Rolling out a Sustainability Strategy
I was down in London yesterday, facilitating a workshop for a client who is about to roll their Sustainability Strategy out across the entire organisation – which happens to span the entire globe. This is an incredible challenge.
We could of course produce a standard slide deck and tour the world with it (physically or electronically), but we all know what would happen – everybody would nod along and then go back to their desks/workstation and go back to doing what they have always done.
On the other hand, when you are dealing with a huge multinational organisation, you can’t run an interactive workshop for every last individual, you would never complete the job by the end of the Strategy timeframe. The engagement principle I use in such cases is:
Everybody needs to know something about everything, but certain people need to know a lot about certain things.
‘Everybody’ can be reached by the slide deck, but those ‘certain people’ would need direct engagement.
My task is to help my client map out ‘who needs to know what’ and yesterday’s workshop was held to generate the first iteration of that map. The interesting thing was that the results were quite different from what I and my client had envisaged in our pre-meetings.
This is the power of a properly structured and facilitated workshop – the process of starting with identifying exactly what we were trying to achieve and then moving on to how we were going to achieve it blew many implicit assumptions out of the water. It was a highly valuable exercise!