I was pointing people towards the six sources of influence in some behaviour change training recently, and went back to some original sources to remind myself about the distinctions between the six sources.

To recap, the six sources are arranged into a two-by-three table, with ‘motivation’ and ‘ability’ divided into personal, social and structural.  In this explanation on the VitalSmarts blog the two ‘social’ sources of influence have been merged.  This bothered me – is there really so little distinction between social motivation (peer pressure) and social ability?

It seems to me that the distinction is brought most sharply into focus when critical mass is needed to make a behaviour viable.  Want to buy more locally-produced food?  A farmers’ market or a local veggie box scheme needs a critical mass of producers and customers to be viable.  Setting up a lift share scheme?  You’re going to need more than two members.  Freecycling?  Hackney Freecycle has over 17,000 members (yes, really) generating about 1,500 messages about free stuff for giving and taking a month.

Now this kind of critical mass isn’t going to be important for all the behaviours you want to change, which is probably why the distinctions isn’t so clear in some of the descriptions.  But where it is, then special attention needs to be given to recruiting the mass.

• How will you make it as widely-known as possible?
• How will you make it simple for people to let you know they’re up for it?
• How will you make it easy to store information about a pool of people and then ‘activate’ them you have enough mass to start things?
• And how will you use their good ideas and information to shape the system, so that it works for enough of them?

There’s a virtuous circle which can come into play here.  This was brought home to me by a stakeholder engagement planning meeting which I ran last week with a community organisation which has been awarded substantial funding through the Low Carbon Communities Challenge.  We did a quick brainstorm of all the non-carbon related ‘social capital’ in their village – the formal and informal organisations which bring people together and build a sense of community.  The population is about 2,000 and the group came up with over thirty formal groups, clubs or regular events (one for every 67 people!) and a host of informal groupings.  Active community organisations build community channels and hubs for conversation.  Members will have more connection with each other, and more trust, than people who are merely residents of the same place.  So a critical mass of ‘warm’ people is much easier to find.

I was bowled over by how many active societies there are, and we all felt very positive about the potential for drawing on this wonderful resource for the low-carbon activities the group has planned.

Actions we take which help build community – in our neighbourhoods or workplaces – all add to the web of interconnections which form fertile soil for future behaviour change.

Strands of work on stakeholder engagement and behaviour change have been woven together in a couple of different pieces of work I’ve been doing with public sector clients recently.  I’ve ended up developing some new frameworks and adapting some existing ones to help people clarify their aims and plan their campaigns.

If you want to influence someone to change their behaviour, there are models and approaches which can help.  For example, the six sources of influence help you identify the right messages and pay attention to the surrounding context which supports and enables – or discourages and gets in the way of – the desired behaviour.

When you are working for a public body (the NHS, a Government department) and you are trying to influence the behaviour of people who you have at best a distant relationship with (mothers, or people who buys cars) then you will go through a multi-stage process:

1. Should we be trying to encourage this behaviour change, which we see as desirable?
2. If yes, what role(s) should we be playing (legislator, educator, convenor, funder etc)?
3. If yes, what are the most effective ways of influencing the behaviour?

Should we encourage this behaviour change?

Given current discussions about social engineering, this question is important.  It might seem entirely obvious and uncontroversial to us that wanting to promote energy efficiency that more efficient light bulbs should be promoted.  So obvious that we don’t stop to consider possible unintended consequences or misunderstandings.

So an important early stage is to engage stakeholders in helping to inform the decision about whether to encourage a particular behaviour change at all.   For this, classic stakeholder identification and mapping techniques (e.g. see figure 1 in this paper from WWF) will help ensure that you hear from more than the usual suspects.

Stakeholders can share perspectives about the policy goals, identify which behaviours might help to achieve them, and whether action to encourage those behaviours is a good idea.

What role should we be playing?

Some public bodies draft new legislation and regulations, others deliver services.  Some enforce regulations and others provide advice and public education.  Some bring other organisations together, convening conversations and partnerships.  Others commission and fund research.  There are lots of roles that public sector organisations could play in a given situation.  Which role or roles make the most sense, in meeting the policy aim in question?

Listening to the views of stakeholders in relation to that question is enormously helpful.  And those stakeholders may be professionals who work in that field of expertise – but removed from the coal face – or they may be practitioners on the ground whose direct experience can bring a dose of reality to the conversations.

A great example of this is the Low Carbon Communities Challenge, launched on Monday 8^th February.  It will (amongst other things) draw on the experiences and insights of 22 communities which are being funded to install energy efficiency kit and renewable energy equipment en masse in their areas.  They’ll also be encouraging people to adopt low-carbon behaviours.  Each community will be doing something different, guided by its particular circumstances and enthusiasms.  Excitingly, each community will also be asked to identify the barriers to and enablers of progress, in particular what government could do differently to make this kind of low-carbon push as successful as possible across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I’m delighted to be a facilitator on this project.

What are the best ways of influencing this behaviour?

A cool analysis of the system of players and pressures which lead to the current patterns of behaviour is a good starting point, and involving a team (including some stakeholders) will help ensure that the picture built up is rich and complete.

In a workshop a few weeks ago, we used the classic ‘pestle’ headings to brainstorm the pressures and players which influence a particular behaviour which my client is interested in changing.  Let’s say that the behaviour is keeping one’s car well-maintained, so that it runs as fuel-efficiently as possible.  Specific behaviours include keeping the tyre pressure optimum, and removing the roof box when it’s not needed.

In the workshop, people identified players and pressures and wrote them on post-its, sticking them up under the headings of Political, Economic, Social, Technical, Legislative, Environmental and Other.  The headings and team-work both help to ensure that no aspect of the system is forgotten.

Once that was done, we stood back and looked at the results, and pictures were taken on a camera phone.  Then I invited people to bring the post-its to a big blank sheet of paper, and to begin mapping the relationships between the players and pressures, starting with “the most interesting” element of the system.  [The idea of asking for ‘the most interesting’ came from a book about coaching which I’ve been reading.]

One post-it was brought to the empty map, and was soon followed by others.  Lines of connection were drawn, and amid the chaos some patterns emerged.  Most importantly, the team realised that these behaviours were more like DIY and home maintenance than like ‘eco’ behaviours, so when targeting different audiences they should seek our market research which segments people according to things which are relevant to that kind of behaviour, rather than segmentations which have been developed with an environmental purpose in mind.

Mapping stakeholders for behaviour change

This brought us smoothly to looking at which stakeholders to engage as a priority, to add muscle to the campaign to  influence people to adopt (or reinforce) the desired behaviours.

Many of these stakeholders were ‘players’ identified in the earlier exercise.  Some were organisations and people who the team thought of as the system was being mapped.

As a variation on classic impact /influence matrix, and building on the ‘who can help me’ matrix which I use with organisational SD change champions, is this diagram.

Brainstormed onto post-its, stakeholders are then mapped according to the team’s view about their influence and attitude.

You then overlay the coloured ‘zones’ onto the matrix, and these are linked to typologies of engagement like the ladder of engagement.

The people and organisations which are the highest priority to engage with, are those who are highly influential and have the strongest opinions (for and against) the desired behaviour change.  In-depth engagement which involves them directly in designing and implementing the behaviour campaign will be important.

Those in the ‘enhanced’ zones need to be involved and their opinions and information sought.

Those in the ‘standard’ zone can be engaged with a lighter touch – perhaps limited to informing them about the campaign and the desired behaviour.

The workshops helped these clients to identify new stakeholders, reprioritise them, and consider more strategically who to engage and to what purpose.

Frequently, my work involves large group workshops and teams of willing volunteers acting as support facilitators.  They may be drawn from the client team or from the wider consultant team.  They are often technical specialists or traditional communications specialists, and sometimes – but not always – they have facilitation experience.

In a recent workshop, I was faced with quite a challenge:

• Up to 50 participants who we’d invited to help with the larger project;
• A complex set of questions which the team wanted them to address;
• A desire from the project team to start with a blank sheet of paper, rather than building on existing thinking, which is possibly flawed or at least too narrow.
• A desire for people to be challenged by the diversity of perspectives in the group – which I responded to by building in a carousel process;
• Plus the need to spend some time establishing the group formally and informally, as it is intended to have a life of three more meetings over the next year;
• A facilitation team which included technical specialists with unknown facilitation experience.

Now I’m a slightly risk-averse person who manages my anxiety by making lists.  And (as anyone who has worked with me will tell you) my ‘detailed meeting plans’ can run to 20+ pages.

So my approach was to think through the break-out group processes in a lot of detail, and to provide as much pre-prepared support materials as I could for my trusty support facilitators.  As well as the overall meeting plan, they got a very detailed briefing document, a briefing meeting and a stack of pre-written flip chart sheets with task instructions and blank templates to be filled in.  We also had worksheets to be filled in during conversations around tables.

This reduced my anxiety.

I’m not sure what it did to their blood pressure when they received the briefing documents!

So, I felt 100% prepared for the things I could control in advance.

Once you’ve asked the question, it belongs to the group

With such detailed preparation and planning, it can be tempting to think that the design job is over once the workshop begins.

Of course, that’s not the case.  In a brief conversation with one of facilitators during a switch-over between sessions, we agreed that “people interpret questions in such different ways” and “once you’ve asked the question, it belongs to the group.”

Responding to the emergent conversation

During this workshop, we discovered that the timings I’d anticipated for the carousel tasks were just too short.  A scheduled 30 minute morning break meant that the first carousel session could be extended by up to 10 minutes, without throwing the rest of the programme.  But the second and third sessions required co-ordinated timing among the groups.

As the second session was running, I visited each group briefly to see how they were getting on.  Rich conversations, but taking much longer than I planned for!

Initially I responded by slipping each facilitator a note giving them an extra five minutes.  But it was clear that some more radical process redesign was needed.  Could I really do this to my inexperienced facilitators – ask them to throw away the carefully planned and prepped process and substitute something else, on the fly?

Having considered this for a few minutes (it really helps to have a quiet space and a trusted colleague to talk things through with) I decided that not only could I do this, it was absolutely the best option.  So we rapidly wrote out four sets of staccato briefing notes on sticky notes, and four new ‘instructional’ flip chart sheets.  We delivered these substitute materials each to carousel facilitator, and the workshop was back on track.  We had facilitators who knew what was happening, and we had responded effectively (if not very gracefully) to the emerging and unfolding conversations in the carousel groups.

Some practical things which made this possible:

• A quiet space out of the way of the break-out groups
• Facilitators working in pairs in the carousel groups
• Spare flip chart paper, pens and post-its which weren’t being used in the break-out spaces
• A 60 minute scheduled lunch break, which we could steal 10 minutes from without it being too uncomfortable
• An experienced facilitator as well as the lead facilitator not allocated to a break-out group, to notice what was happening in all of the groups, talk about what we could see, make a decision and implement it fast.

And of course, it wouldn’t have been possible without the positive attitude of the facilitation team who didn’t grumble or complain but stepped up to the challenge brilliantly.

In the debrief at the end of the day, it was generally agreed that changing the process at that point was a good call, and no-one raised the change or how it was done under our traditional ‘what went less well’ heading.  So I’m satisfied that, on that occasion at least, my dance between preparation and responsiveness worked well enough.

…at the AMED Sustainable Development Network Cafe Conversation on 26th January.  Details here.

What do we make of Copenhagen?

Here are some contrasting views, first a commentary on what went wrong, from the BBC’s Richard Black with – as Bruce Nixon says -

“some interesting news of tectonic shifts in the international relations between countries which need time to digest.”

Richard’s analysis?

1. Key Governments do not want a global deal.
2. The US political system.
3. Bad timing.
4. The host Government.
5. The weather.
6. 24-hour news culture.
7. EU politics.
8. Campaigners got their strategies wrong.

Next, something to cheers us up.  Forwarded to me by Dave Sharman, this quote comes from the blog of  Roger Harmer.

“For three days, the mayors and leaders of a hundred major cities discussed the challenges of climate change, their ideas, plans, projects and responses and their shared focus on action and delivery.

At no point did anyone question the need for urgent action or question their own individual – and shared – responsibility and there was a quite remarkable lack of competing, showboating or criticism.

There was no carping about the levels of adopted targets or about who was at what stage – even though Copenhagen plans to be carbon zero by 2025 and Los Angeles daren’t mention what their carbon emissions are likely to be 25 years later!…

This looked and felt like a team!”

Who’s coming?

As well as the people who have RSVPd on the AMED site, we are expecting people who:

• cycled part of the way there raising funds for adaptation projects and delivered pledges from a 350 event in his home town;
• helped set up a sustainable tourism and education project in Nicaragua;
• wrote a book on sustainable business and is currently writing another;
• set up a consulting practice around sustainable development, and whose teenaged daughter went to Copenhagen;

Perhaps you’ll be there too?

What’ll we talk about?

The purpose is to share reflections and perspectives on what the outcomes of Copenhagen were, and what they mean for us and our practice as consultants, facilitators, organisational developers and the various other hats we wear.

I’ll blog about what happened.

If you’d like to be part of this conversation, see here for details.

We have three dates in the diary for this one-day workshop, which I’ve been running since 2005.

The day is very interactive, with everyone sharing a specific sustainability challenge which they are working on, and using various frameworks and exercises to explore and understand the challenge better.

During the workshop, people

• Hear about some theory on organisational change and approaches to change, including a scale of strategic engagement, visioning, identifying key players, choosing a change strategy, identifying barriers to change and planning first steps.
• Apply this to their own organisational sustainability challenge.
• Hear from others in a similar situation, discuss common challenges and discovering sources of further information and support.

As you’d expect, the contents have evolved since I ran the first one.  But the approach is still one of making selected bits of change theory as accessible as possible to people, and giving them time to work on their own particular situation during the workshop. And everyone still gets a free copy of the workbook, so they can carry on making their own notes and using plenty more exercises and frameworks at their own pace.

If you’d like to come along, you can book through IEMA’s website.

London: 28th April 2010

Leeds: 20th July 2010

Newcastle upon Tyne: 12th October 2010

I’ve been mulling over the meaning of  ‘resolution’ as the New Year crept up on me.

Plot resolution

Sometimes, a resolution can be the end of something – like when Poirot gathers everyone together to explain who the murderer is.  The threads are drawn together, the loose ends are tied up.  The plot is resolved and that chapter of the characters’ lives closed.

Perhaps, as Auld Lang Syne is sung, some New Year’s resolutions are to do with leaving family feuds behind as people close the old year neatly.

Resolving dilemmas

In the field of stakeholder engagement – particularly the part of the spectrum I’m happiest in, where the aim is co-enquiry and co-creation, and the approach is closer to dialogue – resolution is often about understanding dilemmas and choices, and finding the win-win.

I’m not sure how this might apply to New Year Resolutions.  I guess there would need to be a lot of exploration and reflection in the autumn and winter months in order for a resolution of this kind to emerge bang on schedule on 31st December.  This kind of self-imposed yet public deadline can help coordinate the efforts of the various people involved – although it doesn’t seem to have been useful at Copenhagen.

Making your mind up

Related to resolving a dilemma is the idea of coming to a conclusion about a choice or decision.  When you resolve to do something, you are consciously committing to a particular course of action.   When Lady Macbeth urges her wavering husband to “screw your courage to the sticking-place” she’s encouraging him to strengthen his resolve and take an action which is irreversible.   The scene ends with Macbeth reassuring her “I am settled”.

This kind of resolution must surely lead to significant and rapid action – delay might ‘unsettle’ the resolution.

Conference, I move

Many years ago, I had the dubious honour of being part of a team organising the formal annual conference of a UK NGO.  Its particular semi-democratic structure meant that every year we had ‘motions to conference’ which, if passed, became ‘resolutions’.  Some people took the standing orders of the conference very seriously, and were helpful in making sure that we stuck to our rules.  Others found the debating and voting process old-fashioned and restrictive, frustrated by the way it turned interesting choices and genuine puzzles into win/lose combats.

These sorts of resolutions bind an organisation – they settle arguments and commit people to action.  Some organisations are very good at wriggling out of the commitments quietly at a later date.  Perhaps the resolution was worded loosely, and is open to interpretation.  Perhaps the process was flawed allowing the resolution to be set aside.  Perhaps the people charged with actioning the resolution have new information which wasn’t available at the time, and feel justified in ignoring it.

These are excuses – if the people implementing the resolution really agreed with it, they wouldn’t find ways of wriggling out of it.  They’d find ways of pushing it through.

This is beginning to sound a bit more like most people’s experiences of New Year’s resolutions : commitments which aren’t really commitments, where even weak excuses are seized on as explanations and justifications for broken promises.

New Year’s resolutions as explicit commitments to change behaviour

I’m working with two different clients on behaviour change at the moment, so I’m particularly interested in the parallels between New Year’s resolutions and other ways of encouraging or supporting changed behaviour.

There’s an important point to notice here:  New Year’s resolutions are, in theory, voluntary.  They are related to a change in behaviour of the person making the commitment.  For both my clients, the behaviour they want to change is other people’s behaviour (staff, contractors, consumers).  This seems to me to be a crucial difference, and one which I’m keen to explore more with them and in my wider practice.

Having acknowledged that, what are the parallels between New Year’s resolutions and behaviour change programmes?

One striking parallel is the relatively low chances of success combined with a kind of complacent optimism!

I notice over and over how people go into behaviour change work as if they believe that making a commitment and announcing it means that it will happen.  Too often, very little effort is put into preparation, planning and prior engagement. The supporting activities, positive feedback and physical resources are missing.  (See here for a posting about the six sources of influence which help catalyse and reinforce new behaviours.)

Fortunately for us all, the appropriately named Prof. Richard Wiseman, psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, reveals the secrets of keeping your New Year’s resolutions.

Prof. Wiseman’s four top tips are:

1. Break your goal into a series of steps, focusing on creating sub-goals that are concrete, measurable, and time-based.
2. Tell your friends and family about your goals, thus increasing the fear of failure and eliciting support.
3. Regularly remind yourself of the benefits associated with achieving your goals by creating a checklist of how life would be better once you obtain your aim.
4. Expect to revert to your old habits from time to time. Treat any failure as a temporary set-back rather than a reason to give up altogether.

There are six more tips on his blog.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting the two categories of resolution: acheiving a goal (in our case, let’s use the 10:10 campaign goal of  ‘cutting carbon emissions by 10% in 2010′) and changing a behaviour (for example, not eating meat on Mondays).  Paul Maisey’s blog on New Year’s resolutions concentrates on setting well-formed, congruent and authentic goals.

One of the comments on the Prof.’s blog astutely observes:

You have to really want the new behaviour, not just the ultimate outcome.

So it’s crucial to find behaviours which you enjoy (or could come to enjoy) which contribute to meeting the goal.

My resolution

So I’m off to do my dull old exercises which will, in time, allow my knee to recover sufficiently that I can get back on my bike and feel the wind in my hair as I travel fast and carbon-neutral to meetings.

1. SMART – do them five times a week.
2. Tell people – well I’m telling you now.
3. Remind myself of the benefits – hang my cycle helmet on the back of the office door.
4. Treat lapses as temporary set-backs not as a ‘broken’ resolution – I resolve to do this.

And the bonus – how can I want to do the exercises for themselves, as well as wanting the ultimate outcome?  Listen to the radio, award myself a star each day.

And I further resolve to share the Prof.’s research with my clients, when we come to develop approaches to behaviour change.

Happy New Year!

Update

25th Jan – and I’m keeping up with the exercises.  The stars I put in my diary each time I do the stretches are proving motivating.  So far I’m slightly ahead of my goal, which was to do the routine five days out of seven.  And the outcome?  I cycled up to the farmers market on Saturday!

I’m finding it hard to listen to the news or read about the Copenhagen meeting, except through the fractured glimpses from other people’s blogs. Reminds me of peeping at Dr Who through my fingers from behind the sofa.  Can’t watch properly.  Can’t look away completely either.

These are the ones I’ve found particularly interesting :

• George Monbiot – taking a very big picture on how we, as a species, divide into types about climate change, and showing very eloquently why this is so hard.

• Living on Sunshine – the title of this blog alone is enough to raise the spirits, and with its provocative strapline “how old will you be in 2050?” (personally, 84, if I get there) reminds us old folk that if we’re not going to lead, we’d better get out of the way and let the youngsters do it.

• Mark Lynas – surprisingly optimistic

• Jonathon Porritt – sounding comfortable (if that’s the word) back amongst the activists and campaigners.

Will someone tell me what happened when it’s over?

I’m keen to use more ‘e’ in meetings.

Teleconferences mean live conversation without the travel.  Add in some kind of live editing of a shared document (like google docs), and everyone can see the notes being written in real time, just like flip charts in a workshop.  Share some video or slides, and everyone is viewing the same input.  Include video calling (e.g. using  skype), and we can see each other as well.

I can see that there’s loads of potential to reduce participants’ carbon footprints (probably) and include people whose other commitments mean that adding travelling time onto meeting time would mean that they couldn’t attend at all.

Toe in the water

So I’m making a concerted effort to experience e-meetings of all kinds as a participant.  I joined a webcast (lecture and panel discussion) a couple of days ago, and I’m attending a webinar on how to design good webinars next week.

I’m also adding in some virtual elements to meetings which I facilitate.   Some tips on good teleconferences, built from that experience, are available here.

Spontaneous blending

Trainers sometimes talk about ‘blended learning’, which includes traditional face to face workshops with virtual elements like a web-based discussion space or a module delivered by email.

In a workshop I ran over the summer, there was a fascinating example of spontaneous blending of methods.  The group is a community stakeholder group, set up to represent local interests during the early phases of developing plans for a flood defence.  During a half day workshop, the group was looking at maps showing alternative sites for the defences.  Timescales for the project are very tight, and this workshop was taking place during a very short window of opportunity for people to feed comments back to the organisation which is developing the plans.  So the pressure was on the participants to ensure that they were accurately reflecting the views of the wider constituencies that they were there to represent.

One innovative participant whipped out a camera phone and took pictures of the maps.  Within seconds they could be sent to people who weren’t at the meeting, and their comments relayed back.  I don’t know whether this meant that their views made it ‘into the room’ during the meeting, or whether it simply gave them a head start in discussing the plans after the meeting.  In any case, it set me thinking about how much wider groups of people could be involved, if we can come up with ways of using technologies like camera phones and texting, which are ubiquitous.

What if this person had stuck to the ground rule about keeping mobile phones off during the meeting?

I’m enjoying dabbling my toes in this pool.  I’m readying myself to dive in!

If you’re a consultant (internal or external), are any of your clients going to Copenhagen?

What are you doing to prepare them to, in the words of Dave Hampton, “succeed, against the odds, and pull off a real deal”.  Dave suggests, in his letter to the Independent, that if this comes about, “history will remember them for eternity, for the bold leadership they found, out of the blue, when planet Earth needed it most.”

Those of use who are coaches, mentors, facilitators or similar help our clients to think better, listen better, find out what they really want and co-create their future better.  Those of us who are advocates, communicators and campaigners bring inspiration, motivation and purpose.  What are our best, most excellent ways of helping clients find bold leadership, out of the blue, when they need it most?

If you’re interested in hearing from others and sharing your own perspectives on this, why not pop along to this informal meet-up of the AMED Sustainable Development Network, which will focus on the Copenhagen Climate Summit.

If you are planning to come, please RSVP on the site, so we have some idea of numbers.

And why not post your thoughts here, on the discussion thread on AMED’s website.

I’ve been running a training course today, helping sustainable development specialists get some insights from the world of organisational change.  As part of this, each person identified a sustainability challenge that’s real for them and their organisation right now.

One of the participants was grappling with how to get people from across the organisation to look at the sustainability impacts of the services they provide.   This will entail having a much better understanding of what the social aspects of sustainable development are, and how you might measure or assess your performance on these aspects.

We came back to this question about the social aspects of sustainable development when looking at Dexter Dunphy’s phases of organisational strategic engagement with sustainability.  There’s a pdf of a presentation summarising this here. One of the phases in this typology is ‘efficiency’.

If your focus is on the environment, it’s clear that this is about eco-efficiency or resource-efficiency.  If your focus is the economic aspects of sustainability, then financial and labour efficiency (productivity) are easy concepts to grasp.  But what does this mean when you are thinking about the social aspects?

With wonderful serendipity, I had just been reading Jonathon Porritt’s valedictory report, published yesterday.  Jonathon recently stepped down as Chair of the UK Government’s Sustainable Development Commission, and in this report he examines what he calls the mystery of why sustainable development hasn’t been better embedded in the various strands of government in the UK.  He blogs about it here and there’s also a link to download the report.

As it happens, he provides a very useful summary of what social sustainability is and what efficiency means in that context.  He does it so well, that I’ll quote at some length here.

The two overarching ends [of sustainable development, as articulated in the UK Government’s 2005 strategy] (“Living Within Environmental Limits”, and “Achieving a Strong, Healthy and Just Society”) require very different approaches. The test of “living within environmental limits” is a strictly empirical test: define the limit (as in concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, for instance, or threshold limits for pollutants in the air or water), measure levels of compliance against these agreed limits, and then adapt policies accordingly.  By contrast, “achieving a strong, healthy and just society” is a predominantly normative aspiration rather than an empirical test, with very different metrics and very different value judgements as to the weight that should be attached to different aspects of “strong, healthy and just”.

At the heart of the concept of sustainable development lies the concept of “dual equities”: inter-generational equity (living today in such a way that we aren’t ruining prospects for people tomorrow), and intra-generational equity (living today in such a way that we reduce – or even eliminate – current unsupportable inequalities in wealth, opportunity and broader entitlements).

In that respect, sustainable economic development means “fair shares for all”, ensuring that people’s basic needs are properly met across the world, while securing constant improvements in the quality of people’s lives through efficient, inclusive economies. “Efficient” in that context simply means generating as much economic value as possible from the lowest possible throughput of raw materials and energy.

…Once basic needs are met, the goal is to achieve the highest quality of life for individuals and communities, within the Earth’s carrying capacity, through transparent, properly regulated markets which promote both social equity and personal prosperity.”

This idea of efficiency in the use of the Earth’s carrying capacity to give as much social well-being as possible must mean, in some situations, redistributing carrying capacity from those who have an unfairly large share of it, in order that those whose needs are not being met can better meet their own needs.  This is the case because it is not possible to ‘increase the size of the pie’ – we only have one planet.

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) produces the Happy Planet Index which uses official statistics to reveal, as they put it,  “the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered” in 143 countries covering 99% of the world’s population.  (I know you want to know – the UK score is 43.3, the USA is 30.7, and Costa Rica is 76.1.)

I wonder how this approach could be used to measure performance in organisations?