Greening Your Design Firm in 10 Easy Steps

A Two Part Article written by: Barbra Batshalom and Kevin Settlemyre

Part II: The Plan – How to Be All Green All The Time

In last month’s newsletter article, Part 1, “The Opportunity Investigation – Understanding Your Business Practices as Green Opportunities”, we made the case that in order to deliver green, firms need to understand green in a new way and understand all aspects of their business through a “green” lens. Once you understand how green relates to project management, profitability, staff attraction and retention, relationships with consultants and clients, quality control and liability, you can take a more mature and valuable approach to improving your design process and product. You can then achieve health and performance goals as an integral part of your operations and not as a contrived and painful add-on to an already dysfunctional process. 

The current paradigm of 3-10 green champions in a design firm is nearing the end of its life. If that is the extent of your firms’ commitment to green design, you are already behind the curve. If you are banking on a horde of LEED Accredited Professionals as a metric for your credibility and expertise, you are also behind the curve. Last month’s article outlined some specific examples of how to look at your current firm operations through new eyes and identified what pieces you need to include in a plan to move forward and design green into your firm. 

This article picks up where we left off and lays out the 10 elements of a plan in more detail. Incorporating these ingredients as part of a customized plan for your firm will get you to a point where green design is integrated fully and seamlessly into your business. The elements laid out below are derived from our experience with companies over the past seven years and are distilled in a generic way. Your firm may have specific issues not addressed here, or may have already addressed some of these issues for different reasons. The main concept to take away is that greening your firm is a design challenge in itself (insert creative here). No generic plan will do it for you. As with any organizational behavior or management initiative, you need to work from the inside out – from a deep internal understanding out to a clear path towards your company’s desired outcomes. If you are serious about not being behind, you will likely need to address the items outlined below and perhaps some others. Many of these activities happen in parallel and should build from and reinforce one another. The components of a ‘green design’ plan for your firm are as follows:

1. Assess a Baseline
2. Understand your current (strategic) business plan
3. Get a deeper understanding of what “green” is
4. Educate and build capacity
5. Establish Transfer of Knowledge - mechanisms and processes
6. Culture dynamics
7. Build metrics and feedback loops
8. Transform Relationships: clients and consultants
9. Designing a Workplan
10. Marketing with more data

For more info, visit: http://www.greenroundtable.org