Dear Sir/Madam

July 30, 2010 – 3:28 pm

I reacted badly this week when, in response to a tender document I’d prepared, I received an email saying “Thank you for your submission, but I regret to inform you that you have been unsuccessful in your application…”  It wasn’t the No that upset me - it’s an occupational hazard of competitive tendering, after all, and even some of my favourite clients occasionally have to tell me that they didn’t like my proposal - but the email began “Dear Sir/Madame” [sic].

Now I know that research managers are busy people, and selecting the winning proposal from a few dozen tender documents is difficult and risky and time-consuming.  But to send a mass rejection email using blind carbon copy seems to me to display a basic lack of civility.  Every recipient of that email had tried hard to write a proposal to win a piece of work to look at the low carbon economy; every one of them had thought hard about the issues and the methodology and the timetable and the pricing and so on; and every one of them had put in many hours of effort to try to win the contract.

And the individual with the responsibility of telling all these people that they had been unsuccessful couldn’t even be bothered to spend half an hour writing ‘Dear Mr Fell’ or ‘Dear Ms Jones’ or ‘Dear Dr Mudgal’.

Perhaps I am not displaying the right attitude of ‘customer service’ here.  Perhaps, if the customer is always right, they have the right to dismiss me with a casual ‘Sir/Madame’.  Perhaps I should just take it on the chin, get back in my place and work even harder to win the customer’s business next time.

Er, no.  Tackling climate change, devising the low carbon economy and running twenty first century enterprises requires collaboration, partnership, engagement, trust, mutual respect. Yes, money needs to change hands (there’ll always be a client and a provider) but the best work comes from sensible, grown up working relationships in which both sides learn and contribute.  This single, thoughtless act of disregard - ‘Dear Sir/Madame’ - tells me clearly that such a mature relationship with this particular organisation wouyld be impossible.  We shall never submit a proposal to them again.

Maybe I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face (it’s something I’ve been accused of before), but I’d rather have a little less money than work with someone that holds me in such low regard.

By dfell | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Time to buy the Sustainable Development Commission?

July 22, 2010 – 5:23 pm

News that the government has decided to withdraw its funding for the Sustainable Development Commission is prompting comment in a number of locations.  I particularly enjoyed George Monbiot’s observation that the £1.9mn being saved is no more than ‘a rounding error’ on the Trident missile invoice.

Having once been a Commissioner on the London Sustainable Development Commission, I have some sympathy for an entity such as the SDC.  It exists, in large part, to act as a ‘critical friend’ to government, which can sometimes make life difficult.  Speaking truth to power is never easy, and if you wanted to ask, for example, whether prosperity is necessarily the same thing as economic growth, you’d better be ready to have lots of arguments about the presence or absence of a question mark in the title of your report.

You need also to strike an appropriate balance between speaking out and speaking in.  The SDC hardly has a high public profile, so it would be easy to presume that it doesn’t do very much and, on the back of that, conclude it can easily be abolished.  But what if its work behind the scenes is actually making a subtle but vital difference? What if the multiplier effect of its influence is considerable?

Things start to get really interesting when one notes the distinction between ‘abolish’ and ‘withdraw funding from’.  Because, unlike many quangoes, the Sustainable Development Commission is actually a company (company no. 06798740, official name “The Sustainable Development Commission Limited”, registered office 55 Whitehall, London SW1A 2EY).  The SDC, just like any other company, could regard this announcement from the government as merely the loss of its biggest client.

As any of you with experience of working in the private sector will know, the loss of your biggest client is hardly comfortable, but it doesn’t automatically mean your business goes under.  In fact, if you are good at business, you spot the difficulty your biggest client is in and you begin to make alternative arrangements: you foster new clients, or new areas of work.  When the proverbial hits the fan, you bust a gut to bring in the new clients and the new work, because you believe in your company, you believe in whatever it is you are doing and you want to carry on doing it.

Do the Commissioners want to carry on? Are they ready with their Plan B, their discussions with the devolved authorities, with the Department of Health, with the charitable foundations and philanthropists and big businesses who think that something like the SDC is a Good Thing? Sadly, on the basis of their response to Defra’s decision -  – it would appear not.

OK, here’s an alternative: what if we – we the wider community of researchers and activists and academics and communities with an interest or a stake in sustainability – what if we thought that the SDC was a Good Thing?

Maybe we could buy it.

In fact, isn’t that what the Big Society is all about?  Freely associating activist citizens running the services that have accreted over the decades to the state?  We could each chip in a modest amount, and then we’d have our very own Sustainable Development Commission!

So, come on, who’s in? Put me down for a tenner.

By dfell | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

Marketing to the marketers will be key for green claims guidance

July 22, 2010 – 3:12 pm

Our research for Defra on the prevalence and content of green claims was published recently. The study – along with our work on consumer understanding of green terms – is feeding into a revision of Defra’s green claims guidance for marketers, the consultation for which closed in June.

While researching a possible follow up story, one journalist picked up on our finding that as the recession tightened between mid 2007 and late 2008, the incidence of green claims almost halved (see below). He asked whether, this being the case, there was any need for Defra to revise its green claims guidance at all. In a way, you can see where he was coming from. The fall in green claims was not matched by a commensurate fall in claims overall, and even at their peak, green claims made up just over 1% of all adverts, a far smaller proportion than commonly perceived by industry experts.

Number of green claims over time (Chart prepared for Defra by Brook Lyndhurst and Icaro Consulting, derived from Xtreme data)

But there is, of course, much more to this than plain percentages. The belief within the marketing sector that green claims are more prevalent is telling in and of itself – flogging mainstream brands on their environmental credentials is a fairly new phenomenon for consumers and industry alike, and people take notice, even if such claims are relatively few in number. When we run consumer-facing discussion groups about green marketing, participants are able to reel off two or three green ads they’ve seen with barely a pause for breath.

Our research also highlighted some persistent bad practices in the deployment of green claims. Two in every five adverts we reviewed contained no qualification to support a general claim (e.g. ‘environmentally-friendly’ or ‘green’), although this figure also includes public sector campaign ads.  Almost 20% of the green claims we reviewed used language that implied a product or service was somehow greener than another, without specifying the basis for the comparison, or even what the product was being compared with.

The short answer to the reporter’s enquiry, then, is yes – the need for guidance on green claims is as great as ever and, as both consumers and industry develop a more complex relationship with the green agenda, so the guidance must evolve too. In some ways though, his question missed the point.

For me, one of the most telling findings of the study came from our work with almost 150 industry stakeholders.  Very few were aware of Defra’s Green Claims Code (which the green claims guidance builds upon) and fewer still had used it. Despite this, many expressed nervousness about deploying green claims, demonstrating a clear need for guidance. The challenge for Defra, then, lies not only in ensuring that the green claims guidance keeps up with the times, but also in making sure it is in the hands of those who need it.

The development of a ‘quick guide’ for marketers (issued for consultation along with the revised guidance), is a good step in this regard, making the advice much more accessible to busy execs and copywriters. So too was the involvement of some big brands in our study – with representatives of a number of FTSE 100 companies included in the mix, the research process itself proved a useful way to promote the guidance. Ultimately though, its effectiveness will depend, perhaps fittingly, on marketing. If Defra and other stakeholders can find imaginative ways to get people in the industry talking about the guidance – even so that they are simply aware of its existence, its principles stand a far greater chance of being adhered to.

By jfletcher | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

A chicken or an egg? Behaviour change vs. a new Forth Bridge

June 29, 2010 – 9:32 am

Yesterday, during the Q&A following my presentation to the Scottish Government’s ‘What works in behaviour change’ conference, I flunked a question about the contentious plans for a new Forth road bridge (or the Forth Replacement Crossing as it is officially known). The question related to whether it is right for a government to exhort the public to behave in a more sustainable fashion while planning to pour billions of pounds into measures geared to “maximise traffic flow” across the Firth of Forth (this is actually the stated intent of maintenance on the current crossing, but the general message seems the same for both).

Lesson one: never get drawn into issues that are locally contentious and about which you know less than a little. I’d largely lost track of the plans for the new bridge since my exit from the world of construction journalism five years ago, but scrabbling around in the dusty corners of my brain, remembered that the justification for the replacement had been based upon the notion that the existing bridge was crumbling and would eventually become unsafe. A world of responsible travel is not necessarily a world without travel, I suggested (particularly given Scotland’s geography, achieving a truly comprehensive public transport network will be extremely challenging and is likely to take decades, though admittedly that’s no reason not to get the ball rolling). For a government to refuse to replace a decaying bridge as a measure to stop people driving would, I suggested, have all of the persuasive power of a bank robbery. Sure, the money will go in the bag, but robbers don’t leave the building with the expectation that the bank clerks will continue to send them regular payments.

Behaviour change works the same way. Berating people might make them change under pressure, but if anything it can make them less inclined to make sustainable behaviours part of their identity and buy into them in the longer term. This was a point I’d made in my presentation - just telling people what to do without either (a) a growing societal belief that that behaviour is right; or (b) regulatory momentum (we can reference the usual suspects here - drink driving, smoking in public places, littering) will only get their backs up.

After a hushed response that suggested I could well find myself hanging from the existing bridge, I decided to look into the proposals a little further. First up, it turns out the existing bridge is in much better repair than first thought, a situation the Transport Scotland website describes as a “more positive prognosis“. Indeed, so positive is the prognosis that revised proposals for the new crossing make provisions for the current bridge to become “a dedicated public transport corridor carrying public transport, pedestrians and cyclists”. In the future, it goes on to say, it could even carry a tram. While those keeping tabs on progress with Edinburgh’s new tram system might be sceptical about this notion, the overarching idea is an appealing one. A bridge dedicated to low carbon transport options would certainly send out more positive messages.

The question then becomes, is the new bridge really necessary? This document by the ForthRight Alliance presents some fairly compelling arguments to the contrary, but in my mind rather ducks the question of increasing road traffic. The existing bridge, it now appears, could survive until 2017 without any restriction in heavy goods vehicles, and there is the possibility that technical fixes could ensure its longer term future too. On the flipside, they quote a report from 2003 that suggested additional capacity created by a new crossing would be “used up” by 2031, and this assumed that the current bridge remains open to traffic. Ultimately, if we can do nothing to curb demand for road use, none of the options available looks particularly promising and any debate about new bridges becomes somewhat academic (though admittedly not to those living in the planned new road corridors). If we can’t encourage more people to drive less, and transport both goods and people in more equitable ways, debating the relative merits of a new Forth crossing - or any other new road - will continue to address a symptom of the problem, not its cause. This isn’t to say that backing the new bridge is the right way forward, but rather an acknowledgement that, without positive behaviour change, the options open to transport planners will remain limited by circumstance.

One final lighter note - this is a really interesting article looking at some examples of planners axing roads in favour of public spaces, and finding relatively little negative impact on traffic congestion. They’re products of particular circumstances and in ways very different to the Forth crossing dilemma, but nonetheless food for thought.

By jfletcher | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

The wake of BP

June 16, 2010 – 2:37 pm

A brisk survey of mainstream media reports in the wake of BP’s recent apparent comeuppance seems to reveal a large helping of schadenfreude. It is a given, apparently, that BP and the others form part of a destructive complex that we’d be better off without. Before we jump on board, though, perhaps we should take a few calm breaths.

Some suggest that increasingly desperate offshore drilling operations are an indication that easily available oil is hard to find: the Deepwater Horizon had an alleged yield of 4 barrels of oil for every 1 barrel’s worth of energy needed for the operation – the Energy Return on Investment, or ERoI – compared to a healthier ERoI of 100:1 for the more straightforward fields of yore. The consequence of this disaster may be that welcome caution will be employed in future over high-risk operations, but this could push the extractive industries to focus ever more on safer onshore operations, such as the environmentally devastating Canadian tar sands. Or perhaps, some analysts have commented, this will push the matter of peak oil higher up the agenda and force us to investigate alternatives with a little more urgency.

It is sobering to consider that the projected capacity of the oil field that Deepwater Horizon was drilling was 50 to 100 million barrels, and that global consumption stands at 85 million barrels per day. All of this mess and loss of life, then, was brought upon us for the sake of remarkably little – perhaps as little as one day’s worth of oil. Compare this with a plan due to be presented on 16 June by Seamus Garvey, Professor of Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering at the University of Nottingham, in which he will describe the possibility of compressed air storage of energy produced from offshore wind. It would be sufficient, he suggests, to provide the UK with all of its energy by 2030. A gentle steer to the hitherto demonised oil industry may never be more effective than now, as crisis upon crisis dramatically threatens business as usual.

A descent from fossil-fuel dependent civilisation is clearly desirable, with climate change threatening uncomfortable changes and the daily reality of ongoing local environmental damage (let us not forget that Nigeria has experienced worse, yet barely reported, oil spills than the Gulf of Mexico over an extended period, or that since Deepwater Horizon’s tragic demise there has been a further spill, this time in Alaska, in which BP is implicated). However, a good plan must consider all available resources, and the offshore and infrastructural expertise in the oil industry could be borne in mind.

More constructive than a gleeful trumpeting of BP’s 50% share value loss over the last two months would be a plan which is capable of using their considerable expertise and resources towards more benign and progressive goals. After all, their carefully projected clean and sunny image of numerous PR campaigns is already in place.

At the very least, a grip on the prerequisites for the current global lifestyle would be helpful. We live oil-hungry lives, but it is not at all clear that a reduction in our usage would be as uncomfortable as we are led to believe, nor so difficult to replace. An ‘us and them’ attitude will help no-one. Although low-tech solutions may feature in our future, like it or not, we have deposited much of our knowledge and skill in BP and its industry colleagues, and it may be reasonable and timely to request that it be made to work for us. After all, the collapse of BP would be unlikely to result in any significant slowing of worldwide oil extraction, while even their own operations would almost certainly continue under a different name. Rose-tinted though our spectacles may be, if there is even the merest chance that their skills could be put to getter use, we can ill afford the demise of a momentarily ailing energy corporation and the wasted opportunity that this could present.

By ohughes | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)