One thing that happened back in January was the WWT Waste Water conference, which I went along to, virtually. There were some great insights shared and a number of questions running through my mind following all of the presentations and discussions. This one statement right at the outset really stuck with me though. Here’s how it was framed:
“The number of Pollution incidents have plateaued since 2014”
As the conference went on I heard a lot about ambitious goals, what had been achieved, certain projects but I still couldn’t get this statement out of my head. Are we just setting ambitious goals now? I don’t think so. Ambitious goals have been a staple of the sector year on year, amp on amp from what I can see so how have we gone 8 years with no further progress around this?
A question that came to mind….
How has the thinking changed / evolved in the past decade?
I’m a firm believer that if you want something different then you need to start introducing different thinking into the equation, especially at a leadership level. Setting the goals is one thing but understanding how we are going to be able to get there is another thing entirely, and it’s not going to be what we did in the past decade.
Towards the end of the conference there was a presentation by Simon Cyhanko at Northumbrian Water which was all around how they had gone about working with people in the community to enact change in Customer behaviours. They have built a team with a defined purpose around building relationships in key regional areas to support behaviour change.
Now I don’t know the full details but this felt like an emergent way of working as a result of some different thinking. It may or may not have had a huge impact on the number that has apparently plateaued but for me this demonstrated a less mechanical approach to thinking about the problem, a more human approach which was based on building relationships and developing trust. A great example I thought.
So, when you think about the current strategies, plans, activities that are aimed at achieving your ambitious goals, how confident are you that the thinking these are built on is significantly different than 8 years ago?