Posts tagged “support”

So I’m just topping up on today’s environmental news feed (my feed of choice is The Guardian, a nice little app that even a web dilettante like me can add to their Google home page) and two stories stand out and demand a closer look.

The first states, “Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes“.   The second say, “CO2 is green”, which is less self-explanatory.  In fact, it’s an astonishing TV ad running in the US aimed at scuppering a cap-and-trade bill – thanks to Leo Hickman for picking this up in his blog.

What I notice is that while reading them, I get that creeping feeling up the back of my neck and round to my jaw, and the sinking in my shoulders.  I’m physically cringing.  Not very much.  But it’s there.

And which had the biggest cringe effect?  I can’t be certain, but I’d say that CO2 denialists make me more unhappy than the Met Office’s truly dire research.

So I wonder: what can I learn from this?

That I’m more comfortable with things which reinforce my existing world view, however awful?  Perhaps.

That we need to pull together now and use all our considerable intelligence and organising power to avert the worst and prepare a soft landing, and that I’d rather the US pro-CO2 lobby would ‘get with the programme’.

I’m happier owning up to that as a reason!

The other thing I notice is that these cringe-related feelings are not empowering and motivating.  What I plan to do now is

• forget I read either story,
• remind myself of some of my reasons to be cheerful,
• review my to-do list, and
• plunge into productive work.

Does that make me a denialist too?

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.

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.

This is a slide show that I gave to the EABIS Colloquium in 2008.  It presents the results of a survey I conducted of organisational change agents, and asks how we can better support ourselves, and each other, at a time when we’re getting better informed (and many of us more anxious) about the sustainability crisis.

There’s also a paper and a  journal article (originally published in Greener Management International) that accompany the slide show.