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  • Eliminate the what?

    By G. Rendell May 7, 2008 5:47 pm

    My job just got a lot harder. At least, if it didn't, I'm missing something significant.

    Part of what I'm charged with doing is to raise awareness of sustainability issues on campus. Among students, staff, faculty, pretty much everybody. But I just got told that I can't convey any bad news. Not just that I can't conduct intense existentialistic doom and gloom sessions which leave everyone in attendance wondering only which method of suicide is most ecologically responsible. Not just that I can't present compendia of information where the bad outweighs the good. I'm instructed that I can't, in my awareness efforts on campus, convey any single datum which is, in and of itself, bad news. Greenback wants to stay positive, here. We've got our recruitment and development efforts to consider. No news is good news, and bad news is no news, hence bad news is good news and I better make sure I present it that way!

    Now, every marketing effort I've ever been in has focused on solving customer problems. If we could get (or facilitate) a clear problem definition from the customer, it made selling whatever solution we had on tap that much easier.

    I've been looking at sustainability in similar terms. In order to sell, or facilitate, or encourage a set of sustainability solutions, I've been focusing on clarifying and communicating a set of sustainability problems which pertain to Greenback (some of them, admittedly, only indirectly). Solutions (or steps toward solutions) too, but problems first. Now I'm told that I have to sell solutions for which there are no clearly defined problems. Kind of like selling the cure for which there is no disease!

    Or am I missing something, here?

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Comments on Eliminate the what?

  • read Breakthrough
  • Posted by PhD and an environmentalist on May 8, 2008 at 8:45am EDT

  • You might want to read the book Breakthrough, it describes how to move away from deficit thinking and towards the politics of possibility. I'm on my second read of it...

  • Futerra
  • Posted by Lindsay , Sustainability go-to on May 8, 2008 at 9:15am EDT

  • I recently attended a Masterclass with Lucy Shea of Futerra Sustainability Communications. The presentation was excellent and dealt with the impossible task that you (and many of us) have been given.

    http://www.futerra.co.uk/

  • two audiences
  • Posted by JB on May 9, 2008 at 9:15am EDT

  • I've come to view this contradiction in terms of two audiences: internal and external. Internally we spur on action by framing a situation as a sustainability issue that needs to (and can) be resolved. Externally, we celebrate even the smallest victories as tremendous accomplishments. Of course a little mix of both is sometimes needed.

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