Green Jujitsu is the art of tapping into people's strengths, interests and habits in order to make Sustainability relevant to them. The analogy is that most attempts at engagement are like boxing – trying to batter the other person into submission. Jujitsu experts adjust their techniques to match their opponent, for example using that person's momentum to power a particular throw.
How to do this?
Try to find out what attracts our audience's attention and then translating sustainability into that format that gets us through those filters and gets our audience's attention. This can be done with the help of the Elephant model
The Elephant Model of Change: Analogy 2: Rider riding the elephant
The analogy is the rider is the logical part of our brain that creates data and information and wants to see the evidence as perfectly logical. The rider is the bit of our brain that we like to think makes decisions, but in actual fact, it's the elephant, it's the gut instinct, the emotional part of our mind that really makes decisions. The elephant represents, fear, love, lust, greed, love, all those emotions. And the third element is the path, which is the environment in which we operate. And you tend to find that decisions are made by the evidence we have, what our gut instinct says, usually working from experience. And lastly, the physical environment of the bureaucratic environment in which we operate and those determine which direction the elephant and the rider actually head off in.
Implementation of the Elephant Model
The big question is how to make sustainable shifts? This can be answered by engaging the audience in three steps, basically answered by setting in place the rider, elephant and path.
1.Rider: What information do you want to get across?
For example, if our audience are people in the Finance department, when addressing them the issue, the below mentioned table can help in the way the issue needs to be communicated.
2. Motivating the Elephant
Think of ways to emotionally engage audience in the following mentioned areas
3. Shaping the path
You can engage the audience by asking the following questions:
Engagement is crucial for sustainability if you don't have people on board, nothing will happen Most engagement is completely useless because it tends to rely on generic green cliches which don't speak to anybody. Green jiu jitsu is about seeing the world from your audience's point of view. You need to find that sweet spot between their strengths, interests, hobbit's fears, whatever it might be, and and target that overlap. You have to do that across all three elements of engagement. Looking at the elephant model, we have got the rider who wants information, the elephant itself, which is all about emotional engagement, and then the path, which is about the physical, both the physical environment and the bureaucracy in the organization.
Seeing other people's views as more important to the engagement process than our own personal views in the key towards bringing a change with sustainable habits
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