La Bourse / Volume IV / Nº IV.01 / Workbook — the Gainshare employee

A woman in a dark suit standing at the edge of a still green lake, seen from behind, mist on the forest beyond. — Plate IV.01 · Workbook — the Gainshare employeeThe Declaration.A product and its declaration are two different objects, and the whole of this volume is about the distance between them.

WORKBOOK — THE LUMINOUS GAINSHARE EMPLOYEE

Chapter IV.01 · Making Things That Add

For the person working inside a gainshare arrangement — where a defined share of verified improvement returns to the people who created it. This chapter's subject is boundaries, and a gainshare is a boundary with your name on it.

WHY THIS CHAPTER IS YOURS

A gainshare has four parts: a baseline, a measure, a share, and a period with a verifier. Chapter IV.01 defines a net-positive claim by four declarations: a boundary, a baseline, a counterfactual, and a unit.

Line them up and the correspondence is exact. The measure is the boundary — what counts. The unit is what the measure is expressed per. The counterfactual is the thing your scheme document almost certainly does not name and should.

So everything this chapter teaches about reading a product declaration applies directly to reading your own statement, and the central finding transfers without modification: the number is decided by where the line is drawn, and the line is drawn by whoever writes the document. In a gainshare, that person is not usually you. It can become you.

The finding you can use immediately. In the chapter's worked product, held over its own declared service life, 63.8 percent of the whole-life climate impact is the maintenance regime and 29.1 percent is manufacture. The entire improvement effort was aimed at the manufacture. The largest available gain was sitting in an operating routine that nobody had costed, because the document reported it as a rate — 0.403 per year — rather than as a total, 6.045 over fifteen years.

Uncounted gain is unshared gain. Making something countable is the highest-leverage thing you can do from inside a gainshare, and this chapter is a manual for doing it.

PART ONE — DISCOVERY

Days 1–30: find the gain that is outside the boundary

Exercise 1.1 — Map your scheme onto the four declarations (2 hours)

Take your scheme document and answer in writing:

Boundary. What exactly is inside the measure? List what is explicitly included, then list what you know contributes to results and is not named.
Baseline. What period, what value, what date, and who signed it.
Counterfactual. Does the scheme credit improvement against what actually happened before, or against what the business says would have happened anyway? If the second, find the words and copy them out exactly.
Unit. Per what — per unit produced, per hour, per head, per site — and over what period.

Question three is the one that decides how much you can trust the scheme. A gainshare paid against a measured prior period is a baseline scheme and is auditable. A gainshare paid against "what we would have achieved regardless" is a counterfactual scheme, and a counterfactual is a description of a world that did not happen. It can be revised downward at any point by anybody with a model, and you will have no measurement to set against it.

If yours is the second kind, that is this month's finding, and it is worth more than any improvement you could make in the same month.

Exercise 1.2 — The rate-versus-total sweep (one week)

Walk your own operation looking for anything reported as a rate where the multiplier is not on the same page. Per shift, per unit, per week, per service, per clean, per changeover.

  rate x periods over the life = total
  0.403 x 15 = 6.045

For each, multiply. You are looking for the item where the total is an order of magnitude larger than the attention it receives. In the chapter's case it turned out to be vacuuming, which is about as unglamorous as an operating variable can get, and it was three and a half times the entire manufacturing footprint.

Write down five. You need only one.

Exercise 1.3 — The appreciative team conversation (45 minutes)

Run this with your team, in these words:

"Think of something we do here that works better than anybody outside this room realises. Not the biggest thing — the one that would surprise them. What makes it work, and how would somebody who was not here ever know?"

Take notes on what would make it visible, not on the thing itself. That is the list you are actually assembling: a set of currently-invisible gains and the measurement each would need. Every one of them is unshared today for the same reason — nobody drew the boundary around it.

PART TWO — THE ARITHMETIC

Days 31–45: compute what the gain is actually worth

Exercise 2.1 — Size the uncounted gain, with a range (90 minutes)

Take your best candidate and compute what it is worth, in the scheme's own units, as a range rather than a point.

The chapter's discipline here is strict and it will serve you in the negotiation: where the underlying document does not break something down, do not assert a split. The chapter needed to know how much of the maintenance module was vacuuming and how much was extraction cleaning; the declaration does not say; so it states a 30 percent reduction explicitly as a scenario, labelled as one, producing 1.813 kg CO₂e/m² — 0.74× the whole gate-stage cut.

Do the same. A range you can defend beats a point estimate you cannot, and the first person to find one unsupported decimal in your submission will use it to dismiss the whole thing.

Exercise 2.2 — Convert it into the scheme's currency (one hour)

  verified improvement  =  current period measure  -  baseline
  your share            =  verified improvement  x  share percentage

Run it three ways: against the baseline as written; against the baseline as you believe it should be defined; and against the widest defensible boundary. Note the spread. In the chapter, the same square metre spans 11.625 kg CO₂e/m² across six defensible boundaries, with a change of sign. Your spread will be smaller and it will still be the most persuasive object in your submission, because it shows you understand that the boundary is the argument.

Exercise 2.3 — The ratchet check (30 minutes)

Find out what happens to the baseline once the gain is realised. If it resets to the improved level each period, you are on a treadmill: every gain raises the bar, the same effort yields less each cycle, and the scheme quietly dies. A well-made scheme holds the baseline fixed for a stated term, or ratchets on a published, gradual schedule everyone can see coming.

This is the same rule the chapter gives a corporation: freeze the boundary at the moment a comparison is made, and treat any change as a restatement, disclosed, with the prior position quantified. You are entitled to exactly the discipline the company would demand of its own suppliers.

PART THREE — DESIGN

Days 46–70: make the uncounted countable

Exercise 3.1 — Build the measurement before you make the change (one week)

This is the single most common way a legitimate claim is lost. You improve something, then try to prove the improvement afterwards, and there is no clean prior period. The counterfactual is then the only available argument, and a counterfactual argued after the fact loses.

So: establish the baseline first, in writing, dated, and get one other person to countersign it — ideally somebody who would benefit from disagreeing with you later. That countersignature is what turns your number from an assertion into a record.

Exercise 3.2 — Write your own declaration card (2 hours)

One page, four fields, for the gain you are claiming.

Boundary. What is counted, named precisely, and what is excluded and why.
Baseline. The measured prior value, its period, its source, and the countersignature.
Counterfactual. Preferably the word none — meaning this is a measured before-and-after, not a model. That is the strongest entry on the card and it is worth redesigning your claim to be able to write it.
Unit. Per what, over what period.

Hand this in with your claim. Almost nobody does, and the effect on how the claim is received is out of all proportion to the effort.

Exercise 3.3 — Propose the boundary extension (one week)

Now the ask. You are not asking for more money; you are asking for a wider measure, which is a different conversation and a much easier one to win.

The proposal, in one page:

The gain that exists and is not counted, with its range.
The measurement that would count it, and what it costs to run — usually a report, a log, or a meter reading.
Who verifies it and when.
The share percentage that already applies, unchanged.
What the business gets that it does not have today: a measured, verified improvement in a place it currently has no visibility at all.

Point five is the one that carries it. You are offering the firm a control it does not currently possess, in exchange for being paid the share it has already agreed to.

PART FOUR — DESTINY AND DELIGHT

Days 71–90: make it hold

Exercise 4.1 — Get it onto the standing report (one week)

A measure reviewed on a standing schedule persists. A measure reviewed by exception does not. Getting your new number into the monthly pack is worth more than any presentation, and it is usually a two-line request to whoever assembles the pack.

Exercise 4.2 — Recruit the second reader (ongoing)

Find one person who did not build your measurement and ask them to try to break it. Give them the card and the underlying data and ask specifically: where is the boundary doing work you would not defend?

This is the practice the whole chapter rests on. The most valuable correction in the worked case — that maintenance dominates the footprint — was available to every reader of a public document for years, and it took somebody who was not the author to multiply two numbers that were printed on adjacent pages. The author is the one person who cannot see it. Give somebody else the chance.

Exercise 4.3 — The claim conversation, scripted

"I have found a gain that our measure does not currently count. Here is the range — I have not given you a point estimate because the underlying data does not support one, and I have said so on the card. Here is the measurement that would count it and what it costs to run. Here is who would verify it. The share percentage is the one we already agreed. What I am asking for is a wider measure, not a bigger share."

Then stop talking. The distinction between a wider measure and a bigger share is the whole negotiation, and it is usually granted, because the firm gets a control and the cost is a share it has already committed to.

Exercise 4.4 — The satisfaction worth naming

There is a specific pleasure in the moment your number appears in somebody else's paper, unattributed, being used for their own purposes. That is the point at which a finding stops being yours and becomes infrastructure — and infrastructure is what pays every period, without you pushing it, long after the conversation that created it has been forgotten.

KNOW YOUR SCHEME — A CHECKLIST

Ten questions. Any you cannot answer is this month's finding.

What is the baseline, and on what date was it set?
Who signed it, and are they still here?
What is the measure, expressed as a formula?
What is the unit, and over what period?
What is inside the boundary, and what is knowingly outside it?
Is improvement credited against a measured prior period, or against a modelled counterfactual?
What is the share percentage, and is it of gross or net improvement?
Who verifies, on what date, and can you see their working?
What happens to the baseline when the gain is realised?
What is the process for widening the measure, and has anybody ever used it?

Question ten is the one almost nobody asks and the one that changes the most.

APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR TEAM

What do we do here that works better than anyone outside this room knows, and what would make it visible?
When has a number one of us produced changed a decision — and what made that number credible?
Where is there a rate on a report that nobody has multiplied by its multiplier?
If we could widen the measure by one thing this year, what would be worth the most to both sides of the table?

THE THREE THINGS THAT MAKE A CLAIM SURVIVE REVIEW

Most gainshare claims that fail do not fail on the merits. They fail on form, and the form is learnable in an afternoon.

One: the baseline exists before the change does. A claim with a dated, countersigned prior measurement is a record. The same claim assembled afterwards is an argument, and an argument can be met with another argument. This is the single highest-return habit in this workbook and it costs one email sent before you start rather than after you finish.

Two: the assumptions are labelled as assumptions. Where you have estimated, say estimated. Where you have scenarioed, say scenario, the way the chapter says its 30 percent maintenance reduction is a stated scenario and not a measurement. A submission that distinguishes its measured numbers from its modelled ones is read completely differently from one that presents both in the same typeface, and the difference is entirely in your favour.

Three: the boundary is stated before the number. Open with what is counted, then give the figure. A number that arrives before its boundary invites the reader to supply their own boundary, and the one they supply will not be yours.

WHAT TO ASK FOR, IN ORDER OF DIFFICULTY

Not everything is worth asking for at once. This is the order that works.

Sight of the verifier's working. Almost always granted, rarely refused, and it tells you more about the scheme than any conversation.
A written answer on the ratchet — what happens to the baseline when the gain is realised. Costs the firm nothing to state and costs you a great deal not to know.
Your measure on the standing report rather than reviewed by exception. Two lines to whoever assembles the pack.
A widened measure, with the measurement you have already designed and costed attached to the request.
A fixed-term baseline, stated in years, replacing an unstated one.

Notice that none of these is a request for a larger share. The share is the least movable number in the scheme and the first one most people reach for. The measure is the most movable, and it is where the money is.

THE LEDGER, KEPT BY YOU

Keep your own record, monthly, in four columns: what changed, what it was before, how I know, and who else has seen it. Four lines a month, ten minutes.

The third column is the only one another person can reuse, and it is the one that will still be doing work for you three years from now when the scheme has been rewritten, the verifier has changed, and the person who signed your baseline has moved on. A gain nobody recorded is a gain nobody can be paid for, and the person best placed to record it is the person who created it.