Ronald Reagan got plenty of opprobrium during his time as president (remember Spitting Image’s The President’s Brain is Missing! sketches? If not, ask your parents), but even his strongest detractors would admit he was a great communicator. And one of his wisest dictums was:

If you’re explaining, you’re losing.

I always have this in my mind when I’m drafting a political speech (I’m a City Councillor here in Newcastle). Make your argument clear and concise, and steer clear of any ambiguity that opponents can latch on to. “But if they say X, you can just say Y” might sound like solid ground when discussing tactics, but in the heat of a political debate you can quickly find the sands shifting under your feet if you try to argue nuance and you and your message will end up stuck in a messy quagmire.

Last week, I paraphrased Reagan in response to a LinkedIn post by somebody complaining about the amount of time they had spent in a previous job “persuading” people to embrace Sustainability – often having to persuade the same people the same thing over and over again. I’ve changed ‘persuading’ to ‘cajoling’ for the title of this post again to remove ambiguity as ‘persuading’ can imply success.

The problem is people can be ‘persuaded’ one day and flip back to ‘unpersuaded’ the next because they don’t own Sustainability emotionally. To use an analogy, as a decidedly armchair fan of Newcastle United Football Club: I love it when they win, but, unlike a true fan, I don’t feel much pain if they lose – I simply don’t have that level of emotional engagement with the club. That kind of ‘diehard fan’ emotional ownership is what we need in Sustainability for key decision makers to stick to their guns when the going gets tough.

You will never get emotional engagement by talking at people. That is known as the Theory X approach to management – you tell people what to do and hope they listen to you. Most of the time they stick to what they know.

Theory Y flips this on its head, by asking what needs to be done, not telling. Here’s my outline set of questions:

• Why should our/your organisation take Sustainability seriously?
• What would the organisation look like if it did take Sustainability seriously?
• What would we/you have to do to achieve that vision?

It doesn’t matter if their answers to these questions aren’t cutting edge Sustainability thinking; it matters that key decision makers own those answers – and they will own them as they formulated them. After all, a good Sustainability Strategy that gets implemented is infinitely better than a perfect one that gathers dust on a shelf.