I’ve recently finished delivering a series of five Sustainability workshops to members of the North East Automotive Alliance (NEAA) ie manufacturers of vehicles and their key suppliers. Do you know what I taught them?

Nothing.

Well, that’s not entirely true, I did add my insights now and then, but the majority of what they learned was from each other. I spent most of my time posing the right questions and capturing their answers either on one of my templates (all those Post-its on the board behind us or a flipchart (right). No Powerpoint whatsoever.

Why?

Because I find peer-to-peer learning is the best way to learn stuff properly. So much so I was also recently doing the same with the UK’s organ transplant community (although there was a bit of Powerpoint as the attendees wanted some ‘teaching’), and my own cross-sectoral Sustainability Leadership Roundtable has recently been refreshed with some great new members. The interactivity is key – if I put up a slide on, say, power purchase agreements (PPAs), people will think “that’s interesting” and forget about it when I put the next slide up. But if someone says “we’ve saved loads of money through a PPA, but you have to be careful about X”, and that triggers a conversation, that is a much richer experience, because they are hearing from someone who has been there, done that and learnt the lessons the hard way.

This approach pervades our services – whether working on a Sustainability Strategy or engaging employees, we always involve key people to the maximum extent as that deeper understanding and ownership of the issue is gold dust.