The Deeper Values of the 'Sustainability Value Proposition'

I was recently invited to speak in a webinar for the GBCA on ‘Communicating the Sustainability Value Proposition’. The message seemed to resonate, so I thought it might be worth sharing it here as well, although sadly, this doesn't include the contributions of my fellow speakers, Ken Lunty, Jo-Ann Gamble, Nicole Sullivan and Jamie Wallis, and the insights of those who attended. Thanks to them and to the GBCA for the opportunity to share these ideas. You might want to grab a cuppa and strap in – this is a longer post than I usually do, but it weaves together some threads that I didn’t feel I could serialise effectively.

So today, we are looking at: how to get people to do things that are a departure from what they normally, habitually do? And for the purposes of this post, we are assuming we’re working with someone who doesn’t already work from a sustainability ethos.

I’m sure we can all recall a time when we were aware that someone was using tools and techniques on us to change a pattern of behaviour for us. They might have used things like encouragement, advice, incentives; they might have tried disincentives, even punishments. It’s natural when we first begin working on being a change agent to try those sorts of tactics. They were what we could see, what we could directly experience. Mimicking these practices, you might have noticed that sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. You did the same thing in both cases, so why didn’t it work?

How do you get reliably repeatable results that move the dial in the direction we’re trying to go?

It’s not the tools and techniques. There’s something else going on when people decide to step up and commit to making a different choice.

Making the sustainability case (or any case) comes down to speaking to what people value. Simon Sinek in his classic ‘Start with Why’ TED talk notes that people don’t do business with you because of what you do, they do business with you because of why you do it. They want to work with you because they sense common values as the basis from which you are moving, and that is the place from which decisions get made, not the intellect. What people care about is what moves them to action.

So if we are working on ‘communicating a value proposition’, each of us needs to be clear on:

• What do we mean by ‘communicating’?

• What is it that we are valuing?

Communicating

In my communication about sustainability, it has been my experience that when I try to tell people what to do or why it’s important, I get resistance. If I do get compliance, the effect lasts as long as I am around, and as soon as that encouragement, support, answer-supplying or enforcing is gone, sustainability objectives are vulnerable to being dropped.

So, what’s another option?

Rather than tell, I ask questions - and not questions about sustainability. I ask: ‘What is important to this person? Why? And what is that important?’, until I get to something they value. Then we have common ground to align around from a value-adding process perspective. We sometimes call this ‘getting buy-in’, but I think what it really is doing is building shared intention and trust.

Valuing

What I am valuing in working this way is a belief that humans are an essential player in the health of our planet, and we all have within us the capacity to reclaim and evolve the next iteration of that role, if we are willing to embrace that challenge.

If it seems like this case is harder to make at the moment than it has been in the past, well, that may or may not be true. I think it’s always been challenging. But 20 years ago, we were only talking about things that might happen. Things are happening. We live in interesting times. Things seem to be unraveling faster and faster, there is more uncertainty, more polarization, more urgency, more intense activity, and not necessarily more clarity…yet. And sustainability, especially in economically turbulent times, seems even more vulnerable.

The Great Turning

The eco-philosopher Joanna Macy referred to these times as The Great Turning, which is the movement of all those who want to create a life-sustaining society. We’ve been in it for about 4 decades already, and it’s even more important at a time when the future looks so bad.

The core question which drove Macy’s work was: ‘How can I be fully present to my world—present enough to rejoice and be useful—when we as a species are destroying it?’ She said that she was continually ‘stunned by the strength of community that springs up when people, through their anguish and their tears, open to the immensity of their caring.’

There’s more in that sentence than we can unpack in this post, but I raise it because it points to the place where we find stickiness. It’s not in the head. The intellect is great at coming up with options, but clarity comes from tapping into what we care about. This is what we will show up for, no matter what. What we value has to come first. Then, the intellect can help us iterate and find the optimum solution.

The Four Fundamental Shifts

Here is a model which intends to describe the transitional, transformative times we are living in. The energies on the left are what we have been living in for the last few thousand years, so there is a lot of inertia around them. The energies on the right are emergent and will become the dominant energies in the years to come. Aligning ourselves with the energies on the left, we will get more of the same: scarcity, competition, fragmented considering, and no change in our trajectory. Aligning ourselves to the energies on the right is what moves the dial towards sustainability and regeneration.

This is how people wake up to what they value, and build the muscles needed to show up from that place, rather than contracting into a conditioned place that feels more like what’s on the left.

I’ve noticed in my work that the reasons tools and techniques work or don’t work is the extent to which these four shifts are happening in the team. I’ve got a premise for ‘sticky sustainability’ for each of these.

Ignorance to Understanding

Premise for sticky sustainability: Ground solidly in the specific.

Shifting from ‘I know already’ (which is ignorance) to ‘I am seeking to understand’. ‘Here’s one I prepared earlier’ might work, but chances are it won’t be the best fit. Asking people to change is risky. If it doesn’t work, they will likely be even more resolved not to be open to this next time. Giving your approach the greatest chance of being a fit is based on finding a custom fit.

Grounding solidly in the specific is the way to do this. In the absence of a specific context, we want to do amazing across all indicators. We often go to ‘What’s ‘world’s best practice’?’ and come up with a list of targets that sound good but may direct energy towards investments that are not optimal for this specific location or organisation. Alternatively, we choose based on what’s easiest (which we call ‘low hanging fruit’) or what’s cheapest (which is usually already BAU). All of that means we are not in a conversation where change is available.

Connecting with specifics invites us to genuinely do what is needed. What is essential, here? What is the potential of this place that wants to be expressed? What is the next iteration of that unique contribution? How can the sustainability strategy be in service to that? How can our work help to define measurements of thriving for this place?

What’s great about specificity is that clear messages arise from this process, which the team can then align around and focus how to deliver in holistic, integrated design responses. They are always different for each project, and they always arrive with an ‘aha!’ sort of energy that lights the team up when we hit on them. This makes the solutions more resilient, and so does this next shift.

Control to Cooperation, Collaboration and Co-Creation

Premise for sticky sustainability: Ask the stakeholders what they see for their community, not what they want.

Stakeholder engagement is very scary for someone who wants control. Many people do this in an inauthentic way to tick a box because they think stakeholder engagement is inviting chaos. There will very likely be some spirited input at the start, but holding in the desire for cooperation, collaboration and co-creation, we can create the space and structure for open dialogue, through a focus on uncovering shared values.

To achieve this, I’ve found asking the client and stakeholders what they see as potential in their place, not what they want naturally leads people away from talking about their personal preferences and into sharing observations about the patterns of their community and what would support it in its thriving. Ask them to image their community thriving, years into the future: ‘What does it look like, feel like, what do they see? What do they not see?’ Then: ‘What is it that this project can do now to help you make that real? You (stakeholder) are engaged in a process – how will this project assist you in that work?’ This leads to things the individuals in the room can align around because they can say, ‘Yes, I see that, too.’

Again, clear messages arise from this process, which could not have been predicted, and which the team and the community can align around. These directions do not come from theory, or opinion. They are based in inquiry, with the community.  This inquiry is ongoing throughout the process. This participation makes the solutions more resilient, because it is more likely that the building will be loved and all the sustainability strategies that were embedded in the design would be taken forward and not dropped after the shininess wore off, because they were an expression of these people and their vision for their community.

Separation to Connection

Premise for sticky sustainability: Work on creating a team, not an assembly line.

Fragmentation to integration can be about design features delivering more than one benefit. Another aspect of this is the project delivery process and how we disrupt that for greater ability to see and work with potential.

Our standard process treats projects like cars on an assembly line. The feasibility team is different to the design team, who pass to a building team, who pass to an FM team. There are so many points of failure in this model, so many places where the original intention can get lost, key pieces get left unresolved because of incomplete information or unfortunate timing.

Helping everyone see the full cycle makes it more likely that passing off to the next set of hands won’t cause the ball to be dropped.

So instead of an assembly line, you’re building a team. Allow them to see the connections through the process, rather than the gaps. Rather than feeling limited in what you can do while you have the ball, focus on communicating what you need when you have the ball. Other people are similarly focusing on what they need when they have the ball, and they don’t understand the project from your perspective. Encouraging dialogue builds this understanding across the team, and the a-ha moments start to happen. People first need to build empathy (which you get from listening to each other’s insights), then they can move to trust, and from there into creativity and willingness to do something different.

Okay, so now that you are a team – see that you are a team of humans, not machines. Which brings us to the stickiest shift of all…

Fear to Love

Premise for sticky sustainability: Don’t push. Pull.

Can you say ‘love’ in a professional context? Yep. We are all here because of love. We take up change work in service to sustainability because we care.

Your caring does not mean it is your job to ‘inspire the team’. That doesn’t move anyone to action, they’ll just sit back and look at you and say, ‘Wow, she’s so inspiring’. That’s not what we’re after.

We also know from techniqueing and tooling that whatever you try to impose upon the team as either cheerleader or taskmaster will stop working as soon as you stop pushing.

So we don’t push. We pull.

Ask the team what they are in service to: ‘Why do you do this job? What are you doing, as a designer, engineer, builder? This is not an easy job. Why do you do this, of all the things you could do? What is the opportunity of this job, for you? What does it mean? You are on a journey – your working life is an instrument of your development as a human being. Are you using it that way? If not, how might you?’

Their answers are already there, waiting to be invited to join the discussion. This is a room full of humans, not machine parts. Invoke their agency, invoke their unique genius. And stand back.

Allow them to have a free-flowing discission without too much interference from you (unless they go off topic). These questions allow the team to speak to what they really care about and realise where they are aligned at a deeper level than just having a successful business or a successful project. In one such workshop, I had someone ask me, with her face all lit up, ‘Do we get to talk about this stuff at work?’ YES! You get to bring your whole self to work, if you choose to. It is your choice to show up fully and allow yourself to be seen.

The Real Value Proposition: Be an Invitation

The context to be working from as someone interested in being an agent of change is: How do we enable this shift? That’s a really specific word choice for what this work is: It’s not for us to do it. We’re here to help create the conditions conducive to it occurring.

We can choose to model the curiosity and care that is needed to make our work a contribution to life. Then we get the chance to be delighted by something unexpected because we chose to turn up from a different place.

I think the value proposition of sustainability is that we get to bring our whole selves to our projects. Anew, every time. Why work like a machine when you can work like a human? You get to put your heart into it. What a privilege that is if we choose to hold it that way.

The value proposition is that we will co-create projects that are connected to place, that enable communities to thrive, that are resilient, elegant and holistic solutions, that invite the people who live in them to participate in the unfolding ongoing story of that particular spot on the Earth.

If we invest our fully human selves in our projects, then we and our projects will be invitations to anyone who experiences them to be fully human in them. And then, we all get to be awake to our part to play in what good looks like. Joyfully, full-throatedly, shifting the dial in the direction of Life.

‘We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy…is not ours by domination, but by invocation…we need only summon these forces to our support in order to succeed.’ - Thomas Berry

I look forward to your comments in the chat. As always, it’s wonderful to be in the Work with you.