At Work With Water: Cristina Ahmadpour
At Work With Water is a new series focusing on the incredible people who are making a difference for water. In each edition of XPV Water Partners’ newsletter, we’ll speak with a person from one of our portfolio companies who is doing things differently – ensuring that the water sector continues to evolve, thrive, and meet global challenges with innovative solutions.
For this edition of At Work With Water, we spoke to Cristina Ahmadpour, President and Managing Director (Americas) at Isle Utilities, a leading consultancy on water technology innovation. We asked Cristina about Isle’s approach to tackling systemic barriers, the importance of challenging the status quo, and how Isle is helping the sector prepare for a resilient future.
Like many professionals who now work in water, you didn’t start here. What brought/attracted you to this sector?
I’ve often been asked – did I find water, or did water find me? It’s a bit of both.
During college, I wanted to get my master’s degree in finance and become an investment professional, but, as it turns out, life had other plans for me. As part of my bachelor’s degree in business administration, I had the choice to do an internship or capstone project. For so many young people entering the business world, it’s difficult to get real-world experience, so I chose to take an internship and landed a role with an emerging Canadian water tech start up.
As an emerging professional, I didn’t know anything about the water sector, nor its opportunities. However, I understood strategy, sales and marketing, and thrived working with people – which is something all start ups need. In my new role, I helped the company develop a business plan for entering new markets, created an ecosystem of partners to accelerate the technology, and had to creatively generate enthusiasm and incentives to drive the adoption of new technology.
A fire sparked inside of me; I realized working with others dedicated to protecting this vital resource was where I wanted to direct my career. My father worked in public services for water agencies throughout his career and, later in my 20s, I learned my grandfather (his dad) was a lead engineer for the construction of dams in Iran. After making that realization, everything kind of added up. I am where I am meant to be. What it means to work in the water sector has continued to evolve for me and I feel incredibly fortunate to dedicate my life’s work in this space.
What brought you to Isle Utilities? What are the things that interest you most about the work?
For a few years I had been watching how Isle was challenging the status quo. I liked how they took a relationship-based approach to introducing new technologies, and how some of the most progressive water utilities in the world considered Isle an independent advisor to facilitate step-change technologies.
At the time, I had already spent several years focused on innovation in wastewater through biological aeration technologies and novel process control strategies. While it was rewarding work, I realized I was early in my career and had an appetite to broaden by knowledge and experience around water resource management. I was inspired to lend the best practices and strategies in accelerating innovation within my area of practice more broadly in other areas to help advance untapped opportunities in our sector. Isle seemed like a firm where I could learn about all aspects of water management and apply my academic training and real-world experience to influence change from business-as-usual practices. I could see the potential for Isle’s model and wanted to help take that important work to the next level.
While you’ve been with Isle, the firm has evolved from a consultancy that vets and introduces new technologies to utilities to one that also strives to remove the systemic barriers for these solutions. Can you talk a bit more about Isle’s evolution and why the work you’re doing is so critical for our sector?
At Isle, we have always vetted and elevated solutions that have promise over conventional solutions. We offer utility leaders safe spaces to share challenges and best practices, and we protect them from the noisy tech landscape. At the core of Isle’s work is the belief that progress happens when we collaborate and share what we’ve learned.
For these reasons, we have doubled down on building trusting peer relationships in the sector. And, through these relationships, we’ve spent a lot of time working through some of the barriers that traditionally hold water utilities back, such as lack of access to funding, outdated procurement models, identifying key priorities for technology and innovation, affordability, economic disparity, and climate change.
Isle has evolved to offer responses that begin to address these barriers. To improve how utilities seek and adopt tech solutions and share best practices, for example, we bring together utility leaders through programs like Technology Approval Group and Peer Partnership Projects. Our global Water Action Platform, which started as an informal WhatsApp group to support utilities during the first wave of the pandemic, now counts more than 1,700 members from 1,200+ organizations across 102 countries and offers learning and knowledge sharing opportunities. We’re also finding new, meaningful ways to overcome funding obstacles and mitigate the risks of trialling new technologies to help utilities and other end users meet net zero, such as our evergreen fund, the Trial Reservoir.
In addition to these various collaborative resources, we’ve also positioned ourselves to better support utilities to investigate global best practices, facilitate the vendor qualification process, and aide the change management process to be a leading innovative utility.
From your perspective at Isle, what are some of the most pressing challenges the industry needs to address?
One of the sector’s biggest hurdles is to get beyond talking about the challenges. We have smart people and great solutions, and, as the world experiences the impacts of climate change, more funding is coming to the industry. We need more leaders who ask “how are we going to solve this?” and move on from trying to frame the challenge we are trying to solve. We don’t have time for that. We need brave bold leadership to get things done.
We also need more visibility for proven and innovative climate and water technologies. Given current federal priorities in the United States – namely, energy, climate change, affordability, and access – we need to take advantage of the unprecedented amount of funding that is coming our way. One solution would be to establish a clearinghouse of the best qualified solutions to support agencies that don’t have the resources to investigate options on their own as they decide how to spend funds that perhaps can be accessed at the state (state revolving fund) level.
This is our chance to direct the greatest investment in water towards step-change solutions that meet 21st century challenges. My greatest fear is that we’re going to spend this money on conventional technologies when we are dealing with unconventional and ever-escalating challenges.
Utilities are keen to leverage technology to improve system resilience, reduce their carbon footprint, and navigate future regulatory pressures. Innovative technology exists in the shadows, which is why a clearinghouse would be an invaluable resource. We just can’t afford the status quo.
After several years of working closely with technology providers and utilities, you must have some insights you can share about how they can make progress. What’s your top advice for them?
For emerging tech companies, I’d say these are my top three:
Firstly, articulating the challenge you’re solving is not enough. You need to know what your prospective customer cares about, how you’re going to help them be successful as a partner, and how you’re going to do it better than anyone else.
Secondly, focus on understanding your market, building trust with your customers, and educating your investors, who might not fully understand the sector.
Finally, start at the top! Ask “who are my early adopters” and find the right people. Build a list of the top 20 people you want to meet and be targeted, intentional, and disciplined about building relationships with them. There are lots of great industry associations and forums that support these goals and there are stakeholders willing to partner.
And for utilities, here’s what I’d offer:
Prioritize building a diverse and inclusive workforce, which should also include professionals outside of our sector. This will lead to fresh thinking and perspectives that impact culture in a positive way regardless of seniority and create space to engage and listen.
To all the folks in power, step up and promote others. Innovation is no longer a “nice-to-have.” Rather, it’s an essential mindset for achieving organizational excellence. Set priorities, goals, dedicate resources and follow through. Identify champions and help raise them up.
Tell the story of water’s value. Water is critical to everything, from health care to economic stability to quality of life. Show people what it means to them. Contextualize it. Utilities need to make the transition from “we keep your rates affordable” to “we know your quality of life is important to you, and we’re going to makes investments to protect that, and here’s how.”
This last one returns to my points about leadership and diversity. It’s critical! We need leaders who come with a range of skills and experience, and who can help our sector be prouder and bolder about what we do. As the people who protect and manage the world’s most important resource, we have got to stop hiding in the shadows.
Cristina will be speaking at the Journeys Through Water – Water Leader/Industry Giants Panel as part of the Water Environment Federation’s InFLOW program at WEFTEC on October 11 in New Orleans. XPV Water Partners is proud to support the InFLOW program.