information. People needed information regarding water in specific locations and we didn’t have that type of information.” So, the team decided to create a detailed local survey for bottling plants. The only problem was how to get people to do it. They discovered, almost immediately, that the survey evoked a basic problem with most corporate-led change efforts: suspicion as to why headquarters needed all this information. “We created a three-hundred question survey,” says Vermeer, “asking for all sorts of information that people had never been asked before. When people saw it, they told us that if we got 10% of the local bottlers to fill it out, we would be doing great.” Working with consultants and other Coke staff, the team focused on local operating people they knew from their interviews and got a few to complete the survey. The survey took 10 hours per plant, and many questions explored areas where even experienced people had little operational knowledge. Gradually, it became evident that the reality for the operating people was that if, for example, you were getting water from a municipality, that was assumed to be an assured supply. Vermeer adds, “There was no transparency beyond the municipality, to where they got their water. That was a question that most people, in Coke and beyond, had not asked. So, asking was important – even if there was no way to expect even experienced operational people to have all the answers.” It became apparent that, while many plant managers were aware of issues in the larger watershed they were part of, by and large, “they had no framework for addressing them, nor clear support in doing so.” But, as local operating people became engaged in the survey, they wanted Vermeer and his colleagues to assure them that their efforts would be worthwhile. “People said, ‘Look, we just worked really hard to provide this data for you. Don’t be corporate.’” In most big companies, local managers providing this sort of detailed and potentially important information to corporate headquarters have learned that two types of things usually happen. Either corporate staff do nothing with the information or there is a witch hunt. The first wastes everyone’s time. The second is worse. Somebody writes a report and it goes to the CEO, pointing to divisions who have operational problems. The CEO then calls the division president, who then calls the technical people responsible, who will then typically say, “We don’t know how they reached their conclusions.” To circumvent these concerns, the corporate water team created a two-day workshop for each business unit based on their own facilities’ survey responses. “The workshops were amazing,” says Vermeer, “because people came together to study their own information, so it was grounded in the information they had given us, which we had analyzed to identify priority water issues for each site and geography.” Toolkit Cross-Reference: “Inquiry and Engagement Workshop”, Page 75 People began to see connections between the data and the actual risks to their operations. “You could tell that it all started to become real to them when they stopped speaking English and started to talk to each other in their native language - Spanish, Thai, whatever. Suddenly, they
©2008 Sustainable Food Lab
Innovations for Healthy Value Chains -- 47