In August, Bertha Benz, without telling him, took her husband's car and drove her teenage sons the 65 miles to her mother's house in Pforzheim, Germany. No, not a story of marital strife, but of pioneering action by a woman - for the year was 1888 and this was the first ever long-distance drive in a car with an internal combustion engine. But movement is on the move. What kind of novel ways of getting around would Bertha and her peers use today?
The gap between what we say we want, and the way we behave, is such rich territory. We get in our own way – we make excuses for our perceived failures, blame others, or assume too much responsibility. Our internal stories are one of the ways we do this. The stories we tell ourselves about the climate emergency often come back to three strong themes.
The loo with an integrated handbasin which drains into the cistern; the fifty-page guide to recycling and rubbish disposal; the tiny boxes you can put your leftover food into at a café; the handbag size hand towel you take with you to use in public loos… I saw a lot of things in Japan which we could usefully adopt in the UK.
Businesses - acting alone or, better still, collaborating - can do so much to help society meet the Sustainable Development Goals (or Global Goals).
Whether it’s reducing emissions from travel and energy use, making sure women and minority groups are able to progress, or cutting unnecessary plastic, there is so much to put right. And there are organisations, tools and initiatives to help you.
Find out more in the series of articles I wrote for The Environmentalist. A complete set is available in pdf here.
If the IPCC’s Special Report on climate change made you want to do something – anything – to calm the climate, swiftly followed by a sinking feeling that you just don’t know what is both doable and meaningful, and you’d rather not think about it…. You can do something meaningful! Here’s a great way to find your contribution.
The two worlds I straddle - sustainability and process - interweave in all sorts of ways. And one of those ways involves challenging myself, and other facilitators, about the sustainability of our own practice. And although I've called this blog post 'greening' our practice, of course there are the social and ethical aspects of sustainability as well as the environmental ones to consider.
For Diageo, the drinks company, agricultural suppliers typically represent more than 90% of its water footprint, so of course it's vital that the company’s water strategy looks beyond its own four walls to consider sustainable water management and risks in the supply chain. By contrast, what matters most for Unilever in tackling its global water footprint is reducing consumers’ water use when they are doing laundry, showering and washing their hair, particularly in countries where water is scarce.
Here are some fascinating examples of staff behaviour change initatives, particularly about travel, which have been carefully thought through, using creative responses to the elements which might enable and discourage the new desired behaviours. I've analysed them using the six sources of influence framework which still feels very intuitive and helpful to me, a few years after I first came across it. (There's a very useful summary here.) This article was published in the environmentalist on paper and on line, last month. The article didn't have room for the table below, so when you've read it, come back and see this more systematic matching of actions to sources of influence in the case of Akzo-Nobel's sales team car travel.
|
Motivation |
Ability |
|
| Personal |
Using the sales forces’ existing strong competitive instincts and love of gadgets. Not using eco-awareness as a motivator. |
Provide targeted training. |
| Social |
Popular simulator game, competing for highest mpg.
|
Not used for this behaviour change. |
| Structural |
One for the future – considering how to incorporate a fuel-efficiency aspect into the reward scheme. |
Fuel-efficient choices and real-time mpg displays in cars. |
The article was written some weeks ago, before the encounter with a disgruntled staff member which I blogged about here. (Neither of the organisations in the article is the one in that blog.)
Pondering on the approaches take by Lloyds and Akzo-Nobel would have avoided this response, I'm thinking that this is probably less about the specific initiative, and more about the sense of alienation that staff have from the organisation they work for. If you're grumpy generally about your workplace, then an initiative like the low-carbon diet will exacerbate and provide a focus for that anger.
Trewin Restorick at eco-behaviour NGO Global Action Plan has also blogged recently about staff travel. A good period of internal engagement prior to setting up systems and initatives - to make sure that incentives and polices are aligned rather than contradicting each other - seems needed, given some of the insights he describes. He makes an interesting point about greenwash - in this case, dressing up a travel reduction initative as an environmental benefit when it is 'really' a cost-saving measure. This is in contrast with Paul Turner's experience, described in my article, of seeing the dual-benefit as a win-win which enables Lloyds' to appeal to different groups of staff.
"Who do they think they are preaching to?"
A visit to a client's canteen earlier this week brought me face-to-face with one extremely disgruntled staff member. In the queue, my contact pointed out the points-based reward system staff can now choose to join, which incentivises choosing a meat-free or meat-and-dairy-free meal. Like a coffee-shop loyalty card, you accumulate points and get mystery prizes. The explicit motivation is calorie-reduction and carbon-reduction: a vegan meal has, it is explained, a lower carbon footprint and is better for you.
I asked whether there had been any controversy about the scheme, knowing that promoting a lower-impact or reduced-meat diet is considered very hard in this Defra research. Behind us, a member of staff neither of us knew spat out
"Well you're not allowed to disagree around here!"
She continued:
"Who do they think they're preaching to? What makes them think they're always right? What do they think they're doing interfering with our private lives?"
She was clearly very angry about it.
The organisation in question is one which has a public and explicit commitment to a low-carbon future, and it could be expected that a high proportion of staff are personally committed to reducing their environmental impact. So this reaction was surprising.
I think it's worth unpacking the points, to see if there's something to be learnt about engaging staff in this kind of impact-reduction activity:
Perhaps it doesn't matter that this one person feels this way. After all, staff take-up of the initiative seems pretty high, and the person I was meeting was an enthusiastic user of the points scheme.
Or this one person could be giving voice to concerns and needs which are shared more widely. If it's really the case that people find it very hard to tell colleagues that they disagree, then it will be hard to know.
Peggy Holman maintains that we serve our goals best when we engage with those who disagree and dissent. Seek out difference, listen harder, enquire into the needs and concerns which are being offered as a gift into the conversation, understand the common aims and see where a 'yes, and' response might lead.
Richard Seel similarly champions diversity as a critical condition for emergence of new ways of doing things.
What else might have been going on here? What could the scheme designers have done to avoid this? And what can they do now, to respond?
Let me know what you think...
In November '09 I blogged that my toes were in the water, trying out how to integrate e-communications into workshops. Over a year later and I'm happy paddling up to my ankles: using cut-down post-its, a document camera and telepresence. I was delighted to work with a client which had installed video-conferencing in many locations in the UK and US. We were able to run a half-day workshop for a small team who were spread over three different locations.
This is a stock picture from Teliris on wikimedia commons, but it gives an idea of what the room looked like. In addition to the large screens, the people in the 'main' room had screens in the desk where images from slide shows or the document camera were visible.
Here are some very practical lessons and tips from that experience, firstly about things you can do before the meeting begins:
Having worked out how the document camera worked, and tested different sizes of post-it and handwriting, I was able to use small square post-its to record individual contributions and move them around until we had collaboratively created a timeline of the organisation's journey to this point.
Later in the session, I recorded contributions about people's vision of the future in a mind-map which was also broadcast live to the people in other location, via the document camera. Unfortunately one of the locations lost the feed, so we ended up with some people not being able to see what the rest of the meeting could see: an imbalance which we were unable to correct before the meeting ended.
For my own use, I made a little map of who was sitting where, and used it to keep track of who'd spoken. This enabled me to invite contributions from time to time.
This was a half-day meeting, so I built in a comfort break which everybody really needed. Keeping focussed and engaged in virtual meetings are harder work than face-to-face, I think.
In future, I'd like to work out a practical way of integrating a running record into a meeting like this. A simple word document shared live through google doc or a similar system might work. You would need to check that everyone could access it - firewalls might be a problem. Alternatively, a bespoke webmeeting package with a whiteboard could be used. I'm getting experience of both Huddle and Central Desktop in different client work at the moment.
8.01 Left home just after the pips. 476 and then the Northern Line from Angel. Man with lacrosse stick on the bus makes room for woman with toddler and pram. Everyone trying to be accommodating. 08.40 Cup of tea. Plenty of time.
9.10 We set off from Euston, on a Pendolino. We don’t have seat reservations but since this isn’t the usual train which does this journey, I’m not sure anyone else does either. We will have to change at Crewe. Slightly nervous. New apartment blocks near Euston have solar panels on the roofs, each at a slightly different angle.
09.45 Lots of people get off at Milton Keynes, so we swap seats so we have a table and sockets for our laptops. Now we can work! Misty. We pass sopping allotments and horses dripping slightly in the fields.
09.50 Announcement reassures us that Crewe know we’re coming, and we will be helped to make our connection. Those who need assistance, those with lots of luggage, those with small children and pushchairs – it sounds like she knows us all individually. Reassuring.
10.27 Going through the Shugborough Tunnel, 777 yards according to the sign. Signal down, of course.
Sycamore, willow, birch, oak. Freight train. Convolvulus. Canal boat being manoeuvred through a small arched bridge.
10.31 passing through Stafford station. Vertical axis wind turbines on building by the station are not turning. Design flaw? Or grid problems leading to automatic shut-down? Or just not enough wind?
10.41 Mobile broadband connection on this laptop is SO SLOW. Everything takes much longer to do than I’d like.
10.58 Successfully changed at Crewe onto the new train. Which apparently divides at Chester. We think we’re in the right carriage. Table and sockets all present and correct. Weather slightly brighter. Beginning to think about the ferry – will it be rough? Wish I’d remembered to bring wrist bands.
11.07 More canal boats. They manage to look so much more attractive than caravans. Very small wind turbine whizzing round, powering who-knows-what on one boat.
Getting hillier. Red soil peeps through. Dramatic ruins on rocky hill which juts out of flat landscape.
11.17 Chester. Dapper gent sharing our table gets off here. Cheeringly large number of bikes at the station bike racks. Race course looks very well cared for, protected by the curve of the river. Surprisingly busy looking airport – runway lights look very bright as it’s still a bit overcast.
11.31 Judging by the length of the sign at the station we have just passed through, we must be in Wales. I was hoping for an announcement.
11.33 Tidal stream alongside us – tide’s out, lots of shiny mud with a very thin channel snaking through it. Lots of people in this carriage have bought crisps from the shop and there’s a crackling crunchy noise in front and behind me. Hungry.
11.36 Gleeful lady just popped her crisp packet! Unbelievable. They wouldn’t allow that in the quiet zone.
11.37 I can see the sea! This line is right by the water’s edge, with just a narrow stone wall on the seaward side. Sea level rise, anyone? One for the Climate Change Risk Assessment , I think.
11.41 Three grey herons in meadow – but no water for them to fish in. I wonder what they are doing there. Mountains stretch out ahead and to the left, silver in the haze. Blue sky on the seaward side – perhaps we’ll have a smooth crossing.
11.46 Rhyl. Sun breaks out! People hunching over their screens so they can read despite the light.
11.52 Fortifications line the forested hillside, but this must be a folly – there’s no room for anything behind them!
11.53 Wind farm out to sea, gleaming white in the sunshine, but none turning. Bad news for electricity generation, good news for calm crossing?
12.03 Llandudno Junction. Gateway to Snowdonia National Park. Ah, to be in the hills.
12.07 Or in the river, like a dozen kayakers and four boatloads of canoeists.
12.16 Clouding over a bit.
12.22 Arriving at Bangor. Suddenly much noisier. Jolene being played on a very poor machine – perhaps a phone. Hope they get off.
12.28 Spectacular bridge crossing, and some kind of monument: not quite Nelson’s Column. Apparently we’re now on Anglesey. Lush and green; boggy fields; wind-twisted, low trees; sheep and cattle; glossy crows in low hawthorns.
12.38 RAF training flight zooms past and I wait for the sonic boom which doesn’t arrive.
12.44 Could that be a little egret in that pond? Black bill, otherwise snowy white.
12.45 White water rafters in channel between railway line and road. Annoying music is back.
14.01 On ferry. Luggage had to be checked in, which we hadn’t anticipated. Quick swapping over of essential items before we consign our cases to the conveyor belt. Once through security, we wait for a while on the little bus, regretting checking in so promptly. Cheery man from National Statistics Office of Ireland invites us to take part in travel survey, but fails to lift the mood, which is grey.
Once on board, the veggie dish of day is chick pea curry. Surprisingly good, although the naan bread is best avoided. Very glad, as I didn’t think we’d get decent veg-laden food on this rather convoluted journey. Wi-Fi working (faster than mobile broadband on train), spacious table by the window, weather good. 14.29 Fully at sea, though hills still visible if I crane my neck. Water steely grey, sky pearly grey, water a little choppy but boat still moving smoothly.
14.42 My phone tells me that making and receiving calls will cost me £1.30 a minute. Should have brought continental adapter as electrical socket need round-pin plug.
15.15 WiFi means I can follow Ed Miliband’s first speech as Labour leader on twitter. No mention of environment yet. Hmm.
15.16 There it is! Needs a new politics. I’ll say.
15.48 Google thinks I’m in Norway. Shame that the only Norwegian I know is the finger counting rhyme: “Tommeltott, Slikkepott, Langemann, Gullebrand, og Lille Petter Spillemann”.
Transfer from ferry port to Connolly station is free, quick and easy.
Connolly station is small, tidy and shiny but eating options very limited.
19.14 Our Belfast-bound train crosses a lot of water on a narrow causeway. CCRA again!
20.01 Dundalk. Station architecture familiar from so many English Victorian stations: decoration iron columns and canopies, decorative brickwork with stripes and arches picked out in cream, green and terracotta.
20.14 Glad I brought a book (Peggy Holman’s Engaging Emergence – lovely) as well as my laptop, as I’m now out of juice and there’s no sockets on the train.
20.20 Passing Newry. Strings of orange streetlights netting over a bowl of hillsides.
Walked from Belfast Central station to hotel – about 10 mins – refreshing after the long journey.
In room by 10.00.
Feel fresh and ready for workshop.
During workshop, people who knew about our travel choices swapped their own stories and perspectives: ferry journeys disrupted by bad weather, the iniquity of untaxed air fuel, questions around the relative carbon intensity of a very full flight versus a mostly empty ferry.
18.09 On train waiting to leave for Dublin. Glorious blue skies and sunshine.
18.35 Golden skies and long shadows.
19.09 Sky pinkish and grey, mountains on the skyline. Newry by daylight this time!
19.21 My phone tells me I’m in Ireland.
20.32 About 20 minutes late into Connolly station, but we get a cab straight away and there’s no trouble checking in. Very few foot passengers. Will there be any veggie hot meal at this time of night.
Yes! Chick pea curry again, no mini poppadums this time, but mango chutney. Naan bread still inedible.
23.30 My phone tells me I’m in the Isle of Man.
Stupid O’clock. Walk from ferry terminal to hotel in Holyhead marred by lack of signposting. We can see the hotel, but it takes a couple of goes to cross the main road and actually get to it. We spot a footbridge from the station which we’ll use tomorrow. Hotel cheap and cheerless.
08.15 Meet for the walk back to the station. Marred this time by discovery that entrance to footbridge is firmly locked. Weather good.
09.23 Train to Birmingham, we change at Chester. Lovely morning, with pale sun illuminating semi-wild countryside. Green fields edged with thick hedges and grey stone, with occasional peat bog breaking through.
09.55 Back across the bridge to mainland Wales. Statue looks wistfully out across the short stretch of sea.
10.04 This stretch of track lined with nut trees.
10.14 Penmaenmawr The sea on our left gleams and shimmers, calm and sunlit. To the right, rocky hills and screen slopes. The road and the railway line protect (separate?) the hills from the sea.
10.49 Prestatyn. Warm hubbub of chat on this friendly train, as Sarah types up worksheets from yesterday's meeting and I catch up with emails.
11.32 On new train at Chester, waiting for the off. Table and sockets mean we can work all the way back to London. Hurray.
12.05 Speeding through gentler landscape, though rougher sedges still break through the grass in the sheep fields.
12.21 Passing large power station, not sure which one. Modest clouds of steam emerging from cooling towers.
12.53 Getting hungry, but we’ll be back at Euston in less than an hour. Should I wait to eat proper food?
12.59 Milton Keynes. Signal much worse as we approach London. Very frustrating.
13.22 Shop closed, so food decision is out of my hands.
13.48 Leek and potato soup at Prêt outside the station. Feeling revived.
Verdict: doable, cost relatively low, requires free day for travel on either side of assignment. Preferable to have more than one thing to do to make full use of the time (and carbon) of travelling. We had first draft of workshop record ready pretty much by the time we left the train. Take continental plug adapter for ferry. Investigate staying overnight in Dublin rather than Holyhead on return leg of journey.
Last time I flew for work was in 2007, running a workshop in the Netherlands. I had tried to find a way to go by boat and train, but couldn't make the timings fit in with other commitments. The last time I flew for pleasure was so long ago that I can't remember. I have turned down all work that involves flying since then, but without being up-front about this. I say I'm unavailable or "I'm sure you can find someone locally" . And I try to help them do just that: a great reason to network internationally and to keep in touch with people who I've come across over the years who understand both process and sustainable development, or may know someone who does.
On a coaching course this year, we did a pairs exercise about 'boundaries'. We had to identify a time when we had noticed a boundary and maintained it. We were invited to illustrate this. As I drew the picture I realised that flying was emerging as a boundary for me. It has been a value-in-action and I can choose to make it an espoused value too. In that realisation I decided to make it an explicit aspect of my work.
The illustration I drew at the time shows this through the picture of sealed charter which makes 'not flying' a clear part of how I do business.
Since then, I've included this in the 'walking the talk' statement on this website, and in an updated discussion document which I share with new clients which sets out how I intend we will work together. (This latter also includes a range of other 'draft ground rules' for our consultant-client relationship: things like honesty, collaboration, learning from feedback, acting in good faith and so on.)
I've had a chance to test out this espoused value in two different situations recently.
One is a new client is based in the UK and the USA. I set out up-front (before putting in a proposal) that I would not travel to the USA as part of this assignment. I felt some trepidation in doing this: might I lose the work? Reflecting further I realised that this outcome was not, surprisingly, such a big worry for me as I'm turning down work at the moment and I knew I didn't want the work if it meant flying. The bigger source of my anxiety was that these people who I'd only just met might they think badly of me. They might interpret my refusal to fly as a criticism of them - they almost certainly are obliged to fly for work. They might simply think me wildly eccentric. (One day I'll blog on the EAFL meme : "environmentalists are **** loonies" ). They might worry that association with me would make their colleagues think this about them.
I'm being very frank here - explaining my worries discretely even though I know they were quite murky at the time before I was able to pin them down precisely.
The new client was not put off, although I will continue to watch for the impact this stance has on our relationship, as well as the practicalities of the project. Our first multi-continent workshop was run using impressive video presence facilities, and I'll blog about that separately.
The second challenge came about because I wasn't really paying attention!
I am working on stakeholder engagement for the UK's first Climate Change Risk Assessment. As part of this, there are workshops for stakeholders in the Devolved Administrations - Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I agreed to facilitate these workshops as part of a team, with the workshops distributed between us. Only later did I realise that - of course - Belfast is usually accessed from other parts of the UK by plane, these days. As luck would have it, the Belfast workshop is the one date that I could do. Could I get there without flying? Fortunately I had a full day with no meetings on either side of it, allowing slow travel.
I checked the cost of travelling by train and ferry, using the legendary Man in Seat 61 website. I also checked the travelling times, and worked out that two nights accommodation were probably needed, not one. I resolved that I would absorb the additional expenses if they proved to be higher than those of my flying colleagues, and not charge for the longer travelling time.
Armed with these mitigations, I raised my 'no flying' commitment with my immediate client (the consultancy I am sub-contracted by). They seemed fine with it. And - thanks Sarah, you're a star - one of my facilitator colleagues said she'd travel with me too.
I still feel a bit funny about this choice to go by train and ferry rather than flying. It takes much longer. And if we miss a connection, or there's a storm at sea, people may criticise me for choosing a less reliable way to travel. It feels like an experiment which could go wrong.
And I have read and re-read this blog entry, afraid to click 'publish', for some weeks now!
I know that for many people, deciding not to fly for work would be a seriously career-limiting decision. The way we organise our working lives and our international organisations is now so dependent on being able to travel very long distances or across seas fast, that using only surface transport would be very inconvenient. Even within the UK, there are lots of journeys which involve moving from one island to another, where boat is slower and - ahem - more bilious than flying.
I have the great good fortune, though, to be in a position to say 'no' to flying for work even as I recognise that this is not an option for many of the people I work with. So I can be an experimenter, someone who tries out what a world with seriously reduced dependence on aviation might look like. And if I can do it, perhaps I should.
The reaction from people who I've told about this has been an interesting range. Some applauded and said "I bet your clients love it, because you're really walking the talk". Some said "that's a long time to be away not earning". Others said "that's really interesting, I'd like to experiment like that, tell me how it goes".
I'm going to actively reflect on this experiment, and I'll tell you how it goes.
If you're trying to get fashion-crazy teens and young people interested in climate change, it makes sense to start where they are. And that's what Global Cool have done, in their Eighteen Degrees of Inspiration campaign. But isn't it superficial, missing the point, and above all not going to get the scale of change we need at a systemic level?
Well, according to Chris Rose's VBCOP theory, starting where people are and eliciting changed behaviour for non-'green' reasons is the most effective way to build up political space for systemic change.
Want to know more?
I've written about this in the environmentalist, and you can read that article here.
Growing Communities is an inspiring social enterprise which grows and trades organic, seasonal fruit and veg in Hackney, North London. Transparency alert: I'm the chair of the Board. It has three core activities:
The organisation was first set up by a small group of friends and neighbours paying in advance for produce to be produced on a single farm: a classic community supported agriculture scheme. Later, grant funding from sources like the National Lottery, the Esme Fairburn Foundation and the Bridge House Estates Trust provided the capital for starting up new initiatives. Hats off to all of them!
Trading fruit and veg through the box scheme, and an entrepreneurial can-do attitude meant that Growing Communities could, after a short time, move to being self-funding. This freedom enables it to be nimble and to change rapidly as it learns about how to make this alternative local food system work. Its work has always coupled a radical and strategic vision, with a deeply practical approach. Standing on its own two feet financially is a value as well as a tactic. It demonstrates to customers, members, suppliers and the wider world, that an alternative food system can work even in the current context.
It also makes growth possible - bootstrapping rather than dependent on grant funding and subsidies.
But what does growth mean for an alternative enterprise like Growing Communities?
Its principles and structure (its box-scheme customers are voting members who attend AGMs in surprisingly large numbers and elect the Board a.k.a. 'Management Committee') mean that it is community-led. So a growth model which involves moving into a new area and opening up a mirror image of the Hackney original isn't good enough. What about simply opening more outlets in Hackney, and growing the local customer base? Yes, Growing Communities has done some of that, and intends to do more, with its satellite pick-up points for the weekly veg bags. The things limiting the growth of the Farmers' Market include limitations on the space where it is held, limits on the amount of produce small farmers and growers can grow, and a dearth of small producers who fit the exacting criteria: e.g. local, organic, and producers / growers who sell their own produce, not someone else's.
Growing Communities wants to keep the community-led, local value while providing a stable and reliable market for sustainably-produced food which will enable more growers to build strong (albeit small) businesses.
The growth model also needs to be very lean - Growing Communities can't provide capital funding or flashy materials, and it can't expect fat franchise fees from the new organisations - which, like Growing Communities, will be social enterprises or some other form of not-for-profit structure. And because every community is different, an emergent learning approach makes sense.
So it's adopted a growth strategy which involves closely supporting other organisations which want to set up their own version of the Growing Communities model. The first few 'start ups' will be intensively supported with workshops, training, resources (things like copies of the ordering system, model contracts) and hands-on problem solving. As the 'start ups' get going, their learning and experience will be captured in a series of on-line briefings, which will then be available to the next tranche of start-ups. There will also be on-line discussions, so everyone can learn from each other.
This programme is being funded partly from the organisation's own resources, and partly by UnLtd, the social entrepreneur's organisation, which has provided some funding already. As it progresses, the idea is that successful start-ups will also help to fund the programme of live support and detailed guidance materials, and deliver parts of it.
If you're interested in setting up a transformational pioneering food organisation, then check out the start up website here.
If you're interested in what it means for a sustainable organisation to grow, without being beholden to short-termist shareholders, being in debt to a bank or being dependent on grant funding, then keep an eye on Growing Communities.
Was the shut down of air travel a right pain for you and your organisation? Now that the ash has settled, there's a great opportunity for you to use the recent disruption to discuss sustainable development with your colleagues. [And as if to prove the point that it's a good idea to be prepared, it's back - as of 08.52 @BST 4th May 2010.]
Whichever way you look at it, a low-carbon economy (whether forced on us by peak oil or chosen as a planned way of mitigating climate change) will mean a drastic reduction in cheap air travel. Your colleagues may feel this is too far off, or too fanciful, to plan for. But the shut down actually happened. So it's a great way in to discussions you might not have been able to have before April 2010.
Here are 11 questions to structure a discussion about your organisation's dependence on air transport - and how you can reduce it over the long term.
With the skies over Europe still (rather blissfully) free of planes, more people will be thinking about meeting by phone, video conference, telepresence or web-meeting. Like Fay Ripley and this groovy crowd in the dothegreenthing video strange meeting, part of their stay grounded strand.
If you have skype then teleconferences for a small number of people are possible at very low cost. If there are only two of you, you can video call using skype.
I expect that providers of web meeting software will find their free trials taken up a lot this week. Free trials are available on Citrix GoToMeeting , Webex and DimDim (which also has a totally free product). Acrobat Connect is free for small meetings - three people maximum. Elluminate.com is aimed primarly at a teaching / training situation, but their vRoom product is free for up to three people to meet.
If you aren’t used to this way of meeting, but have been forced to change your plans, here are some top tips for teleconferences.
Before the call
Ensure that someone takes responsibility for preparing and chairing the call - including
All participants should make sure they are calling in from somewhere quiet and with minimum distractions.
Let the chair know if you cannot make the call.
At the start
When you join the conference, announce your presence.
At the start of the call, make time for
During the call
At the end
At the end of the meeting, make time for
Gillian Martin Mehers has blogged about preparing for a video conference.
Facilitate Proceedings blog about virtual meetings.
If you’re interested in exploring how to facilitate really good group interactions online, there is also a curriculum for an online facilitation course, developed by Nancy White.
After the 7-7 tube bombings in London, there was a surge in the number of people cycling. This rise was sustained, and London still echoes to the swish of cycle wheels. Over the next few days, as people are forced to find ways of doing business without flying, perhaps some of the experiments will be so successful that they’ll be added to the set of options which are considered ‘normal’. Maybe we’ll look back and discover that we were experimenting and practising for transition to a low-carbon economy.
Have fun with your experiments.
Small print: I don’t have any business connection with any of the products mentioned, nor does their presence here imply any endorsement etc. Just blogging to be helpful.
I was pointing people towards the six sources of influence in some behaviour change training recently, and went back to some original sources to remind myself about the distinctions between the six sources. To recap, the six sources are arranged into a two-by-three table, with ‘motivation’ and ‘ability’ divided into personal, social and structural. In this explanation on the VitalSmarts blog the two ‘social’ sources of influence have been merged. This bothered me – is there really so little distinction between social motivation (peer pressure) and social ability?
