Sharing Training Materials: A Good Idea, But Will Companies Participate? — EDF Innovation Exchange Blog.

I know green teams that are simply desperate for this training materials, particularly with regards to how they spur action and a mindset change on the part of their colleagues in the workplace.

As a trainer myself, I must admit to some reservation for sharing my training materials.  They are the product of hours of direct work, and years of indirect work thinking, talking, and contemplating on a given subject.  It takes an enormous amount of trust in… the universe? in good will? that something will come out of that effort when it is trusted to an open space.

On the other hand, I know that we are all figuring out how sustainability works; and the points that Jim Jubelirer, the author, makes are compelling reasons to join in the fun:

• Being recognized as a leader
• Creating “brownie points” for individuals within companies (e.g., tying to professional development credentials or company certification ratings)
• Quid pro quo – contribute in order to receive/use materials
• Supplier/partner network – potential to incent suppliers or customers in exchange for other value
• Leveraging existing partnerships and networks that have already created public materials

It truly stems from a new idea of what intellectual property is, and he suggests that authors become recognized via the Creative Commons licensing – a way to both be acknowledged and also to have your work build on something greater.  The benefit most attractive to me is that ultimately, my work may benefit from participating in an effort like this, and a vision of a world that “Thrives in Perpetuity” (Adam Werbach’s definition of sustainability) might be realized.

Some part of why this idea is compelling is because I know that my work is heavily influenced by the brave and thoughtful work of many others. I certainly see the hypocrisy in my sense of reservation.

Even more so, I am a strong believer in collaboration, and a great admirer of the way that Linux and Open Source were built (see my previous post reporting back from the Solutions Lab)  – perhaps this is a way to put my money where my mouth is.  Thanks, Jim, for leading the way!

What do you think?

The day was organized as a modified “unConference”. Odin said that morning that “during conferences, the best parts are usually during the coffee breaks.  So, we decided to make a whole day of coffee breaks!”  The day was truly geared to allow us talk with one another, and it was wonderfully stimulating to have a chance to really talk to the professionals, experts, and activists in the room.

I participated as a facilitator during the morning for a session loosely called “Collaborating Effectively to Advance Sustainability.” A small and dynamic group of 8 attended, representing innovative social enterprises and non-profits as well as companies you have heard about on Fast Company and Forbes.   During our hour and a half together, discussion was surprisingly heated and unsurprisingly fast-paced.

The discussion centered around:

1. Is collaboration happening in the field of sustainability?
2. What are some best practices for achieving collaboration in sustainability?
3. What are the barriers to collaboration – why do companies collaborate, and why DON’T they collaborate?

One trend that all of us noted is that sustainability was actually leading to a lot of formal and informal collaboration.  Anecdotally, participants spoke of sustainability managers who reached out to other managers to solve micro to macro problems – from what kind of disposables to use, to how do they help company culture change from disposables entirely. It seems that sustainability cuts across normally competitive barriers.

Participants also noted that a leading barrier was also a leading incentive – organizations must be able to see the value and relationship of sustainability to their own work. If they don’t see that, the initiative will fail.  If they do, then the possibilities are vast.

And that leads us to one of the key best practices – find the “hook.” We turned to the Open Source movement, which seemed to have a quite compelling hook.  In Open Source, thousands of developers from around the world contributed to creating an Open Operating System for their computers.  Why would developers spend countless hours to develop this operating system together?

It all boiled down to two things: Freedom, and Combating the Evil Empire.  Developers wanted to be able to design/control/play in the net, and it just was not possible with the Microsoft Operating System.  They also saw Microsoft as doing everything it could to prevent other Operating Systems from entering the market.  By creating Open Source, they could cleverly defeat both those problems.  A unique and tremendously high-impact collaboration was born.  Our conclusion – hooks may not always be financial, but they do tie into the values of those who are collaborating.  For an organization, collaboration will likely be most effective if it yields gains in efficiency, efficacy, market outreach – all things tied to the company’s survival.

As a side bar, I would add that for the people inside the organization, the hook must be more personal – it must tap into their fundamental values as well.  Hopefully, the collaboration matches with the organization’s values.  But if not, the champion must strategize for how to meet both.

Other best practices were discussed as well – including finding the right people to both lead and facilitate, creating a shared goal, etc.  Take a look at the wiki with the extensive notes (including some great references for collaboration in Sustainability) below.

Collaborating Effectively to Advance Sustainability – SJ – Solutions Labs 2010.

My thanks to Peggy Liu of JUCCCE, who helped me think through my approach to facilitating this topic, and who would have helped lead the discussion had she not been in China (time zones are such drag!)

Profit is fairly easily understood; the definition wikipedia uses for “normal profit” is

The return the entrepreneur can expect to earn or the profit that a business owner considers necessary to make running the business worth his/her while.

Questions about what the owner considers “necessary” arise, but we will leave those questions to other posts.

“Planet,” perhaps a little more challenging, is still graspable – if we imagine our natural resources as bank account, from which we draw the interest,  we can understand that our actions could (are) diving into the “reserves” of the planet; thus, we need to change our actions to minimize our planetary expenditures and perhaps to restore and build our planetary reserves again – building our planetary bottomline, and balancing that bottomline against our eonomic bottomline.

However, how do you build the reserves of the bottom line of “people”?  It is a nebulous question in many ways – what “people” are we referring to, first, and then, how do we “build” it, “balance” it, or do whatever else is needed in order to achieve sustainability in a company?  Finally, how does this relate to social responsibility, living wage, social equity, and all of the other ideas that get lumped together in this general category?

Defining People

The first step is to define what we mean by “people.”  One model that has been helpful to me: a matrix defining the organizational territory as being composed of Individuals and Collectives, who likewise each have Internal and External Landscapes.  First discussed by Ken Wilbur (who doubtless based his thinking on many others) and then connected to the “Enterprise” by Christopher Peck and John Stayton in a class about Sustainable Local Enterprise they used to teach for the Green MBA, the following matrix has helped me articulate well the organizational terrain.

developed by John Stayton, Christopher Peck based on Ken Wilbur's Work

As the model illustrates, there are four “Realms” in an organization: the Individual Internal, the Individual External, the Collective Internal, and the Collective External.  By defining “people” we have actually created a doorway into what I would call “Authentic Sustainability.”

I would posit that for a company to be authentically sustainable – it needs to have sustainability infused into each of these Realms.  And here is where the definition for the Triple Bottom Line doesn’t yield enough – we are left with the question unanswered of how can we infuse planet, profit, and people into each of these four areas?

To answer this question, I go back to Bill McDonough, author of Cradle to Cradle and Green Designer.  When defining sustainability, he takes as his operational quest the following:

How do we love all the children, of all species, for all time?

With this quote, McDonaugh points to the quest that is at the center of all authentic sustainability efforts: the quest for life.  To me, the nature of  sustainability in business is a three-fold quest:

1. a quest for to sustain and improve the well-being of the life of the organization
2. a quest to sustain the lives and well-being of the people and species (natural resources) internal to its organization – its employees, the natural resources needed for its products and services
3. a quest to sustain the lives and well-being of the people and species (natural resources) external to its organization – its customers, its suppliers and stakeholders, the environment its products, processes and services effect.

Ultimately, the path of the sustainable organization is one that is life-affirming. This means both good news and bad news for the sustainability champion.

The good news? There is a lot that we are already doing in our organizations that is inherently life-affirming.  Think in your own organization; when we see our employees as people, with aspirations and needs of their own (an effort that would rest in the internal individual quadrant), we are affirming life.  When we pay our employees what they deserve (external individual), and have honest conversations with them when we can’t, yet again we are affirming life.  The teambuilding efforts, the collaborative engagement dollars spent on developing an organizational vision, establishing teamwork between departments are also all life-affirming and key components to affirming the life of the organization and the people who work inside of it.  Practices for authentic sustainability are, in reality, good business practices that sustain the organization, the people it serves, and the environment it is a part of.

The bad news? Being a sustainable company isn’t cut and dry.  In fact, once you start this journey, it can impose standards that are challenging to meet – one reaction could be, Gee, you mean I have to be all that, too? Yes, in reality, you have to be that too.  Why?  Being accused of greenwashing could be damaging – most likely undoing your efforts.

Next post?  How striving for “authentic” sustainability will help you avoid greenwashing, AND create a business, a planet, and a staff that will be around for the long haul.

The Truth about Green Business

by Gil Friend, Natural Logic

is by Gil Friend, a colleague of ours for several years.  Gil Friend is charming, articulate, direct to the point of “terseness” (as he calls it in chapter – “Truth” 4), and remarkably clear-sighted.  His book is much like him, and will do an extraordinary amount to forward the sustainability movement – just as he himself has.

About the book: The Truth about Green Business lists 52 truths, in 12 categories ranging from the basics of “What is a Green Business”, to more technical issues such as marketing, design, procurement, on to Management, Finance, and even “Future-Proofing.”  Each “truth” is a 3-5 page chapter, and he encourages us to either read it straight through, or to jump around to “Truths” that suit us.  The book is really a web; each chapter points the reader to other chapters that further clarify certain points.

What I loved: His claim to “truths” is a correct one;  he summarizes underlying principles of green business, underlining them with examples occurring in mainstream business as well as from his own experience.  The most inspiring chapter to me was Truth 7: “How Green is Good Enough”, where he challenges his readers to set Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals – and “bet the farm” if necessary.

“Do Less Harm,” he writes, “simply isn’t good enough – not when you could thrive by regenerating and enriching the living systems on which our economy depends.” (p. 28)

I agree with Gil – there is so much more possibility  for action than to just “comply”, “do less harm,” etc.  He offers a new term (to me, anyway)  – “regulatory insulation” – his definition being “to deliver products and servics so good and processes so efficient that you don’t care what the regulators want because you’re years ahead of their wildest dreams.” (p. 32)  With ideas backed by solid business sense, he pushes his readers to think beyond just enough to what’s possible?

Finally I also really just liked the way the book felt; I wondered if there were some new material it used, as Natural Capitalism did in producing its “tree-less” book.

What I want more of: One of the reasons I enjoyed reading this is is because of its brevity and clarity; its “Choose Your Own Adventure” feeling, its apt examples,  its  internal cross-referencing and organization.   On the other side of the coin – the writing style tends towards brief, declarative sentences, lending itself well to the feeling of the “field guide”, but not to a sense of the “quest.”  Given that on the ground, sustainability can look very different from company to company, having case studies or more indepth examples would have been a helpful addition.    Perhaps I would have had a different sense if, there had been a section called “Tales from the Trenches,” or “Overcoming Obstacles.”

But that would have made the book much longer, and dilute the power that lies in brevity.  Perhaps another book?

In sum – I would highly recommend this book to any person who is thinking about “taking their business to the next step” – whether it is someone who is new or a veteran to  sustainable business.   It will answer questions many sustainability champions will ask at one point or another in their effort, and also give them a foundation of important principles of sustainability.  Great job, Gil, and looking forward to the next one!

Sustainability on a Shoe String  Click here to register now

Over the last several months, we have had an abundance of blessings – my sweetheart and I have purchased a fixer-upper house, and have been in the throes of ripping out carpet, ripping down wall paper, painting, putting in new flooring, moving, and finally, hosting 17 people for Thanksgiving. Rewarding, and highly stressful (they say moving is amongst the most stressful events in a human beings’ life.) This along with the challenges all of us have faced over the last few months of anxiety over the elections, massive fluctuations in the market, and watching people lose their homes, their jobs, and at times, their communities. (Christopher, my sweetheart, is in the financial sector – you can imagine the stress that creates.)

So how, in all of this, does one maintain one’s own sanity, health, good temper – essentially, one’s personal sustainability?

This has been an important question for me (floating amongst all of the other important questions, like what paint to use, or, how will the market affect our clients?)

It has not been an easy one. In fact, as I sit here, writing for the first time in two months, it is clear to me how fast all of those good habits of meditation, writing, exercise, good food, and time with friends was thrown out the window.

Can we always do everything? No. So, how do we choose what is most important?

I lived on an organic fruit farm for about a year and a half, through two pruning seasons. And during that time, I learned how to prune grapes – they had about 20 varieties of heirloom table groups that were just stunning in their variety and flavor.

Pruning grapes turned out to be one of the most challenging and rewarding tasks I took on, and is a metaphor I refer to a lot when I am having to focus on what’s most important.

Imagine a grape vine, bare of leaves. Every vine has about 25 woody “shoots” or spurs, that are growing from the vine, looking like a crazy bush of muppet rastafarian hair. Your job is to take this vine and these shoots from 30 to around 10. So, how?

Grapes before they are pruned

The first step is to use simple processes of prioritization – is the shoot oriented correctly, is it big and healthy or small and puny, is it diseased, is it spaced well? After clipping those off down to the vine, that leaves you with about 16 big, healthy shoots, just waiting to burst forth with leaves and juicy grapes the next year. But wait – you still need to take 6 off!

And this is the hardest part of the process. Because, at this point it is pure judgment call. You don’t know if one will do better than the other, or will stay healthier longer. For some reason, that first year, it was agonizing for me – what if I chose the wrong one - and marred the plant, or worse, killed the plant by taking off too many? It took me forever to get through a row, and although my farm-mates encouraged me to just “make a decision, already!” I found that my concern slowed me to a snail’s pace.

I have the same habit in the rest of life – I am so in love with opportunities, that “clipping a shoot” literally feels like I am killing an opportunity? And the same line of questions runs through my brain – what if its the wrong one?

Grapes after they are pruned

The second year, though, I went out there, with the benefit of having seen the results of the first year’s pruning. The places where I had pruned more intensely were fine – in fact, they were vigorous and healthy. Guess what – I hadn’t killed the vine! It helped to see the logic of pruning, the results of my efforts, and how I could fine-tune the second time.

I found that not only was I faster at pruning, but that I was able to teach others, and feel confident doing so; I saw the plant in an entirely different way – more about cultivating grapes, than cutting off woody stems. I became (almost) as fast as the good folks who had been doing it for years.

The whole point of pruning is to be able to send more energy to the things that you know are most important. It is, literally, to cultivate the best possible opportunities to grow the best possible grapes, when they are still months and months away from growing.

These last few weeks, I have had to prune, at least temporarily, so that my finite time, energy and resources could go to the things that were truly most urgent AND important. The results? I sit in my warm, new home, relaxing this Thanksgiving weekend. My sweetheart and I are even more in love. And I am learning to be increasingly efficient AND effective with my time. Some of the pieces I have pruned from my life are not doing so well – but surprisingly, some of the other pieces I have pruned are doing much better without my attention; it has allowed other leaders to step up, and for me to recreate my role in those projects.

Pruning does not always result the way we wish it – but by keeping your eye on your job of cultivating what you want to achieve, as opposed to focusing on what throws itself at you, it becomes easier and easier to prune, year by year.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when one must become very, very clear on priorities, to get through a particularly challenging time. I believe our nation is in the midst of such a time – where we have to remember what is important, what will keep us going in the long term, and we have to choose where we want our finite resources to go. What an opportunity to cultivate clarity!

Winter-time, with its short, cold days is a time that lends itself to introspection. The next few posts I will do will be on managing time, cultivating clarity, and remembering what is truly most important. Much of this is based off of the training that I do in time management. May you find it useful.

How you lead is important. In our classes, we define leadership as “The ability to get results while inspiring trust.” Here are two strategies for making your change process yield results while inspiring trust.

1. Be a strong leader. Strength. A word of many interpretations. When I think of strength, I think of the ancient Chinese proverb – the best general is the one who never goes to war. In this change initiative, you must find the way to be insistent, inspiring, passionate, and enthusiastic, and at the same time, keep a balance with listening to others’ perceptions, even if you don’t agree with them.

Sustainability is only achievable with the help of many, and ultimately, with the individual behavior change of every one of your stake holders. You must keep your focus on integrating true sustainability – which means, get ready for the unpredictable impact of letting other people “in” on the process. You must be so good, that like the good general, you need never fight for what you believe, and instead, find ways to attract others to your cause.

Which brings me to my next point.

2. Let yourself – and the process – be influenced. Sustainability is a topic that people can be quite passionate about – whether you are for or against it. It has the aura of “righteousness” about it, and with that comes an almost super-glue strength attachment to one’s position.

I remember the time I got into a discussion with my highly conservative uncle at a family reunion about whether or not global warming existed. 45 minutes later, after the discussion had turned heated (there was a point in which our family were all standing by, ready to leap in to break us apart) we finally found common ground – he thought that straw bale buildings were “pretty cool;” and I conceded that yes, natural cycles of the earth were indeed contributing to global warming. (I couldn’t concede on his other points… but that’s another story.)

Its surprising what you can find if you allow yourself to be open to what the other is saying – even if it is someone who you, on the surface, so fully disagree with.

Next posting, we will continue with strategies for Leading your Change Process.

But lets define terms here. The term “eco-efficiency” was first brought to popularity by The Natural Step for Business (originally coined by Carl Frankel in his book In Earth’s Company), when it talked about industry’s evolution towards sustainability. The Natural Step says that the natural evolution of business into sustainability over time goes through these four stages:

- Compliance (Regulations like those the EPA puts out to keep pollutants out of public space.

- Beyond Compliance (Companies begin to look for savings, begin to see sustainability as a part of their competitive edge.)

- Eco-Efficiency (Profit-driven approach; began in tandem with the Total Quality Management approach)

- Sustainable Development (Environmental Goals; enters mainstream organizational culture; Companies start to design with natural resources in mind.)

As you can see from this model, eco-efficiency is actually quite high in the evolution of industry towards sustainability. Eco-efficiency is really the technical side of sustainability; it is easier to put into place with some technological fixes – a new HVAC system, a carbon-footprint analysis, a lighting retrofit.

But the biggest reason that eco-efficiency is not enough – and possibly triple-bottom line thinking is not enough, is that it only one part of the business process. It looks at reducing costs and correcting mistakes as opposed to creating a vision of what could be. And, it only includes “people” as a by-product – there may be benefits to people, but it does not consciously include people as part of the solution, as opposed to simply a means to the solution.

Sustainable Development, on the other hand, is closer to the mark. It talks about environmental “goals”, sustainability becoming a part of the “culture”, and “designing” with natural resources in mind – all signposts for “things to do” along the way to making your organization sustainable.

One of the most inspiring ideas I have ever heard was the vision detailed in the first couple of pages in Natural Capital – of a factory spewing out water that was cleaner on its way out than on its way in.

Imagine that – an industrial factory valuing the clean water it produces as highly as the water it uses for its practices! Would that we find ways for all of our organizations to do what the boyscouts teach us – leave it better on the way out than on the way in.

Sustainable Development starts to get us there. But even that idea doesn’t include the whole system, and comes, truthfully, from a simple environmentalist perspective that ADDS environmental goals to the mix, as opposed to something more fundamentally related to the way the business conducts its business. Does simply adding salt to flour make the flour salt? Does adding environmental goals to a business make it sustainable?

Do we have to move beyond environmentalism in our quest for a sustainable organization?

]]> http://genevievetaylor.com/2008/06/20/why-eco-efficiency-is-not-enough/feed/ 0 genevievetaylor http://genevievetaylor.com/2008/06/06/building-the-three-legged-stool/ http://genevievetaylor.com/2008/06/06/building-the-three-legged-stool/#comments Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:31:49 +0000 genevievetaylor http://genevievetaylor.wordpress.com/?p=4 ]]> So, why do change agents for sustainability so naturally focus on planet and profit, but not people?

Lets go back to our “people, planet, profit” definition. The “triple bottom-line” is where we maximize our human capital (people), natural capital (planet), and financial capital (profit.)

As an organizational change agent, it is easy for me to give the double Yes!” Yes! I can see the natural capital in my organization – I use resources (energy, paper, water, etc.). And Yes! I am very clear about what the financial capital is; my bottom-line, my cash flow, my profit, my access to more funding.

But to give a triple yes – well, we are more likely to get a single “Huh?”.  Likely with the “huh” will come a blank stare… how do we get people to be more sustainable?

It gets very, very fuzzy when we start to think about the “people” part of the triple bottom line.

When you start considering “People”, you start having to examine how behavior impacts a company; how leadership affects the way that change initiatives are received; how old dysfunctions impact a company’s ability to work.

Few companies actually build all three “legs of the stool” – because it is hard. But, maybe, you ask, eco-efficiency is enough!  Maybe we don’t really NEED the triple bottom line!

A great question – we will look into that question next time.

The purpose of this blog is to explore the question – what is sustainable business, in regards to balancing and building the “triple bottom line” of “people, planet, and profit”.

This blog is meant for organizational change agents – champions inside organizations, whether you are a business, government, or non-profit, whether you are a CEO, an HR manager, or a new supervisor with a lot of big ideas, who want to help their organization become sustainable.

I believe that sustainability can be transformative; it can be used as a vehicle for changing the entire organization for the better. In fact, like teambuilding or visioning of any sort, it is hard to contain it once an organization authentically starts on this path.

In sustainable business, informed change agents are constantly looking for the best way to balance, support, and build three different components: people, planet, and profit (the Three Ps). The search for the “three-legged stool” of the Three Ps is elusive – many times, organizations will get one, or even two, but rarely all three. For those organizations who really want to “do it right”, who wholeheartedly believe that the definition of sustainability is to maintain the ability of future generations to meet their needs while meeting the needs of the current generation, getting one or two of the legs isn’t enough. They don’t want to be just profitable, just environmental, or just socially equitable. They want to be all three.

But nailing all three into place is not easy.

Next time, I will talk about how to get to all three.

]]> http://genevievetaylor.com/2008/06/05/hello-world/feed/ 0 genevievetaylor