hotel/motel in the region. It is an exclusive annual retreat for the emerging ranging and rural enterprises. Overflow attendance is provided within the Rural System Inns. Owners, presidents and CEOs from more than 60 companies and agencies attend this annual event. The Summit provides an ideal forum for executives to gain strategic insights, to network and to relax with other industry leaders. Topics covered include the state of the global and U.S. outdoor industries and practical advice on partnerships, marketing, planning, and acquisitions.
The Consequence Strategy
At the political borderline, but not crossing it, a consequence strategy is developed. Within Q Works is the capability to do high quality environmental impact analyses, thus to cut the costs to citizens of these documents and the work to produce them for public projects that are desired … and for projects that are not desired and those that groups wish to fight. Under contract, Rural System could produce best available information on the consequences of a range of projects proposed within the county within a general set of inclusive options of
These estimated consequences were expected to lead to designs for more long-term beneficial functions within the region (See Peculiar Manor, chapter 14. The consequences provided were within about 50 categories of typical public concern (typically categories of impact, functions, and forms). This unique ability comes from knowledge of ecological modeling and systems building and using transition tables or ecological succession. Only presenting the best data for others to use, the enterprise does not "take stands" and is available for either (or both) side of often-difficult environmental decisions. Previously, the mere presence of such a system has deterred people from presenting questionable proposals that would impact a county or a group of private ownerships. Consequence reports typically are compared to results from an optimization run given a profit objective and conventional fuzzy alternatives.
Other Q Works Action: Adding Value, Not Extracting but Transforming Resources
When I cut a mature walnut tree and send it to the mill I am probably engaged in logging and, hopefully following the advice from forestry. When I cut that tree from an area certified by Smartwood as a sustainable forest, and know that the value of the harvested wood will be 5 - 10% greater, then I realize that certification itself adds value to the wood grown on a tract. The land owner may have gotten "certified" for personal and social reasons, perhaps because he wanted to be in the environmental movement, but it could have been because he wanted extra financial gains from his resources. That same tree sawn nearby (with computer guidance), properly stacked and dried, and then the boards cut into pieces called "blanks" which will be further processed in to the stocks of rifles or the arms of chairs, will add value for the owner and for others in the region.
In an off-beat way, we think we add value to the lives on rural people in work on RuraLives, the enterprise that collects and preserves information about the lives of people. We add value to flour and water by adding ancient yeast from Alaska and selling sourdough starts and breads. We add value to "waste products" by finding one or more alternative uses for them before they become integrated with the soil or move on to cosmic otherness.
Simple transformations (as above) or adding a seal of approval or standard of quality can add value to products. Packaging (e.g., plastic covers on meat) can add value. Information identifying a new hybrid fruit can convert it from an unknown to a much-sought item. Numbering and consistent labeling of prints, sculpture, and art can add value to items. Processing - grain to whiskey for example - can add monetary value, but as always, there are social and legal dimensions to appropriate changes and additions.
Foresters have, for years, used a high rate of return in analyzing forestry investments. The reasoning was that with insect, fire, wind damage, trespass and vandalism, the risks for growing trees form plantation to mature size and harvest was very great. Binkley and Raper (J. Forestry,1997) added value by the discovery that the appropriate risk adjusting rate of interest (also called hurdle or discount rate) for timberland may be lower than yields available from financial markets (stocks and bonds) taken as a whole. They found that timberlands tend to carry less risk than ordinary financial assets, therefore such lands should be evaluated with a lower hurdle rate than would be applied to other classes of assets.
I think we are fiddling while the fires burn and we ought to be running for the hose. I've used such figures of speech 50 years ago and I've not "burnt up." No, but I've seen northern Nigeria, part of India, and northern Senegal and northern China and they all have. I do know that taxes, the costs of group living, services, waste disposal, and good water have gone up. I've seen buffalo herds convert a massive Senegal park to a desert because the regulatory predator pressure of lions was removed from the herd. No one was going to let lions regain dominance, again rule the land. I've seen the deserts of China advance, the wetlands of the Eastern US decline, aquifers become shallow and poisoned, species become extinct, wonderful wildlife areas flooded, stream-sides bulldozed, lakes and ponds of the US fill with silt, salt water intrude under vast areas from which fresh water has been pumped, thousands of Mid-America people about ready to experience "the dry well" along with people from Appalachia who have had the top of their mountains blown off for coal and the rainfall unaccomodated. I've seen whole communities of people grow ill from toxic substances in their air and water. I continue to ask: Is being incensed and unforgetful not the proper feeling about the loss of the beautiful oncager, the endangered wild ass of the Rhan of Kutch of northwestern India that is being eliminated by soldiers using it for target practice? Why must I ignore these personal observations? Is all of this really acceptable to everyone? Can't we think of what will exist after we clear our minds of the major wars? (Maybe such a time will never come…but I cannot allow myself that thought.) At least can't we think of how to keep the soldiers and refugees well fed? Must the last whine always be "If I had only known!"?
"Whoever has the most intelligent customers will flourish, and this is true for countries as well as customers" (Hawkens 1993:155).
The manager works "to gain control of the system" and how might we know when he or she has done so? What is the evidence? When objectives are being achieved! When the system is going "smoothly straight down the road in the right direction at a safe speed"! But where, precisely, is that?
Monitoring, Feedback, and Adaptive Management
Monitoring of wildlife has long been recognized as a need in floral and faunal (wildlife) management programs. What is done with the results, collected at such high costs (and occasional danger), has been a persistent question. In most natural resource work, action is at walk speed. There is no working capital; progress is made at the rate of the annual budgeting process. There are unclear objectives and thus no feedback and thus little improvement.
Feedback is a well known term for the engineer and biologist. It is the corrective or adjustment action taken to reach a certain condition. (The role of a thermostat in regulating room temperature is a common, often-cited example of the feedback subsystem operation.) Monitoring needs to have more of the characteristics of a thermometer; what is needed is to use the results of having the temperature just as a thermostat uses the information about temperature to turn on or off a heating or cooling unit. The same is needed in land management. When managers are attuned to the environment through monitoring and when they are taking a systems approach and using information to make small changes in the system-all aspects-to assure continually that they are achieving objectives (or moving toward such a state), then they can be said to be using adaptive management. The works of Holling (1978) and Walters (1986) outline the concepts and techniques of adaptive management and an attempt has been made to incorporate many of these into Q Works statements. Walters (1986: 3) argues that management should be an "adaptive learning process" so that the manager him or herself is influenced, has feedback, from the system being managed. Cooperative efforts to use reported results (not "published" but merely serious, precise notes) can allow Rural System itself to learn and improve.
The major elements of adaptive management (based on Walters,1986) are:
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