Here are 12 potential green business new year resolutions of varying ambition for your business - pick one and drive it through to get 2012 off to a sustainable start:
Set some really ambitious stretch targets to hit by 2017 and 2022;
Engage employees in a carbon/waste/water reduction programme - ask for ideas and use them;
Instigate a carbon reduction competition between staff teams/sites;
Be kind to cyclists: improve racks, start paying cycle mileage, subsidise cycle purchases, improve site access;
Install/improve teleconferencing facilities;
Radically increase the number of employees working from home;
Work with a supplier to develop a more sustainable supply of raw materials/goods;
Bump up the weight given to sustainability in supplier selection (and tell your suppliers);
Initiate the development of a new, greener product, service and/or product service system;
Delete an unsustainable product line;
Install (more) on-site renewable energy systems;
Invest in more efficient/alternatively fuelled vehicles, subsidise low emission vehicle purchases by staff.
Whether or not you decide to do any of the above, you MUST do the following in 2012 - no excuses!
It was a crucial workshop for an high profile new client. I got to the venue in good time, found my seminar room, tweaked the layout, set up my laptop, checked the presentation, stuck my A0 brainstorming sheets to the walls and distributed Post-Its around the tables. All set and ready, so I headed off for a coffee.
After the initial plenary sessions, I walked briskly back to the seminar room to be there before the first delegate. I walked into the room and my heart sank - I had left all the lights blazing, projector on, and my laptop plugged in for two hours in an empty room. I thanked my lucky stars that no-one had noticed, acted like nothing had happened and ran the workshop - on how to persuade fellow staff members to behave in a greener way. All the time, a little worm of guilt wriggled away at the back of my mind.
They say cobblers are the worst shod, but there is no excuse for saying one thing and doing another. Apart from the sheer hypocrisy of it, "do as I say, not as I do" can hole your sustainability efforts below the water - cynics will justify their cynical stance, enthusiasts will feel betrayed, and the rest will say "why bother?"
I've certainly learnt my lesson. I make a point of double checking seminar rooms at break times and switching off everything I can before leaving. I've also started reusing my brainstorming charts for as long as they stay semi-presentable. On the rare occasions I have to fly, I offset the emissions (better than nothing).
So, if your role involves spreading the green message, it is worth spending taking few minutes every so often and thinking - "how can I behave 'greener'?". Don't fall into the trap of giving yourself a pass 'cos of all the good work you do. You must be an exemplar.
One of my favourite moments of many in the comedy classic Fawlty Towers is when Basil Fawlty is cornered by the two gushing old ladies who live in the hotel just before he heads off for a weekend away with his wife Sybil.
Miss Gatsby: And don't do anything we wouldn't do!
Basil (through gritted teeth): Oh, just a little breathing, surely.
I'm always reminded of this exchange during events when someone complains about 'superfluous' use of resources for fun or recreational purposes. Take a seasonal example like Christmas lights - yes, they are strictly speaking 'unnecessary', but so are TV, music, theatre, presents, cards and holidays. If you kill off your organisation's traditional Christmas decorations in the name of the planet, you will put normal people off the whole sustainability message. Sustainability has to be sexy and fun, not dull and worthy.
But there's a tricky balancing act here. You can't go to the other extreme and put up Christmas lights that resemble the Las Vegas strip in full swing and then scream "But it's Christmas!!!" at any one who has the temerity to suggest it just might be a little over the top.
The answer, as is often the case, is to replace "or" with "and" - green and fun rather than green or fun. Such as energy efficient lights, preferably powered by a sustainable source of energy, lit only between dusk and 'bed time'. If you can deliver a wonderful display that is also a demonstration of low energy technology, you'll get an extra gift for the sustainability Santa this Christmas!
PS: I'm breaking my iron rule never to mention the C word before 1st Dec!
We will be holding two Green Academy on-line sessions on 7 December 2011. Each session lasts for one hour. You need access to a computer with sound or a computer and a telephone. You will receive a workbook to apply the learning to your organisation prior to the start of the session.
During one of my recent sessions on culture change for sustainability, a very earnest young lady asked me about the use of shock tactics to make people take the environment more seriously. My short answer was "no, it doesn't work" but with my usual esprit de l'escalier, I thought of a great analogy on the way home.
I was using the elephant model of culture change in the session. In this model the elephant's rider is our conscious mind, the elephant itself is our subconscious and the path is the environment we operate in. So to change people's behaviour we have to instruct the rider, inspire the elephant and shape the path in a way that the elephant & rider go the way we want them to.
If you try shock tactics, it is the the equivalent of throwing a firecracker under the elephant. A number of things can happen:
The firecracker is too small, so the elephant ignores it and does what it was doing;
The firecracker scares the elephant so it retreats back down the path and refuses to move;
The firecracker panics the elephant and it charges off in a random direction.
None of these are desirable outcomes.
The most famous example of such tactics were the UK Government's "nightmare fairytale" climate change adverts on TV back in early 2010 which were criticised by the Advertising Standards Agency, which had no discernible positive impact, but caused a backlash from many elements of the media and jubilation in the climate change denial movement. These adverts blundered on many levels: people don't like being preached at by politicians, the scare tactics were aimed at making you fear for your children and there was no clear call to action. You'll notice they haven't been repeated - for good reason.
I spent yesterday at the BBC's Productions That Don't Cost the Earth seminar. My role was to run a workshop to train the Beeb's sustainability reps in culture change techniques. The session went very well - it generated about a hundred ideas in a 25 minute exercise (out of a 60 minute workshop), driven by the impressive knowledge and enthusiasm of the attendees.
But, as well as the 'work' element, I thoroughly enjoyed the plenary sessions which were open to production staff from across the industry. This is a sector in which I have little previous experience, so I learnt a great deal. The BBC has done a lot of work on behalf of the whole industry, most notably developing "Albert", a carbon footprinting tool for broadcasters which is now hosted by BAFTA. The reason why it is called Albert is the source of much debate and conjecture...
The keynote speech was given by yachtswoman/sustainability campaigner Dame Ellen MacArthur. My sailing experience is limited to the occasional jaunt around Strangford Lough as a boy, so the tales of derring do in her various solo around the world triumphs had me on the edge of my seat. One thing I could relate to was her evoking the glorious feeling when the wind first catches the sails and tugs, then you are off, skimming along the surface, working with nature.
Dame Ellen has now given up professional sailing to run the Ellen MacArthur Foundation which promotes the design of products for a circular economy. As you can imagine for someone who has spent a huge chunk of her life racing solo around the world for months without catching a glimpse of her competitors, when she sets her mind to something, she really goes for it. I was extremely impressed by both her passion and her depth of understanding.
Here are a few things I picked up from the rest of the plenary sessions:
In TV, 20% of the carbon footprint is in production, 80% is from the rest of us watching at home with all our widescreen TVs and set top boxes (remarkably similar to the manufacture/use ratio of, say, a car);
The production itself (cameras, set lighting etc) is a small part of that 20% - the bulk of the BBC's carbon footprint is in office accommodation and travel;
Albert means the industry has a standard footprinting methodology, so different broadcasters can compare their performance directly (some other sectors such as fast moving consumer goods are also working to do this);
The BBC is striving to rationalise overseas filming, so when Liz Bonnin went to Hawaii to present from the observatories there for Stargazing Live, she hung on to do a piece on volcanos for Bang Goes the Theory, rather than flying two different presenters and crews to the same location;
Not to be outdone, Sky has just moved into the most energy efficient broadcasting building in Europe (25% less energy than before), they're recycling 66% of their waste (with the aim of zero waste next year) and they're working to reduce the energy consumption of their set top boxes;
One of the challenges for the industry is that a huge number of production staff are now freelancers which means it is more difficult to embed a culture of sustainability;
On the other hand, the nature of the industry is that people are fiercely driven, intelligent and creative, which makes communicating sustainability easier.
And that last point concisely sums up my feelings about the day - the delegates and speakers had that blend of passion, intelligence and creativity that finding and delivering sustainability solutions requires. Inspiring.
Everyone who has tried to spread the green message has come up against the wall of indifference. What's wrong with people? Don't they understand the world is in peril? Why won't they do anything?
What happens if you shout louder? People seem to take even less notice. So you start railing against the world - why can no-one grasp the issues instead of you?
The problem of course is people have plenty of priorities and will resist having another one. Yes, they care about the polar bear, but what's that got to do with their paper-pushing or lever-pulling job at Megacorp plc?
It's this gap between global issues like climate change and/or high level concepts like sustainability and the day to day pressures of completing that paperwork or finishing that widget that you need to bridge. And you bridge it not by trying to beat your values into their brain, but by putting that issue into the context of the world they inhabit.
Here are some tactics for doing this:
The human interest story: we respond to 'people like us' telling us their story - which is why TV reporters always interview the Western aid worker in famine stories rather than the poor victims (I hate this, but they do it for a reason);
Getting people involved in generating solutions: if people work out what this means to their job function, they make the bridge themselves and get a much deeper understanding than you telling them;
Tailor training and awareness material for particular job functions. So marketers get trained in green marketing, accountants in the business case for sustainability, product developers in eco-design etc;
Tap into any organisational cultural traits. If another issue is a key plank of the culture - eg innovation, health & safety, hygiene, third world development, charitable donations etc - then try to piggy back on that issue rather than trying to create a new plank.
But overall, we have to remember it is about them, not you. This can be tricky - I must admit I occasionally get dragged into a debate with a climate change "sceptic" online and I often forget that others are watching and may give the other guy the benefit of the doubt - particularly if I start batting down the same old tired arguments with a bit too much zeal.
Putting the old ego in the back pocket for a while and getting yourself into their world is the way to win people in the long term.
Why is culture change such a big issue when dealing with sustainability?
After all, personal change can be quite easy. Some people claim it takes just 30 days for an individual to form a new habit (see this interesting TED talk). So why not simply run a 30 day programme to beat sustainable behaviour into your colleagues?
Because it's not that simple.
Amory Lovins says that, whereas animals like ants have communities which exhibit intelligence way beyond that of the sum of the individuals, the more humans you group together, the more stupid the combined behaviour (or words to that effect). As an optimist, I like to think of this phenomenon as "institutional inertia" rather than group stupidity. The definition of institutional inertia is:
The more people you get together, the harder it is to effect change.
You can see this if you go on holiday with a group of friends and try to decide which restaurant to eat at one evening. The length of time it takes to make the decision and act increases exponentially with the number of people involved. If you are a couple, you'll probably be onto your coffee before a group of eight have finally chosen an eatery.
When you scale this up to the organisational level a huge number of factors kick in: internal politics, factionalism, fear of failure, fear to speak up, fear of standing out, the desire to belong, tradition (aka "the way it's done round here"), formal and informal hierarchies etc, etc - they all add up to considerable inertia.
The challenge of overcoming this inertia - "turning the supertanker around" - is immense. In my experience, the most important factors are strong, consistent leadership and a somewhat counter-intuitive combination of bone headed determination and nimble culture change techniques. I can teach you the latter, but the others have to come from within.
At the minute I am spending the bulk of my project time engaging clients' staff members in sustainability with the aim of changing their attitudes and behaviour. I've talked about some of the techniques I use elsewhere, but one issue that keeps coming up is non-green behaviour is often easier than green. It stands to reason that if you expect your staff to act green, you've got to make it easy for them - if you want someone to use a recycling bin, then don't stick it at the end of the corridor, put it by their desk.
A great recent example was a session where someone complained that no-one was using the company's teleconferencing system. When we explored why not, we discovered that in order to calculate the financial benefits of the system the company made it a condition of booking that a calculation of avoided staff travel time and travel costs had to be included. So you'd have to sit down and work out where everyone was coming from, how they were travelling, how long it would take them, what each person's hourly cost was and what fares/hire car charges/mileage they would incur. And then add it all up and then you could use the system.
Most people are unfamiliar with teleconferencing, so by putting this extra burden on "good" behaviour, staff were just sticking to the same old "bad" behaviour they were used to - booking a conference room and letting everyone make their own travel arrangements. You can hardly blame them.
This is known in the trade as a "perverse incentive". If you want your staff to act in a certain way, you have to make sure that the architecture of choices (to borrow from the book Nudge which is all about this type of thinking) always makes it easy to take the green choice and harder to take the non-green choice.
A positive example of this I came across recently with another client was they had changed their travel booking so that booking a train fare was done in house for you, but if you wanted a short haul flight, you had to book and pay for it yourself and claim back the cost. So while you still had the choice, it was much more of a hassle to fly.
One option I always offer to my clients is to capture these issues because they are often below the radar issues that only emerge when I challenge attendees to think of solutions. Not only does the client get an extremely useful "to fix" list, the attendees feel empowered and much more likely to engage properly both inside the session and afterwards.
It just seems to be unrelenting bad going-on-horrific news at the minute: the famine in Somalia, the massacre in Norway and Amy Winehouse's tragic, if inevitable, demise. Anyone looking at the three stories objectively would rank them in that order of importance, yet this morning's UK newspapers had it in reverse, with La Winehouse making most of the headlines and Somalia barely getting a mention.
You'll see a lot of people getting very angry about this inversion of priorities on the Twittersphere. While I have sympathy with them, I'm afraid it has always been this way.
Human nature is driven not by logic, but by gut instinct. We are more interested in news stories that affect people we feel familiar with, at a level we can comprehend, those that are sudden, and those that are geographically close. The Somalis who are suffering are pastoralists, a lifestyle most Westerners have never experienced, so we can't imagine this happening to us, and the tragedy has been unfolding for many weeks. The Norwegians live closer to us and have much the same lifestyle, so we can emphasise with the loss of relatives in such a shocking single event. And Amy Winehouse had touched millions with that extraordinary voice - so much so, that many of us felt we somehow knew her.
You will see the same factors in environmental issues. Last year's Gulf oil spill got a lot of coverage, because it was a single dramatic event, it was easy to see the scale of the problem on TV and the people who were most affected had Western lifestyles. Climate change if a much, much bigger problem yet it rarely if ever gets the same coverage as it is incremental, its impacts are geographically dispersed and there are no pictures of people like us being affected.
So how do we account for this when formulating green communications? If you look at TV coverage of African famines, the presenter will usually do two things - first interview a Western (read: white) aid worker about the scale of the problem (someone like us) and then tell the story of the suffering of one family (get down to the human interest level). I used to get angry about this as I felt it continued a myth of "Western benevolence in terrible Africa" and then intruded in one family's grief when I felt they had suffered enough. But now, while I still don't particularly like it, I understand they are trying to make the story comprehensible to the audience back home.
Likewise, I always advise clients when they are trying to communicate green issues to copy the media and make the story relevant to the audience and, preferably, recount it through the eyes of someone just like them (the audience). For most people, talking about polar bears just won't cut the ice.
I don't think I've ever recommended to a client that they appoint environmental champions amongst their staff and my two books make only fleeting reference to them. And yet a huge number of organisations trying to go green have gone done the champion route. So why am I so reticent?
The simple answer is the most powerful question in our armoury - Why? What is it that environmental champions are expected to bring to culture change? I've never had that question answered satisfactorily.
The usual answer is that champions are embedded into the organisation and can provide peer-to-peer support to other staff members who want change their behaviour and act as local flag wavers for corporate green goals. Only one problem - peer-to-peer is by definition is bottom up, appointing people to roles is top down - and I believe that is a fundamental conflict.
My other problem is that I've seen the champion role widely abused. I've seen junior volunteers given energy efficiency targets for entire sites, I've seen them (post volunteering) being expected to read energy meters on a regular basis, and I've heard of them being expected to get into work before everyone else to check who has switched their computers off. That's like calling a traffic warden a "parking champion".
One of the participants at the staff engagement session I ran at the Low Carbon Best Practice Exchange last week had abolished their champions programme as it had descended into a forum for whinging. Instead they had appointed "green angels" to tackle particular problems. This story certainly surprised many of the other participants who had champions - and they seemed quite surprised that I sided with the dissenter.
Let's look at some basic principles of culture change which I think conflict with the champion concept:
If you give people responsibility, you must give them commensurate authority and accountability - these are not the hallmarks of a voluntary champion;
If people volunteer for a role, they shouldn't be subject to mission creep with more and more tasks dumped on them - you will breed resentment - yet mission creep is very common for champions;
Peer-to-peer only works if it is genuine - you can't dictate it top down and if peers feel that one of their number is judging them it will breed distrust, destroying the whole point of the exercise;
If you want proper culture change, then sustainability must become everyone's responsibility. Having champions can lead to others feeling they can wash their hands of the issue.
So what's my alternative? Well, if you want to engage with green thinking people, why not create a forum to glean their ideas and share what is happening in the organisation? Then the peer-to-peer communication will come out organically rather than the artificial champions version.
Do you disagree? Have you got a thriving, effective champion programme? If so, then please share in the comments.
I’ve said it before, and I'll say it again: one of the things I love about the sustainability field is that it is so broad and fast moving that you are constantly learning. This week was full of discovery
On Tuesday I had a meeting with Dan O’Connor of Newcastle University to discuss his (private) venture WARPit – a social-media style reuse portal to allow organisations to trade used furniture etc (check it out here). But our chat about his day job were interesting too:
The Daily Mail’s paranoia knows no bounds. The University’s interesting student bin cam research project to test how a webcam in a student household bin connected to Facebook can affect recycling rates is, in Daily Mail land, a potentially vicious attack on civil liberties by ‘council snoopers’;
Cardboard now has such a scrap value in the UK that gangs are raiding students’ wheelie bins to get their hands on it – theft of metallic items is common when scrap metal prices soar, but I’ve never heard of people stealing cardboard before.
On Thursday I ran three sessions at the Low Carbon Best Practice Exchange at Olympia in London: Staff Engagement, Greening the Supply Chain and Environmental Strategy. We had some great discussions and here are the points that I took home:
There was quite a debate about the role of environmental champions. Most participants in the engagement session had appointed champions, but there wasn’t a clear consensus of why or whether they were actually making a difference. One participant had actually abandoned champions as they found the idea counterproductive in practice (I intend to explore this in a later blog post);
One participant has an almost real time energy consumption readout along with a traffic light system to show if consumption is low (green), high (amber) or very high (red). This is a nice way of converting data into a form that staff can easily grasp and of course you can tighten the amber and red settings to encourage continual improvement;
There was an anecdote about a company that paid actors to dress as cleaners and go through the office bins, tutting over waste that wasn’t being recycled to embarrass staff members. While such stunts only have a transient impact, I like the creative thinking;
Another anecdote was about a company that deliberately but surreptitiously changed their travel system so staff who want to use short haul air have to pay for the tickets out of their own money then submit a claim. Train tickets are purchased directly by the company, so staff members don't have to tie up their own cash in the process. Crafty, possibly underhand, but why not?;
On green procurement, one participant is using broad sustainability questions at the PQQ stage to determine what best practice in that sector might look like. This is then used to benchmark bidders during the formal tender process;
Many junior staff are desperate to get their managers to take a more strategic approach to sustainability, but the latter have their heads in the sand. We discussed many ways of ‘managing up’, but concluded that eventually top level buy-in is required. I am still strongly of the view that delegating the development of a strategy is an oxymoron and a derogation of responsibility.
I am increasingly trying to eradicate Powerpoint from my stakeholder engagement sessions whether for employees or external people. Tomorrow I'm jetting off to deliver the first of many energy awareness sessions for a major manufacturer armed only with a flip chart, pens, Post-its and some A0 prints of the Terra Infirma Brainstorming Tool (above).
Why? Well my favoured approach to engaging employees is to get them involved in developing new solutions. The benefits of this approach are:
People feel they are being taken seriously;
Individuals find it hard to switch off in exercises - so you get more attention;
You get automatic buy-in as people get excited about their ideas;
You usually get some cracking new suggestions;
If those suggestions are implemented then they're more likely to be accepted by employees.
The problem with Powerpoint (or any other presentational form) is that people reflexively sit back in their chair and go into passive listening mode. It is very hard to get their brains warmed up again to start generating ideas - much better to challenge them from the start.
The A0 sheets are highly effective too. They are fresh and novel for most participants, a big group can crowd around them, they encourage a more kinaesthetic approach to the problem, and the big sheet takes a lot of filling with Post-its, encouraging more ideas. The brainstorming tool itself is a simple fishbone diagram designed to ensure that all four main bases are covered. The top of the diagram is about doing the right thing, the bottom about doing it right. The left of the diagram is about people, the right about kit. This gives us four bases: formal procedures, actual behaviour, choice of technology and the application/maintenance of that technology.
The Green Executive Webcasts went really well on Friday with lots of excellent questions. My favourite, partly because I had a response ready, was:
"What is the biggest barrier to corporate sustainability?"
To which my reply is:
"The biggest barrier is only six inches wide - it's the space between our ears."
This might sound a bit trite, but it doesn't make it less true. Much of the reason why we pursue unsustainable practice is attitude - lack of priority, busy-ness, ignorance, habit, shortsightedness, despondence, fear, laziness or combinations of the above. Of the 18 Green Executive interviewees, to my mind Martin Blake of Royal Mail puts it best:
“Don’t take no for an answer and don’t ever give up. People will often tell you that things are not possible when they actually are."
This is why staff engagement and culture change are so critical to delivering sustainability. You've got to understand how people think, what motivates them and how to tap into that. It's much more important than shiny new technology.
Amongst political interweb types is a phenomenon known as the 'echo chamber'. This is where a tribe of people get very excited tweeting, blogging and facebook-status-updating about an issue within their tribe, but all the retweeting, linking and liking is completely within that community. The message is crafted and refined for the audience who has already 'got it', rather than for people who are unaware, uninterested, or both. Despite the perceptions of the participants that the flurry of activity is of huge importance, it has absolutely zero impact on the wider world.
The environmental movement can be particularly guilty of this. Issues go into the echo chamber evolve and are reinforced, but rarely does anyone wade into the argument as devil's advocate, challenging the received wisdom, and the message starts going over the heads of anyone outside the circle. In fact you often get a meta layer of discussion of increasing self-righteousness, deriding those who "don't get it" and alienating the masses in the process.
If you want to change something - anything - whether in society or an organisation, this is suicide.
From a green business point of view, I have seen environmental committees where the agenda kept getting sidelined in favour of rants and moans about everyone else in the organisation who "doesn't get it". This is utterly dysfunctional and self-indulgent. If you're the change agent then you've got to realise that this is your problem, not theirs. You need to stop preaching to the choir and engage with (not preach to) the masses. This is a whole different ball game, with different language, different communication channels and different tactics.
So don't let an echo chamber form. Challenge others and challenge yourself: what is the message that will appeal to the masses?
It's been a busy, busy couple of weeks here at Terra Infirma Towers and around the country as we've delivered four half day workshops as well as the usual round of desk work, workshop prep, tendering and responding to potential clients - I even just sat in the audience and listened at an event last night, a rare role for me these days.
As regular readers will know, I periodically feedback on what I have picked up during these sessions as there are always useful perspectives. So here are the key points:
Don’t get too fascinated by shiny technology – culture change is more important;
Participation reaps rewards - if it is done right;
Visual stimulus is very powerful - mind maps, realia (aka physical objects) and drawings trump Powerpoint for impact;
Celebrate each success, then strive for more - the job is never done;
Competitive advantage for green business is now sourced from "we have done x" rather than "we will do x";
The construction industry is the latest to start really tackling its supply chain - joining the public sector and big retailers;
The rise in the 'floor carbon price' is likely to revolutionise the energy market;
There is a lot of enthusiasm from all types of organisation for "rent a roof" deals on Solar PV;
The cutting edge companies have set the pace, now the pursuing pack is trying hard to catch up.
I also drove an electric vehicle on the public highway for the first time yesterday. I wasn't very good at it - I kept instinctively reaching for the clutch and hitting the brake instead - regenerative braking is not the most sympathetic system in the world, so my ride was a tad jerky. Anyone used to an automatic gearbox would handle it much better, but I've got some practising to do.
The third of our Green Business Webinars will be held on 13 April at 14:00 GMT. The hour long session will cover the critical issues of staff engagement and culture change. It aims to give you the tools you need to transform your the culture of your organisation - we'll be looking at why 'switch it off' campaigns fail, how to emotionally engage with people, and how to deal with environmental cynics and other difficult people.
The webinar costs £45.00 + VAT per person - use the button below to pay by card or Paypal. Contact us to make a BACS payment.
"Gareth's webinars are smart, punchy and thought provoking. His approach shows how sustainability is about achieving commercial advantage and not simply an altruistic gesture. Highly recommended." Graeme Mills, GPM Network Ltd.
"[The webinars] are great value and I would recommend them to both CSR professionals and SME owners." Louise Bateman, GreenWise
"I consider this a must for organisations looking for practical help in improving their sustainability performance." Ted Shann, Wipro
There's a new eco-doc out called Carbon Nation aimed at US climate sceptics - tag line "the climate change solutions movie... that doesn't even care if you believe in climate change". I've only seen the trailer, but it looks like a classic piece of green jujitsu.
For those unfamiliar with my green jujitsu concept, the idea is to avoid getting bogged down stat-trading deadlocked arguments over, say, climate sensitivity. Instead make arguments that appeal to your opponent's outlook on life - in the same way that the martial art of jujitsu eschews the boxing approach of trying to bludgeon the opponent into submission, in favour of using their strength against them. So to US Tea Party types, the appeal of the new movie is to values like patriotism, quality of life, national security and energy security rather than 'save the polar bear'-type egalitarianism.
The same approach can be used to appeal to the sceptics, cynics and not-interesteds in individual organisations. You have to rein in your ego and think about what appeals to them - cost savings, new business, brand protection, recruitment and retention or risk reduction? Press those buttons instead. Life will be easier for all parties!
Here's the fiftth Green Business Confidential podcast, entitled "Stop Shouting At Me", which discusses why your staff engagement isn't working and what you might want to do about it:
