Archive for August, 2009

Most often, corporate action around sustainability issues is looked at as if the organisation is a single discrete entity, making decisions by itself. While this is convenient for discerning general patterns and for traditional management theory, itʼs not the way it appears to me in my day-to-day work with change agents.

For example, Tom Lyon and John Maxwell talk about the usefulness or otherwise of companies including environmental activities under their CSR umbrella. Their post, understandably given their interest in the level of overall society rather than the micro of what happens inside organisations, concentrates on whether voluntary activity by companies might work against a potentially more effective approach of government regulation.  That’s an interesting debate and one which I’ve seen first hand when I was the expert rapporteur for the European Commission’s Round Table on CSR.

But I’m interested in the lived experience of individual actors.

So, what if we look at this from the point of the view of the individual change agent?

If I’m in a company, and I’d like to get it to begin shifting towards sustainability, then I’ll look around to see where the opportunities might be.

If there’s already an active CSR programme of some kind, then I might see this as a useful initiative to piggyback on or link in with.  Perhaps I can build in operational environmental improvements to a CSR programme which currently is little more than philanthropy.  Or perhaps the CSR team would appreciate support in making their community activities more related to organisational strategy.

Getting involved in existing activities gives me the legitimacy to be part of the conversation about how they can be made more strategic, more mainstream and more ambitious.

Being part of the conversation is critical if we’re to add tinder to the sparks of positive intent which will be present where people are doing CSR.

Some years ago, the stalwart John Brady – who I first met at a training workshop with The Natural Step – invited me to write a column for ‘the environmentalist’, the magazine of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA).

The column has the wonderfully open and yet curiously specific title of ‘engaging people’, and it has enabled me to pursue one of my passions: bringing insights from the fields of organisational change, learning, stakeholder engagement, communications and psychology to the technical specialists who are working on environmental improvement.

Update, March 2011

‘The environmentalist’ has a new website, where you can access all the articles online (although not the entire archive).  Most of my articles are also somewhere in this blog (tagged “the environmentalist”).

I have to put this somewhere on my site, and this seemed the best place!

Penny Walker is the trading name of Verlander Walker Ltd.  (Strange but true.  Of course, Penny Walker is also actually my real name.)

Verlander Walker is registered in England (company number 0463 6657) and is registered for VAT (VAT registration number 853 7496 84).  The registered office is at 27 Mortimer  Street, London W1T 3BL.  Verlander Walker Ltd is insured for public liability and professional indemnity, and holds a licence from the PPL to use recorded music in workshops.

Because I think this job of bringing about a sustainable society is too important to keep secret, much of the material on this site is published under a creative commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives” licence, which means you are welcome to use it as long as you don’t sell it on, don’t fiddle around with it, and tell people that I wrote it and that they can find it on this site.  Of course, you are welcome to ask me whether you can use it ways not covered by this licence, and I’ll be happy to think about it.

Some of the material was published elsewhere first, in which case even though I wrote it, the copyright may be shared with or held by someone else.  So you may need to abide by the stronger restrictions that they may have in place.