The Dirty Secret of a Successful Sustainability Strategy
Since November I’ve been revamping and refocussing our Net Zero Business Academy (formerly Green Academy) series of webinars, which certainly seems to be delivering results in terms of participants. Last week I delivered the Strategy module and the one message I wanted participants to take away is what I call the Dirty Secret of Sustainability Strategy:
The process of developing the strategy is more important than the strategy itself.
Why? Because the development process is the best opportunity to get buy-in for the strategy. And a half-baked strategy with buy-in will deliver far more than a perfect strategy with no buy-in. Buy-in is everything, or to quote Peter Drucker:*
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Most people draft a strategy and then present it to key decision makers. That’s like walking up to them and asking them to take up crochet – they’re very unlikely to go “OK, yes, sounds great!” Whereas if you engineer a situation where they get to try crochet, they’re far more likely to get, er, hooked. Likewise if you involve key decision makers directly in the process of developing the strategy, they are 100 times more likely to believe in it than if they have signed off a draft.
Or as the joke goes:
How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Just one but the lightbulb has to want to change.
Participation in the process of plotting change is the best way bar none to get key people to want to change. Involve them!
* like many famous quotes, there is some uncertainty over whether Drucker actually said this, but I don’t care, in my experience, it is very true.