I’ve spent the first part of this morning giving some advice to an entrepreneur who has an exciting green business idea but wanted some help with the direction to take it. As we talked, a theme emerged from my rambling – to get a novel idea up and running you have to:

1. solve a really pressing problem that your customer has, and/or

2. lower the mental leap required to adopt the new system.

These apply to all aspects of encouraging people to use more sustainable technology. For example, if you want people to use teleconferencing rather than business travel you should play on the convenience (more time with the family rather than in a dull hotel), make sure that booking/using the system is at least as easy than booking the travel, and get key people to insist on using teleconferencing for their meetings so others are forced to get familiar with it.

One of my clients, a chemist by trade, refers to barriers to change being like the ‘activation energy’ required to make a chemical reaction happen. Catalysts are used to reduce the activation energy and that’s how we, as sustainability practitioners, should see ourselves – catalysts.