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Here’s a (lightly disguised) anecdote I heard last week: “I worked really hard on this project, did all the research, polished my arguments, presented it to the boss and… nothing. Nothing happened. Why aren’t people interested in Sustainability?!”

The simple answer is: you haven’t got them interested enough.

Here’s when the penny dropped for me. Early in the history of Terra Infirma Ltd I had a contract with Envirowise, a Government-run project to get business minimising waste and water use (we did energy too, but, shh, don’t tell the Carbon Trust or they get mad). I’d literally walk around each facility, methodically from goods in to goods out, write up and cost some proposals and send the company my report.

Every so often I would bump into my contact at one of these companies and ask them how they had got on. This invoked embarrassed muttering about how they’d been busy with something else. Now, it wasn’t the quality of my work as most of this was bleedin’ obvious quick wins: “your air compressor is overheating because it’s breathing in its own exhaust; attach the inlet to the outside air and you’ll save loads of money etc.” It was a waste of time, just like my opening anecdote.

I expressed some frustrations in an online forum and a kind bloke called Peter Hunter replied, saying “I’ve written a book about this, it’s called Breaking the Mould.” I gave it a read and it changed my life.

Hunter explained that people like me were using the Theory X approach to change: make a logical argument, tell people to do it and sit back and wait… for nothing to happen. It’s like yelling at a smoker to stop smoking. People just keep doing what they’ve always done.

By contrast, Theory Y involves asking people what needs to change and how. You don’t always get the exact answer you want, but you get movement in the right direction, sometimes quite fast movement. Twice I’ve had CEOs increase the organisation’s carbon ambition during the meeting and once a procurement decision was changed within half a working day.

So, if I want to develop a proposal/strategy/whatever for a client, I don’t squirrel myself away working on it until I’ve got a final draft. Up front, I ask key decision makers in the organisation what they want to do, why they want to do it and how to do it. I might guide the conversation using my years of experience, but, fundamentally, I get them to design the solution for themselves. Then, they own it, not me. And ownership makes implementation about 100x more likely than any Powerpoint presentation.