by Janus Boye
Gerry McGovern is a true Internet visionary who’s recently turned his focus to environmentally sustainable digital leadership
The subject line of the very first edition of the New Thinking newsletter by Gerry McGovern was ‘Massively parallel societies’ and opened like this:
Language is the invention of a co-operative society, and we wouldn’t be where we are today if we hadn’t co-operated.
This was on June 24, 1996 and Gerry wrote about how multimedia and the Internet would hopefully help us realize again that we are nothing without each other.
Since then his newsletter has gained traction and readers around the world, including yours truly and he’s kept doing it with a weekly dose of provocative and thoughtful insights.
Besides his newsletter, Gerry is perhaps even more known as the inventor of the Top Task framework, the author of eight books and his relentless focus on helping organizations become more customer centric on the Web.
Recently his focus has shifted to sustainability with his most recent book titled World Wide Waste. Gerry is based in Dublin, Ireland and also our expert of the month.
Top tasks are about simplifying things
What really matters when it comes to your digital presence? This question has been on Gerry’s mind for longer than most and out of his work came his unique approach to Top Tasks, which over the past twenty years have been further improved as a framework to help organisations identify what is important.
In brief, Top Tasks Management is a model that says: “Focus on what really matters (the top tasks) and defocus on what matters less (the tiny tasks).
Gerry McGovern is also a popular conference speaker and has spoken at conference around the world
Together with his network of global partners, Gerry is also the mind behind Customer Carewords, which is a unique scoring technique enabling customers to tell you in precise, statistical terms their top tasks when they arrive at your website.
Customer Carewords is also the name of a consulting firm with Gerry at the helm, which offers services to help organizations implement the top task approach. Besides identifying customer top tasks and offering their task performance indicator, they now also offers a Digital Waste Audit, where they identify and fix areas of digital that are wasteful. We’ll talk more about that shortly.
Interestingly in our conversation, Gerry made the connection back to 20 years ago and said that we have less information architecture skills now compared to then. To quote Gerry:
It’s as if people have said: “Digital too big to manage” and with the increased ease-of-use in the tools, they’ve just given up managing.
Unfortunately, this way to use tech has massive, hidden negative impacts on the environment.
Introducing Earth Experience Design
While reflecting on his decades of work with digital, Gerry realized how low the awareness of e-waste is. This in turn became the focus of his latest book titled World Wide Waste which documents how tech damages the Earth-and what we should be doing about it.
In our conversation he shared just a few facts to set the stage:
We are producing vastly more data and content that we have the capacity to consume
We took more photos in 2020 than we’ve ever done before. This is really an unimaginable number of photos and the majority of them will never be accessed.
In Ireland data centers amount for 10% of electricity consumption and then there is the water consumption. In our call, he specifically named data centers as among the most damaging things we have ever built.
There are many more numbers in the book, including the mention of 1.6 billion trees which would have to be planted to offset the pollution caused by email spam.
To quote Gerry:
In order for life to continue to thrive, designers must consider not only the user experience (UX) but the earth’s experience and the impacts of what we design.
Gerry has written about the principles of Digital Earth Experience Design, which I encourage to study. Here’s the three principles in brief:
The first principle is to not create
The second principle is to make stuff that is reusable
The third principle is to minimize waste during reuse and creation
Gerry shared this slide during our recent conversation - the keywords being (A) Wisdom, (B) Worth & Wait and (C) Weight & Waste
Earth experience is also a shift in your purchasing and repair behaviours to reduce environmental impact by understanding the lifecycle of the physical tools - phones, tablets, computers - used to interact with the digital world.
Delete and be gentle on the environment
The promise of tech has always been the efficiency, but in reality IT tends to be chaos zones and many organizations are drowning in unmanaged data.
When I asked Gerry for advice in terms of how we can take today, he said: Look for something to delete!
Going a bit further in your daily digital habits, Gerry said there are lots of little things we can do and shared this example:
If I need to do a presentation, I go to a folder, and make a habit to delete something. Try to delete 1 file each time. Also, before taking a photo, ask: Do I need to do this. It’s all about individual habits to help raise awareness
Gerry also only keeps 2 years of email and he starts every year by going back and deleting old emails. Gerry wrapped up our conversation by zooming out:
At every part of your day, you can make decisions that will be gentler on the environment. Every time you save 15 minutes on a video conference, you do something good for the environment. Every time you choose audio over video, you do something good. Every time you choose text over audio, you do something good.
Learn more about Gerry McGovern
With his 25+ years as an industry expert, Gerry has received numerous awards and recognition, including in 2006, where The Irish Times described Gerry as one of five visionaries who had had a major impact on the development of the Web. (The other four were Tim O’Reilly, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and Nicholas Negroponte.)
In May, Gerry hosted a member call on his World Wide Waste book. Read more and watch the slides and recording here: Waste is the business case of big tech.
He has also appeared on BBC, CNN and many other news outlets. You can find more on his website at gerrymcgovern.com, connect with Gerry on LinkedIn, but do consider subscribing to the newsletter mentioned in the beginning.