I saw a car the other day which had been customised to promote its owners business. It had the company logo (a three letter acronym), its web address, e-mail and phone number – everything you needed to contact the company, if you only knew what the company actually did. Why on earth would I randomly phone a company if I don’t know what they might do for me? A complete waste of time, money, effort and paint.

This kind of thinking – seeing the world from our own perspective, rather than that of those we wish to communicate with – is all too common. It certainly pervades culture change for sustainability – the vast majority of practitioners simply do what everybody else does, rather than working it out for themselves.

A couple of years ago, I got a call from a potential client. “We’d like you to talk to our employees about what they can for the environment at home.” Why?, I asked. “Oh, hopefully they’ll change their behaviour at work too. I heard about another company doing this and I liked the idea.” As an engineering company, I recommended we focussed on challenging the employees to generate engineering solutions to sustainability problems, rather than doing something less relevant to the individuals and their work and hoping the behaviour crossed into that work by osmosis.

Putting yourself in your colleagues’ shoes is the fundamental principle that underpins the Green Jujitsu approach to culture change. Forget the trappings of the green movement and think about what would appeal to your audience. If they are engineers, as above, cast sustainability as an engineering issue. If they are people who would be likely to read true-life-story magazines, then present sustainability in the form of personal stories. If they are hardcore financial nuts, then focus initially on the business case for sustainability. (In practice you should mix all these ideas up, but with one element to the fore.)

This takes some thought, guile and a spoonful of humility – forgetting what appeals to you and think about what appeals to them.