‘Green Jujitsu’ – the key to sustainability?

The pressure for laboratories to be sustainable is becoming ever stronger – but the pace of change has been slow. Can a new approach called ‘Green Jujitsu’ be a solution to this? Possibly, says sustainability expert Gareth Kane, but the real answer to that can only be supplied by you… The scientific case for a rapid shift to a sustainable society is closed. The threats of climate change, ozone depletion, and the destruction of eco-systems are real and present dangers. The economic case is closed. Resource scarcity is driving up the cost of energy, food and many other basic commodities upon which our quality of life is based, and the economic impacts of climate change outweigh the cost of acting by a considerable margin. The business case is also closed. Study after study has shown that ‘high sustainability’ companies outperform ‘low sustainability’ companies across a wide range of financial indicators. So why isn’t the shift to sustainability already happening at pace? Our understanding of the issues is good, green technology is maturing fast and the risks from inaction are overwhelming. What’s stopping us? Well, I often joke that the biggest barrier to sustainability is only six inches wide – the space between our ears. As a society, we may be aware of the need to change, but we don’t yet have the will to actually change. One of the problems comes from the pious attitude of the green movement itself. We are told to feel guilty about our impact on the planet – effectively to be sorry for existing. It is implied that we must downshift to a lifestyle of communal yurt-dwelling, drumming groups and ‘mindfulness’. In other words sacrifice everything we hold dear from the jobs that give us financial security to guilty pleasures like slobbing in front of Strictly Come Dancing with a pizza on a Saturday night. Unsurprisingly the vast majority of people pass on the offer. My contribution to the sustainability practitioner’s toolbox is a way of squaring this circle. I call it ‘Green Jujitsu’ as it works to the strengths, interests and habits of the target audience in the same way that a jujitsu master sees their opponent’s strength, weight and momentum as an opportunity, not a threat. In other words we work with the prevailing culture instead of trying to change it wholesale. That might sound obvious but it is 180° different to how most sustainability practitioners approach the problem. When I visit organisations I see sustainability communications drenched in ‘green’ clichés – photos of planet Earth from space, hands cupping saplings, and starving polar bears. Jute bags are handed out containing energy efficient light bulbs and fair trade chocolate bars. Sweets are left on the keyboards of those who switch off their computers overnight. How any of these messages relate to people’s day jobs is never explained and any impact fades fast.

We work with the prevailing culture instead of trying to change it wholesale

I’ll illustrate the Green Jujitsu approach with the example of employee engagement at two of my blue chip clients. The first is a major engineering and technology company. Instead of presenting sustainability as a moral issue, I presented it in terms of an engineering problem. I designed some templates based on fishbone diagrams – a simple engineering tool – and challenged teams of employees to use them to generate solutions. Engineers love solving problems, so they rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in. We did this with over a thousand employees with more than 99% throwing themselves into the process, secured real buy-in, and got dozens of really good practical ideas out of the process as a bonus. Another client is a major media company where the prevailing culture is fast, high-impact and competitive. Through a workshop we identified the importance of using the same techniques to communicate sustainability internally that journalists use to communicate with the public – short punchy articles, human interest stories, high impact photography and infographics to communicate complex data. A year on, awareness of sustainability has surged and real change is happening on the ground. Green Jujitsu can also be applied at the organisational level, by working to its strengths such as the existing reporting structure. Again, this may sound obvious, but too many people try to effect change by creating networks of volunteer ‘champions’ who have absolutely no authority to change anything. By the time I am called into a company to help, the champions have lost all enthusiasm through frustration at not being able to deliver change. I don’t blame them. The only effective way to make the level of change required happen is to align responsibility with authority – giving appropriate sustainability targets to operations managers, procurement teams, product development managers and so on. Those people not only have the authority, but also the experience and knowledge to make pragmatic change in their sphere of influence. This alignment is particularly important in middle management – the place where environmental projects go to die. Middle managers are often overwhelmed with competing demands, so if something isn’t in their personal objectives it is very unlikely to get done. If you want sustainability to happen, middle management must be held accountable for delivering it. So how do you get started on Green Jujitsu? Firstly you must first drop all the green activist baggage you may have accumulated over the years. Then you must embrace humility and acknowledge that the views, fears and knowledge of your audience are more important than your own. Finally, you must look at the world from their perspective and identify the sweet spot where sustainability overlaps with that worldview – or preferably get the audience to identify it for you. That overlap gives you your starting point. By now, you are probably asking “but can you tell me how to make the laboratory sector sustainable?” Under the principles of Green Jujitsu, I refuse to attempt to answer that question for you. This is not a cop-out: you know your sector better than I ever will, so I will turn it back on you - “How would YOU make it sustainable?” I can help you develop that answer, but at the end of the day the ideas and the will to implement them must come from within. Over to you. Author Gareth Kane, CEO of Terra Infirma Gareth Kane joins celebrity scientists Quentin Cooper and Andrea Sella and comedian Robin Ince at the free-to-attend Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) conference, hosted at Lab Innovations on 5 & 6 November 2014 at Birmingham’s NEC. The other seminars will focus on a select group of overarching themes, including Horizon 2020 Funding, Energy, Environment, Fire Safety, Training and Legislation. To find out more about attending visit www.lab-innovations.com