How Does Real Change Happen?
Like many people I love a good Linked In scroll and I am always saving articles to ‘read later’, however a few things have happened over the last week that have left me questioning this habit as I compare it to what I’m experiencing in my every day life. I’m getting curious about how real change happens and here are 3 recent experiences that show its messier and more complicated than the nicely branding Linked In thought pieces!
This week one Linked In report I read suggested 5 key elements needed for success in using standards to address climate change. When reading the report I found myself thinking ‘yes great this is just what is needed’. Yet, when I paused to think about my lived experience I realised one of the reports key five elements ,ambition, didn’t seem to exist in recent standard stakeholder conversations. Maybe because fear of change meant stakeholders were keeping their ambitions very low.
How do we bring the ideas from reports into real life- do people need training in thinking from an ambitious mindset rather than a scarcity?
Then over the past 3 months I have been in conversation with what seemed to be an academic journal but turned out to be funded by a CVB. They were creating a journal of others ‘sustainability best practice’ and using that action to meet criteria of ‘an event industry created sustainability rankings’, speak on stage at an event industry event about the usefulness of the journal and no doubt publish it on Linked In. I bluntly explained to them how we need action now not more best practice journals or more speaking at events and asked for our content to be removed. This was after suggesting they share the opportunity with their supply chain to join The Race to Zero and share other free resources to build capacity for sustainability. Their feedback was they were not ready for that i.e. not ready to take action. Leaving me to surmise that spending time and budget on a nice report for Linked In is actually a way to put off change.
The final lived experience that is leaving me curious, about how real change happens, is a conversation that has been taking place over 18 months with various partners on how COP28 could have a Pavilion for People which would enable civil society (ie you and me) to be included and participating. Starting at the end of Nov Linked In is going to be full of pictures from pavilions at COP, many probably launching beautifully formatted reports which will find their way onto Linked In. Also at the end of November a messy, volunteer led experiment of engagement called The Pavilion for People will launch. Time will tell if The Pavilion for People will create more change than the nice reports circulating linked in.
My current lived experience is that change comes from action, especially action in the face of no agreement rather than writing a nice report about what could be possible. The Pavilion for People could be a lovely report suggesting what could be possible in the future and why. This would give partners the time to think, consider, ease themselves into new business models. But we don’t have that luxury of time so when The Pavilion for People launches it will be an example of what happens when good ideas in reports are acted on in real life.
(And I’m sure we will do a linked in report on it!)