Can you look at Sustainability from others’ perspectives?

Last Tuesday evening I was shivering on the touch line of my youngest’s football practice and scrolling through my e-mails. A message had arrived from a Government agency which from time to time calls on me to assess funding applications when they involve Sustainability. It contained a rather severe dressing down about the impacts of late assessments and a reminder of the sanctions for repeatedly doing so.

“But they haven’t sent me any applications for over a year! Unless I’ve missed something – have I missed something?” I thought with a sinking feeling in my stomach.

I decided hold off responding until I could check my assessors account on their website when I got home, but by that time a second e-mail had appeared, apologising for the first. They’d had a few late returns on recent assessments and decided to send out a reminder to everyone, and presumably had received a series of robust responses from people who like me thought it was aimed at them personally.

The mistake they made of course was not to think through how the message was going to land with the audience. They knew why they had sent the e-mail, but we didn’t, and they didn’t think to tell us. Comms 101. 

Putting yourself in your audience’s shoes is the basis of my approach to not only Sustainability communications, but all my engagement. At the very basic level, we need to choose our language, images and messages so they are not only comprehensible to the audience but familiar and interesting.

One of my favourite examples was in an engineering company where one production engineer had built a system which allowed parts of the production line to be switched off and back on again without lengthy calibration, cutting energy use massively. That story of innovation an ingenuity was featured in the company magazine and everybody knew about it because engineers like engineering.

It was the same company where I pioneered my Green Jujitsu approach to engagement by getting engineers to think up solutions to Sustainability problems using problem solving tools used by engineers. It was a roaring success in terms of engagement, outcome (an immediate 10% cut in carbon emissions, almost certainly through behavioural change) and forward success (we ended up with dozens of practical ideas to implement in the short-medium term). All because I built the programme for engineers.

The bottom line is that, as a Sustainability Professional, what you know and think doesn’t really matter until you can persuade people with different outlooks to deliver for Sustainability. And having the humility to put yourself in their shoes is the very first step in that process.