Our Clients

Our customers are a very wide range of businesses from sole traders through public sector organisations to multinational corporations.  No matter what their size or sector, they all get a bespoke service, tailored to their needs.

Our client list includes BAE Systems plc, the BBC, Black & Decker, NHS, Johnson Matthey plc, Sage plc, InterfaceFLOR, the Universities of Durham, Newcastle and Sunderland, Viridor Waste Mangement, East Coast Mainline, Kohler, Dover Corporation and many others. Below are some examples of the work we have done with our customers.

Johnson Matthey plc

Johnson Matthey plc (JM) is a FTSE100 company specialising in catalysis; they have 13,000 employees, £10bn turnover and a third of the global market in automobile catalytic convertors.

Terra Infirma initially supported JM in engaging employees, and then with solving specific sustainability issues via our coaching service, but more recently we have been helping JM design the roll-out of their Sustainable Business 2025 sustainability strategy.

The roll-out has been based on the principle that everybody needs to know a little bit about everything in the strategy, but key decision makers need to know a lot about certain things. To design the engagement, we worked with the JM Sustainability team to map ‘who needs to know what’. Using this map, Terra Infirma designed two engagement workshops aimed at two strata of decision makers and trained the JM team in delivering those workshops.

NHS Blood & Transplant

NHS Blood & Transplant (NHSBT) provides blood and transplantation service to the UK’s National Health Service, looking after blood donation services in England and transplant services across the UK. This includes managing the donation, storage and transplantation of blood, organs, tissues, bone marrow and stems cells, and researching new treatments and processes. Having supported NHSBT for many years, Terra Infirma has recently helped them develop a Sustainability Strategy.

We ran a workshop with the NHSBT Sustainable Development Group (SDG) to work out the business case, set targets and outline key priorities using a backcasting methodology. We replicated this workshop with the NHSBT board to gain buy-in, with the success of the session illustrated by the Directors boosting the carbon reduction goal from 40% to 50%.

Using the content of those two workshops, Terra Infirma worked with the SDG to condense the goals and priorities into a short 8-page strategy document. Given the diverse readership the strategy starts in very accessible, high-level terms then grows progressively more detailed as it goes on. This means the reader can go as far as they need to.

Following the publication of the strategy, Terra Infirma has been supporting its roll-out across the organisation.

BAE Systems plc

BAE Systems plc is the third largest defense contractor in the world, with 82,500 employees and a turnover of £17.8bn turnover. Terra Infirma ran a large number of employee engagement sessions involving almost 1000 employees from BAE Systems’ Munitions division across the UK.

These workshops were some of the first to use our ‘Green Jujitsu’ approach to engagement, ie exploiting the overlap between Sustainability and the company culture. We largely eschewed Powerpoint in favour of structured problem solving workshop sessions based around simple engineering tools. By tapping into the innovation culture of the company we not only got a deeper connection with the engineers and technicians, but the sessions generated many hundreds of potential solutions, several dozen of which were implemented by the company.

The workshops were well planned, thought-provoking and generated a large number of new ideas from our employees. We have no hesitation in recommending Terra Infirma Ltd

~ Peter Clapperton, Head of Sustainability, BAE Systems plc

News International

News International, since renamed News UK, publishes The Times, Sunday Times and The Sun. Terra Infirma ran a Green Jujitsu workshop for the company’s Sustainability Champions.

During the session, the Champions identified the cultural ‘hooks’ at News International to tap into to, from the fast-moving high-impact world of journalism. They were then challenged to develop these broad principles into a comprehensive change management action plan using a simple 3 step change model. This resulted in a two-year action plan for News International.

One of these actions, using infographics to communicate complex Sustainability information internally in the same way journalists use infographics to communicate with readers, had a phenomenal effect according to Sustainability Manager Lugano Kapwembwe. He said

I used to be banging my head off the wall, now I can hardly keep up with the Sustainability projects springing up spontaneously around the company. A good problem to have!

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the most venerated broadcasting organisation in the world. They have long championed Sustainability, both internally and across the broadcasting sector via the BAFTA organisation. Terra Infirma has been engaged twice to support the corporation’s Sustainability Champions:

A workshop to upskill the champions in change management techniques. We used our simple 3 step change management model to stimulate ideas and techniques for the champions to take away and use, and a session with the Sustainability Team to advise on how to make the network self-sustaining.

Gareth Kane presented 5 different models which have worked in other organisations and recommended the one which best matched the BBC’s needs. This has now been adopted by the BBC.