It’s everywhere you turn. Fortune names General Electric the most admired company, citing GE’s Ecomagination campaign. Arnold Schwarzenegger graces a recent Newsweek cover, touting California’s leadership in new environmental policy. And lest we forget Al Gore’s star turn in An Inconvenient Truth—the film that may have started it all—seeking to dispel misconceptions about global warming while chronicling the former vice president’s crusade for the environment.
More and more companies are getting on the greenwagon and the emerging discourse goes beyond corporate responsibility and box checking. No longer is “going green” just the right thing to do—some are saying it’s the smart thing to do, too. Thomas Friedman argues in a recent New York Times article that going green should be the centerpiece of U.S. foreign and economic policy, and GE says their efforts are “as economically advantageous as they are ecologically sound.”
Your firm could be next. We offer a few guidelines to consider as you contemplate your company’s efforts to go green and your approach to communication:
- Don’t call your company’s efforts a “program” or “project.” Programs and projects tend to have ends. Green is “in” and some might say it will be “out” before we know it. To avoid the “flavor of 2007” label, communicate permanence, not temporality.
- On that note, have a simple message that explains what your company is doing and why, and situate the message in a pre-existing, larger strategic context. Why and how will going green help your company achieve its strategic objectives? A compelling why will persuade the skeptics and eliminate any lingering “tree hugger” associations.
- Don’t spend an enormous amount of time with branding and flashy promotion. We can’t tell you how many efforts we’ve seen make a name for themselves, only to fail as a result of heightened employee expectations about the new thing from corporate that’s taking up so much space (and so many resources).
- Show that your efforts are real in leadership decisions and behavior. Is your CEO “serious about this,” yet still driving a gas guzzler? What investments can your company make in cleaning up operations or exploring environmentally friendly innovation? If there’s nothing that symbolically communicates leadership’s commitment other than the newly formed employee committee, then it’s all just talk.
- Hold employees accountable for their greenability. Yes, we’re serious. And if you’re serious, too, you’ll align your environmental strategy with your performance management and reward and recognition systems. Our experience tells us that most people will do what’s expected when they know what’s expected and the right type of consequences are following their performance (or non-performance).
As part of my 2007 reading regimen I’m working through Gary Klein’s Sources of Power, which is a fantastic if slightly academic text on how people make decisions—especially in time-compressed, high-risk situations. In the book I came across something that strikes me as a practical and powerful tool to use as you prepare for important communication events (be they an important speech, presentation to the board, or a face-to-face with the CEO). Klein calls it a “Pre-Mortem” strategy, and it’s a means of identifying assumptions and mitigating risk. The original approach comes from Choen, Freeman, and Thompson’s “Crystal Ball” method (PDF), which the US military uses in war game exercises. The Crystal Ball method goes like this:
- Select a critical assessment, no matter how confident you are that it is true (e.g., that the enemy will cross the river at point X).
- Imagine that a perfect intelligence source, such as a crystal ball, tells you that this assessment is wrong.
- Explain how this assessment could be wrong.
- The crystal ball now tells you that your explanation is wrong and sends you back to step 3.
The Pre-Mortem is a slight variation on this: After laying out a plan, look several months into the future and assume the plan has failed. The task is to explain why. The idea is to break the emotional attachment to the plan, and turn your creativity and experience toward identifying its flaws and opportunities for breakdown. These are contingencies to revise the plan against, making the plan as a whole stronger (and your or your team’s view of the plan more realistic).
Here’s why it’s important: The research shows that people tend to “fall in love” with their own plans. We lend them more credibility than they deserve, especially if we are not highly experienced in the area and do not have a good sense of what’s typical. As a result, we tend to underestimate risks and be under-prepared for contingencies.
In our work with leaders and communication professionals we’ve taken a similar approach for years, building what we call a “Risk Mitigation Checklist” for any significant communication event. It’s the list of all the things we know can introduce significant risk into a communication, all other things being equal. A small example might be “Test the TelePrompTer equipment” before a speech; a more significant example might be “Brief the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors about any change to the capital budget” for a multi-million dollar technology initiative.
We arrive at the items for the Risk Mitigation Checklist through our experience. The issue is that with the communication opportunities or problems you face day-to-day, you don’t (and shouldn’t) have us by your side to identify problems in the plan and craft contingencies. So here’s what you should do: Before your next important communication, project several months into the future and assume the thing failed—miserably. Then explain why it failed, and come up with as many explanations for failure as you can. Then work alone or with your communication staff to resolve those failure points in the design of the message and plan.
We have an adage at CRA that is one of the first things we tell a new employee, regardless of their level or experience: “Plan for the worst, expect the best. Find the worst thing that can happen, and eliminate it. Repeat.” It’s served us well for years, and I think the Crystal Ball / Post-Mortem method is a great little tactic to keep in your back pocket while you communicate as a leader.
