On Monday I spent a total of 7 hours going to and from Birmingham by train for a project close presentation to a client. This always gives some time for thought, background reading and poking around social media – all soundtracked by the Rolling Stones live in Brussels ’73 or some other classic live album of the 1970s.

One tweet from another sustainability practitioner caught my eye; roughly speaking it went:

We have #Brexit and the #McStrike and all people can talk about is the #RoyalBaby 😡.

Now let’s deconstruct this a little. The Brexit jalopy has been spluttering along for 15 months since the referendum without a dun-dun-DAAAAAH moment. I’m politically active, campaigned for Remain, would love a second referendum, and yet I am bored stupid by Brexit – I now skim read the newspaper stories and I guess most do the same.

I am not surprised that MacDonald’s employees are striking given their poor wages and insecure contracts, BUT, let’s put it into perspective: there were 2 restaurants striking out of 1249 in the UK – hardly Hold the Front Page stuff no matter how much you or I might support the cause.

Lastly, the royal baby has all the ingredients of public appeal – celebrity, gossip, glamour, happiness, impending cuteness etc, etc. It hasn’t captured much of my attention, or that of the tweeter above, but it is not surprising it has caught the public mood.

Because here’s the rub. Not everybody thinks like me, the tweeter, or you. Or should do. Just because I’m not that into the royal baby news, it doesn’t mean that millions of people aren’t – or shouldn’t be.

My biggest realisation is Sustainability was that to engage people for whom Sustainability is an alien concept, we’ve got to stop talking about Sustainability from a practitioner’s point of view. If they haven’t ‘got it’ already, they won’t ‘get it’ by being preached at. Instead we’ve got to put ourselves in the audience’s shoes, see the world from their perspective, and reframe Sustainability to resonate with that worldview. I call this Green Jujitsu.

If you haven’t checked out our new Green Jujitsu Employee Engagement training yet, then click here for details.