Quite a bit of my work recently has been around taking a Sustainability Strategy and embedding it into the organisation. While gaining buy-in from employees is a big part of how I approach this (my preferred option is to get the buy-in of key people by involving them in developing the strategy, but that’s another story), if we are to truly make sustainability the new business as usual then it has to be, almost by definition, the default option whenever decisions arise.

This is not a trivial challenge. Many of my clients have been in existence for 50+ years (some over 100) and they have slowly accumulated ways of doing things based on the largely linear, fossil fuel based economy which arose from the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly we are trying to change all that in just a few years.

On the positive side, fast change is very possible – sometimes destructively so, as when Kodak was decimated by the very digital photography it had invented but sidelined. There is also my favourite mantra, the 80:20 Rule, which holds that a very small number of changes will deliver the vast majority of results. If you are smart, you can identify those key changes and put your efforts into making them happen, rather than sapping your time and effort on trying to get thousands of people to switch off their phone chargers overnight.

While many ‘sustainability by default’ initiatives involve ‘nudging’ people by, say, setting printers to print duplex by default, there are some much bigger gains to be won by, for example, tweaking investment appraisals to account for full carbon costs or putting energy reduction targets into the personal objectives of every site manager. It is this kind of hardwiring of sustainability into core systems that will deliver year after year with little or no further intervention.

Isn’t that what we’re trying to achieve?