I had a fantastic day out at the Sustainable Best Practice Exchange at Harrogate yesterday. I used to be a regular facilitator at these events when they toured the country between 2010-2012 and I loved them as they promoted discussion over presentation and everybody learnt from each other. In fact the round table format was a formative influence on the design of the Corporate Sustainability Mastermind Group.

Yesterday, I gave a speech on Green Jujitsu as a better approach to employee engagement. I took a (slightly noisy) recording which you can hear here:

I also facilitated a session on ‘getting colleagues on board’, and the conclusions were:

• Match language to audience
• Legacy is a strong driver for CEOs
• Peer pressure works
• No evangelism
• Middle management need formal objectives
• Awards attract attention
• Let colleagues pitch pet projects – the best get implemented
• Give targets branding (even ‘characters’) to make them easy to communicate
• Removing barriers is as important as new ventures;
• Human interest stories beat case studies
• Stretch targets grab attention

If much of that sounds familiar, one of the delegates had read Green Jujitsu and was quoting from it at length!