Brite Green team up with Imperial College London to deliver a workshop on stakeholder engagement strategy using the soft systems thinking methodology.

Alex James from Brite Green and Dr Mike Tennant from the Centre of Environmental Policy at Imperial College are running a workshop at the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) Annual conference, on November 2nd 2010. The workshop focuses on how organisations can identify and effectively engage with those stakeholders who will have an influence on their climate change strategy and impacts.

The workshop introduces soft systems thinking and the rich picture tool kit, and how they can be used to create an effective stakeholder engagement strategy on climate change. The soft systems approach makes it easier to break down and document the interactions and concerns of multiple stakeholders, allowing organisations to plan an effective approach to dealing with them.
There are three parts to the approach:

• Identify the structure of the relationships
• Identify the processes which occur
• Identify the concerns of the stakeholders

These three areas are then represented pictorially to give clarity to what is often a complex set of relationships.

As the process breaks down the relationships into structure, process and concerns, a clear picture of the nature of the stakeholder relationship emerges. Once this is clear, strategies to engage with the various stakeholder groups can be developed, tailored to their specific circumstances.

Alex James is a strategy consultant at Brite Green Ltd, the sustainable strategy consultancy.  He leads the sustainability audit and reporting group and has over 10 years experience in financial and environmental audit. As a founding partner at the firm, he has developed Brite Green’s end to end sustainability offering, from strategy to solution implementation.

Dr Mike Tennant is a lecturer in Business and Environment at Imperial College, London. He specialises in systems thinking, complexity and innovation for business sustainability, and is particularly interested in using and developing creativity and systems tools to design disruptive and innovative products and services that meet environmental and social needs.

Click here to download the workshop slides