Hi, I'm John Byrd and this week, we're looking at identifying good first projects as you become a sustainability change agent. We've talked about energy savings, recycling and nudging people to conserve. Nudging often involves information. If people know what their neighbors or their coworkers are doing, they respond. People have better information, they make better decisions, so - including looking at energy labels during procurement decisions will help companies purchase more efficient equipment and so on. In this lecture, I want to pursue this information idea a little further. Instead of being a user of information, you can be a creator of information. Many small or even medium-sized companies and organizations do very little sustainability reporting. This is a real problem for a number of reasons. First, if you don't make some effort to tell people, no one knows what you're doing. In fact, a friend in the marketing area once told me that if you don't tell people what you're doing, it's as if you haven't done it at all. Second, sometimes it's very difficult to go back several years and reconstruct data. That means if you're not collecting and organizing information now, it could be lost forever or be so expensive to retrieve that it'll never get done. Third, if your company or organization is serious about sustainability, it needs to be able to understand what works and what doesn't work and which projects create benefits. You can only do this by having a baseline set of data against which to evaluate changes. Without a baseline, you don't know if your changes are helping or hurting or how much - that is, how much the magnitude of the change is. Only by collecting data, whether it's reported publicly or maintained internally, will you have some basis to measure change. You might say that publishing a sustainability report is way beyond anything you can envision yourself doing. That's a good realization. Doing a full-blown sustainability report is a huge undertaking, usually very expensive and requires lots of input and vetting across the company. So I'm not suggesting that you go from zero reporting to a 20 or a 30-page glossy report in a single step. Instead, I think you could find one or two key impact areas and collect data on those areas. The most important impact indicators will vary, depending on the industry that your company works in. There are some metrics that apply to almost all companies. For example, on the environmental side - carbon emissions, water consumption and waste to landfill. On the social side - worker safety records, diversity, family policies and community involvement and charity or - or giving are standard topics of interest. Later in the specialization, we'll talk in more detail about how to compute some of these metrics. How do you actually go about reporting? I think the easiest way is to just create a page on your company's website. It's low-cost, it's easy to edit and it can be expanded or shrunk, depending on how the company wants to move forward with sustainability. This gives people a chance to look, to comment and to make changes. It's important that the decision-makers are happy with the presentation. My experience is that it takes a couple of iterations to get things looking good, so having data on a website allows for that. When you begin to think about what metrics or items you might want to collect, you should think about what sort of projects you might be taking on in the future. As I mentioned earlier, to evaluate the effectiveness of a change, you need to establish a baseline against which to measure the impact of that change. Basically, it means having a before and an after measure. If you don't do this, you could have trouble later showing that the change mattered. Some information you can retrieve later, like utility bills and energy use, but things like the amount of paper used each month could be much more difficult to determine. So you might need to make a count; you know, mark in the ones you've counted, so you don't miscount. Remember that this first project is just a starting point. You need to establish yourself as someone who has credible ideas and who can get things done and can show the impact of the project or the plan. To make a second request, it's mandatory to show that your first plan worked as you said it would. You can only do this with good record-keeping; so think about this beforehand. Find the person or the people who have access to the appropriate information and make sure they're willing to help. You need to establish a baseline and measure the impact of your sustainability idea. The other thing you need to think about is how you're gonna share the results. But I just suggested putting the results on company's website - isn't that all there is to it? No. Remember, what your goal is, is you're trying to establish yourself as a person who's interested in sustainability, can get things done and presumably wants to do more. I've already mentioned elsewhere in the class and Ken is going to develop this with a lot more detail, that you need allies and advocates and supporters. The absolute best way to encourage people to work with you is to be able to share credit with them. Is there a company newsletter where you can list the names of everyone involved in the proposal and its results? Can you post a flyer thanking people and telling them what they've accomplished? Be sure to share credit. You need allies to help implement your next idea and the idea after that. Also, other people have ideas that they want to have considered and carried out. Be willing to be their ally and use your growing expertise to help them be successful. When there's a number of people all moving the same direction, so much more can get done. It's like that old saying, "Many hands make light work." Having a team almost always produces a much better result. Also, it's just fun to work with people. We've given you a few suggestions about where to look for good first projects. Once you've established- once you've established yourself as a reliable person who gets things done, you can move on to more interesting and higher impact projects. We'll introduce those tools in the next couple of classes of the specialization. Thanks.
