The Importance of community engagement and alignment to reaching decarbonization goals
An interview with Marie Cresswell, President of TCI and Co-founder of Climate Change Leaders and Wayne Clancy, CEO, MindSuite Metrics.
In the face of the escalating climate crisis, engaging stakeholders is crucial to driving meaningful change. However, effective engagement requires more than just raising awareness; it demands the use of data-driven strategies that resonate with diverse stakeholders.
Can you tell us about the work that you do with MindSuite Metrics to engage and foster community engagement and alignment?
The MindSuite Metrics system measures the difference between how important something is and how well it’s working. This emphasizes the need to break down silos and political divisions and engage with community members to create ownership and psychological buy-in for positive outcomes in a collaborative way.
There is a need to break through cognitive conditioning and political ideation to create new ideas and thoughts around sustainability, and the importance of ongoing engagement and communication to maintain alignment and ownership.
Originally it was designed and set up as a unique algorithm and a way to predict customer experience. Because my background was in marketing. And a lot of people think, because I own a tech company that’s got a human analytics platform that I have a technical or analytical background but I don’t.
Applying hard numbers to soft issues is important for organizations and people who are driven by numbers. Sometimes your greatest strength is your greatest weakness you see things differently. But then you work with others who see it differently, you can definitely make a difference, together. You compliment each other. You can approach things from a common thinking point of view with alignment around an outcome. One of the greatest things about the word alignment is it doesn’t necessarily mean agreement it means a common vision or end goal.
For example, I am a co-founder of Gray2Green and I’ve told people about that work, and at Gray2Green, we would say that we want to make the world a greener and cleaner place for all. People kind of zone out, and they don’t want to be a part of it. But about eight months ago, I started shifting that a little bit. And I said, I want to just make sure the world is a better place for our children and our grandchildren. That resonates with most people as we are all aligned around that. We may not agree on how to get there, due to varying opinions about climate change and the beliefs in possible conspiracy theories. But the neat thing about it is that we’re aligned around a healthy common outcome for our children and our grandchildren.
How does MindSuite Metrics initiate change with organizations?
Our company uses a powerful tool that combines cognitive science and data analytics that can help bridge the gap between climate action and stakeholder engagement. By leveraging this innovative approach, organizations can foster a deeper understanding, collaboration, alignment and commitment towards combating climate change. MindSuite Metrics can foster collaboration among stakeholders by encouraging participation and co-creation. By involving stakeholders in the decision-making process, organizations can build trust, consensus, and a sense of ownership. This collaborative approach ensures that climate action initiatives align with stakeholder needs and expectations, increasing the likelihood of successful implementation and long-term commitment.
We basically measure the difference between how important something is and how well it’s working. And we call it the expectation gap index, and it’s a simple index, and because most research is: “Are you satisfied? Is this working? What’s important to you?” And you may ask those questions, but a lot of times you can be doing a great job, but it’s not important to people. So why bother? And what we’re finding is regionally groups are very different. The way people communicate and think in New York is very different than Toronto, Atlanta or Phoenix or wherever it happens to be. It doesn’t make them right or wrong, it makes them different.
We’ve done many projects in New York, where people are absolutely focused on cleaning up our environment and creating a better environment going forward. They love the idea and they’re all about it. However, they’re often not thought of that way, because of the sort of aggressive nature of the way they communicate. It’s all based upon being designed and built by the people who live/function in the area. This community/geographic uniqueness in method of communication is very fascinating to me.
We started in the customer experience side, and then we added models around organizational culture, and how different groups of people work together impacting both the customer experience and their own team work experience. For the first 15 years, it was very designed around organizational measurements, whether it be customer experience, supply chain optimization, or organizational culture in the way people communicate, which were used in mergers and acquisitions to try and fit companies together and understand the cultural components. Not just the financial components, because a lot of times companies buy a company and then integrate it into the other one, but the cultures are so different that everything breaks down, but they don’t look at the human side, they tend to look at the financial and operating components.
When I started to do some work in communities, I was fascinated with the whole culture around different communities and how they interacted with each other. We’ve done some really, really fascinating projects helping different community members actually work together on things. A huge passion of mine is sustainability and taking account of our components and our responsibility in this area, and then getting things moving forward. But one of the big things about sustainability, when it comes to all of the different areas we’re finding is that there isn’t alignment, there is alignment around a better future, there’s disagreement on how to get there.
People get stuck in the disagreement side without actually being open enough to look at it. Some think that man isn’t causing climate change while others disagree and think we are. I often use the example, ‘if a meteor was flying towards the Earth, and it was going to wipe us out, we would do everything in our power to stop it from hitting the Earth, even though we didn’t send it’. So, whether we started it or not, is irrelevant. Here it is 73 Fahrenheit, or 24 Celsius in Toronto. That’s insane for literally the end of October. And it’s going to be a record today. The weather is changing, which is happening everywhere. So, let’s embrace the fact that things are changing, and what is it we can do to minimize damage and optimize where we’re going? And a big part of that is creating healthier environments.
Can you drill down a little more about how to create engagement and alignment using the Climate Change Leaders (CCL) Check-up example? Where do you start?
There’re so many different things that humans are involved with. Usually the first step is determining what your objectives are. But now a really critical step is getting the different groups of people aligned around a better outcome, like Climate Change Leadership. Getting people engaged in it, whether they agree on what some of the different elements is one thing, but really focusing on the desired outcome is crucial. One of the biggest drivers is political division. And it’s happening in the States in a massive way right now and certainly becoming more previlant here in Canada.
So, some of the passion in the research work we’ve done is getting community feedback and engagement on particular elements and then being able to go back and show them that they actually agree on most of the same things. Some of the language may be a little bit different, but the outcomes we have agreement on. We don’t ask them to answer a survey, we ask them to help co-create a better future together. You give information, and then we share it back. So, it becomes a conversation. We call it community possibilities – whereby we do a community check-up to bring our thoughts and ideas together. In the case of Climate Change Leaders, we did a CCL Alignment Check-up with school boards in Ontario before launching Climate Change Leaders, a learning partnership with Mohawk College and ten school districts focused on reaching net zero in school buildings, in February 2020.
Some of the steps involved were: developing a baseline of current stakeholder knowledge and engagement beginning with a senior team Climate Change Leaders Possibilities Alignment Checkup. The leadership team participated in a problem identification and a leadership action/implementation plan (dashboards and reports on priorities, required action, and measures. The prework helped support shaping the priorities of future projects and aligned school board stakeholders in creating their plans. Ongoing weekly check-ups with the full team on identified action Metrics and a 60-day leadership/teamwork session to address changes and/or challenges. The work was interrupted by the pandemic as priorities shifted to health and wellness, however, some of the good is just now being re-engaged.
Can you expand on the Community Possibilities approach?
Everyone in a community wears a number of hats: they’re a customer, a voter, they’re also an employee or potential employee, etcetera. And it’s interesting, with the focus on the people who live in a particular area, and then be able to share that back out with the different types of organizations and government to help them understand how aligned they are around certain things. This approach has proven to be a much better starting point than simply launching a program that dictates behaviour and prescribes solutions that may or may not resonate with stakeholders.
So really, this is a critical opportunity, in getting people engaged in the whole process and making wholesale change. The amount of time and energy that’s wasted, in arguing about this stuff is stupid, if you take that energy and put it into positive outcomes, it’s amazing — what could actually come out of this whole thing. And sustainability, climate change, sustainability and other different words mean different things to different people.
We have accelerated the science, as humans just by being born as world population reaches over 8 billion people. What do we need to do to do to minimize and shift our thinking to create a sustainable future for all? How do we get humans aligned around this as well as breakthrough the cognitive divisive conditioning. Then and only then people start to get interested and understand how they can help contribute to a brighter future. And I think that’s where some of the bigger opportunities are.
I like what you mentioned about co-creating the future. They will have better buy-in based on the end result.
Yes, and they have some ownership in the outcomes, because they were part of creating it. And that’s why we need to create more psychological ownership for people in the outcomes.
Can you share a personal story that resonates with you and the work that you?
One of the successful projects I worked on that focused on getting people more aligned, included a community in Scottsdale that built higher buildings to create a more sustainable environment and attract younger people. Students would learn and leave for the most part. It was interesting, the way that kind of played itself out. And when we did our research, we talked to people and some of the conclusions were that they younger people didn’t want to go buy a big house. When they came back after graduation, what they wanted was the community that was created. For a while, they wanted to live in condos close to their community because they wanted to be a part of something that was close, accessible and wasn’t taking away from the environment, the way million homes are versus people living within environments that were more sustainable buildings.
Our company also helped the City of Toronto reimagine homelessness by changing the name of shelters to transition houses to reduce negative connotations. We noticed a rise in the community culture and humanity scores in Toronto, which were lower than their organizational scores. In both cases, it was the subtle changes to the positioning that made a difference which were discovered through the Community Possibilities Check-up.
What are some of the barriers to change?
The barriers to change as it relates to sustainability there is a lack of consistency in measurement. Price is another barrier as the corporate world’s perception of sustainability as an expense, rather than an investment, and the importance of building a business case for sustainability. It is important through our work that we reveal the interrelation between different factors such as sustainability, health, and healthcare, and the need to look at greater understanding and integration. The fourth barrier to change is the need for government support in this area and the misunderstanding around sustainability as a word and its impact on decision-making. emphasizing the importance of creating excitement and ownership in people to get them involved in sustainability initiatives.
Sounds like you’re talking about culture, are they culture ready?
Oh, absolutely. And we refer to it as a culture of sustainability. And sustainability is much broader than having green homes and breathable air. There’s a psychological blend in true sustainability. There are many, many different elements that fit into sustainability as a broader topic. And getting people on to that. I mean, that’s what humans have been fairly good at historically. Now more than ever we need to raise the bar, continue to grow and protect the planet.
So, algorithms certainly benefit a lot of the work you do, and many others who work in this field, right?
If you can, if you can apply hard numbers to soft issues, it helps motivate leadership who are very numbers-focused organizationally. I had that conversation with the CEO about 12 years ago and I said to him: So, do you measure your financial outcomes every 12 or 18 months? He said are you crazy I look at those every day. Okay I then asked do you look at your operating outcomes every 12 or 18 months, he said no I look at them every week. Okay. And that’s how you manage your business’s finances and operations. It’s a pretty wobbly two-legged stool. What’s your most important asset? Oh, my people of course! Oh so you look at that every 12 or 18 months with the annual culture or engagement study? And it’s, yeah, you got me because they don’t think about it because humans are the stabilizing third leg of the stool, as we like to put it, which is part of the reason why we started bringing in the human measurement piece in because we can help stabilize the other two parts.
You can do an annual engagement study and two weeks from now or a month from now that data is old, because humans change fairly significantly and quickly, the same way financial and operating numbers do. So, part of our mission is to help bring more measurement to the table, more regularly. And we’re putting a bit of science together with the art. Our term for AI, as is not artificial intelligence but augmented intelligence. How do we get the humans and the technology aligned? And so, we’re working together, and we’re augmenting the human experience and not replacing it.
I like that augmenting versus replacing. Can you share a few stories of the work that you’re doing?
We did a project to work with them. And then I was introduced to a guy who was running a Humanities initiative, to make the world a better place. And I met him in the basement of the building where he works.. And he’s telling me about the project and everything. And I said, why are you in the basement, this is such an important project. He says, well, because you can’t measure humanity, it’s only the disciplines you can measure that get funding, right? And that one hit me like, whoa, and I literally left there and looked at Socrates and Aristotle and John King, my author, buddy who coautherd, Tribal Leadership, the #1 bestseller, and a whole bunch of other people and I isolated 14 constructs of humanity and put those into our system. And started to measure that and compare that to other types of outcomes. And, and it wasn’t who it was. It was really simple stuff, but it was how people interacted with each other and how they were supportive and helpful to each other, on where they were going and things and some of the early research is showing that the higher the humanity numbers, the more money the company made. We had a revelation that some of the softer areas are critical for us and our future and bringing them together and being able to create some measurements would be helpful for organizations by ‘creating a business case for humanity’. Now we have expanded and are excited about also creating a business case for sustainability, and how they fit together because it’s the humans that need to get into that and treat each other better. We can actually get more aligned around a sustainable outcome and better future for our children and our grandchildren.
Any other stories that stand out for you?
Oh, yes, we, we did a project with City of Toronto and help them to reimagine homelessness. And one of the biggest reasons we, we used our platform for that, and we went out and we talked to a large number of the citizens in the city. And one of the things that we learned, it was a really simple thing, actually, that there were there was an issue with having a shelter in your area, the shelter is a very negative connotation, right. And the humanity side of it was really part of it. So, we ended up working with that. We used the platform and but we ran some focus groups with both citizens and homeless people as we were putting it all together And one of the simple things that came out of that was that they need to change the name, that there was a trigger when with the word shelter, and if you’ll notice down here in the city of Toronto, there aren’t many buildings that are called ‘a shelter’.
They’re called Transition houses and, and different things like that. In the city right now, I’m not aware of any that are still called a Shelter. Right. And then, but there isn’t the pushback from the from the communities if there’s a transition house, in their community, whereas if there’s a shelter, it’s not a good thing. So, it was it was interesting. But the other part of that research it was fascinating to me was the community culture in the community humanity scores because Toronto is an amazing city. We measured the community culture as well as we do the corporate culture. And the community culture is a lot of the things are very similar. Like, you know, we work we respond well, when things don’t work out as planned in our company, in our community, you know, those types of things. It was fascinating that the community culture or the community, humanity scores were actually lower than organizational scores, which for city like Toronto blew me away.
Now, they’re in Toronto, they’re still much higher than most other cities. But they’re pretty well, all cities that we’ve done this work in. It was fascinating to me to see that and it got me thinking about it, what used to be our ‘Safe Place’ was our communities now our ‘safer place’ is our workplace, and then we go back to our community.
And so many people are online and doing those types of things, and not necessarily connecting with people within their community, that we’re having some of that division there as well. And if we’re going to create truly sustainable communities, we need the people within the communities interacting with each other. As we move forward, we need that kind of interaction as humans because humans need to be very connected that way.
That certainly makes sense, even when you look at schools communities.
So, what’s next for you on your journey?
Yes, we’re separating our business platform and tools and models for organizations, not just business, but organizations of every type. And we’re also going to be putting a lot more effort into tying together the whole community component which includes humanity, culture, and sustainability. We can help engage community partnerships where there is real ownership, and organizational and government support. So that’s kind of the mission we are on where we’re going. And capturing community possibilities people are intrigued to discuss ‘what’s possible’ for us.
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