Feedback from the LCBPE, 3rd Dec
I had a brilliant but exhausting day at the Low Carbon Best Practice Exchange last Thursday. A late train led to a missed connection wiping out my planned acclimatisation/caffeine hit period before I was straight into the my first workshop, Empowering Your Staff. As with the second session it was over-subscribed and I was relieved not to keep everyone waiting.
During the session, I used Arnstein’s ladder of participation to lead the attendees away from beating staff over the head to making them part of the solution – by getting them involved in developing solutions and delegating power as low as possible in the organisation. What always hits me about this session when I run it is the fear of getting staff involved – a lot of excuses were made why this just wasn’t possible. “Empowerment” has become a bit of a cliché, but few people are really doing it. Getting client teams involved in developing solutions is the basic technique at the core of much of our consultancy work now as a. it gives better solutions and b. buy-in is automatic. We know it works.
There’s always something new for me at these events and when I shared Northern Food’s colour coding of machinery technique, one attendee from a food company pointed out how this could solved language barrier for her – her company has 32 different native languages on the factory floor. I hadn’t considered that as a barrier to engagement before.
The second session was on long term environmental strategy. I got the participants to analyse their organisation using the sustainability maturity model. All agreed that they would have to move to the full integration level to address sustainability properly. We then discussed the difference between forecasting and backcasting in developing strategies and I got them to describe a vision of their business in 2020 to get them into the backcasting way of thinking.
As well as the two sessions, four people had requested individual meetings with me (two because they couldn’t get on the first session). I also interviewed Nick Coad, Environmental Director of National Express, for The Green Executive – a really interesting guy, describing himself as “a failed elephant tracker” – and caught up with the two clients I had invited to the event who appeared to have really got lots of value it. My last meeting at 3pm was cancelled, so I finally got a wander around the stalls and then got out for some fresh air before getting the train home.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – these events are brilliant. Learning, sharing and networking are maximised and, while there were some powerpoint driven seminars in side rooms, I got through the whole day without hearing the words “I’ll just get the technology sorted, and then…”.