It’s been a crazy week. Starting with a public holiday where my phone rang and I was asked to do a 5 hour behavioural change workshop for an Edie event on Wednesday. I got the full brief on Tuesday morning and had half a day to design the workshop and make my logistical arrangements. Within 24 hours of getting the ‘go’, I was standing in a trendy Birmingham creative space with a single sheet of A4 paper in my hand (almost) the only thing I’d brought with me. What could possibly go wrong?

The novelty for me was I’ve never facilitated a workshop with a graphical recorder before. And they hadn’t worked with a facilitator who asked them to draw a massive elephant in the middle of their mural before. But Matt from Scriberia did an amazing job (seriously, click on the pic above and check that jumbo out!)

The delegates were energy/sustainability managers from a very wide range of organisations – leisure, hospitality, construction, local Government, childcare and more. We spent the morning going through the basics of my Green Jujitsu approach to engagement – finding that sweet spot between the existing culture and Sustainability – and the elephant-rider-path change model.

In the afternoon, the delegates split into teams and chose one of their businesses and developed a behaviour change process. The group that chose the pub chain, decided that the strongest emotional driver was ‘pride in the pub’ (as opposed to the corporate brand) and built their process around competition between pubs for an annual award. The group that chose construction, decided that ‘compliance’ was the sweet spot and proposed a construction energy consumption benchmark would become the basis of engaging site managers.

It was great to have two completely different approaches as it illustrated the basic Green Jujitsu principle that engagement needs to be tailored to the audience and not generic off the shelf techniques. In other words, job done!