…or not quickly anyway.

I was reminded of this on Monday at the sustainability strategy workshop I was running for a client, when a participant pleaded:

“Please, please, please, don’t propose another bloody culture change programme!”

Or as Peter Drucker put it:

“Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.”

This is the essence of my Green Jujitsu approach to engagement. Find the overlap between the existing culture and sustainability and start there. So for engineers, talk engineering sustainability, for healthcare professionals, talk, say, air quality or fuel poverty, for journalists, use human interest stories and infographics*.

Speak the language of your audience and they’ll absorb sustainability into the existing culture. After all, it’s behaviour you need to change; if culture changes over time, then that’s a bonus.

* note these aren’t exclusives – you can use infographics for engineers, but you should use ‘technical’ imagery in those infographics.

Photo: © JanErkamp at the English language Wikipedia, Creative Commons License