About
Kevin Little and Warren Gaskill of Rapid Improvement Associates, LLC developed the Energy Stewards web platform starting in 2005. The observation that “any building can teach, as long as you pay attention” guided their work. From this core observation, Energy Stewards aimed to help customers in two ways: 1) Make it simple for average building users to pay attention to the financial and environmental costs of heating and cooling a building. And 2) To make it easy to take action to improve building energy use performance, learning from peers, and key action steps. Little and Gaskill’s consulting background has been in the quality improvement field, which informed their design choices for Energy Stewards. The basic QI tenets–tracking key measures over time, adopting practices to one’s unique conditions, testing a change on a small scale to see what leads to improvement and what doesn’t, and peer learning– are all part of the framework of Energy Stewards.