A living and inspiring sustainability strategy for Stedin

The application

The topic of sustainability is enormously complex. It touches an awful lot of areas: from electric buses to sustainable cables, solar panels at stations and training underprivileged young people to become mechanics. When building new stations, different issues come into play than when replacing assets or network breakdowns and maintenance. But housing, company cars and employee vitality also touch on sustainability.

Besides priorities such as reliability and security of supply, sustainability must be taken into account in the final choices. After all, core tasks and making operations more sustainable all ultimately serve the same purpose: creating a future-proof society in which there is sustainable energy for everyone.

Inspire, take away, translate

Therefore, the whole company needs to understand that Stedin’s core mission and sustainability can actually reinforce each other and not delay or make it more difficult. And of course, when implementing a strategy, you want everyone – staff, engineers, IT people, mechanics and everyone else – in the company not only to be informed, but to really feel the importance and understand why changes need to take place.

Stedin asked Flatland to help think through their strategy design and develop resources for all staff to see what they can do themselves.
The goals:

• Inspire and include Stedin employees in Stedin’s sustainability goals.
• Make them see coherence between Stedin’s different impact areas.
• So that they can make their own translation of what sustainability means for their role.

The solution

We first made an overview of the main activities to make Stedin a sustainable and inclusive company. The Design Thinking method calls for first stepping back and mapping out for whom and why you actually want to design something. In four sessions, we worked in co-creation towards a structured story:

• Kick-off > unravelling and clarifying the purpose, target audience and components
• Clarity > getting the building blocks for a clear story in focus
• Story > structuring a story and testing the visual
• Deliver > going through the story together and checking whether it is complete, correct and logical

We then developed three different communication tools.

Working visually and in co-creation during sessions

As always, during all sessions we work together visually, in co-creation with the client. By drawing everything, everyone’s ideas become visible. It gives insight into the differences as well as the similarities: is everyone on the same page? Hugely valuable, especially in complex and abstract topics such as sustainability or inclusiveness.

Drawings give room for individual input, everyone is heard. In online sessions, people sit very close to a drawing and can give feedback and stick (digital) post-its directly. Thus – because it becomes instantly visual and insightful – people build on each other’s ideas. They sharpen each other’s proposals and so innovative ideas emerge. This method releases creativity, gives energy and speeds up the process of reaching agreement.

Different resources for different purposes

After putting the strategy into a structured and clear narrative, we developed three different products. All with different goals. A talking plate for an easy-to-read summary of the sustainability strategy, making the goals for 2030 concisely clear. A tangible product, which you can hang up large and visible and everyone is constantly reminded of.

Plus an interactive website, where much more depth can be found. Concrete explanations per component: the playing field, the core tasks, the supply chain, buildings and people. Finally, a talking animation, communicating the focus and urgency from A to Z in a clear story. You could say that the talking plate communicates the what , the animation the why and the interactive website the how.

Result: a total package

Dirk Bijl de Vroe, sustainability manager at Stedin, is very happy with the result. He says that all new resources are being used enthusiastically and communication with all employees is being done step by step throughout the year, each time based on a different part of the interactive. “Based on these resources, a completely new intranet page and internet page were also immediately created. So all in all, a new backbone for all sustainability communication.”

Visual strategist Tom van ‘t Westeinde is proud of the result, of all the expressive and clearly designed communication tools, but especially of Flatland’s contribution to this important goal. We need to tackle sustainability together, and he is happy that our visual methodologies can give this process an energy boost.

“This project with Stedin also shows well what Flatland has to offer. Designing different products: talking boards, interactive websites and an animation. But especially what working visually throughout the process brings in terms of energy and effectiveness,” says Tom.