Why do we get stuck in business as usual? Almost always it is because we make most decisions subconsciously, doing the same thing as we always do. One of my favourite quotes is from Mike Monteiro:

The world is not broken, it is working exactly how we designed it to.

What Monteiro means is that not making a decision to do things differently is a decision in itself. We decide to do what we always do, even if we don’t realise we are deciding to do it.

In his book Sustainability by Design, John Ehrenfeld cites the humble dual flush toilet as a disruptor of business as usual. On a conventional toilet, we do our business and press the button. We don’t question it, we just do it. But if we have two buttons, that creates a decision point – we have to decide which button to press – which brings a passive decision into an active, conscious one.

A big part of my consultancy is making the implicit explicit. I like to use backcasting as a process to develop Sustainability strategies as it forces my assembled group of key decision makers to decide how they want to deliver Sustainability – bringing those decisions firmly into their conscious mind. The process is like having two buttons, one marked business as usual, one marked Sustainability and saying “which one is it?” It forces the decision to be made.

Alternatively, for behavioural change we can do a bit of nudging (remember Nudge?) and make the desired option easier to follow than business as usual. Too much of the Sustainability profession fails to understand that we have to make Sustainability easy. It should not be a test of others’ moral commitment, but the obvious way to do things. I often quote the example of a client who (pre-Covid) wrapped their teleconferencing system in red tape, making face to face meetings easier to organise for the host. The system sat gathering dust. When they stripped away that red tape (in response to one of my workshops), use of the system soared.

The tough option is to remove the business as usual option, eg banning lead-free petrol was a big win for the environment. However, sometimes such measures can backfire if the intended audience doesn’t embrace the change. Often you have to put on a tin helmet and wait for the furore to die down (assuming it does). Not for the faint-hearted!

Those anti-BAU options in summary:

1. Force the decision into the conscious of the decision maker
2. Skew the decision by making the Sustainable option easier to take than business as usual (nudge)
3. Remove the business as usual option (high risk, high reward).