A Sprint through Social Justice

This conversation takes us to the intersections of the environmental, social, and economic elements of sustainability through the lens of equity and fairness. We chat about access to resources, who is hit hardest by pollution and climate change (spoiler alert: it isn’t those causing them) and we think about how to ensure everyone is heard.

We discuss resilience, beyond the stoic sense and into the realms of what it means to be thriving as individuals and communities and creating the conditions for sustainability.

The SDGs make a final appearance and Jenny talks about writing to Boris Johnson during lockdown (she’s still waiting for a response) as we consider what happens when decisions are made without the right stakeholders.

Our practical suggestions for bringing social justice into our approaches include being ‘the voice’ and the importance of having challenging conversations.

This is our final Sustainability Sprint of this first series (well done if you have made it through them all!) but we are already planning series 2 when we’ll be bringing some others into our chats.

We are sharing our conversations about sustainability to help you start your own. 

The Women in Sustainability report that we mention can be found here.

A Sprint through Fabulous Failure

If innovation is essential to sustainability, then we need to consider our relationship to failure because we can’t expect to do new things without making some mistakes along the way.

It was important to us to share this conversation about re-framing how we think about failure and how we intentionally make space for it in our sustainability practice.

We talk about failing with intention, how we learn from failure and getting comfortable with how it makes us feel. We talk about how fear of failure might stop us from pushing boundaries and trying new things.

We also consider how the dynamic, fast-changing sustainability landscape of sustainability can make measuring absolute success a real challenge and how measuring learning can help us think differently about progress and impact.

As always, we share some practical ways to create space for failure and innovation both informally and formally.

We also talk about the correct pronunciation of the word scone and the power of the word yet.

We are sharing our conversations about sustainability to help you start your own. 

A Sprint through Travelling Hopefully

This conversation reminds us about the importance of hope in relation to sustainability. We chat about how we use hope to avoid despair and burnout when we’re trying to tackle massive global challenges.

We talk about the importance of finding ways to help us keep going. Sheri-Leigh attempts ‘running chat’ as we discuss the sustainability cliché ‘the journey’ but quickly retreats to the safer territory of gardening.

There is a focus on using a positive outlook to bring others along for the ride and we consider whether you can practise optimism. We chat about the practical ways hope and optimism enable us to explore choices with the people and teams we are working with and how important it is to believe you can succeed when you are trying something new.

We also share a couple of things that keep us hopeful.

We are sharing our conversations about sustainability to help you start your own. 

The ’Dancing Nut’ video we mention can be found here.

A Sprint through Storytelling

We loved recording this chat! We talked about how hard-wired humans are to hear and tell stories and how stories are used to help us make sense of the world. We shared the ways we use stories as part of our own work, to make connections, fast-track understanding and encourage engagement.

The SDGs get another honourable mention, as we talk about using them as a way of encouraging teams to share their personal and team experiences.

We also consider how stories can help us to explain what hasn’t gone so well, or what we’ve learned, as well as simply creating impact reports. The role of ‘trusted messengers’ also gets an airing, as does using story to reinforce narrative (we use it to reminisce about our mis-spent youth).

As ever, we pose some questions designed to connect to practice: have you got a good story? Are you telling it effectively? Do you link it to engagement and impact or is it in the territory of ‘so what’?

We don’t think you would be here if you didn’t like a story, what are you waiting for?

We are sharing our conversations about sustainability to help you start your own. 

A Sprint through Impact and Measurement

As we chat around impact and measurement in this Sprint and we find ourselves discussing honesty, confidence and whether we’ve ever had ‘the right amount’ of data for reporting (spoiler alert: we haven’t!). 

Jenny reminds us to revisit materiality when we’re thinking about measurement and impact and Sheri-Leigh shares a couple of pitfalls to avoid when deciding what to measure. As ever, we chat about the complexity, messiness, and the dynamic nature of measuring impact and what that means for practitioners.

Sustainability is a relatively new accounting system and that brings its own set of challenges; there is a lack of consistency and a lot of change in the reporting landscape. We consider how to manage that when looking at the plethora of reporting options and deciding which is the best fit for your organisation.

We are never far from some practicalities. How can you report progress when you have incomplete (or entirely absent) datasets? What happens if you can’t expect to see results from your efforts for many years but you have an annual report to produce? 

We share our thoughts around how to use data to supplement a narrative, something we can use to deepen understanding and engagement, rather than simply being a measure. 

If you are getting to grips with measuring your impact, it might be worth a listen.

We are sharing our conversations about sustainability to help you start your own. 

A Sprint through Operationalising Strategy

Our conversations in this podcast are about embedding sustainability. How we build sustainability into the policy, process and practice of an organisation or team. Some of the ways we can make sure 'business as usual' includes sustainability.

We're exploring how we trace the threads of sustainability from strategic ambition out into the wider organisation. How are they woven into departmental plans and activities and what sustainability action looks like in practice (especially if it isn't badged as such). 

We talk about how to support the idea that sustainability is something that is everyone's job. We share some thoughts around where we start with when we're operationalising sustainability strategy and how uncomfortable we make people when we're honest about not having all the answers.

We link to some of the other Sustainability Sprints and chat about the risk and opportunity of single issue strategic ambitions (we're looking at you Carbon) and reminisce about the days sustainability was harder to spot in strategy documents. 

We consider how to create space for creativity in strategies and make sure we don't inadvertently make sustainability a tick-box exercise by building it into organisational processes.

We are sharing our conversations about sustainability to help you start your own. 

A Sprint through Engagement

This podcast is a deep but pacy dive into sustainability engagement. We chat about what we think ‘engagement’ really means in the context of sustainability and how to do it in ways that are impactful.

We consider how engagement has changed over recent years and how sustainability teams can take advantage of a much more knowledgeable general population. How we can connect people to action much more quickly if we don’t need to explain what sustainability is.

Sheri-Leigh shares a few terms that aren’t found in sustainability textbooks (though perhaps they should be!) and Jenny explores the idea of ‘hidden leadership’. 

As ever, we share some of our top tips for targeting engagement and making it attractive (or boring) and we highlight a few pitfalls you might want to avoid. There is some chat about practicalities including good (and bad) times to engage people, how to provide something tangible for people to engage with and about the horror of enforced engagement activities.

If you want to encourage people to seek out opportunities to engage with sustainability and understand how engagement should align with ambitions and targets, to avoid it might be worth a listen. 

We are sharing our conversations about sustainability to help you start your own. 

A Sprint through Materiality 

We get a bit more into the nitty gritty in this podcast with a conversation around how we help teams and organisations decide what is important, in terms of their approach to sustainability. 

As always, we’re keen to cut through the complexity so share some practical ways to prioritise and discuss how this can really help reduce overwhelm (as well as supporting busy, under-resourced sustainability teams).

We chat about the involvement of judgement (or ‘common-sense’) in a materiality exercise and how engaging with stakeholders can ensure you don’t miss anything. We also share some tips to prepare your stakeholders for action and delivery of your sustainability ambitions.

There is no cake chat in this podcast (materiality is a very serious business) but we do bring materiality to a very human level, exploring connections between organisational ambition and team or individual action.

Have a listen.

We are sharing our conversations about sustainability to help you start your own. 

Our very first Sustainability Sprint! 

A Sprint through The Basics 

In our very first podcast we talk about how we introduce people to basic concepts of sustainability. We chat about what we think 'the basics' are and share some practical ways to cut through the complexity. 

We share some of the tools we use as conversation starters, things we know help people understand what sustainability is and, importantly, why it matters. 

We start to discuss the importance of having a framework for understanding sustainability and why we think connecting with individuals on a human level is so important. 

We also talk about cake (something we end up talking about a lot in these podcasts!). 

There is also chance for us to introduce some of the topics that have their own Sustainability Sprint such as storytelling and the importance of narrative for sustainability and how vital it is to be hopeful. 

We are sharing our conversations about sustainability to help you start your own. 

Some of the resources we mention in this episode can be found below: 

Producer Milly told us we needed to do a little intro so our audience knew which voice belonged to which human and why we were recording a podcast together. 

About 6 minutes in we (sort of) get to the point. 

Our conversation includes snack chat, the Women in Sustainability network and getting so lost in conversation we forgot to collect children from School. 

Listen to this version if you want to know who we are as humans!