Our opportunities to change things can come from unexpected directions. A new CEO who wants to shake things up. A sudden upsurge of public enthusiasm for naked shampoo bars or reusable cups. A cost-cutting drive.
How can you make the most of these changes from elsewhere, and surf them expertly to get things moving in a sustainable direction?
The two worlds I straddle - sustainability and process - interweave in all sorts of ways. And one of those ways involves challenging myself, and other facilitators, about the sustainability of our own practice. And although I've called this blog post 'greening' our practice, of course there are the social and ethical aspects of sustainability as well as the environmental ones to consider.
Contemplating ecological apocalypse, and being really really angry with the bozos who are letting it happen, can make us sustainability people pretty dull conversationalists.
In a bid to learn some new ways of delighting people while helping them stare into the abyss, I enrolled in the marvellous Sustainable Stand Up course, run by my old friend and colleague - and all round laughter fairy - Belina Raffy with support from Dr Steve Cross.
When I first met with Brigid Finlayson and Carolina Karlstrom, to see whether we could work together to create the first She is Still Sustainable, we talked a lot about the kind of event we wanted to make it. And our conversation focused a lot on mood, atmosphere, emotional tone: we wanted it to be “warm, safe, friendly event which is refreshing, inspiring and supportive”.
Lots of the women who came along to She is Still Sustainable said that the highlight was a co-coaching exercise we ran, using a solutions focus approach. People paired up and coached each other, asking positive, future-oriented questions about the sustainability work they wanted to do. The instructions are here.
Any fool can design a workshop. What really tests you is having to redesign it part-way through.
You’ve done a great plan, and prepared your materials. You know how you’d like the space laid out, and your workshop will take the group on a journey towards a convergent, satisfying conclusion.
And then it all goes horribly wrong. Nasty surprises throw your plans into disarray. You need to redesign and you need to do it NOW!
One of the lovely things that we did at She is Still Sustainable last month, was to build a wonderwall of our achievements. And wow! What a lot we have achieved.
Some were very personal – surviving divorce, arranging funerals, raising children....
Some had enormous reach – training 100s of facilitators, systems change programme with Sierra Leone Ministry of Health to improve community health, part of a team delivering a sustainable London 2012...
Some were very tangible – writing books, setting up organisations, creating community gardens, renovating a house to high eco-standards, building an environmental showcase house on Trafalgar Square...
Browsing the wonderwall.
When we’d browsed the wall of achievement and organised it a bit, we cheered and applauded our collective fabulousness, and thanked each other for our contributions. It was very moving to be looking someone directly in the eye, and expressing gratitude for what they had done so far, and to have their thanks in return.
It's like a long hike. We’re part way along this journey, and have climbed high enough to deserve a rest. We take in the view, spotting the landmarks we passed earlier and remembering the tough stretches where we doubted our ability to go on. There is further to travel, and we know we can do it, because we have come this far.
The process: we gave everyone big post-its and marker pens, and asked them to think about their achievements and choose three to write down. We encourage people to put aside any British reserve or modesty – this is a time to blow our own trumpets! A wall had been prepared in advance – lined with flip chart paper – to receive the post-its. We encouraged grouping but with a light touch and we didn’t push this: there around 40 women so nearly 120 achievements, and we didn’t want the process to detract from the amazing array of sustainability successes.
Remembering our achievements
She is Still Sustainable was more workshop than a conference, but we did have two speaker panel sessions. Like other She is Sustainable events that came before ours, this included a presentation on some of the facts and figures showing the systemic disadvantages women experience in the workplace.
First up on the panel, Becky Willis reminded us of the gap in pay and power between women and men in the UK. Gender discrimination happens:
Published a couple of weeks earlier, IEMA’s 2018 survey of its members – environment and sustainability professionals – found that there is a 14.1% gender pay gap, which is 2.6% less than it was in the previous survey but still higher than the national average. Women are also under-represented in senior roles (the survey found 77% of ‘leadership’ roles are held by men), and in senior membership grades. As a Fellow of IEMA, I am in a tiny minority: 84% of the Fellows who responded to the survey are male.
When we were approaching speakers for She is Still Sustainable, we were challenged to think more widely than gender. What about women of colour? What about lesbian and bisexual women? We broadened our panel to include people who could speak from personal experience and give us some analysis: Lisa Pinney MBE is an Area Director with the Environment Agency, an LGBT+ ambassador and until recently was a trustee of LGBT+ rights organisation Stonewall. Angela Francis is Chief Economist at the Green Alliance and shared her experience of growing up as 'the only mixed-race girl in the village' (apart from her sister). As was ruefully pointed out, while it was wonderful to have so many mid-career women in the room, we were an overwhelmingly white crowd. I can’t speak confidently about our diversity along dimensions of sexuality and class, but my guess is that that we were not a very diverse group. We have more work to do to make these events inclusive of all women working in sustainability.
Early on we asked people to stand up if they had caring responsibilities, and then if they didn’t have caring responsibilities. It was roughly 50/50 split, which was a surprise to me: as someone who checks up on the health and happiness of my children and my parents, it was a useful reminder that not everyone's circumstances are like mine!
The Environment Agency has an active LGBT+ network, and its recent gender pay gap report shows a really interesting level of attention being paid to understanding how not being male, white, straight and able-bodied impacts on pay and progression. The Environment Agency also looked at the differences between people who self-identify as religious or not.
TL:DR – the Environment Agency’s headline gender pay gap is around 2.5%, very similar to its disability pay gap of 2.6%. Its race pay gap is higher at 3.3%. Its ‘religion and belief’ pay gap is -0.2% - those employees who have a declared religion earn marginally more than their colleagues with no declared religion or belief. Unhappily, the pay gap for LGB employees is 6.2%. All these figures are the ‘ordinary hourly pay gap’. The report contains information on bonus payments and representation at different levels of the organisation.
What is exciting about this report, for me, is that it exists at all at this level of detail. I assume that the leadership is paying attention.
That as a profession, we have absolutely no room for complacency – and lots of room for improvement, regret and shame. We can and should be paying more attention to the diversity of our own profession and movement – for our colleagues, for the people we are working with to solve sustainability problems, and as part of our contribution to meeting Sustainable Development Goal 5 (gender equality) and 10 (reduced inequalities within and between countries).
In a recent coaching session, my client was exploring whether they had permission to do something. And, in an uncertain and fluid situation, how they would know whether they had permission or not. What if they misread the signs?
We developed a two-by-two matrix, to sort out the possibilities.
Permission 1
If you realise that you have permission to do something, then that's the best place to be: empowered, confident in your mandate, and able to forge ahead. If you have permission but don't realise - or don't believe - that you have, you can disappoint the people who are expecting you to show leadership. If you think you have permission, but others don't agree, then conflict can arise. You waste your time and in this client's words, it's a right headache. And if you rightly believe that you don't have permission, then you can at least recognise that it's not your problem. Unless you wish you did have permission!
Permission 2
We also looked at what the implications are if you like or don't like the amount of permission you have. If you have permission, but wish you didn't, then you need to ask yourself whether you have permission to say no! If you wish you had permission to do something which others haven't given yet, then you have an engagement and advocacy pathway in front of you, to get the permission you want.
Sometimes there really is a person or institution with power which formally and explicitly gives or withholds permission. But so often, all of this is happening in our heads. Who is the real person whose views we are assuming we know? Can we replace our assumption with some actual conversation? They may surprise us!
Who is the imagined person we are waiting to hear from? It may be a voice we have carried with us from our earliest childhood, which we can experiment with ignoring or challenging. We can give it new things to say.
And if the 'permission' feels significant but we don't know where we stand, we can play with scenarios to find a way forward in the face of uncertainty.
The Beast from the East has blanketed much of the UK with its beautiful sparkles, covering up roads, railways lines and in some cases front doors.
Olivier Bataille, flickr
But the snow has also revealed things that aren’t usually seen: particulate pollution, uninsulated roofs, space which could be reclaimed from traffic for pedestrians and cyclists, and the impoverished nature of our soil.
The pictures show, clockwise from top right:
As you look around the sites your organisation occupies or is responsible for, what has the snow revealed about its sustainability aspects and impacts?
Less easily photographed, the recent weather may have revealed other things which are useful to know, about sustainability and resilience.
Wind Swept Tree, Fereneze Hills, cc-by-sa/2.0 - © wfmillar - geograph.org.uk/p/1502759
One of the things that came up again and again when I was talking to people about the new edition of Change Management for Sustainable Development, was supporting ourselves as sustainability professionals and as change-makers. This diagram shows three key pillars which support us. It was in the first edition (2006) and felt even more essential when I wrote the second edition.
Support yourself: three pillars, Walker, Change Management for Sustainable Development, 2006, 2017
Fortunately, many of the things which help you to do this will also bring you other benefits which are easier to justify – in traditional organisational and management terms – like developing new skills, developing others, networking with potential clients or suppliers.
Perspective is about learning from the doing. Every day, week or year you will have done things which pleased or disappointed you. Your actions may have moved things closer to a sustainable development path, or you may have tried and failed to do so. You don’t have to reflect on every single thing you do (or fail to do) every day. But taking some time out to think about what’s worked well and what’s not will help you to do better next time.
Perspective is also about stopping yourself from getting stuck. If you only ever see the big picture, then you’ll miss out on the chances to make some of the thousand little changes that will bring sustainability closer. If you only ever see the details, you’ll miss out on the mid-course corrections that are needed, and never see the progress you’ve made along the route. Sometimes the optimist needs to see the emptiness in the glass and the pessimist needs to see the fullness.
Marry perspective with giving yourself a break, by having a laugh at failures (see the wonderful Sustainable Stand-up) and celebrating achievements. Or take a holiday which combines relaxation with some other kind of activity or learning – music, drawing, bushcraft skills, yoga.
Time off and time out are essential – this is a long-distance path, not a sprint. Recharging your batteries is not self-indulgence, it’s part of the plan.
People recharge their batteries in lots of ways – listening to a great piece of music, going to a show, drawing, meditation, running, cooking a meal for someone, walking in the countryside. And there are things that can just make you feel good about yourself – finally finishing that niggling job around the house, doing a good turn for someone, getting in touch with a relative or old friend.
What are the things that feed your flame?
Open your schedule and book in one thing – even if it’s just 10 minutes’ worth – for each of the next seven days.
Make time-off possible by getting really good at delegating, engaging others in implementing things, and plan for your successor(s).
Inside or outside your organisation, find like-minded fellow travellers to share the journey with.
Talk and listen with these people to help you reflect and learn, and to give each other moral support.
And as you network – formally and informally – build up the kind of listening and coaching skills which mean that the conversations are useful and effective, rather than descending into being superficial or a moan-fest.
My own offering to build resilience, alongside one-to-one coaching, is the seasons of Still Conversations for Sustainability Leaders which let people think aloud, with supportive peers, about the hard questions of sustainability. These have been very special, with a quality of connection which is outside the normal superficial, competitive conversation you get at conferences and other events. More like a mini-retreat.
I'm also involved in the wonderful She is Sustainable – for women working in sustainability, in particular the version aimed at women with a couple of decades of work under their belts: She is Still Sustainable.
Network with others who are also making change for sustainable development. As well as structured and informal opportunities to share experiences, networks can help when you need to build alliances or find people to give your efforts external credibility. You can find people like this in various ways. These are just some ideas:
However you do it, please look after yourself. You can't be your best self if you don't.
Many organisations in the sustainability field do their best system-changing work when they are collaborating. They recognise this, and they seek out collaborators who, like them, want to make more change than one organisation can do working alone.
They understand the power of collaboration so well, that they put resources and staff time into facilitating and convening it.
And they find themselves in a challenging situation - playing the role of convening and facilitating, whilst also being a collaborator, with expertise and an opinion on what a good outcome would look like and how to get to it.
When you have expertise and a point of view on the topic being discussed, and you're also the convenor or facilitator, it causes three kinds of problems:
These problems are not insurmountable, but they are real. Understanding that they are an inherent feature of being a non-neutral facilitator/convenor helps you to anticipate them, spot them when they occur and mitigate.
I work with a lot of organisations who are in this position, and recently I ran a half-day masterclass for one of them. The masterclass began with me setting out the problem, and then the group shared their actual experiences and discussed what they wanted to do about it.
Here are the slides, suitably anonymised.
Once you understand the typical challenges, you can decide which situations need that additional neutrality, which really need you to be 'in' the conversation, and come up with ways of making sure that happens. There are some ideas here.
I'd love to help other organisations think through these dilemmas and make their own choices about them.
Time, elycefeliz on flickr.
It's the last working day of 2017 for me, and of course I've been looking back and looking forward.
It's a lovely thing to do. Identifying the highlights of the past year, and dreaming just that little bit more ambitiously about the year to come.
In 2017, I experimented with still conversations: a peer-learning, coaching-inspired way of giving sustainability leaders the space to reflect and think aloud, so that they can go back to their work refreshed and inspired to make more change for the rest of us. In 2018, these will run again and they will be a key part of the work I do to support change-makers. People who need to build their own (or their organisation's) resilience, and who want to make more change, are welcome.
Change Management for Sustainable Development was published by IEMA. In writing it I got to interview some of the best in the business - in-house leaders who want to build a better world and know how to transform an organisation from the inside-out. In 2018, I'll be sharing more of these insights through blog posts, webinars and with clients.
I was honoured to be made a Fellow of IEMA in the summer. In October I joined hundreds of other facilitators at the IAF's Europe, Middle East and North Africa regional conference in Paris. What a wonderful event! I learnt so much and was able to share some of my own expertise with facilitators from all over the world. My CPD next year will be a bit 'out there' - I'm taking part in Belina Raffy's Sustainable Stand-Up communications course. And yes, there will be a show in late May. Come and laugh with / at me!
One other highlight from 2017 was She is Sustainable - a warm and supportive event organised by women working in sustainability, where older women shared their life stories and hard-won wisdom with younger women just starting out on that journey. I was so inspired by facilitating the open space sessions. In 2018, working with some other wonderful sustainability women, I'll be putting on She is Still Sustainable. This sister-event will be for women who have been around the block a few times, working in sustainability and related fields, who are ready to take stock and plan their next adventure.
Throughout the year I worked with clients who are campaigning, innovating, convening and collaborating for sustainability. The kinds of things I helped with included organisational development and strategising, capacity building around facilitation and engagement, designing and facilitating workshops, coaching... I am looking forward to stretching and being stretched by ambitious, imaginative clients in 2018, and helping them make change!
Are you an environment or sustainability specialist, working to help your organisation step up to its role in bringing about a sustainable future? Want to make more of an impact? I want you to as well! Which is why I was so pleased when IEMA invited me to write a second edition of Change Management for Sustainable Development.
And when one of our peer readers said "it's like having a coach in your pocket", I was really happy, because that's exactly what I wanted it to be.
It's published today!
Huge thanks to all the wise, insightful and generous practitioners who shared their experiences with me.
There is a free download for IEMA members, and non-members can order an e-copy (£10) or a hard copy (£25 /£15 for members). https://www.iema.net/cmsd
Green Sea Turtle, NOAA
The BBC's brilliant Blue Planet 2 has certainly sparked a great conversation about how delicate and beautiful our planet is, as well as showing us how fragile the ocean ecosystem - on which life depends - is.
Today, the BBC has launched #OurBluePlanet - aiming to get 1bn people talking about oceans and how to protect them. This blog post is a contribution to #OurBluePlanet, and it's about how you - as an environment or sustainability professional, if that's what you are - can surf this wave of change.
In Change Management for Sustainable Development - out soon from IEMA - I write about some different approaches to making change in organisations. One approach is to 'surf a wave of change'. Notice what else is attracting attention and getting things moving. Use it to advance the sustainability conversation. Get traction for your green action by harnessing the energy that's already on the move. The public's concern and new appreciation of the blue planet is just such a moment.
At the very least, you can let colleagues know how your existing environment and sustainability initiatives help protect oceans and allow them to recover. Whether it's reducing carbon emissions, cutting effluent, moving towards a circular economy or sustainable fishing (and I'm sure you can think of other connections), so much of what you already do is connected to #OurBluePlanet.
If you are working on the Sustainable Development Goals (Global Goals), then you will know that SDG 14 focuses on Life below Water.
While colleagues are interested and motivated, help your organisation respond by showing them the changes they make - strategically and operationally - to improve their ocean impact further. You are the one with the expertise, so use it to identify genuinely impactful initiatives.
