Accelerate your climate work with facilitation
Are you worried about how your organization is addressing climate change? If so, your concerns might be triggered by these kinds of issues:
supplies drying up due to changing weather or regulatory action
land values changing, such as more land being sought for wine-making in England, other land becoming uninsurable
physical risks emerging, such as theft of bee colonies (valuable pollinators) or increased storm water pressure on dams
legal risks arising, such as corporate board members having a duty to reduce and manage nature-related risks
Reporting and disclosure guidelines forcing you to confront behaviour previously hidden from public view
Whatever sparks your concern, you soon see the need for widespread collaboration, where a third party facilitator can help. Without facilitation, you’re in danger of the unbearable heaviness of meeting clutter: too many meetings without enough focus. (Read more about meeting clutter and facilitating your way out of it in this post and in this post, which points out that scheduling more meetings hasn’t led to better results because ‘insufficient number of meetings’ is usually not the root cause of project chaos and indecision.)
Facilitation for new thinking on climate
Climate work requires innovative thinking, often creating new linkages among disparate areas of work. You’ll need to connect people and ways of working from across different parts of the organization.
For example, climate strategies will try to avoid costs or capture gains associated with, to name a few:
environmental and human health
resilience of infrastructure and materials
new financial mechanisms (such as carbon markets)
frameworks and tools for tracking and reporting emissions
Beginning your climate journey with a few facilitated sessions provides both a safe space to begin discussions, and techniques that ensure full participation (to avoid certain people or groups dominating), so key ideas and learning aren’t missed.
New relationships facilitated for climate work
Climate work is often tied up in a chain of activity that extends outside your organization. You’ll engage stakeholders in new ways. Consider a hotel chain. Its carbon emissions are tied into the global tourist industry including travel, food, and shopping. Hotels will have to adapt to extreme weather as disappearing snow affects skiing or coastal storms affect beach-going.
Whatever your business, you’ll find that different pieces of knowledge exist across the wider landscape in which you operate. A skilled facilitator can help you draw out the relevant knowledge and ideas in a time-efficient way. Facilitation can also create a neutral ground for interacting with the third sector and regulators, to elevate partnerships to new levels.
Updating and adopting new practices
Climate work also requires new practices and new ways of doing things. Even if best practices and guidelines exist, you’ll have to adapt them to your specific operations.
You’ll need to tap into the creativity of your staff and maybe even your external stakeholders (customers, competitors, suppliers). For example, a property company may collaborate with peers who also own historic properties that struggle to meet strict new energy efficiency standards.
In all these cases the real value of facilitation can be uncovering innovative ideas by using structured approaches. These approaches sometimes feel uncomfortable without the right introductory work. And, there’s also 100% participation, so that new practices don’t start out half-baked. For example, you don’t want to end up with your advertisements banned because of false environmental claims, like Equinor, AirFrance, and Lufthansa recently did, or your board members in court because they didn’t understand or mange real climate risks.
Facilitated sessions also give people the time and permission to delve into an area and get new perspectives on the challenges. In these spaces people can start to see the business model in a new light. Ultimately, a facilitated session focused on climate work engizes people by putting them on the path to making a difference. It can help you attract and retain staff members.
Example facilitated approaches
How would a facilitator get started with you on climate work? A big value-add from a facilitator will be in designing your interactive sessions to get the most out of the time, working faster than you could through regular meetings. The process starts with scoping the session (learn more about scoping).
Once a session is scoped, let’s imagine how a facilitator might help organizations at two different stages of the journey, starting out and more advanced.
Just getting started
If you’re just starting climate work, a facilitated sessions can help you map out the net zero space and your place in it. The session might draw upon exercises that help you:
Explore your sector’s climate goals and reporting frameworks
Map stakeholders – who’s involved internally and externally
Examine drivers from different contexts such as technology, economics, policy and the environment– what are the implications for your organization?
Decide and prioritize next steps
The result could be a road map for your group, your company or your division for how you’ll build up climate work including who will be more heavily involved (internal and external stakeholders) and the issue areas to tackle.
More advanced
If your climate journey is under way, facilitated sessions might help you come up with specific solutions to test. The process could include:
For one of your climate challenges, such as ‘our energy use in transport,’ collect in people’s thoughts on what’s working in reducing energy use and what needs improvement. People might suggest things like business air travel, deliveries, commuting, construction etc.
choose one of the areas (e.g. by voting, or through an appointed ‘decider’) to be the focus of the rest of the session and turn it into a ‘how might we?’ (find out more about ‘how might we’ questions in this post)
create solutions. Give people time and structure to explore ideas, both individually and together. Identify the higher rated solutions using, for example, an impact-effort matrix. (Get sources for exercises on idea generation in this post)
commit to testing the highest rated solution(s) by creating storyboards that outline how the experiments will work and who will be involved. (Learn about storyboards in this post.)
(Learn more about the collect, choose, create, commit framework, also known as ‘design thinking’ in this post.)
The result of this session is a preliminary plan(s), in the form of a storyboard, to test solutions by running one or more experiments. Examples of these kinds of experiments:
UPS shipping company used a small experiment in Hamburg in 2012 to test bicycle deliveries in cities, which led to a global network of 30 innovative urban logistics projects including EVs, bikes and drones.
A hotel in London trialled switch-off of lobby underfloor heating, low energy lighting in meeting rooms, and switch-off of guest room heating from 9am to 6pm, which led to large savings, without guest disruption, within a month.
How could your organization use facilitated sessions to speed up your work on addressing climate change?
