Low Carbon Innovation Workshops
The two LCIN workshops yesterday went extremely well, with full capacity on each.
The first, Long Term Environmental Strategy, was the more tricky for me as facilitator. When I asked the participants where they were at and where would they like to be, they all gave the same answer – “we haven’t a clue”. I had two choices, lecture them for an hour (and bore them to tears) or get them to think through the process stage by stage. I opted for the latter and it went very well, but it took a lot of patience to elicit the answers. We covered drivers (cost was surprisingly low on the agenda given the recession), baselines, targets, solution generation (including backcasting which no-one had heard of), filtering solutions, financial commitment, leadership and a little on staff engagement. That’s quite a lot to fit into an hour with no powerpoint…
The second session was on eco-renovation of buildings. This time almost everyone at the table had some experience of the topic, so I could sit back a little and facilitate the discussion properly and there was some really great sharing of experience and expertise. We covered insulation, micro-renewables, upgrading HVAC systems, waste heat recovery (internal and external), natural cooling (particularly of server rooms), layout and user behaviour.
I also sat in on another workshop on “the boardroom imperative”. My learning point for the whole day (every day is school day in this game) came from a guy from KPMG where instead of trying to find a fair financial incentive scheme, they have decided to give 50% of savings on paper use to charity. This has proved extremely successful and popular and avoids all the potential pitfalls of incentives payments going straight to staff. Genius.