Program for a Sustainable Environment

Summary - A Path to Make Change Happen

Premises:

• The most potent change drivers toward environmental sustainability are organizations focused on the problem.
• It's not too much exaggeration to say that most people in those organizations are under continuous stress from working their hearts out tackling world-sized problems in the face of massive obstacles and even opposition to their efforts.
• At the same time they have a wealth of knowledge and experience that they may not be able to fully leverage in:

- operational and program optimization

- communication of the value they produce to their clients, audiences, donors and other stakeholders, and in

- coordination with partners for mulitiplying each other's efforts.

• The purpose of this program to leverage those hidden knowledge resources for those purposes, at a worldwide scale.

Why?

The best hope for preservation of a sustainable environment lies with organizations that are focused on that problem. These organizations have impact as shown in the illustration above.

These organizations also provide direction for a very large percentage of the overall resources available for sustainability. So the effectiveness of these organizations is critical to the overall sustainability effort.

Accordingly, a major leverage point for supporting a sustainable environment is to

1. Improve the effectiveness of those organization their activities and communications
2. Support them in coordinating with each other.

And a major part of achieving these results is increasing shared understanding among stakeholders of organizational activities.

The Need for a Process-Oriented Approach

The people that are engaged in environmental action organizations may not have come from commercial/industrial backgrounds where there is a large emphasis on process-oriented methods.

And people in all organizations frequently overestimate the amount of shared understanding that exists among stakeholders, and frequently underestimate its importance.

Also, social enterprise organizations, including environmental action organizations, are not generally a focus market for people with process-oriented methods and skills (which when effective involve increasing shared understanding). So social enterprise organizations may not have access to those methods and skills.

The reality is that social enterprise organizations can very often benefit from process methods and from increased shared understanding among stakeholders, applied in many different ways.

At the same time, those results are rarely achieved unless they are deliberately pursued.

Purpose

The purpose of this program is to:

Improve operational effectiveness, stakeholder communication and partner coordination at the largest possible scale for organizations focused on a mitiagating and reversing environmental polycrisis risk and impact, focused on broadly increased shared understanding of:

– the physical, social, economic and political systems involved in climate change

– the events within the systems and activities within the organizations, and

– people’s interests, concerns, ideas (referred to as “evaluations”) and plans with respect to those systems and activities.

Approach

The approach to achieving this goal is to establish a mechanism for broadly distributing tools and skills for conducting online and in-person workshops using a particular methodology (described below).

The purpose of the workshops is to create both:

1) strong shared understanding among the workshop participants and

2) high quality work products that can be used to:

a) support action planning and implementation, for purposes ranging from fundraising to community carbon-reduction to voter mobilization and

b) extend that understanding to other people outside the workshops

The work products include graphic models of the systems and activities along with goals, issues, ideas and plans that people have with respect to these systems and activities.

Examples of the work products produced by the proposed method are shown at the bottom of this page and also at this ?here.

Tool and Method

The primary tool for this approach is a software application from ActionMap Inc, called the ActionMap? Toolkit? (or “ActionMap”, or “the Toolkit). The author, Jim Johnson, founder and CEO of ActionMap Inc. has developed and proven this software in extensive use.

The software is based on a flip chart/whiteboard-based method that is still effective without= the software.?Compared to the manual versions, the software is faster and less work to “operate”, and easier to use in virtual meetings.

A full description of the ActionMap workshop service for nonprofits in general is provided at https://actionmap.com/nonprofits.

Testimonials to the impact of the proposed method are provided?here.?

Free training in the manual method is provided at?actionmap.com/freetraining.?

Tool and Method Distribution

?ActionMap currently has the capacity to provide scores of free subscriptions and trainings for the software, in order to get the Program started.

?High level phases of the Program

1.?Proof of concept?

???a. Workshops conducted pro bono by Jim Johnson, principal consultant and founder, ActionMap Inc.

???b. With a core group of people committed to seeing if the Program can be made to work

???c.?On both environmental systems and climate change organizations

First Step: Identify and conduct one such workshop. Then do a few more.

2. Initial trainings

??a. Free training an additional group of other software users, to conduct further workshops, by Jim Johnson

??b. Pro bono co-facilitation with Jim Johnson (unless we can get paid!)

??c. Free use of an online community provided by ActionMap Inc. to support learning and knowledge sharing

3.?Track impact

a. Survey workshop participants.

b. Follow up to see if action items are pursued.

c. Follow up to see if action items are being effective.

4.?Ongoing Impact

??a.?Establish governance and processes for continuing operation

b. Solicit ongoing funding for training trainers and providing subscriptions more broadly?

Key Features of this Approach

There are several key features to this approach, including:

Scope of application: Any organization, initiatives and movements that are focused on climate change. The ActionMap method can also be applied to environmental systems.

?Scale:?the scale of impact in terms of numbers of people acquiring the understanding; as broadly as possible within the criteria of quality

Quality: the quality of the shared understanding among the parties involved; sufficiently detailed and integrated to motivate people to take action.

Call to Action

?If you are interesting in exploring the development of this Program among climate change communities of interest, please email me or direct message or connect with me on LinkedIn to arrange a conversation.

?Jim Johnson

https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/jimjohnson/

Email me at [email protected]

actionmap.com

Example Work Products

There is a clearer image of this spreadsheet at https://actionmap.com/examples.

More examples at https://actionmap.com/examples.