From March until December the Knowmads worked on an assignment for Royal Haskoning SMC. It was the first assignment we could work on. It connected to the theme of social innovation and especially sustainability. Working in a co-creative way we had over 10 meetings in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and Nijmeigen.

Following a rough outline of what we did, including our final presentation and the report and attachment to download!

1. Introduction and getting to know each other
We worked with a Dashboard in the first weeks to monitor ideas, moods, value-streams, etc….

2. Working on a project proposal and forming a core team
The core team was not consistent as such. Some choose to work on other projects, others joined in at later stages.

3. Exploring sustainability and connecting in a workshop with the 30 employees of Royal Haskoning SMC
We worked from the hypothesis that:

Connecting = Caring –> Caring = Sustainable

4. Deciding upon a hypothesis, research questions & developing a questionnaire

We presume a difference or gap between sustainable behaviour in the private life of Generation Y as compared to their work life

“We believe that the company could benefit from this wisdom of Generation Y and that the voice of this generation needs to be heard. If organisations will not facilitate the needs of next generations’ workforce, it could leave potential unrealised. Furthermore, organisations that do not integrate the next generations’ needs could risk loosing their relevancy for society and their (future) workforce.“

5. Running, marketing and analysing the questionnaire
We send the questionnaire out to companies, asking to forward it to their young professionals (generation y).

6. Doing several interviews with the selected target group
In the survey we offered the opportunity to be contacted for a deepening interview. This gave us a much deeper insight in the generation and how they think about sustainability:

“All knowledge, drive and experience is probably there in the company. Its about connecting the dots by networking”
Royal Haskoning

6. Combining qualitative and quantitative research, interpreting results, formulating conclusions
We choose to write a report on the research (Download: pdf, 23 p.) and attach an additional report (Download: pdf, 11 p.) with more detailed information. The results where presented in the following Prezi:

Final presentation: RHKSMC & Knowmads on Prezi

7. Presenting the process and working with the results
Last week we presented the results and conclusions in Utrecht. Oscar from ModelMinds was visualising the outcome of the world-cafee session that  followed the Prezi presentation:

8. Follow up and reflection
Royal Haskoning SMC choose to continue working with Knowmads. Roy and Ditte who joined the core team in September are currently working on the next project proposal which will be connected to the results of the research outcome.

I have not drawn my personal conclusions and learning’s from the assignment yet. A couple things are for sure: I learned a lot & it was an intensive process. My personal thanks go to Royal Haskoning SMC who decided to become one of the first partners of Knowmads and presented also the first assignment.

9. The Process
We already wrote several blogposts on the assignment, the process and sustainability during the last nine months. Here some more articles:

On co-creation (Naomi)
On co-creation (Brock)
Working on the assignments (me)
Weekly Review (me)
The natural step (Brock)
Detailed Week-Review (me)
Sexifying sustainability (Oscar)
Workshop on sustainability (Oscar)
The survey movie (Roy)
The outcome of the world-cafe session (Oscar)

Feel free to spread and use the results but respect the following licence:
_____________________________________________________________________________

Sustainability and Young Proffessionals in Multinationals (By Knowmads & RHKsmc) by Knowmads – Royal Haskoning SMC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.knowmads.nl/wp.