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Presented by The American Beverage Association: | | | | |  | | By Debra Kahn | | | | | | | 
Renée Lertzman believes companies need to embrace "ambivalence." | Photo courtesy of Renée Lertzman | Renée Lertzman is a psychologist who deals with climate anxiety — but she's not a therapist. She works with companies on their sustainability and ESG initiatives. She's been doing this since 2011 and thinks one of the key concepts companies need to embrace is "ambivalence," or the recognition that people often have competing and conflicting motivations when it comes to acting on behalf of the environment. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
| | | | A message from The American Beverage Association: At America’s beverage companies our plastic bottles are made to be remade. We’re carefully designing them to be 100% recyclable, including the caps—so every bottle can become a new one. That means less plastic waste in our environment. Please help us get Every Bottle Back. EveryBottleBack.org | | | So what do you actually do? I basically am an organizational strategist. And I often will partner within organizations. It might be a team, like a climate, ESG or sustainability team. Or I might work closely with a leader or a leadership team or with a department or a program or an initiative. And I work with them to bring in a more psychologically informed, emotionally intelligent approach. I also coach people. I'll work with thought leaders or climate scientists who want to look at how they're communicating and messaging around these issues, but the main thing that I do is I'm approaching climate, sustainability, ESG work through that lens of emotional intelligence and through the lens of a depth psychology approach. What's the distinction between emotional intelligence and emotion? You're working with companies, not individuals, but don't emotions come up? I don't see this work as being about emotions, as much about experience and the complex ways that people experience the issues that can include emotional responses. And so how I tend to frame it is through looking at anxiety. There are these three A's I use a lot: anxiety, ambivalence and aspiration. I prefer that versus "emotion," because emotion sounds emotional. It sounds like one needs to be having strong emotions about these issues. Well, some people don't. And that's okay. If you're working in organizations — if you're a funder, if you're a startup, if you're a multinational corporation, if you're an NGO — you need to be really good at engaging people within and outside of your organization on these issues. And if you are in fact communicating and designing your ways of working with people in ways that are triggering, and unintentionally turning people off or alienating people, that is not effective, that's not impactful.
| | | | A message from The American Beverage Association:   | | | You've worked with a lot of companies and nonprofits: Google, Impossible Foods, VMware, WWF, Dow, Inner Development Goals. Is there an example of how you've been effective? I just had this really cool project where we worked together on their ESG engagement strategy, like, 'Here's our ESG agenda, and here are these goals that we're going for for the next several years.' There was a lot of listening and going out across the organization and really hearing where people are in relation to these ESG goals. Then we engaged in a series of what we called dialogues with a variety of stakeholders within the organization. Over time, they were able to articulate their principles. Now they're in the very early stage of rolling that out across the organization and rolling it out in a way that is truly a collaboration across different business units and teams in the organization. It's really about enabling people within an organization to develop some skills, to evolve some of their mindsets around doing this work and then practicing and trying it out. Experimenting, see what works, what doesn't work. How is it different from what it would have looked like otherwise? I think that it's going to look very different from a typical approach, which is either 100% positive, cheerleading, or come across as an educator and just put a bunch of reports in front of people, like 'Here's our report, here's our white paper,' or showing up as a activist, basically saying, 'Unless we get on this train, we're going to be really in deep trouble, and what's wrong with you for not doing more.' What it means is that they have the ability to ensure that they take an integrated approach so that they never default too strongly to any one particular approach. A lot of what I do, you can point to the tools of Project Inside-Out. Often organizations I work with are inspired and informed by those guiding principles. But they may choose to translate that into their own context and their world and what makes most sense for them.
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| Are there any companies you wouldn't work with? I definitely draw some lines with companies that are not mindful of, say, science-based targets . That's very important to me, that the work we're doing is actually grounded in reality. I need to see some commitment to moving beyond business as usual. I generally won't work in anything that actually encourages the use of fossil fuels. But I have worked with energy companies like Vattenfall, in Sweden. I was part of their going carbon-neutral roadmap. That's an example where I'm partnering with a company where they're taking a very intentional and thoughtful approach to energy transition, and to a just energy transition. Speaking of reality, you work with a lot of tech companies. Why do you think the simulation hypothesis is so in vogue right now? Because it's so profoundly seductive. You only need to look at what psychoanalysts have been observing about human nature for like hundreds of years. Reality on its own terms is hard and painful and brings up what can just be intolerable feelings and responses, just intolerable, like I can't even process this. And so what do we do? We get seduced into alternatives to being with messy, complex, complicated reality. I think we have to be really careful about the temptation to get seduced at this point. You've been working in this field for more than 10 years. Have you seen any progress? There's been tremendous progress in the sense that just even in the past couple of years there's been a sea change in recognition of the fact that business actually has to — we all have to come to terms with these issues and rethink and redesign what we do and how we do it. So whether you're a business or not, that's the moment we're in. And now it's not about trying to convince people of why this is important, which was never a good strategy anyway.
| | | | A message from The American Beverage Association: America’s leading beverage companies - The Coca-Cola Company, Keurig Dr Pepper and PepsiCo - are working together to reduce our industry’s plastic footprint through our Every Bottle Back initiative. We’re investing in efforts to get our bottles back so we can remake them into new bottles and use less new plastic.
Together, we’re:
· Designing 100% recyclable plastic bottles and caps – we’re making our bottles from PET that’s strong, lightweight and easy to recycle.
· Investing in community recycling – we’re marshalling the equivalent of nearly a half-billion dollars with The Recycling Partnership and Closed Loop Partners to support community recycling programs across multiple states.
· Raising awareness – we’re adding on-pack reminders to encourage consumers to recycle our plastic bottles and caps.
Our bottles are made to be remade. Please help us get Every Bottle Back. EveryBottleBack.org | | | Well, how do you tell anyone anything? What's happened is people have come to this through a variety of forcing functions, you might say. Whether it's unfortunately crisis, extreme weather, public goals, big announcements, more attention in the media. It's found us versus us finding it, so it's actually a really exciting time. The thing that concerns me is right now there's a lot of people who are just kind of newly evangelizing. And I think it's very important with any kind of movement like this — you've got decades of people who've been working really on the front lines, especially people who do environmental science and climate science, who've been literally out there studying this stuff and looking at it. It's not just scientists, it's people even within the private sector who've been the equivalent of that, like going up to bat to shareholder meetings, people who've put their neck out on the line, people who've taken enormous risks in their personal and professional lives to advocate and to really draw attention to these issues. Now, with this surge of people really getting it and getting on board, we absolutely need that, but we have to have humility. That's the thing I see happening that is concerning about the moment we're in now is that a lot of people who've been hard at work on this quietly for decades are like: “Hey, you know, we actually know a lot, we could be really valuable for you right now.” And meanwhile, this newly kind of awakened mentality can unintentionally sort of roll over that. Do you think they're disillusioned because they see what's come before? How can you meet them where they are when they're so frustrated and they see nothing's happened? I think it's on all of us to try to approach each other as partners, basically. And not like 'Oh, young person, I'm going to teach you something.' It's not that. It's much more about 'How do we become force multipliers for each other? How do we leverage the energy and the perspective that younger people have with the more kind of tenured, seasoned perspective and battles of some of the folks who've been doing this for a longer time?'
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