Curious.

I thought this thought while editing my interview with Tobias Webb last week. The theme that emerged was ‘learning by failing’, and failing either means trying something new, or trying something old that doesn’t work and never has – but learning from it.

My best ever Sustainability idea is almost certainly ‘Green Jujitsu’, the idea of tailoring your engagement to each audience rather than the standard approach of throwing green slogans around. I make no apologies for repeating the Green Jujitsu origin story. Asked to engage engineers at at FTSE100 company, I declined their suggestion I talk about switching their TVs off properly at night (!), and proposed treating them like engineers – using engineering tools to generate solutions to Sustainability issues. It worked like nothing I had ever seen before. And I’d thought of it – kind of.

The precursor step – of realising that the best change management comes from asking people what they think they should do (theory Y) rather than telling them what to do (theory X) – also came from curiosity. I had been doing the usual consultancy thing of collecting information, analyzing it and writing up a report concluding with a list of recommendations. Fed up with those recommendations being ignored, I cast around for better ways of working.

A little known book called Breaking the Mould by Peter Hunter resonated with me because years before, as a wet-behind the ears graduate engineer, I had been tasked with asking production line staff at a small electronics company for ideas for improvement. Once their jaws had returned to normal positions (the company culture was very top down), they compiled a list. Some of the ideas were great, the staff embraced them as they owned them, and felt good about being listened to. The guy who gave me this task was curious as to whether it would work – and used me as a proxy for trying something against the grain.

The old cliche about you’ll never solve problems with the same thinking that created them is never more true than in Sustainability. If you want to make the world a better place, you need to think differently, and that takes curiosity. Cast around for interesting ideas. Try stuff and see what works. Add an element of experiment to everything you do. If nothing else, it is far more fun than doing what everybody else is doing over and over again.