Archive for September, 2009

Well as promised, here are my thoughts having attended the morning of the IEMA Conference 09.

Speeches

- I’d gladly hear Jonathan Porritt again.  He talked about the need to get off the hedonic treadmill, and the challenge of getting marketeers to sell austerity.  His slides are here.  I’m intrigued that he found Dr Steven Chu’s speech to the Nobel Laureate’s symposium inspiring – because JP says the speech was about energy efficiency.  And in the words of Theodore Roszack,

…prudence is such a lacklustre virtue.

I couldn’t find a way to read, hear or watch Secretary Chu’s speech (please let me know if you know of one) but the symposium site is here.  The other insight which caused me to stop short is that, apparently, family planning is the single best intervention in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, from a cost benefit point of view.

I didn’t really understand what Lord Jenkin was trying to tell us.  Insufficiently relevant, at least to this member of the audience.  Sorry.

Peter Jones is always interesting, although his acrobatic mind can leave me behind sometimes.

Skills for Change

The workshop I ran was an hour’s worth on skills for change.  I chose to focus on inter-personal influencing, through mirroring body language, asking facilitative questions, and sharing the six sources of influence that I learnt about through the ‘all washed up’ video which I’ve blogged about here.

The handouts from the session are here.

It was a lot of fun – it’s amazing how quickly you can find three things that you have in common with a total stranger – and I hope stretched some people to think beyond ‘awareness raising’ as a way of influencing others.

I hope that it also helped people to be braver about networking later in the day, because making connections and building trust within a group such as this one, composed of IEMA members and fellow-travellers, will – in the long run – have far more impact than speechifying.

I love World Cafe as a ‘technique’ to use in meetings.  And I was privileged to go to one where Peter Senge was one of the facilitators.

This article – a longer version of one I wrote for the environmentalist – explains more about the technique, and the results that emerged from this meeting of a mixture of climate change professionals and activists.

It won’t have escaped your notice that not everyone in the UK loves wind turbines.  So if you’re planning to add to our renewable energy capacity, you might want to think about how to involve your neighbours early on.

In 2005 my article (pdf) in the environmentalist described some interesting initiatives specifically designed to help those promoting or planning wind energy developments, to engage their stakeholders.

…the North Wind and the Sun?

In Aesop’s fable, these two characters argue over who is the strongest, and decide to settle the matter by seeing who can get a traveller’s cloak off his back.

For those of you unfamiliar with Greek tales, the denouement can be found here.  And while you read it, you might reflect on our behaviour change strategies – and which are most effective.

Too often, I meet with people who see stakeholder engagement as a more sophisticated way of selling their messages to potential critics.

That’s not the game I’m in!

Don’t bother asking people what they think if you’re not willing to change your plans as a result.

This article explains why you need to act in good faith when you’re listening to your stakeholders.

Update: November 2010

I’ve been using a new categorisation recently with good effect, courtesy of Lindsey Colbourne and Sciencewise:

• transmit – “straight comms” – one way, putting out a message about something which has already been decided or already happened.
• collaborate – work together to co-create an understanding of the situation, problem, possible solutions, implementation plans and so on.
• receive – “extractive research” of the kind perfected by social researchers, market researchers etc.

There is absolutely a role for all three, and many processes or even single events will include ways of doing all three.

But if you want buy-in, and want those implementing the outcomes to want to do so, collaboration is the way.  And more fun, IMHO.

Facilitator and blogger Myriam Laberge has explored this a bit too.

When we write a blog post, draft a leaflet, design a poster or click ‘publish’, it’s important to think about who we’re trying to reach, and what will get through to them.  This isn’t just about the mechanisms, it’s also about the tone of voice, the words we choose and the messages we decide to present.

Sometimes we get it right, by chance or intuition.  Sometimes – especially when we’re trying to reach out beyond people like us – we fall flat on our faces.

Here’s some ways that you can segment your audiences, to make sure your talking gets heard.  The article was first published in the environmentalist.

At an action research seminar organised by Bath University, Dr Gill Coleman shared a work-in-progress: a learning history of the iconic eco-factory built by MAS Intimates in Sri Lanka.

By coincidence (if you believe in it), someone from MAS had been a student on the Post-Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Business (on which I’m a tutor) so I was intrigued to listen to this detailed inside story.

I’ve written more (in the environmentalist) about learning histories as an ‘intervention’, and about the eco-factory here .

Good.  Then I’ll begin.

Stories are a powerful way to get your message heard.  And telling our own stories is a powerful way of helping us to make sense of our experiences.

The story you tell might, when you examine it, be unwittingly framing a situation.  Change the frame and you may see something different.

Making sense of stories and unravelling their role in building better understanding between us are just two of the themes covered in my article on stories for the environmentalist.

Read on.

Update

Here’s a round up of stories about climate change, from the good people over at the Centre for Alternative Technology.

There’s a neat metaphor for understanding the delicate relationship between a change maker (be they in a formal leadership position or leading from the middle) and the rest of the people in an organisation.

Imagine you are connected to the rest of the organisation by a big elastic band.  As you move off in the direction of more ambitious, radical change, the elastic stretches.  The pull on the others may be just enough to get them moving and bring them with you.  You stay a bit ahead, to maintain momentum.

But if you go too far ahead, and they aren’t ready to move so fast or such a distance, then the bounce goes out of the elastic, the tension rises and -ping- it snaps.

As a result, there’s nothing holding you back!

But, unfortunately, there’s no-one moving in your direction any more, either.  And, if you look back now, you’ll see that you’re alone.

This article I wrote for Croner helps you check that you’re involving people properly.  They’re happy for me to include the original here, as long as I say this:

“This report was published as part of Croner’s Environmental Policy and Procedures, a resource designed to guide organisations through setting up an effective environmental management system.  For more information on this and other products published by Croner, go to www.croner.co.uk or telephone 020 8547 3333.”

Which I’m happy to do.

I was delighted to be asked to run a skills-based session for IEMA’s 2009 conference (London, September 22nd), because it’s a chance to help environmental specialists get better at the soft stuff.  I’m going to be sharing three different skills which change agents really need if they want to influence other people, and I’ll blog about how it went when it’s done.

The skills are – developing rapport, asking facilitative questions, and understanding six key sources of influence.

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Later addition:

The handouts from this session are available here, and the ‘how it went’ entry is here.