a. isn’t a book about Sustainability, and,

b. you’ve probably never heard of it.

When I set up Terra Infirma Ltd 19 years ago, my first contract was one I brought with me from my previous job, as an Envirowise advisor. Envirowise was a Government scheme funded by landfill tax designed to promote waste minimisation. Typically, I’d get sent into a business – anything from kitchen manufacturing through pharmaceuticals to Portacabins – for a half day visit, clipboard in hand, and then I would have half a day to write up the waste minimisation opportunities I’d spotted during my brief time walking through, and try to quantify the cost savings involved.

The North East of England is quite a small place and, whenever I bumped into any of my Envirowise ‘clients’ at events, I’d naturally ask them how their waste minimisation efforts were going. I usually got despondent as they would typically start making excuses about restructuring, ISO14001 certification or some other slightly tangential reason for doing nothing.

While I was making a decent income from this and found the visits very interesting, I got frustrated that I wasn’t actually changing anything – after all, that was the reason I chose this career, to make a difference. At the time, I was a member of the now defunct Ecademy networking platform, so I threw my challenge into the community: how do you make change happen in a third party organisation?

A chap called Peter Hunter suggested I take a look at his book, Breaking the Mould. In it Peter explains the revelation he had while acting as a troubleshooter in the oil and gas industry. Like me with Envirowise, he would go in to an underperforming business with his clipboard, ask lots of awkward questions and write up the results. And, like me, nothing would change. So he tried another tack.

Instead of telling people what to do, he started experimenting with asking the site employees “what would you do to improve productivity?” He found two results: firstly, that some of the underlying problems would never have been spotted by an outsider, and, secondly, that if the suggested changes came from the employees, they would get implemented. Ownership of solutions was the secret sauce of change.

So, I gave it a go. I had another contract to engage small business on waste issues, but this time the methodology wasn’t carved in stone. So I would get a team of employees into a meeting room and ask them to plot out the production process in the business and identify where waste arose, before asking them to identify opportunities for reduce, reuse, recycle etc. It worked a treat with a huge amount of enthusiasm and some good outcomes above and beyond the obvious.

Soon after I got a chance to try this on a division of a multi-national corporation. I was asked to engage their, largely engineering, staff in Sustainability. I persuaded them that, instead of lecturing them about recycling, we should treat engineers as engineers and ask them to try and solve the company’s Sustainability challenges. Much to my relief, the engineers rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in. It wasn’t meant to be a consultancy contract, but we ended up with dozens of fixes – which the company implemented. For example, when they stripped red tape from the booking system for teleconferencing suites (this was the pre-Zoom era), usage went from once in a blue moon to being over-booked by 100%. The carbon footprint of the division fell by 10% over the year I was delivering the workshops.

Ever since this watershed, I have based my consultancy around workshops wherever possible. Yes, I could write you a Sustainability Strategy, but it will more than likely sit on a shelf gathering dust. But if I work with your decision-makers to co-design the strategy with them, it is far more likely to get implemented as they will own the strategy, not me. Ownership is gold dust.

[For management geeks, the traditional “you need to do this” model is known as Theory X and the “what do you think you need to do?” model is known as Theory Y. Peter’s book, Breaking the Mould, is available on Amazon.]