There was a lot of debate last week on my LinkedIn feed as to the ‘best’ Sustainability message – should we appeal to people’s sense of community, or their narrow interests, which group of people needs to be engaged most urgently etc. Every commenter had their own opinion. I read some of these with a wry smile on my face as I had, and still have, a Post-it stuck to my computer screen with one word on it: Listen!

The Post-it was there because I had a couple of coaching sessions last week and the key to coaching is listening. Even having done loads of coaching, facilitation and mastermind groups over the years, I still have to remind myself occasionally to shut up at key moments and let the participant(s) express themselves fully. My natural instinct when someone says “I’m struggling to enga…” is to interject with a loud “GREEN JUJITSU!” It doesn’t matter whether the answer is right (and it >90% probably is in this case), I could easily spoil the moment as the participant thinks “FFS, let me speak!” So the Post-it goes up as a wee reminder.

Green Jujitsu – the art of tailoring your engagement to each audience – is also about listening. If a client wants an engagement programme, then I will typically take one or more focus group(s) and ask them to identify the buttons to press for that audience. What gets their colleagues out of bed in the morning? What do they like doing? What turns them off? And then you build your programme around those do/don’t ‘buttons’.

A company running 25+year PFI projects has a completely different culture to that of a newspaper group. There is no point in preaching cathedral building to the latter when their product often has a lifespan of hours – you need to match the fast-paced, high impact culture of the newsroom. The PFI company needs a culture where Sustainability objectives are passed from one employee to their successor.

There is often more than one significant tribe in each organisation. At a research establishment I did a workshop for, the boffins wanted data, statistics and proof (some would do their own statistical analysis on raw energy data) whereas the estates staff had a culture of clear instructions  eg “Can I turn that bit of kit off? Yes or no?” So you need two parallel engagement programmes, neither of which should feature a polar bear.

I started developing Green Jujitsu as an engineer talking to other engineers, using engineer terms and tools and solutions generation as an engagement method – engineers get out of bed in the morning to solve problems. I then moved on to health and realised I didn’t have the same deep understanding of the job, so that’s when I started listening and we emphasised the health benefits of Sustainability as healthcare workers get out of bed in the morning to make people healthier  (I still did solutions generation, but made it less engineer-y).

So, I keep telling myself to shut up and listen! It’s a great skill to have, but it takes practice.