System Changer Interview: Dr Rose Chard
“When I started working in energy seven years ago people couldn't understand why I was talking about innovation and fuel poverty in the same sentence. They’d assume that people in fuel poverty can’t afford innovation. For a long time I pushed against a lot of closed doors, brick walls and assumptions that people in power have about people in poverty. And that was hard. But amazingly, our incredible work has encouraged and accelerated changes that will help us to reach a fair Net Zero.”
Dr Rose Chard is an inclusive designer and innovator for a Net Zero energy system. With a decade of experience in research and insight, she helps decision makers and innovators to understand what consumers need and want from energy to develop consumer-centred energy products and services.
In her role at Energy Systems Catapult, she translates insight into the design of policies, products and services that help to achieve a low carbon energy system and address the challenges of consumer vulnerability and fuel poverty. As well as overseeing a programme of work on fair futures in energy, she’s currently leading a project to test and scale the ‘Warm Home Prescription’, an innovative, cross-sector partnership to help those most in need through the energy crisis.
Rose has a PhD in social sciences and research and she’s a frequent speaker and facilitator within the UK energy sector.
So tell us about your journey to this work, Rose!
Looking back I realise I didn’t have any sense of wealth or poverty as a child. I had a really happy childhood. My parents worked so hard to provide for our family that I felt the world was my oyster. Both of my parents are incredibly caring people, both for family and friends and for wider society and the community. They’ve always done so much for the community and so as a child that felt completely normal to me.
I really valued my education and followed my heart without really realising it. When I was around 14 I wanted to be a town and country planner which inspired me to study geography at university. I studied the sciences right up to age 18 at school so I really loved doing a degree that was equally balanced between physical and human geography. I really loved studying the space between the two. There’s so much to learn in that space.
I studied at Lancaster university and whilst I was there I found a real love for sustainability and community and how the energy system was evolving. I fell in love with work that was focused on the future, that was constantly changing. How can we influence transitions to support people effectively? I did my first piece of research on renewable energy, which was very new and felt very different at the time. I looked at how having access to community-based renewable energy sources would influence people’s perceptions and their interest in installing renewable energy in their own homes. This got me really excited about how systems unfold and change and what can be done to encourage people to consider and adopt new things.
I got on really well with my supervisor for my undergraduate dissertation on the renewable energy project and he encouraged me to do a PhD. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the world to do a PhD, you just need to have a really inquisitive mind, a thirst for knowledge and a subject you’re really interested in. I did my masters in Edinburgh on environmental sustainability, which gave me a chance to step back a bit and see the theoretical positions my work sat within. Then I went back to Lancaster to do my PhD, looking at older people and how they use energy in their home. I focused on fuel poverty in the UK, how policy is designed and how this is experienced in people’s homes. I looked at how fuel poverty is defined and focused on lived experiences, how energy advisors going into people’s homes could translate energy policy and practice to help the people they were interacting with.
Doing a PhD wasn’t a confidence-building exercise for me by any means. I knew that I didn’t want to continue working in academia as it didn’t really fit my skill set. I wanted to be out in the world having an impact in some way. Energy Systems Catapult was being set up as I finished my PhD and I knew some people on the team. I was originally appointed by the CEO to educate the board on fuel poverty and after a few months we realised we could do some research on customers in vulnerable situations and fuel poor households. And the rest is history! We were a team of 50 when I started and we’re now over 200, seven years later.
Tell us about your work at Energy Systems Catapult
My work is all about helping people to understand how the Net Zero transition, the transition to zero carbon emissions, can involve people in vulnerable circumstances. The energy system tends to design for average income people, homeowners, people who are tech-savvy, and inevitably white and male. My task is to work out how we think about other households, not just the average.
I’m leading and growing a line of work in fair energy futures. This involves leading research and design projects on future energy propositions; forming strategic partnerships by developing projects with clients and partners; influencing key stakeholders by authoring thought leadership pieces and speaking at key industry events; coaching colleagues in participatory methods and insight discovery with vulnerable energy consumers.
We’ve done projects around how we can help disabled drivers use electric vehicles, how we can help people to understand the cost of using energy in different ways in their home… And more recently we’ve been looking at the health impacts of fuel poverty and how we might address these in new ways. I’m the technical lead for the Warm Home Prescription which is a new service we’ve developed to help vulnerable people to heat their homes.
Day to day we have a daily standup where we talk about our priorities and any blockers we foresee for the day ahead. And then I’ll spend most of the day working on materials aiming to get buy-in for what we’re trying to achieve and the impact we’re trying to make. I’ll also be designing and explaining where we’re headed, what the next steps are. Right now I’m working out who’s going to work on our Warm Home Prescription project to maximise our impact, and creating the content we need to influence people in order to drive change.
Can you tell us more about the Warm Home Prescription?
Cold homes claim approximately 10,000 lives per year and cost the NHS in England around £860 million every year. The recent rise in energy prices has put severe pressure on millions of households across Britain, making life tougher for many people being forced to turn down, or turn off, their heating, where it could be the choice between life or death.
You can’t provide people with a warm home quickly by improving their insulation or energy efficiency, or de-carbonising their energy. It takes weeks if not months.
Last year we ran a pilot to bring together two previously unrelated communities, our health and energy sectors, to try to solve this problem. The Catapult worked with the NHS in Gloucestershire to design and pilot a small-scale ‘Warm Home Prescription’ service. It partnered the health service – who often have the best idea and data about who in their area is most at risk from living in the cold because of their pre-existing health conditions – with the energy sector, who have the skills and resources needed to keep people warm at home.
The pilot was a success, both for patients and the health service, and so this winter we’re running a 1,000-home trial, funded by BP, to verify if the approach can work at scale and provide sufficient data to drive change in how the health and energy sectors work to support people staying warm and well at home. This could reduce the costs involved in finding vulnerable households and see priority for home energy improvements given to those whose health would benefit the most.
The trial aims to determine whether it is more cost-effective overall to help pay the heating costs of vulnerable people than it is to pay for their health care if they fall ill – saving the NHS money and reducing pressure on frontline staff.
We’ve benefitted massively from widespread national media coverage across radio, TV, in print and in a big range of media outlets. From that we can see that there’s real support for the concept from a range of different organisations in different sectors, we can see that people really understand the logic and how this could help people and the different ways it could be delivered. That’s one of the first things you want to understand when you design a solution, are the people who would have to deliver this supportive? This gives me hope for how the initiative can scale going forwards!
What’s it like to scale an initiative like this and what has enabled the work?
It’s really hard! We’ve gone from 30 homes in the winter before last to 1000 homes this winter just gone. We’re learning an awful lot. I’m really grateful to all the householders we’re working with for giving us direct and immediate feedback so that we can implement quick changes if things aren’t working for them. This helps us learn long-term where we might need to iterate the service if it was to scale to many more households.
Have you had any experiences of winning over people who are real sceptics?
Yes! When I was able to make the case that by designing for low income, vulnerable consumers, we produce a better solution not just for them but for everyone. If we design a piece of hardware or technology for those that don’t have the internet because they can’t afford it, that can also benefit people when your internet drops out or when you move house and you haven’t set up your internet connection yet.
When we design for the average household, we automatically exclude a lot of people from our solutions. With the current cost of living crisis it’s more and more important that we don’t do that, especially as energy is such an essential everyday need. People in vulnerable situations rely on energy to maintain their health, such as keeping medicines cool, using a stair lift, and using heating to aid health challenges.
The way I’ve won people over is to be really conscious of my reaction when someone doesn’t agree, to lean in and think “ok this is interesting, why do they have a different perspective?” A book called The Power of Soft helped me to understand how good negotiation can work. There’s often a way to reach compromise and move beyond positions of difference and disagreement.
What are your superpowers?
Empathy! It’s hard to stand in other people’s shoes but it’s something that I work really hard on. I make sure I don’t go into every conversation holding too tightly onto my own assumptions about what people are experiencing, what their life story has been. This applies to my relationships in our team but also in the work we do with our end users. This is quite rare in innovation work, so it really does feel like a super power to make the outcomes we design truly people-centred. There’s a lack of this in the energy sector sometimes and so I intentionally bring empathy to my work.
My other main superpower is being able to step back and see the bigger picture and help others understand how they can design and develop their work to have the impact we’re looking to make. When anyone undertakes research, they’ll have all sorts of questions they’re looking to answer about the user or product, but we always have limited time and resources. So it’s important to work out which of these is going to have the biggest impact on moving the product or service forward.
What successes have you had in this work?
Building confidence is what I’m most proud of. If you met me seven years ago you’d be speaking to a very different person. My PhD was a hard ride! I’m really proud now that I have good confidence, self esteem and confidence in my abilities.
When I started working in energy seven years ago people couldn't understand why I was talking about innovation and fuel poverty in the same sentence. They’d assume that people in fuel poverty can’t afford innovation. For a long time I pushed against a lot of closed doors, brick walls and assumptions that people in power have about people in poverty. And that was hard. But amazingly, our incredible work has encouraged and accelerated changes that will help us to reach a fair Net Zero.
There’s so much work that needs to be done so the more people working in this space the better. We need to change the conversation around working with consumers in vulnerable situations to make it more accessible and exciting. We can support you to work with these consumers and have just as much success getting your products and services to market.
The Warm Home Prescription has been particularly exciting in that it’s not a tweak to an existing system. It’s a radical re-imagination of how solutions can work, across silos and sectors collaboratively. People are realising that there’s true value to working with different sectors to deliver a really impactful consumer outcome.
What’s in your toolkit?
I love a book called Radical Candor and I use the methodology to build a culture of rapid feedback and a way to work with my team which cares personally for people and also gets the job done. It’s about kind, generous feedback. I use this every day. I also love a book called The Coaching Habit which provides a simple set of questions you can ask to elicit more information and empower colleagues to make more decisions for themselves. It helps me to remember that I don’t need to be doing everything.
I’m a stationery addict! I love a good notebook and a brand of pens called Y Studio, they’re Japanese. When I was promoted I bought one of their pens, I’d wanted it for 5-10 years! I use it most days and absolutely love it. Drawing with pen and paper really helps me unlock my thoughts and creativity.
I listen to podcasts a lot. When I walk my son to nursery, as well as seeing him excited for the day ahead, I really look forward to my walk home and the opportunity to listen to a podcast. My current favourite is the Mel Robbins podcast. It’s very motivational, very honest and it helps me to get in the mood for a day of taking action and not being scared. It really works for me at the moment. I also love a podcast called High Performance.
What are the three hardest things about the work that you do?
The first one is knowing deep down that you’re never going to be able to make the world a better place for everybody. I struggle with that more on some days than others. If you’re working in a space where you can have a high impact, you’ll inevitably be working with some people in tough situations. I’m really honoured to be part of their lives and help to find a solution, but it can be incredibly hard day-to-day to know that you’re never going to have the full impact you want to have. I’d love to see nobody in fuel poverty in the UK by the time I retire but it probably won’t happen.
The second thing is knowing what to prioritise! I just love helping people and I love our work. I love working with my colleagues and sometimes that means I try and do too much. I’m trying to get much better at prioritising stuff and literally saying to people “I can’t prioritise this work/meeting/task today.” Sometimes it feels hard, but it’s like a muscle. Every time I use it it gets easier.
The skills I’m developing are driven by what the work requires of me at the time. Because I’m so focused on having impact and making change, I have to pivot and change the skills I use in order to see that change. The energy system is changing all the time, policies change and the conversation around how we can achieve justice is changing. So it can be hard to feel like I'm on top of it, to ever feel like I’m honing and using the right skills. It’s hard using such a wide range of skills. The constant change and evolution makes it hard to feel like you’re progressing.
Tell us about some work in your field that excites you
I’m really excited by some spontaneous work that’s happened on the ground this winter where local authorities have set up warm hubs, spaces that are heated that people can pop in and use.
The clever thinking and innovation is where they’ve organised for citizens advice or social prescribers in the NHS, or other community organisations that provide support for people that have financial difficulties or experience social isolation, to be in that space to make the most of the time that people spend there. I would love to see more joined-up thinking like this happening in the future. It’s sad that it’s taken high energy prices for this to happen, but I’m really pleased to see local councils and communities taking a collaborative approach to tackle these issues.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned working on this mission?
That there are no right answers. The best mindset to apply when trying to make any kind of system change is a learning and growth mindset. It’s about safe experimentation. By it’s nature, when you’re trying to change a system it isn’t business as usual. It requires the unexpected. We can make good educated guesses and test evidence-based hypotheses, but we need to have the humility and the mindset to know that we’re not always going to get things right. If done in a safe and people-centred way, we can make headway to test and find better solutions. Sometimes we’ll fail, but sometimes we’ll get it right. It’s about striving towards more success based on what we’ve learned.
What have you learned about yourself doing this work?
I’ve learned that I can have a growth and learning mindset. I can make mistakes and I can have the confidence and ability to make things right when they don’t go as expected.
In what ways are you trying to grow as a person?
I’m really trying to work on my storytelling skills. There’s nothing quite like the comms team saying “can you be on BBC news in 2 hours time?” to really focus your mind on how to get our story across, the outcome we’re trying to achieve in 90 seconds! I’ve still got a lot to learn on that. No matter how good your product or service is, if you can’t communicate with your intended audience clearly, then you’re not going to gain the traction you’re after.
I’m also working on my interpersonal skills, especially when under pressure, when I’m short on time or under stress. I feel it’s really important to honour my colleagues and to work well with other people and other organisations who have other pressures and stresses on them.
What does the world look like in ten years’ time if your work has been wildly successful?
We would see an energy market where there are offers, products, services and policies that are designed specifically to make sure low income and vulnerable households can participate and get the benefits of a low carbon, smart energy system just as much as other households. And that vulnerability is not a factor that excludes them from getting access to the best offers to get the energy they need in their home. So if they need a consistent, warm temperature in their home, or if they want to use energy as and when they want, at the cheapest price because they might store their energy, they’re served fairly. Other industries manage this, so there shouldn’t be any reason why the energy sector can’t manage it too, especially as using energy is an absolute necessity for our day to day lives.
There would be no restrictions on involving low income and vulnerable consumers in innovation, in innovation processes or when we’re designing a new piece of technology in the home. We won’t be largely designing for the average, tech-savvy, middle income customer.
It’s all possible, but it requires a shift in thinking around how the government and the energy sector and everyone involved in designing for Net Zero designs for consumers.
If you could ask readers to do one thing to support your mission, what would it be?
It would be to actively widen the network of people that you speak to, learn from, design with and for.
I’m really excited about the shift happening in mainstream society, as well as amongst designers, on how important diversity of thought is, and how important it is that we design solutions that work for a diversity of people, not just your imagined average mass market consumer.
So lean into the discomfort you feel when you come across something you didn’t know before, in your work and in your personal and professional life. Don’t other people, don’t make broad assumptions around what other types of people want and need and value in their life. Always go in with an open mind.
It’s key for us to think this way because we need the range of people that design any future services, in energy or other spaces, to be as diverse as the people that use them.