Sustainability Sprints: a new podcast helping you ‘get there faster’ is coming soon.

This will be a podcast about sustainability progress, with tips, tricks and techniques to fast-track your thinking, jump start your journey or simply help you keep on trucking.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been co-delivering responsible leadership modules with Dr Jenny Davidson, Climate Change Fellow at Newcastle University. We’ve been teaching sustainability as well as innovating to embed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the Executive Education curriculum. She’s great to work with and we’ve had fun.

Between us we’ve been working on sustainability (theory and practice) for over 50 years which means we have learnt some stuff. Some of it, the hard way. We bring together theory and practice and our commitment to authentic leadership means we will be weaving personal and professional stories into our podcasts.

Exec Ed students all have ‘proper jobs’ and are studying for their MBA alongside often very challenging roles, some are business owners and they come from public, private and charity sectors. We’ve had some interesting and wide-ranging discussions.

Our challenge has been to help these very smart professionals, with their variety of roles and responsibilities to not just understand sustainability but make sense of it in their own context and explore what it might mean for their own practice.

So, how have we ended up with a podcast? Well, we realised that the best sessions, the ones with the most ‘Ah-ha’ moments, were the ones with lots of stories. The ones where we shared practical examples from our own experiences and provided tried-and-tested practical suggestions from our own extensive sustainability back catalogue.

We did think about writing a book but decided a podcast would be easier (and more fun) and that it would get us there faster! Sustainability Sprints is the result and we look forward to launching that to your feeds soon.

A recent Harvard Business Review suggested that middle management is the key to sustainability and I’ve believed this for many years. Most of the organisations I’m working with now have sustainability strategies and high-level commitments and ambitions to sustainability. These don’t get delivered unless they are translated and operationalised by teams across all areas of the business. This is my zone, I spend a lot of my time helping non-sustainability leaders understand sustainability so that they can build it into their own roles. The tools we’ve developed provide a tangible way of delivering and demonstrating this.

Sustainability Sprints is designed to complement this, to be helpful in this space. We understand that sustainability is complex and embedding it in teams and organisations can feel like hard work. But we don’t think it has to be.

We know that sustainability action starts with humans and how they make sense of things. Sustainability Sprints cut through the theory and make that feel easier, possible, or even a little exciting. We want to help as many people as possible feel that sustainability is something they can include in their professional practice. We believe that you don’t need to be a sustainability expert to contribute to your organisation’s sustainability ambition, just curious about how you can get involved.

At NETpositive Futures, we have always shared our learning and expertise as freely as possible. We hope these short introductions can be used by sustainability teams to help their internal teams make sense of sustainability.

You can find out when we launch by following us on LinkedIn.