No need to boil the ocean

You can be a UN SDG Evangelist without being a UN SDG Expert

“I’ve got to experience this thing, now”, I said, when I stumbled across my first-ever IRL Amazon Fresh store in London.

Why?

Because Amazon’s been trialing and doing something new and amazing and clever and inspiring and exciting, and, and, and.

So I went up to the shop window, read the blurb (30 secs - all obvious), walked in to the lobby (casually, so that no one could the kid within jumping around with enthusiasm - you don’t want to be too excited in a supermarket, it’s not a good look), scanned my phone, walked in to the shop proper, browsed, zoned right in on a can of Diet Coke priced at 75p, picked it up and walked out.

That was a wow experience - but not for the reason you might think, and it taught me a fantastic lesson about the UN SDG life we try to live at Honey.

The feeling of “I’ve got to experience this thing” came from reading and watching about Amazon Fresh online - countless videos and posts about the new shopping experience, the logistics, the robots, the smart tech, the liberating friction-free end-user experience, the upcoming shopping revolution, and so on. You could spend a day studying everything about Amazon Fresh because the inputs and the ideas and the potential changes are huge. Like watching a spark in very slow motion - so much is going on.

The outcome, however, was the thing that hit me hardest. At 75p, my Diet Coke was 25p cheaper than at Pret. In other words, the Pret Coke was 33% more expensive than the Amazon Fresh Coke.

Imagine that the UN SDGs are like Amazon Fresh - there’s a huge industry backstory, with language and concepts, ideas to get your head round, questions and riddles, new concepts, misunderstandings and a high frequency of new understandings: a perpetual dawning of new perceptions as the journey of discovery unfolds.

But you do not need to know any of it.

You can just go in and get the one thing you need.

The magic of the UN SDGs is not their complexity but the fact that the one element which matters most to you personally in the new world which we want to build, is in there.

If you can identify the issue which touches your heart the most, which matters to you the most, then you will find a home for that issue, almost 1,000% guaranteed, somewhere, within the UN SDG framework. And once you’d done that, the framework simply provides inspiration to the conversations you have and the actions you take, alone and with others.

So, first and foremost, be an evangelist for the issue that matters to you, be true to it, be persistent and be clear. Bring the issue to work with you and add it to your conversations with colleagues and clients and suppliers in the knowledge that it’s part of a global conversation signed off by 190 countries nearly 10 years ago - it has momentum and it has credibility. You can be a UN SDG Evangelist without being a UN SDG Expert

Though they are referenced, no cans of Coke were actually consumed in the writing of this post.