SUSTAINABILITY PERSPECTIVES:

#7: Rules of Engagement

This is the seventh in our series of articles describing the Sustainability Visioning project that SaskFlax is working on.

Lee Pengilly is a rancher, writer and published author from Melville, Saskatchewan. She was one of seventeen stakeholders in the Canadian Flax Sustainability Visioning Project.

According to the timeframe outlined by project organizers, the 17-member stakeholder group was to participate in 4 telephone conference calls over the course of The Natural Step (TNS) learning process. The email we received read, “These [conference calls] will allow you to hear from the instructors directly and will give you a chance to ask any questions or get clarification…Going through the eLearning and conference calls allows all of us to get up to speed on the concepts of sustainable development so that we’ll be ready to talk industry specifics when we meet...”

I will confess that a conference call involving large number of people is not my favorite means of communication. I do understand though that it is the best method to engage people over a wide area and it certainly saves time and money. So, it was with a certain sense of resignation that I recorded the date for our first conference call. We had our choice of two different days at two different times to choose from and were provided with a dial-in number and a password. Being as we had two different times to choose from, one could anticipate that not all 17 of us would be on the same conference call – I was relieved to know that.

A couple of days before the first conference call we received an email providing us with further information:

• When you speak, please state your name upfront so that people know who is speaking.
• Please do not keep your cellular phone near the phone you are using, because this causes interference.
• Please speak clearly so that everyone can hear you and benefit from your wisdom!

Hmmm, I think I’m going to like this approach…order to the chaos as compared to some of the conference calls I’ve participated in.

Continue to next article in the series...