The importance of diversity and inclusion: My learnings from the CONSORT project

Just recently a major project I was part of, the CONSORT Bruny Island battery trial finished. Seeing the final public reports (available on the project website if you are interested) made me reflect on these past three years. Sometimes you need to look back I think to really appreciate how far you have come.

So how far did we come?

• 34 people in Bruny Island accepted us into their homes, not only installing a battery and participating in the grid, but also providing their insight to the team’s social scientists through interviews, focus groups, and more;
• We built a distribution services market, Network Aware Coordination, on a real system. A world first application of this technology;
• We implemented co-operative game theory based prices to reward customers for their services to the gird; and
• Through all of this we saved a third of diesel generation on Bruny Island.

These are all great outcomes, and you can read about them in the reports if you are interested. I highly recommend them.

For me at least though one of the most important learnings from this project has been the value of diversity, culture, and inclusion in the team. Working with the project team has been the most rewarding experience of my professional career. We had engineers, social scientists, computer scientists, and economists working across five organisations. This was so valuable because whenever an issue came up we had the combined expertise in the team to solve it. I remember many spirited discussions at project team meetings as we all came to understand each other’s unique perspectives.  I think there was a unique point for all of us where we really came to understand how little we each knew, but how much we all knew.

I remember at our final project meeting where we were talking of the curly question of what customers actually value, and how exactly you might take that into account in an optimisation algorithm. Not an easy question by any stretch. But we had this great discussion ranging from what participants had told us, moving on to optimisation and economic theory, and finally how you select snacks from the morning tea tray. You could see lightbulbs going off for everyone and the energy in the room was something to behold. I still don’t think we solved it (and I’m not sure we ever will) but we all left this discussion with a greater understanding of the whole issue.

But what caused it to be like this? I think it was lots of things. In the team we had a culture of mutual respect. We were willing to give ourselves and each other freedom to try things, and accept that sometimes things didn’t go as well as we hoped. Sometimes we had to pivot the way we did things in the project significantly but as a team we were able to work out the best way to do that in a constructive way. We were all happy to not be experts in all things sometimes, and take on board alternative perspectives.

For me at least it is these sorts of things that really make it worthwhile. They never make it into project reports but they are the bits I’ll really remember and treasure.