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Learning to talk effectively about sustainability (1 of 2)

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by Richard Maltzman, Dave Shirley

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This is a guest post (1 of 2) from Sarah Shahmohammad (pictured below)...

...who I introduced at the beginning of 2025 as follows:

Here's her post (Part 1)

---

We Have GOT to Learn How to Talk About This Thing!

To talk about sustainability, we first need to understand how different people engage with it—because if we’re speaking to the wrong audience in the wrong way, we’re just shouting into the void. We need to meet people where they are and from there, help them take steps forward. With luck and good stakeholder engagement, maybe LEAPS forward!

Generally, people fall into four broad categories when it comes to their thinking about sustainability (see figure):

🔹 The Committed & Aligned – Sustainability professionals, activists, project leaders, and organizations already integrating sustainability into their work and lives. These are the people actively shaping change, setting policies, building businesses, and advocating for systemic shifts.

🔹 The Well-Intended but Uncertain – People who care and genuinely want to do more, but don’t quite know how. They might recycle, use reusable bags, or opt for greener choices if available—but they’re not proactive about pushing sustainability forward. On their projects, project managers in this category may be somewhat ambivalent about raising issues to senior managers. They need clearer guidance and practical ways to engage.

🔹 The Skeptics & Fatigued – Those who feel overwhelmed, frustrated, or disconnected from sustainability messaging. They might see it as moralizing, impractical, elitist, or exaggerated—or they might just be too busy trying to survive the mess of everyday life – and ‘everyday projects management’ to think much about it.

🔹 The Culprit Polluters – A select few who know exactly what they’re doing and consciously make decisions that negatively impact the collective, to their own benefit. “Why should I care?”, they say, “…not MY problem!”. These are the ones setting the world on fire—sometimes literally.

Most people fall into the middle two categories (the bottom half of the figure). The well-intended but uncertain, and the skeptics who either don’t trust sustainability messaging or feel too disconnected from it.

The audience of this conversation is mostly the committed ones—the activists, the professionals, the sustainability nerds. And naturally, we tend to get stuck in our echo chambers—we surround ourselves with people who resonate with our ideas, we work in environments with people who share our vision, and at the very least, we all agree on the absolute basics: Trees good. Oil spills bad.

But sustainability isn’t a niche field—it’s a global shift. It’s not like some cutting-edge, science-y thing that we can just be nerdy about in our labs, develop cool new products with, and expect people to use without understanding it (like a new iPhone or a medical breakthrough).

This only works if literally everyone is on board.

We need to step outside our bubble and figure out how to:

Make sustainability tangible and relevant for everyday people
Bridge the trust gap with skeptics and fatigued audiences
Provide clear, practical ways for people to engage without overwhelming them
Make sustainability about smart system design, not just guilt and sacrifice

Let’s touch base, we’re dreaming about something that doesn’t exist yet.

As sustainability professionals, scientists, and enthusiasts, right-minded project leaders, we’re not just pushing for small tweaks to existing systems—we’re imagining and designing entirely new ones. Smarter, more holistic, more well-rounded systems that can give us the comfort we’ve become comfy in—without taking away the air we breathe.

Reducing harm is such a low-hanging fruit, we’re going for rebuilding smarter.

And in that process, we can’t afford to just stay at the peak of the arrow, charging forward while neglecting the majority of people who aren’t fully on board yet. Sustainability only works as a collective action—which means it’s on us to figure out how to bring others into the fold.

And this is where communication becomes critical. If sustainability was easy to understand and universally valued, we wouldn’t be having these conversations. But it’s not. So we are. That’s why this blog is here, and that’s why this post is posted – for you to think about this and respond with what actions you can take – what changes you can make – as a project leader.

Posted by Richard Maltzman on: March 27, 2025 03:18 PM | Permalink

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Learning to talk effectively about sustainability (1 of 2)

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