Case studies
Here’s a selection of specific projects.
Enabling change for sustainable development
I’ve worked with numerous environmental and sustainability specialists, helping them reflect on the progress they’ve made in different change projects.
For one client from the transport sector, a series of team coaching meetings led to them experimenting with new ways of preparing for, and running, important regular stakeholder events.
For another client - this one a multi-sector engineering consultancy - the head office internal environment team were frustrated, and slightly baffled, by their lack of progress in embedding higher environmental standards in operational and client-facing teams. Team coaching meetings with them were focused around the question “what’s happening here?”. This enabled them to see their current blockages in a new way, and come up with different ways of addressing and overcoming them.
A one-day workshop I ran with Forum for the Future for its business network resulted in a large group of internal sustainability champions from a number of different organisations learning about key theories of organisational change. By coaching each other, everyone left at the end of the day with a set of personal actions to try something new - and a number of new people to contact to help them on their journey in the future.
Working together better
Sometimes my clients need help working together better, to meet their sustainable development objectives. This may be because a particular problem has been stopping progress, or simply because they need everyone in the room to be part of the conversation, and working with an external facilitator can enable that to happen.
After the devastated floods of 2007, the Environment Agency and the Health Protection Agency realised that they needed to review the way they worked together. In particular, they wanted to focus on how they shared information before, during and after flood incidents. Following a number of preliminary conversations, I designed and facilitated a one-day workshop which enabled specialists and operational staff from both organisations to get to know each other better, build trust, and agree some short- and long-term actions to better plan for and respond to flooding.
Another memorable workshop was for a client - and their subcontractors - in the transport sector. By working together with both the client and their sub-contractors, we were able to collaboratively explore opportunities for real change which were now available to them, because of the introduction of a new KPI system.
Forum for the Future is a charity that, like all charities, has a board of trustees. They wanted to make their mid-strategy review meeting as effective as possible. So I worked with the Chair and Chief Executive, designing and then facilitating a session that slotted seamlessly into the agenda, enabling a more creative sharing of perspectives than are traditionally used in trustee meetings.
Get together. Get moving. Get it right.
Learn. And apply widely.
Both of these case studies come from my work with the tourism sector - and both combine organisational and sector-wide change.
First Choice (now part of TUI Travel plc) has been exploring sustainable tourism for longer than most mainstream holiday companies. Their in-house CSR team wanted to build the capacity of team leaders from across the organisation, so they could understand how their work impacts on people and on places. They also wanted to build a shared vision of how they could reduce their environmental impact, while improving their social impact.
Working closely with First Choice, and the specialist charity the Travel Foundation, I developed a series of linked training workshops, where people could learn and be enthused, as well as collaboratively agree on what they could do differently in their own work. The training plan, and accompanying materials, were then made more generic, so they could be used by any other company in the tourism sector. You can find out more about this example here.
ABTA is a membership organisation for UK-based travel and tour operators. As well as playing a role in developing sector-wide responses to environmental and social pressures, ABTA is an SME with its own sustainability impacts. Those impacts are the ones you’d typically expect for an office-based organisation: electricity and fuel use, paper and other consumables, travel and so on.
To play a convincing leadership role, ABTA needed to consider its own direct impacts. It was also important that those people in the organisation whose work influences the sustainability of members should have a chance to think about this and identify their own action plans.
I designed and ran a series of half-day workshops where staff from all parts of the organisation considered their direct impacts and what they could do to improve them. They also learnt about their industry’s impacts - from airline emissions to working conditions - and planned together how to promote more sustainable practices.
Learning together about sustainable development
Individual coaching
Sometimes clients need some one-to-one support, to help them reflect on what they’ve acheived and what they’d still like to do. One-to-one work is often a good solution when people are not yet sure what help they need, or which way to move forward. Or perhaps time is tight or they haven’t won their colleagues round to the need for outside intervention.
Some of the one-to-one work has been with people who want to hone their facilitation skills. I have helped people experiment with approaches, design meetings to deliver particular objectives, and face their fears about facilitating a particular meeting. One experienced facilitator I worked with wanted to understand how to better bring her whole self to her work with groups, to enable her to be more spontaneous and flexible when a planned session didn’t seem to be helping. Another was a staff member in the tiny secretariat of a partnership of high-powered experts. She knew that she needed to assertively structure their forthcoming strategy workshop, but was afraid of not being listened to because of her youth and relatively junior position. We worked together to design the workshop, and then I coached her to help her prepare for situations she feared arising.
I am a volunteer mentor helping members of IEMA. These conversations often begin with the goal of attaining the next rung on the ladder of qualifications, but then progress to helping the mentee take a step back and look at the bigger picture. What is that they would get, from having the next qualification? What kind of career do they want to have? What’s the contribution that they want to make, utilising their environmental knowledge and passion? How can their life outside of work contribute too?
It’s a similar process when exploring the improvements that people want to make in their organisations. Why do you want to put this team through training? What do you want them to be able to do? How will that help? What’s the overall goal or vision? And then we circle back again: so what will you do now, to take a step towards that vision.
For a more comprehensive client list, see this blog entry.
