This Harvard Business Review article argues that sustainability is the new key driver of business innovation, from operations, to products, to marketing, to human resources.

And it’s hard to argue with this article.

As consumer activism ramps up, new regulatory regimes get off the ground, and employees — particular younger employees coming into the mid-career phase — demand a more meaningful corporate agenda to plug into, organizations are seizing upon the new opportunity to revamp operations across all business functions.

Many see it as an opportunity to breathe new life into existing business models, which is exciting for employees and customers.

We’re proud to announce a national workplace greening campaign in partnership with Futureshop and The David Suzuki Foundation.  The press release went out today, and the campaign starts on Tuesday, April 20th.

Additionally, I did an interview with Maclean’s magazine on employee engagement, innovation, and workplace greening, which will be in next week’s print edition, hitting shelves April 22nd.

I was on a panel on Friday with Bob Elton, Stefan Story, and some others, up at the University of British Columbia. The topic was energy resilience in a post carbon world. I was in a room full of mostly engineers, the token social scientist.

When I fired up my right brained presentation, I wasn’t really sure how to address energy resilience through a behaviour change lens, in less than ten minutes.

So I just took a leap into the specifics of what makes people tick, assuming people would agree that people were an important part of the equation.

The other presenters discussed resilience through a quasi-linear systemic, structural lens. And I found the presentations interesting, but I find it problematic, and slightly too clinical, to describe our societal-wide philosophical problems in terms of non-human structures such as buildings and roads, and heat exchange systems; despite their obvious utility.

So I’m thinking a lot, again, about the classic intersection of the non-human and the human worlds — within cities — this week.

And wondering about prescriptive behaviour change and philosophy and how they implicitly inform our system design decisions, despite the non-human, mechanistic leanings of many engineers and builders.

Good Energy was profiled in a recent article on employee engagement and green innovation in Green Biz magazine. We’re grateful for the exposure, and agree with the assertions wholeheartedly.

Smart online engagement truly does surface dormant knowledge capital inside of an organization, and closes the loop between top down decision making and grassroots innovation.

That’s what we’ve tried to facilitate with Good Energy. And we’ve put an enormous amount of our own good energy into making the tool simple, understandable, and easy to implement.

In pro-environmental behaviour change research, “deeply held values” were the focus of a ton of research in the eighties and the early nineties. The idea was that since  researchers (starting with Shalom Schwartz) showed that there was a universal structure to how people described their values across cultural contexts, then these universal value types must act as principles for decision making, guiding people’s behaviours in predictable ways.

A ton of research followed in this vein, looking for a grand unifying theory of human behaviour, which would link values, or what people think is important in the abstract, to actual behaviour and decision making (Stern et al doing the most prominent work).

The result was that it is now resoundingly accepted that there is a weak and tenuous link between values and behaviour. Behaviour is mediated by a million different structural forces, which vary from person to person and context to context.

Values can be one of these structural barriers to change, but they do not predict change.