Archive for “Change agents”

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

The latest issue of the environmentalist includes an article I’ve written, entitled “who can help me make this change?“.  In it, I share an approach I’ve used successfully in training courses and (as my daughter would say) in true life: it helps people to systematically identify key internal and external players who can help them bring about the change they want to see.

If a particular person or group are crucial to making the change happen, then you want them to be supportive of it.  Ask them what they’d like to see happening, and how you can help them.  Find common ground and enlist their support.

If someone is already very supportive, but not really needed, then see what they can do to influence or recruit those who are needed.  Or enlist them to support you.

Remember, the art of engaging people to help create transformational change involves listening and letting go.

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.

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.

This Autumn’s IEMA workshop, Change Management for Sustainable Development, will take place in Leeds in November.  As you’d expect, the contents have evolved over the four years since I first ran 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.  They can also use these exercises with colleagues and in teams, to help get insights from a broad range of perspectives, and to build a coalition of change agents.