Does it sometimes feel as if your colleagues treat their sustainability actions as a favour to you?
I'm working with a couple of in-house sustainability teams at the moment, whose situations have strong similarities, despite one being a global brand and the other a public sector agency. The teams have hats which are familiar to most in-house sustainability specialists:
Thank you so much to everyone who joined us at one of the She is Sustainable spring gatherings in March!
It was wonderful to be part of your conversations about guilt and joy, finding the right boundaries to protect our own energy for what we care about, and whether we should be 'nice' to people who still don't get it, or who are spilling over with new-found enthusiasm.
There are brilliant, committed sustainability professionals working hard inside or with some of the most insidious and damaging businesses. Can we turn them into low-carbon, equitable and just institutions working for noble purposes? Or is the best we can do to make them a little less awful? Before we begin working with a business that is in the 'bad' zone, how can we know?
Earlier this summer saw the launch of London-based Lawyers for NetZero, a peer network for in-house counsel. But which other unlikely professions are changing from the inside out?
The gap between what we say we want, and the way we behave, is such rich territory. We get in our own way – we make excuses for our perceived failures, blame others, or assume too much responsibility. Our internal stories are one of the ways we do this. The stories we tell ourselves about the climate emergency often come back to three strong themes.
More priority given to care and caring? Collective action for individual good? Cities designed to enable us to be good neighbours? Or inequalities made worse by stark divisions between the people who can work from home and those who can't? She is Still (virtually) Sustainable brought together a brilliant panel to explore what the future of sustainability looks like, from our vantage point within a pandemic and a lockdown.
When you think about the changes you want to bring about, to make your organisation or sector more sustainable, what do you see changing? Do you have blind spots about where change might happen, and how deep or how obvious it will be?
Edgar Schein’s Three Levels of Culture model is a great way of understanding what might change, as an organisation or other entity changes. It’s useful to think very widely about the kinds of things that might change – or need to change – to get us on track for sustainable development.
Croner-i’s “Environment” magazine asked me to share key insights from Change Management for Sustainable Development. That article is out now, in the spring edition (no. 74).
You can download it here.
Tldr:
Understand where your organisation is now…
Sustainability initiatives! Low-carbon innovation; gender equality; getting rid of single-use plastics; well-being.... In-house sustainability change makers and the consultants who help them are forever devising and launching initiatives and campaigns to get colleagues to do things differently. Sometimes colleagues take them up whole-heartedly and they develop a life of their own. Sometimes you get feeling people are sighing and rolling their eyes, waiting for it to fade away. What makes the difference?
If you want sustainability to move from being a nice-to-have, to being a must-have, at some point you will need to show that there’s a business case for it: that your organisation will meet its core mission better, faster, cheaper by paying good attention to sustainability than by ignoring it.
What does the business case look like in your organisation?
If the IPCC’s Special Report on climate change made you want to do something – anything – to calm the climate, swiftly followed by a sinking feeling that you just don’t know what is both doable and meaningful, and you’d rather not think about it…. You can do something meaningful! Here’s a great way to find your contribution.
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?
