Everyone wants the Easy Button. Who wants the recipe for it?

Tackling the invisible pain points of codes & standards. A think-out-loud.

I debated against publishing this story that has been sitting in my draft for a month because part of it made me feel a little too personal.

Then, I remember, this is an ode to my future self. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it can’t tell all the stories in my head at this point in time.

In the last month, I crawled out of my cozy hole and spent more time with my peers.

That’s just the things about codes and standards. People — like users, inspectors, designers, contractors, and plan checkers— uphold these rules. They don’t magically happen in the forms buried in a portal nor behind computer screens.

So into the world I went.

What Everyone Wants

SimBuild, BayREN quarterly forum, Electrification Summit, and a small gathering of codes & standards powerhouse — all these engagements were very inspiring in their own ways and made the work feel a little more real. I got a taste of the local regional perspectives, statewide perspectives, and even a small taste of national perspectives — all in a few short weeks.

With AI being more prevalent in these discussions, the desire is still the same: everyone wants an easy button.

Source: Shopping on the Amazon, Staples Easy Button

This was the premise of the “app” era and now the “Large Language Model (LLM)” era.

We need lower barriers and less frictions to quickly deploy software tools to enable building hardware (i.e. buildings) faster, more affordably, and without compensating for quality.

That sounds nice.

However, in the real world, you can only pick two if you’re lucky.

Why “Easy Button” for Policy is Hard

The higher you go in policy, I feel like problems around conflicting goals and objectives do make things harder to focus. It’s something I heard a few months back from the Third-Party Implementer Conference or something like that.

That’s one of the unavoidable side effects in unity and finding optimization. You have to do trade-offs. The cost of not doing something is immaterial and invisible. To add on to the complexity, cost changes and compounds with time.

If you optimize for certain cost, it will be like a moving target over time. This, lady and gentleman, is the basis and crux of energy efficiency policies. This means adoption is justified when resources constraints raise demand, but it also means it’s subject to politics.

Whoever said easy buttons come with efficiency made a foolish assumption. In public policy, easy buttons often require an extraordinary amount of effort to create.

California has a strong history of energy efficiency work and policy. The pipeline is fairly established in a way. Policies are developed upon the success of pilot projects and the emerging techs within a vertical integration pathway.

Pause: What is “vertical integration”?

The vertical integration pathway starts with: emerging technology (proof of concept) to program implementation (mini-scale up for early adopters) then codified in standards (apply to every body).

In this case, a picture does worth a thousand words. Source: me + my assistant

The reoccurring problem OR (if you’re an optimist) also the most opportunities for easy buttons happen at the jump to scalability. That’s where I’ve been marinating my thoughts in.

Making a one-size-fit-all solution work across the most diverse State ranked 4th in the world’s economy is no easy task. I felt like answers weren’t as obvious and intuitive. I found myself questioning my own’s lacking in understanding and having a deeper depth to convince me to really believe in that future.

So, here’s my thinking exercise of the whole thing. Unfiltered. Unedited (kind of).

The key questions are: what characteristics can make up easy buttons and how to make them work happen in this kind of complex California settings.

The Recipe Behind Easy Buttons

1. The General Will and the Institutions

That’s where it all really starts. A thought.

Wouldn’t it be easier if…

Wouldn’t it be better if…

Wouldn’t be faster if…

Wouldn’t it make more sense if…

Ideas, on paper, are cheap. Ideas built on consensus are expensive.

In my Vietnamese culture, we have a saying.

“Một người mười ý, mười người trăm ý.” This translates to — one person, ten ideas; ten people, a hundred ideas.

The difficulty isn’t finding solutions. It’s that when you have hundreds of stakeholders, you suddenly have multiple hundreds (more likely thousands) of perspectives, incentives, fears, and definitions of success.

Imagine all that noises.

Try to meditate with the TV on and ten people yapping in the back.

One of the first challenges are to find the solutions that are worth scaling collectively. In many cases, the effort required to bring people along exceeds the effort required to build the thing itself.

The alternative is allowing a small group of people to decide what’s best for everyone else. That has been the case. However, it doesn’t mean the rest of us will comply because of the inherent problems of small-group-of-expert-led solutions are limited visibility, blind spots, values misalignment, paternalism, and error amplification.

Even with everyone benefits from cooperation, Thomas Hobbes notes that people may fail to cooperate because they cannot trust others to do the same. So, to make good ideas happen, we need institutions to ensure mechanism exists to align behaviors and scale agreements.

Easy buttons aren’t just about technical solutions. Those good ideas need to transcribe into the general will and institutions. Especially the silent majority and institutions that implement the laws.

Good examples are:

• Seat Belt Laws
• Smoking Restrictions

Working backwards, my hypothesis is that solutions will be more effective correlating with broader range of support from the general will.

2. Keep-It-Simple-Stupid (KISS) of Scalability

To scale, the easy buttons need to be stupid-proof.

Fail-proof is a politically correct alternative, but to any architect of the social infrastructure, you need to address the stupid heads-on.

Information is plentiful. With codes and standards, we’re talking about thousands of pages that aren’t naturally for most people to memorize and comply to when their day to day is about building things with hands and tools. Fundamentally, that’s already an invisible human behavior barrier to codes and standards implementation. So what can we do?

The hourly rates for a human to review technical specs only get higher and higher, requiring people to become more and more specialized. We want to minimize tax burden and maximize consumer protection. Those two goals don’t necessarily align.

For example, to maximize the value of a permit, the public servants in codes and standards, notorious with subpar pay than private industry, need to have tons of experience and be better than their private counterparts.

Think about this for a second.

Structurally, as our society becomes more capitalistic, it weakens the fabric of public servants to provide effective consumer protection. Any easy button to be developed in this kind of environment will need to scale to carry specialize experience and consistently apply across large AND small bureaucracies.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying there isn’t super smart and talented people in government work. In fact, public servants' qualifications matter even more and should require high standards because taxpayers demand high-quality service.

I’m saying easy buttons need to be intentional in how it addresses the very basic frictions, root causes, and invisible roadblocks from human behaviors rather than just technical symptoms at the surface. Otherwise, your “stupid” problems will balloon to no ends.

The most effective solutions might not be the most technically sophisticated and it needs to be stress-tested — not by the best of us. That isn’t intending to be demeaning.

A speaker at the Electrification Summit said it more elegantly— focus on the customer experience. The very basic values that forged the system in the first place need to be the first thought, not a historical thought.

3. Time is Money. How can we hack time?

Lastly, the seasoning of easy button ingredients involves time —how fast can you implement?

Elon Musk spoke to in shrinking your 10 years goals to accomplish in 6 months' time. This requires outside of the box thinking with incredibly intention and concentration on the problems.

This is more enabled in private and start-ups because time is boosted by capital and the promises of profits. In public settings, the rewards are less materialistic or monetary.

In public work, the strongest driver is the preservation of human lives that accelerate implementation. This is the very first thing I learned from our Deputy Public Works Director as an intern at the County of San Diego. He’s right. This is a noble objective for public service that should get the utmost time and attention.

A perception that plagues the Energy Codes is that it’s a nice to have. However, as the cost of resources rise over time inevitably, the impact of a slow death will hit us before we know it. In the case of data centers and water quality, it’s here sooner than we think.

Because I’m an analyst at heart and optimistic, here are few successful examples in the context of public service:

• New York City CompStat (1990s) — William Bratton asked what if we knew where crime was occurring this week instead of next quarter, so NYC created CompStat that predicted weekly crime rates, geographical hotspot mapping, accountability meetings, and rapid deployment. The results reduced crime much faster than traditional practices from police departments to act on the last quarterly data.
• FEMA after Hurricane Katrina — FEMA reform after the historical disaster included pre-positioning supplies, pre-negotiated contracts, and building incidental command systems. This preparedness minimizes the decision-making that can occur before a disaster and enable faster responses.

When it comes to energy, we’re racing against a clock that most people can’t see. The benefits of efficiency — and the costs of inefficiency — are often invisible, making urgency difficult to communicate.

Recently, I’ve been listening to the book “Outlive”. The author said there’s a fast death and a slow death. The worst consequences of bad energy resources management feel like a slow death, but when it strikes, it happens quickly. Kind of like global warming and cancer, something we created ourselves and unable to stop when it ripened. Yuck.

Learning to Cook in the Dark Ourselves and Intentionally Use AI to Solve Our Problems

Being the master of none, what I learned about growing anew in each role is the ability to adapt. To adapt in a new environment means learning to solve problems when you know you don’t know what you don’t know, willingness to do an ungodly amount of iterations, and putting in the work.

When we get to the edge of the unknown, I truly don’t think AI is going to solve it for us (more likely to controlling us — the problem). Maybe Yann LeCun’s world model might prove me wrong.

What I suspect is that reaching the frontier may require compromising some of the guard rails we put in place to protect ourselves. After all, this superintelligent machine we’re trying to build to outdo our makers is ultimately a tool. And like any powerful tool, it’s a bit like a knife.

You don’t give knives to children. Children who don’t know what they don’t know.

The hardest pill to swallow whether you’re on AI camp or not — to make easy buttons meaningful, the maker has to put in the work and solve problems in the dark. You are still in control of the micro-decisions and know where to fix it.

A Few Hypotheses

Beyond the characteristics of easy button, my hypotheses to enable easy buttons in the first place require us to address the invisible barriers that make scalability hard in implementing easy buttons. What’s the point of having great solutions without the systematic structures to scale them?

1. Fundamental policy needs to shift away from a “what if, cost-effective” policy. Free energy for all. Period.

This will shift the incentives to innovate and the incentives to scale. Painfully at first, no doubt, but more sustainable than a cost-effective policy. Yes, it’s fundamental to the Warren Alquist Act. Those goals were written 50 years ago. What does it take for our civilization to grow?

I know your first reaction might be — how dare you even suggest that? Are you crazy? Energy takes resources. How can it be free for all exist in capitalism?

Look — in our current civilization, productivity drives the economy. Global trends show that cooler climate and more comfortable climates correlates to higher productivity.

For a capitalistic country — what’s a very compelling case for enabling free energy for all.

The modern objective is to aim for true independence from energy cost burden and to enable humanity to strive for richer experiences in life.

The strategy that informs the tactics. Otherwise, tactics are just noises, per the famous Sun Tzun.

Cost effectiveness is a tactic, not a strategy anymore. When it becomes less relevance where there is more emphasis on first cost and survivability, we need the flexibility to change tactics to resonate with the modern world.

If it’s any proof, Abundance, the book, is a trending for a reason.

2. Establishing Trust.

There has been a perception on the tug-o-war pull between energy efficiency and affordability.

The beef is not only exclusive with energy standards. The sentiment is more generalized with any building standards. It’s just the ones perceived to be most complex are kind of the first targets.

At the surface, to the policy makers that developed these efficiency standards, this highlighted a lack of trust likely rooted from the lack of understanding. The premise of any energy efficiency measure is that it needs to be cost effective (i.e. the benefits outweigh the costs). Some may argue the weakness of this calculation method is simply inaccuracies to reflect of the real world, not including other incidental cost and process cost that can tip the scale. These arguments raise doubts to the cost effectiveness results and the attitudes toward the adopted standards.

In addition, affordability centers around first costs- not limited to incremental cost and including other compliance related costs as well.

A typical homeowner can get sticker shocks when an ECC Raters quoted $700 to test the system after already paying $5,000 to install an HVAC system. Add the sticker price of permitting (let’s say $250), the inspector coming out and telling the contractor to rework, the contractor giving the homeowner the receipts of the change order — everyone is in a predicament of being unhappy. This is the way it often works in construction. The all-in cost expectation is almost never the same as the final bill, so it creates more opportunities for emotional turmoil and ill perceptions to form.

The value position of energy efficiency seems pale in comparison for the average Jill. Even to economist and policy analyst who question the relevance of cost-effectiveness snapshot, they can be swayed to make assumptions that such benefits may not be consistent or always credible.

An immediate solution to this is establishing stronger feedback loop system between what the market is doing and design the standards more efficiently. It will slowly establish trust and take a lot of resources to make it happen. To make aggressive progress with little resources, that’s where we can really use creative solutions or unconventional designs to establish trust.

All in all, trust is the butter to implement easy buttons. It’s a nonstarter otherwise. Without trust between agencies and institutions, we fight against each other instead with doubts and indecisions. We won’t get anything done.

3. Efficiency needs a bigger marketing budget and strategy.

In my years as a Senior Project Manager in military constructions, I see the same problems over and over when there’s a lack of understanding. It’s not just educating the contractors or your potential bidders, because you’re not truly resourced to do so. You mitigate through creating very clear expectations and channel their energy to solve dealbreakers.

Like how Apple sells “creativity” instead of computers and how Turbo Tax sells “convenience”, not a tax software. Sometimes, painting a picture isn’t really telling your story to people but influencing people to tell the story themselves.

Energy standards compliance’s single value proposition that resonates across contractors, designers, building departments, homeowners, utilities, and the commission is probably not energy savings, climate goals, or even cost savings.

The closest universal selling point is:

Get it right the first time.

The value proposition works regardless of whether someone is motivated by money, time, workload, risk, or policy.

California especially established a pre-rulemaking and rulemaking process to adopt new standards, providing stakeholders the last-ditch efforts to voice their concerns. This rigor for certainty needs continual discipline, appropriate institutional support, and the attention it deserves.

Confidence with less wasted time. That’s how reduction in the burden of work happen. Compliance occurs when it’s undisputed, butter through trust and institution.

Furthermore, the compliance infrastructure needs to look like a duck and walk like duck. The cost to not getting right should be clear — not clear as mud.

The reputation of a policy is as important as its implementation resources.

4. No Band-Aids. Period. Period. Period.

As a system thinker, I absolutely understand why band-aids happen and loath the number of resources directed to something not truly meaningful for a quick dopamine hits. I have kids who ask for ice cream- it’s a quick fix to get their compliance, but is it what I really wanted? No.

Humanity is kind of a reactive species. We, as a collective, are short sighted. The one who have the foresight and the long-term outlook even when it’s truly the best for the collective — they don’t always win. I see these symptoms reoccurring across small to large organizations.

Band-aids hurt us in the long term. If it’s not good enough, then it doesn’t deserve to scale. It happens in implementation anyway because quick wins matter to people.

Easy buttons give those impressions, but we ought to be careful. This clip below describes the downfall of symptom management perfectly.

[embed]Easy solutions are not always the right ones.

Other solutions — Comment if you have reactions or other thoughts to solutions.

Closing with the Thinking Compass

With great power, comes great responsibility. As I am sitting here consuming resources where someone else on the planet has to shovel plastic trash into the furnace to make tofu for their livelihood 7 days a week and ingesting the microplastic in our trash with it, I feel privileged and the responsibility of this cost for comfort. Even if we fail, we ought to keep trying and collect data along the way.

At the end of the day, we share a single truth in public service is to make life better for others. In the best of our abilities. What we can in our control. Until our time is up. Perhaps that’s what drawn to me to public service to afford that as a mission.

Maybe it’s just the story I tell myself to keep me motivated.

I hope that this story does it for you.

In some small ways.

Even if you’re an echo.

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