Will Richardson opens a seven-part series on why sustainability efforts fail: regulations and carbon reports are handed down as compliance orders rather than discussed with the people who live with the consequences. His test is simple: if the people who made a sustainability decision aren't the same ones living with it, you have a communication problem, not a data problem.
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Hey, thanks so much for listening. I would love to be able to help you more on what it is that you are listening to and why you're listening to, to me. If you could click on the link in the show notes, that would be awesome because it will help me define what it is that we should be talking about on this podcast. My grandmother was taken to court for burning litter on a beach. This is Sustainability Solved by Will Richardson. And this is the first 7 short episodes about why I'm changing the main Sustainability Solved podcast. It starts a long way from a microphone. I was with my grandmother in Abu Dhabi, and she burnt litter on the beach. And I remember being told about a councillor who saw her burning all this litter And they said it was against the law to do it, and they took her to court. She defiantly defended herself because she knew that it was wrong to have so much litter on the beach, and that the council should actually be clearing up said litter, not leaving it to somebody who happened to be walking past. I think that type of conviction that I've been brought up with is where this all starts. Now, look at what's actually happened there. A woman spotted a problem nobody else was dealing with. She acted on it. The system's response was to tell her she was breaking the law and then to put her in front of a court. Nobody asked her why the litter was there in the first place. Nobody asks her what would have had to change so that she never had to light a fire on the beach again. Remember, this was 40-plus years ago, and lighting a fire on the beach was seen as much more acceptable than it is Now, I see it every week. A regulation arrives and gets explained to the people it affects as a compliance obligation rather than a business decision. A carbon footprint gets presented to a board as a number to be defended rather than management data to be used. A supplier gets sent a questionnaire instead of a phone call. In every one of those cases, the underlying instinct in the room is sound, and the communication around it is doing damage. So here is what your organization can do with this today. Take one sustainability decision you made in the last year and ask 2 questions about it. Who was in the room when it was made? And who had to live with it afterwards but was not there. If those 2 lists do not match, you've not got a data problem or a technology problem. You've got my grandmother and the councillor in a boardroom in 2026. The fix is cheap. Put the people who live with the outcome into the decision before you make it, not into a change management program Afterwards, we've helped more than 500 organizations through Green Element over 20 years, and now through 51 to Carbon Zero, we work with FTSE, NASDAQ, Extra, IBEX listed businesses. The technical answers are always almost available. The gap is nearly always that somebody was talked at rather than talked.
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Climate action is both an obligation and an opportunity, and you forfeit the opportunity the moment you stop listening. The next episode in this series, which is a 7-part series, is the same family, mine, a cow field in Wales, And the best decision we ever made about it. I've got a written version of this on our Substack, or my Substack. The link is in the show notes. I'm Will Richardson, and this is Sustainability Solved by Will Richardson. And I will see you next week.
Grab free access to Will's Substack while it lasts. Every week we pull together the top sustainability stories from dozens of trusted sources. Then he breaks down the big issues facing business right now in plain, practical terms. Link in the description.
