Sustainability: do the same old, get the same old…
This week I read an article on employee engagement for Sustainability on a well-known eco-business website (I won’t bother linking to protect the guilty), wondering if it had a new angle, a nice case study or a clever technique I hadn’t come across before. Unfortunately the piece could have been written 10, 20 or even 30 years ago – we had ‘switch it off’ stickers and posters on the walls when I started in the Civil Service in 1993.
Here’s a thing – if it hasn’t worked in the last 23 years, why would it start working now?
This approach is so old hat, I parodied it in an animation 3 and a half years ago. We have so much more sophisticated approaches including gamification, ‘nudge’ techniques and my own Green Jujitsu (translating Sustainability for the worldview of each audience) that you would have thought that a half-competent environmental consultancy may have come across (hint: try Google). But apparently not.
To deliver Sustainability, we need new thinking across the board. Whether that is managing distributed energy, developing new business models or effective employee engagement; blindly trying the same old technique whether or not it works is the epitome of stupidity. One of the joys of working in Sustainability is learning something new every day – revel in it!