Guest Blogger: Lessons From a Solar Decathlon Team Leader

This week's guest blog article is by John Clinton, Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management at Milano-The New School for Management & Urban Policy in New York City, and Milano team leader for the Solar Decathlon project.

Complex engineering problems, aesthetic design, and, of course, energy efficiency solutions all characterize the Solar Decathlon. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Decathlon is an international competition among colleges and universities to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive. This year’s 20 finalists include entries from across the U.S. and, for the first time, China (Tongji University).

Along with the imaginative and analytical discipline essential to design-development and execution, a seemingly mundane challenge can pose one of the thorniest issues for Decathletes: how to integrate the efforts of hundreds of students in dozens of courses taught by a score of professors over the lifespan of a two-year project, with many of the participants cycling out at the conclusion of an academic semester. Given the tension between continuity and adaptability, how can anyone know what others are doing, let alone break new ground in technology applications, marketability, and aesthetics?

For The New School-Stevens Institute of Technology Solar Decathlon team, (which includes the Parsons School of Design and the Milano School of Management and Urban Policy), an additional consideration has been the decision to take a community-based approach. Our partnership extends beyond our schools to include the Washington, D.C. Deanwood neighborhood advisory commissioner, the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development, and Habitat for Humanity of Washington, D.C. With these partners, we are working to create a simple, affordable, ultra-efficient home that holistically and systemically addresses sustainable living.

While we are convinced that such an approach is necessary to achieve the social impact we seek, broad partnerships of this sort inevitably heighten process and structural challenges. So, our solution to what is essentially an organizational problem has been that seemingly mundane tool: the org chart.
We engaged several graduate students from the Milano Organizational Change Management (OCM) graduate program to collect data through survey questionnaires from a wide-ranging array of academic teams across the three schools. They identified and canvassed 22 teams in all, subsequently interviewed university-based project leaders, and also gathered input from community partners.

Thanks to the architecture faculty member who is the overall project leader, and especially the elected student project leadership of this student-driven project, the critical need for the OCM organizationally-centered work was underscored. Both faculty and student leaders emphasized the integrative potential of the OCM work—an important message for all team members to absorb.

In addition to identifying the 22 student workgroups and clarifying relationships among internal and external stakeholders, the group implemented an organizational chart created by collaboration across all of the schools to promote continuing collaboration. The chart eased the entry of each new group of students as they entered the project, helping them understand the many players and project components, and facilitated internal communication, so that work teams could readily direct inquiries and engage in joint efforts.

Several additional OCM students focused on process issues and devised forums for integration, brainstorming, and communication strategies. A key task was to provide methods for relationship-building in order to improve understanding of the goals of key stakeholders in the organizational chart and the interactions and settings necessary to achieve them.

Unlike more typical projects in which the various professions work in isolation, we learned quickly that curricular attention to human relationships and communication, employing the tools of managing change processes and organizational dynamics, were important contributors to complex, interdisciplinary collaboration. That is a lesson we are now infusing in sustainability curricula across the institution.

As we enter the final stages of the Solar Decathlon competition, we continue to derive lessons for curricular innovation to be shared with the entire university community. Equally, and as importantly, we believe we are preparing our students for the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration that characterize sustainability work beyond the classroom walls.

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