Communication: tools or strategy?

Strategy is about how to most effectively reach your goal. Most communicators concentrate on tools: brochures, videos, photo exhibitions. The question is will that help us reach our goals? My students ask what then is a strategic communication? I answer it is a way of life. And I paraphrase Musashi. A strategy for effective communication is not different from a strategy for success in business development or war. If you don’t appreciate strategy, you won’t value the use of tools. Each situation is different and does not stay the same. Before you communicate you have to analyze it, including the context and key people. Then define success. Each situation may ask for a different tool, set of tools or a different use or timing of the tools. The main tool is speech. You master it when listening becomes hearing.Then you also know how to use the other written media. The other tool is drawing. You master it when looking becomes seeing. Then you also know how to use the other visual media. The success of a strategy is not in the plan but in the planning. It is professional way of life. The principles of the way of the strategy are:
* Always be honest.
* Keep on practicing and learning.
* Become acquainted with every art.
* Know the mindset of all professions.
* In worldly affairs go for the result.
* Develop your intuitive judgment and understanding for every person or situation.
* Perceive things that cannot be seen.
* Pay attention to details.
* Do nothing which is of no use.

Communicating protected areas

For Life's sake. With students of two universities I analyzed a slide show from WCPA to better communicate the importance of protected areas. Afterwards we looked at the final publication and saw that only a few of our concerns were addressed. These are some of the conclusions from the combined analysis. From a factual or scientific perspective the main values are comprehensively captured and translated into content to be communicated. From a communication perspective the top five suggestions for improvement are:
1. Change the word protected area – it does not trigger positive connotation by the non-experts, use words a ‘nature areas’, ‘conservation areas’, special bird areas etc.
2. Start with the positive dream that nature can play in our lives, do not start your messages with the threats, people will immediately switch off their attention and interest.
3. Don’t be abstract or use jargon, be concrete e.g. ‘the mangroves protect us against cyclones’ instead of ‘For life’s carbon buffers’; or ‘the river gives us to eat and drink’ instead of ‘For life’s essentials’.
4. Don’t use landscape photos – people can only positively associate with nice animals, or people in the landscape. If you use a good landscape photo, have a few words providing the essence, e.g. a wild forest = carbon store, food source, playground.
5. Make clear to whom you are talking, what your promise is and what you ask them to do. Be aware that for most people your messages are new and don’t try to cover everything, e.g. inspiration, meaning, joy etc. maybe a bridge too far. Better use words as playground, a space to find some inner peace.

Motivation

Talking about competencies of a sustainability professional, I just received a nice tool from my colleague Dominic Stucker and could share it with the workshop participants. A great animation and talk by Al Gore’s former speechwriter Dan Pink, explaining what really drives and motivates humans.' A nice example how to communicate research and science.

Sustainability mindset

Are conservation and sustainable development just another job opportunity or do they ask more of a professional? If so, where do I go to get the right education. The question of one of the participants makes me think. A recent study on ‘What a sustainability professional should know how to do´, surveyed opinions of experts in the field. It maps knowledge (concepts, theories, ideas, processes), skills (process dynamics, tools, methodologies), attributes (innate abilities) and performance competences (job/career duties/responsibilities) for corporate sustainability managers and community development professionals. Among the top three hard skills are strategic planning, system thinking and project management. The top three soft skills are communication, problem solving and inspiring and motivating. When we look at attributes we see a long list of innate abilities. The softer the skills and attibutes the less traditional training and learning approaches seem to have to offer. It looks as if it is a personal responsibility to develop these. Coaching or a teacher in an unexpected discipline (music, sports, meditation) may help. For me it is basically about looking inwards and practicing a sustainability mindset. Making yourself used of being mindful of others before self, non violence, respect for the diversity of life and cultures, timing, efficiency, effectiveness etc.

Sustainability: sacrifice and gain

Sustainability does not mean sacrifice and expense. My environmental friends here in this Asian country are quite convinced. Instead it provides opportunities and competitive advantage. They have brought me in their four wheel drive to this fast food restaurant on top of a high rise building. Below the streets are literally filled with cars. More high rise buildings as far as I can see. Even this high my lungs seem to feel the air pollution. Transition to a sustainable urban development, mobility and clean air and water will not come only through new technologies and better planning. Habits also have to change. E.g. the habits of taking the car, throwing things so easily away. When you stop eating hamburgers and take the bicycle, in the end you will feel better and enjoy the exercise. But the behavior change has it costs: the pain of overcoming the resistance, the effort to keep repeating the new and unfamiliar behavior. I know you have to compromise, but if environmentalists want to be leaders in the change towards sustainability, they should continuously be mindful of what change really means and how it feels. The only way is to practice change yourself. Eating less or no meat is such a practice. Taking the bicycle or reducing your waste to (almost) zero too. Such practice means some sacrifice and expense, but it also provides opportunities for feeling better and gaining support for sustainability by being able to provide examples of change from personal experience.

Don't try this at home

Donors often think that toolkits are a great way to support the implementation of policies. They can be, but only if accompanied by training and the awareness that experts still are needed. Toolkits contain very useful (explicit) knowledge, but one needs the tacit knowledge and skills of experts to solve questions of what is the right tool and when and how to use it. Otherwise the results might be contra-productive. I remember how I admired as a toddler my father’s carpentry toolkit. I was not allowed to touch any of these tools. I had to be content with my wooden play tools. When I was around ten years old my parents sent me to ‘carpentry’ lessons. An old carpenter had every Wednesday afternoon about ten boys in his work place who he would teach the basics of his trade. We learnt when and how to use each tool. The advantages and disadvantages of your choices and the dangers of either damaging the tool or yourself. After a few months I had acquired some basic skills and knowledge. And had produced a wooden footrest, as a birthday gift for my grandmother. I also knew now I should not try some of these tools at home alone. Some things you better leave to the specialists.

Learning finds us through social media.

In the future we will not longer search for products and services they will find us via social media. This fundamental change in the way we communicate I personally experienced a few days ago. I opened my Plaxo for a few seconds when a blog entry of a colleague Gillian Martin-Mehers caught my eye. I realized that what I saw was a tool I could use to visualize in one image the key concepts of the Bali Action Plan, I was working on. After fiddling a bit with the tool, I also saw its potential for a front page of a new report, or a mirror for clients to illustrate the amount of jargon they use.

Communicating local stories

How to communicate messages from a wide range of voices around the globe about what they consider essential to make the world more sustainable and how they contribute themselves? The Guardian last year provided us with a good example: web page with stories how people experience climate change. You click on the image of a person and a small window opens with a short text in which this person tells his or her story. The project is called the human face of climate change. Although the content focuses on the threats, the format seems to me a good way to communicate local case studies on sustainable development to a worldwide audience.

More than just a logo

The logo of the International Year of Biodiversity is used for many events. Here for an exhibition in the Edinburgh Zoo. Yesterday I saw the logo in the Amsterdam Zoo on a conference banner. What I did not see, nor hear is the story that gets me ´on board´. Yesterday there was a lot of jargon. Not many people seem to use the text and narratives developed specially for the IYB. E.g. non jargon messages are:
You are an integral part of nature; your fate is tightly linked with biodiversity, the huge variety of other animals and plants, the places they live and their surrounding environments, all over the world.
You rely on this diversity of life to provide you with the food, fuel, medicine and other essentials you simply cannot live without. Yet this rich diversity is being lost at a greatly accelerated rate because of human activities. This impoverishes us all and weakens the ability of the living systems, on which we depend, to resist growing threats such as climate change. For more non-jargon bio-diversity messages read here.

Facilitation modalities

Bringing people together to make a joint next step. That is in general often the objective of a conference. In one week time I attended two similar conferences. They had the same theme: ecosystem management and human well being. However they were different in focus and process. Both had framed the theme in a catchy way: 'Nature - What's in it for me?' and 'The Great Escape - There is NO Planet B!' The photo at the left shows the power point lecturing approach of the first conference; the two photos on the right show the interactive round table approach of the second one. The first conference aimed to take stock how IUCN members in the UK are contributing to this program area. The second to start a dialogue between IUCN members and the Dutch development community. Both had official parts with ministers, and ample room for networking. Exciting innovation of the second was a session with opportunities to contribute through twitter. Exciting during the first one was a dinner where a new multimedia project was launched 'why a wilder Britain is good for you'. The last difference was the facilitator: an insider in the first conference, a real outsider in the second one. Normally I prefer an outsider, assuming (s)he has empathy with the audience and affinity with the subject. I look forward to see the impact in terms of next steps of both conferences. I wonder what national committees could learn from each other about organizing conferences.