I have worn a lot of hats in my career: data analyst, technical writer, event planner, policy analyst, program manager, operations lead, startup founder, board member, methane and manure research lifeguard (yep). I have also worked at a lot of business models and sizes during my career: government, science laboratory, utility, Fortune500, Inc500, startup, nonprofit. I like collecting experiences, ideas, intuition, friends. Problem is, almost 2 decades in, this has all gotten a bit unwieldy. Allow me to explain.

I embrace my renaissance woman status and my people are those who appreciate that. Maybe it’s because one of my strengthsfinders strengths is ideation, and I put high value on finding concepts and connections among disparate things. Maybe it’s because I like to immerse myself deep into my learning to build intuition and lifelong connections before bringing that to the next thing. I know when it’s time for the next thing when I’m ready to learn something else.

With that context, I present to you 5 things I learned along the way in my climate career:

1. In my work with startups, I learned that defining the problem and defining the viable choices will remove most roadblocks. Simply defining or ignoring the problem is not enough. If I felt stuck or saw an issue recurring again and again, I learned to dive deep until I surfaced the problem. And sometimes, founders or any builder cannot zoom out enough to see there is a problem so must listen and observe closely for the signs of being stuck.
   
2. In my work with electric utilities, I learned how to move and make decisions from within a highly regulated, highly matrixed bureaucracy. I touch on this here, and the quick summary is: create buy-in and urgency to push decision-making in an IOU. Relatedly, to create urgency for a regulated utility, the drivers are ratepayers and regulators. I was shocked to see how little investor friends in the cleantech1.0 boon understood this and could follow regulatory policy in risk and opportunity assessment. To illustrate, imagine a RACI or DARCI chart to document who is the decider, accountable, responsible, consulted and informed. Know this: those tools, for an IOU, include a very long list of names on the “Decider,” “Consulted,” and “Informed” sections due to the many stakeholders and regulators to which the IOU must stay accountable.
   
3. In my work measuring and reporting on ESG, I learned that alignment between mission/values and metrics for measurement are key to building impact into an organization’s DNA. Without that alignment, the power of reporting and managing (and holding accountable) is lost.
   
4. In my work convening the renewable energy industry and market-mapping bioenergy technologies, I learned that the people who really get the cleantech (er, climatetech) space are engineers, lawyers, and utility leaders. If you want an unvarnished lay of the land, find a sympathetic ear among one of these functional areas and ask away. An unfortunate perception of this sector is how opaque the energy ecosystem in with regards to how decisions are made. Actually, it’s not all that opaque once you dive in, it’s just incredibly technical and the kind of thing most people wouldn’t do unless that’s their job. It’s kind of like we need to save the world but first need to spend several hours at the DMV. To navigate large institutions, you need guides, and the engineers and lawyers who have worked on deals are these guides. This holds true some 13 years later.
   
5. In my work doing climate and soil moisture field research in remote ranchland and farmland, I learned about the importance of community engagement to build momentum and trust. Imagine the distrust farmers might have if someone mailed a letter explaining the US government (USDA and NASA) would soon fly planes, launch satellites, and send international grad students traipsing through their fields to study climate change. And yet, by working with local community and farm education centers, this was largely not an issue. Later, at Greenprint Partners, we worked with community organizations rooted in their cities to connect with underserved and otherwise hard-to-reach stakeholders important to our work.