This week is Climate Week – another of the plethora of weeks, days and hours dedicated to the planet – and it seems to have stimulated a spike in queries on forums for ‘awareness’ posters. And they’ve generated a slew of helpful replies pointing the way the ‘the best’ material.

Just one problem.

Generic awareness posters just don’t work.

When was the last time you looked at a poster and decided there and then to change the way you live your life? If employee engagement was as simple as putting a poster up, we’d have saved the planet many years ago. I deliberately parodied the ‘death by poster’ approach in The Art of Green Jujitsu (above) for this very reason.

The requests for generic material, and the responses, show that too many sustainability practitioners are simply happy to follow the crowd. If there’s one thing I have learnt over the years is that you have to put yourself in your colleagues’ shoes (or in my case, my clients’ employees’ shoes) and build your engagement programme from that point of view.

They don’t need a better poster. They need a better perspective.