After 20 years of consulting, I have dedicated a lot of time to developing action plans and reports. Like me, thousands of people have devoted countless hours of meetings, research, and writing to develop plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, implementing a sustainability strategy, etc. You know the reports with goals, specific recommendations, nice graphics,… Read more
Category: Strategy
Energy Smart Transportation Initiative
What does it take to make the transportation sector more energy efficient? The State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI) sponsored the Colorado Energy Smart Transportation Initiative to explore this question. New Directions Collaborative, in collaboration with Sonia Hamel of Hamel Environmental Consulting and Pat Field of the Consensus Building Institute, helped to facilitate a cross-agency collaborative… Read more
Five Tips for Care and Feeding of Networks
In a recent strategy project with a cross-sector network working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we explored what it takes to coordinate collective action and to capture the full potential of the interconnections within the network. Facilitating goal-oriented teams is fairly straightforward; however, even more value can be created for each participant and the network… Read more
Amplify What Works as a Frame in Strategic Planning
“Well, that meeting was not nearly as painful as I expected.” This “ringing endorsement” came from a participant in a strategic planning workshop we co-facilitated for the environmental department of a large corporation. Part of what made this meeting more engaging than most was a focus right at the start on identifying what was working… Read more
Networks: A Core Strategy for Sustainability
Consider these scenarios: Every hotel could adopt greener practices, such as saving water, reducing energy use, serving food from local farms in its restaurants – and many leaders already have. How do we get the rest of the hotels to learn from the leaders and adopt these innovations? Buildings are responsible for about one-third of… Read more