Engaging people - the environmentalist

Some years ago, the stalwart John Brady - who I first met at a training workshop with The Natural Step - invited me to write a column for 'the environmentalist', the magazine of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA). The column has the wonderfully open and yet curiously specific title of 'engaging people', and it has enabled me to pursue one of my passions: bringing insights from the fields of organisational change, learning, stakeholder engagement, communications and psychology to the technical specialists who are working on environmental improvement.

Update, March 2011

'The environmentalist' has a new website, where you can access all the articles online (although not the entire archive).  Most of my articles are also somewhere in this blog (tagged "the environmentalist").

Change Management for Sustainable Development - a workbook

I wrote this workbook for the IEMA, whose members are largely in-house environmental specialists, external environmental consultants, or environmental policy-makers. The book assumes that they know about sustainable development, and that what they need to understand better is the process of organisational change.

It contains bits of theory that I and my clients have found useful over the years - if it wasn't useful, it didn't get in.

It really is a workbook - there are boxes you can fill in, and people can also download pdf versions of some of the exercises from IEMA's website, to use with colleagues.

You can buy it here.

I'd love to hear what you think about it.

And speaking personally about climate change...

There are quite a few courses on offer in the UK to help people speak in public more confidently, knowledgeably and effectively about climate change. This article which I wrote for the environmentalist examines two of them, focusing on the key points that the trainers are trying to get across.

Walking the Talk

If you're a sustainable development communicator who works face-to-face - as a trainer, facilitator, speaker or internal champion - then you'll want to know how to reduce the environmental impact of those face-to-face events. Walking the Talk (an article I originally wrote for the environmentalist) looks at some ways that venues, practitioners and the meetings industry in the UK are trying to reduce their carbon footprint and tackle other environmental impacts.

Update

November 2010: A useful blog post here from GreenBiz.com, simple steps to greening your meeting has some more ideas.

April 2011: blog post from Coro Strandberg with a link to a guide to sustainable meetings developed in Canada by The Co-operators, an insurance and financial co-op.

Dinosaur DAD and Enlightened EDD - alternative approaches to involving people

I spend quite a lot of my time working with clients to engage stakeholders around topics related to sustainable development. This might be working with coastal communities to figure out how to respond to rising sea levels.  It might be chewing over new approaches to public transport.  Or it could be examining how the market for supplying domestic energy can be adjusted to reward companies for selling less energy or lower carbon energy.

I also run a lot of training courses for people who want to learn more about stakeholder engagement and to develop their facilitation skills.

DAD / EDD is one of the most useful models I know for helping learners and clients understand the difference between traditional communications - Decide, Announce, Defend (Abandon) - and an approach which engages stakeholders: Engage, Deliberate, Decide.

This article I wrote for the environmentalist, published in February 2009,  explains a bit more.

Plenty more fish in the sea?

Why should environmentalists (in all our various guises) get into stakeholder engagement? Sometimes the problems are just too complex to be solved by one party acting alone.

If you can bring people together in an atmosphere of dialogue (a 'conversation with a center, not sides' as William Isaacs calls it), then the chances of finding that sweet spot where everyone's interests coincide is so much higher.

Now this is a bit like an optical illusion even in principle - the concept slips in and out of focus.  It's even harder in practice.  There are, though, some institutions and processes that get close, and have resulted in some interesting collaborative work.

Take, for example, the Marine Stewardship Council.  It's built on the idea that lots of different people have an interest in the sustainability of fish stocks, even if those interests are driven by different motivations.  It's an example of sustainable development happening because of people working together.

There's more about this in my article for the environmentalist, here (pdf).

Eco-nomics and the credit crunch

Enticing people with a money-saving message has always been part of the eco-communicator's armoury.  When the credit crunch began to hit in late 2008, I looked at how those messages were being resurrected in the UK, through make-do-and-mend to more radical voices hoping for a wholesale redesign of the economy. Read that article here. It's a pdf file.

Cutting the carbs

When I wanted to lose weight and get a bit fitter, I did what millions of women and quite a few men have done around the world - I joined Weight Watchers.  In doing so, I got interested in the parallels between the support and motivations that work for slimming, and the ones we use to promote a low-carbon lifestyle. So I used them to write an article for the environmentalist in November 2006.

Behave!

Changing behaviour, encouraging and enabling pro-environmental behaviours in particular, is endlessly fascinating.  There are lots of theories of behaviour change, and lots of practitioners getting out there and trying to make it happen.  And some of them even succeed from time to time!  This article - Behave - which I wrote in 2007 - covers some approaches.  There are also other models, like the six sources of influence which I came across recently. Start your exploration of that model with this great video!

The UK Government's Defra (Department of Food and Rural Affairs) has its own behaviour change models, which I wrote about here in the context of audience segmentation.  NESTA also produced a great report on the use of established social marketing techniques to sell 'low carbon' living.  My September 08 column in the environmentalist covered that.

Which approaches to behaviour change do you see being used by environmental organisations?  And which are used by multi-national FMCG organisations? (That's Fast Moving Consumer Goods to you and me.)  Clue: the behaviour FMCGs want to influence is purchasing behaviour.

OD for SD

I love it when I can cross-fertilise.  When I can bring a gem of insightful knowledge from my work on organisational change, learning and development and pass it on to my passionate, committed and somewhat geeky colleagues in the world of environmental management, policy and general eco-knowledge. This article about OD - organisational development - explores how some different practitioners have drawn on ideas about change to help them push the environmental boundaries.

Raw data - consultants in business sustainability - OCAs only

"Organisational leader or part of a wider change movement? How sustainable development change agents see themselves", Penny Walker, EABIS Colloquium 2008.

Raw data used in this paper is available in this document. This page replaces the link given in the paper (http://www.penny-walker.co.uk/sd_change_agents_survey.html) which is no longer active.

Part of a wider change movement

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.

Penny Walker Eabis08 Organisational Leader Or Part Of A Wider Change from PennyWalker

View more presentations from PennyWalker.

There's also a paper and a  journal article to accompany the slides.  The article / chapter was originally published in Greener Management International and in "Consulting for Business Sustainability", edited by Chris Galea.