Impact in Antarctica: Our Workshop Goes Polar
Imagine being woken from your sleep. It's not quite 7 a.m., and you're aboard a massive sailing vessel, floating as far south on the planet as anyone's ever sailed, making your way slowly toward Antarctica. A voice directs you above deck, where the temperature is below freezing. There, surrounded by your shipmates from 22 different countries, you look up and witness a wall of blue-white ice. Nearly 100 feet high and many miles long, this shelf of ice broke free a decade ago from the continent that housed it for 12,000 years.
No one can adequately prepare you for your first trip to Antarctica, says Net Impacter and Force for Change Award winner Darren McGann, who was standing on that deck. But this was Darren's second trip, and this time he wouldn't just be absorbing the beauty and gravity of the frozen tundra. This time, he would be facilitating our easy-to-use Impact at Work(shop) for almost 80 expeditioners traveling with him, teaching them lessons in sustainability leadership they could put to use immediately on their return...
A Renewed Focus at Work
When you leave Antarctica, you really get focused on your sustainability work, Darren explains. As a sustainability manager at the global tax, audit, and advisory firm KPMG, Darren was sent to Antarctica in 2011 to participate in a sustainability leadership expedition held annually by polar explorer and environmentalist Robert Swan. After that trip, I started ratcheting up the level and quality of the work I did at my firm. He returned to KPMG with a renewed focus on sustainability throughout the firm and overhauled the company's travel program, eliminating 3.9 million air miles from employee travel - a project that won him our 2011 Force for Change Award.
Impressed by Darren's efforts, Swan invited Darren back to Antarctica this past March to lead the expedition's education program. The program focuses on teaching global participants from every sector about the role of climate change and the importance of protecting the frozen continent's - and the world's - fragile ecosystems.
Darren knew he wanted to use the Impact at Work(shop) to teach his fellow travelers. Through discussion and activity-based exercises, Net Impact's carefully designed workshop helps participants develop impact projects scaled to their organization's specific needs and challenges. I thought this would be perfect for the participants, because people could work on their own projects but help each other, and make an impact whether at their company, at an NGO, or at the government level, says Darren.
Facilitating Interaction and Collaboration
Held on the expedition's ship as it moved through Drake's Passage, some of the world's most dangerous waters, the workshop was surprisingly easy to implement. Darren played the role of a facilitator, not a lecturer, and broke the team up into smaller groups. After distributing copies of the Impact at Work toolkit, I would go through each worksheet once, give a high-level overview and engage people in the conversation, then give people time to work together. It was highly collaborative and highly interactive.
Participants were so enthusiastic and so excited, he continues. They had the opportunity to talk together, then work on their worksheets individually, and then come together again. Because we weren't at a conference room table, or school desks, people were literally writing in their laps or getting down on the ground and working together. The volume level was so high when they were interacting, and then the room would go quiet during the individual worksheet part. They were just so into it.
Seeing the Forest and the Trees
Collaborative learning wasn't limited to the ship, of course. We would teach sustainability, says Darren, while we were hiking up the side of a glacier while trying not to fall into a crevasse. One day the group was hiking a glacier when one of his companions remarked how different it looked. That's when Darren realized he'd hiked this same glacier just a year before. I was in shock, Darren says. There was a glacial stream, water was running beneath my feet. I couldn't believe how much ice had been lost. It's one thing to analytically understand climate change but to see the physical transformation of the peninsula - it was an eye-opener.
Even in Antarctica, it turns out, it's easy to mistake the forest for the trees.
But Darren believes this is exactly one of the reasons the Impact at Work(shop) format is so effective: They're able to see the bigger picture of a sustainability project. Most people never consider all the stakeholders who might be involved or have an impact on the project. The toolkit helps leaders frame their impact project in a way that's appropriate for different stakeholders. It lets them write the same argument from the other side of the coin, Darren says. You always have to know your audience when you pitch your project and you have to be prepared.
"They all walked away with a tool that they could use again and again - it's a great tool because it's repeatable. We had 22 different countries, all different sectors, all different levels - they all could use it."
Polar explorer Robert Swan will be keynoting the 2012 Net Impact Conference. Interested in putting the Impact at Work(shop) to use in your organization? Our Impact at Work programming is easy-to-implement no matter where you work.
