Reading Materials: 

9.1 Leadership in Organizations and Society of Sustainable Development

The Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon (2002, 2006) argues, like many others, that the world is currently facing a convergence of multiple stresses, which is leading to changes that could quite possibly engulf us. It is in these threats of catastrophe, however, that opportunities for change and renewal lie, if only we can engage and fashion a resolution that fits as the situation emerges.

Homer-Dixon identifies five tectonic shifts:

（1） Differential demographic growth, with populations increasing in poor areas and remaining static or in decline in richer areas.

（2） Climate change—for example, increase in greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

（3） Environmental degradation, particularly in the developing world, which is reducing economic capacity and weakening institutions.

（4）Energy—for instance, peak oil and natural gas production is occurring with no clear plans for alternatives.

（5） Global income and wealth inequality, with massive global poverty co-existing with massive wealth, causing anger, resentment and conflict.

The effects of these stresses are being multiplied by the increased connectivity and speed with which materials, energy and information move around the planet, leading to cascading failures among the world’s ecological, economic and social systems, and a power shift down the social hierarchy from states and large organizations to various subgroups and individuals, enhanced by the analytic power of new information technologies and possibilities of terrorist action.

The danger is increased by the possibilities of convergence and simultaneity, with all the shifts happening in one place at the same time. Additionally, in the future we may not have sufficient high-quality energy to run our complex systems as the energy return on investment is declining.

One of the deep drivers of our contemporary crisis is the desire to increase economic growth, resulting in increased material throughput, and based on the assumption that more means a better quality of life. These drivers counteract attempts to improve efficiency and lessen our impact on the environment and, although it is not possible to predict the future, for Homer-Dixon, systems breakdown and increasing systems volatility seem ever more likely.

 However, this grim scenario does have a brighter side, as a number of opportunities lie between the twin poles of living harmoniously and sustainably. Complex systems are able to adapt, and adaptation to moments of breakdown offers possibilities for creativity and for leadership to push society down one path rather than another.

Adaptation will depend on the extent to which we are able to increase our social, economic, political and technological resilience, accomplished in large part by the development of a “prospective mind”that recognizes that sharp and hurtful discontinuities are an inevitable part of our future.

 We must embrace the unexpected and expect surprises. For Homer-Dixon (2006: 283), scientific knowledge remains the best tool people have to distinguish between“plausible and implausible futures”. This may mean new localized and sustainable forms of energy production, more time to deal with shocks, abandoning the system of “just in time”production, and embarking on a proactive process of advanced planning and thought which focuses on how future crises could be dealt with in a “non-extreme”, dialogic, networked and collective manner.

Open-source approaches that have been used to develop computer software need to be applied ferociously to hard social, political and environmental problems. The seeds of rebirth will therefore be found in the reality of present problems, with the possibilities of future collapse breaking down denial and inertia to produce something new, useful and hopefully sustainable.

As noted earlier, the idea of complexity is associated with ecology, with living beings, usually manifesting itself at the level of the system itself. Complexity and systems thinking has had a profound effect on many thinkers and activists promoting sustainability values and practices in a wide variety of fields—business, community, politics, society and the economy.

A complex system comprises many elements that interact physically and communicatively in relation to the transfer of information and other factors. These interactions are fairly short range, with each element operating in ignorance of the overall nature of the system itself.

However, they may have consequences far in excess of their localized existence. The effects are therefore non- linear in scope and not necessarily predictable. Feedback loops may enhance or stimulate development, or alternatively hinder or inhibit it. Most importantly, complex systems are not closed, as they constantly interact with the external environment, adjusting or not adjusting according to their degree of internal flexibility and capacity to accommodate, manage or mediate the variety of flows they experience.

The behaviour of a complex system is not determined primarily by the priorities of the individual components or elements of the system, but is the result of complex patterns of interaction. Complex systems only achieve equilibrium when the possibility of change is exhausted.

Hence, the whole is greater than the sum of a system’s constituent parts, and its structure is not so much designed and imposed as emerging from the various interactions taking place between the system and its relation to the wider environment.

 This does not deny the significance of human agency, but does qualify any notion of purely voluntaristic action or planned management outcomes. A self-organizing or autopoietic system selects flows of information or influence, enabling it to develop or change its internal structure spontaneously and adaptively.

What it integrates is not so much a product of conscious decision making, but rather the system’s capacity to make sense of, and rearticulate or redesign, itself in accordance with what it encounters.

A self-organizing system is not determined by an established series of specific goals or targets. Rather, it may be said to have a function shaped by and within the overall context in which it operates.This is a lesson for leaders and managers of the sustainability process.

The work of Capra (1996) argues that a basic set of principles derived from our understanding of ecosystems as self-organizing networks and dissipative structures may serve as guidelines for building sustainable human communities of practice, experience and hope in business, the community and elsewhere. These principles include interdependence and networking, non-linear relationships, cyclical processes, flexibility and partnership, implying democracy, enrichment and personal empowerment.

Management theorist Peter Senge (2006) argues that our focus must be on generative and creative learning that sees systems as shaping events.

When we fail to grasp the systemic source of problems such as economic growth, we are left to“push on”symptoms rather than eliminate underlying causes.

Adaptive learning is simply about coping, but coping is not enough. To create a learning organization and sustainable human communities, non-hierarchical, lateral and cooperative leadership is needed. As Senge (2008: 489) writes: Leadership in learning organizations centres on subtler and ultimately more important work.

In a learning organization, leaders’ roles differ from that of the charismatic decision-maker. Leaders are designers, teachers and stewards. These roles require new skills: the ability to build shared vision, to bring to the surface and challenge prevailing mental models, and to foster more systemic patterns of thinking. In short, leaders in learning organizations are continually expanding their capabilities to shape their future—that is, leaders are responsible for learning.

Sustainability leaders need to bring about ecological and sustainable learning that is both social and dialogic. They need to communicate and persuade people with all manner of backgrounds, understandings and experiences. This may mean acting beyond one’s authority, operating in the outer circles, moving out of familiar comfort zones, challenging opposing views and starting up a conversation.

As Bocking (2007) notes, both Al Gore, with his film documentary and book An Inconvenient Truth, and Rachel Carson(2000), with Silent Spring, first published in the US in 1962, are regarded by many as two writers who have produced foundational texts of the environmental movement, and they have sought to communicate complicated science to non-scientists in the public sphere.

Carson did so through the use of detailed evidence and having the social authority stemming from being a scientist. Gore does so by visually representing scientific knowledge in stunning photographs, and video and computer graphics.

Both present a clear moral view of the human–nature relationship as one where human action disrupts the underlying harmony and balance of nature, and both have demonstrated how ecological damage affects our very selves. Gore is quite personal in his discussion of his own experiences, while Carson writes more dispassionately about the effects of DDT on our bodies.

What is common to both their lives and their commitments is passion.And passion is, in many instances, an important aspect of leadership and a key ingredient of being taken seriously. Both have also been criticized, but, most importantly, both initiated a widespread and wide-ranging public dialogue and debate. Sustainability leaders and practitioners in less visible public arenas frequently need to persuade others to think differently.

This usually means entering into a conversation or dialogue in the community, at work, in the pub, in the home or in the classroom, and when misunderstandings or disputes occur, the problem often lies not so much in a failure to communicate but in a failure to learn to think together.

When confronted by novelty or the need to be creative, innovative or to“think outside of the box”, we resolutely stay inside because of feelings of safety and familiarity and from habit.

As William Isaacs notes, we cling to and defend existing views ‘as if our lives depended on them’(1999: 6). However, for Isaacs, we can learn to go beyond this by nurturing a conversational spirit that can penetrate and dissolve the most inflexible and intractable of issues and problems.

This can occur in close personal relationships, at the workplace within large organizations, within government, and between governments and peoples. Dialogue is the key and, to borrow an ecological metaphor from David Bohm (1996), if we remove what pollutes our thinking upstream, then we can avoid all sorts of problems and difficulties further down.

“The whole ecological problem,”writes Bohm, “is due to thought, because we have thought that the world is there for us to exploit, that it is infinite, and so no matter what we did, the pollution would all get dissolved away”(1996: 10).

Similarly, our thoughts, preconceived and pre-given assumptions often prevent us from talking freely, from sharing our fears, worries, thoughts and expectations.

This affects the whole meaning of what we do, what we say and how we act.

Conversation is never static.

It must always be in motion, for there are times when people will fight, contest, be polite or nice, engage creatively or simply argue.

Leaders have the responsibility to fashion the space, or‘container’, in which these conversations emerge and change, where dialogues may embrace wider ideas and pressures, where the experience of interaction may be enriched and enhanced, and where a variety of styles and approaches may secure recognition and acknowledgement.

Dialogue is therefore as much about learning as communication, but it does not just happen. It is, like the creation of new knowledge, the responsibility of everyone, a collective, community activity.

Dialogue is central to the sustainable development process because it facilitates collective and different ways of thinking, learning and communication. Before this process is initiated, sustainability practitioners ought to ask questions about themselves, about the deep sources of their own thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, values and feelings. It is useful to know who you are.

9.2 Some Representative Views with the UN PRME Initiative

Many universities are now taking ESD quite seriously, particularly as there is now a greater policy emphasis on engaging with the world beyond the campus and a public insistence that higher education proves its relevance and demonstrates its impact on economic and skills development, citizenship, and social cohesion and environmental sustainability.

Dyer and Dyer (2017) relate how sustainability can move from a collection of discrete programmes and research enthusiasms to be a strategic priority for higher education institutions (HEIs). Hope (2016) shows how Knowledge Transfer Partnerships in the United Kingdom can enable universities to act as a conduit for the generation of new and wide dissemination of existing knowledge on urban sustainability.

In their study of how European Business Schools are integrating sustainability into their operations, Painter-Morland (2016) forcefully argued for the need for systems thinking, and strong and systemic leadership in addition to staff capacity building, and connected to business and the natural environment. In this, they are being helped by the UN PRME, which is both an attempt to reform business education in universities and to enable universities to become effective and proactive agents for corporate responsibility and sustainability.

The PRME initiative is growing globally in influence and reach with a number of sponsored publications on poverty and pedagogy showing how businesses can have a substantive impact on social and environmental sustainability as well as the mentalities of present and future business leaders.

 However, the neoliberal discourse of free market economics is pervasive in the university sector in many countries, particularly in the USA and the UK, and this often causes an institutional resistance, and even hostility to change, which contradicts what is essentially an ideological paradigm.

One way to effectively challenge and perhaps overcome this resistance is through a faculty education or CPD programme, including the development of faculty learning communities for sustainability and course redesign and changes to pedagogy, that serves to reframe root metaphors in instructional texts in such a way as to disrupt neoliberal assumptions and so foster a more intentional and critical sustainability .

By focusing on the“logics”of business and business education such as the logic of profit or social purpose, Andersson and Ohman (2016) suggest that it is important for business and sustainability educators to understand how a business person’s subjectivity can be reorientated.

There is a difference in how business education may position a business person and engage his/her subjectivity through enabling him/her to add or create rather than simply to adapt to different values and modes of behaviour.

Thus, Andersson and Ohman (2016: 477) write:

The different logics of approaching environmental and social challenges in business education have different potential consequences. When the logics that are embedded in the language used by teachers and students come into play, they simultaneously privilege different ways of thinking and acting as business people, e.g. that business people should follow consumers’demands, laws and regulation.

Alternatively that business people should go beyond the law by implementing sustainability guidelines, which could mean improving the environment and society or businesses cleaning up their image but not their business operations.

It could also mean that business people should involve emotions when making business decisions. Considering these differences, we suggest that scholars and educators within the field of environment and sustainability education should consider the contingency of a business person’s ethical responsibilities and actions.

As Stewart (2017) shows, success in achieving a greater prominence for ESD within the university curriculum is often a product of top-down and bottom-up approaches that engage faculty, administrators and students.

However, there is still a long way to go before sustainable education becomes mainstream. As Wals writes, although there has been progress in recent years,“learning processes and multi-stakeholder interactions that engage in deep change involving developing alternative values are still scarce”(2012: 71).

The growing global recognition that a transition to a green economy is urgently needed may foster future interest in sustainability and transformation, but for this to occur and to be meaningful, ESD needs to retain its critical focus and arguably take a more challenging approach to the shibboleths of the market economy and increasingly marketized societies of this world.

It may also need to recover some of the urgency around environmental and ecological matters, which for Helen Kopnina (2012) have been too much ignored by many ESD advocates.

If higher education in general is to be more inclusive and ESD less anthropocentric and more plural, then both must become more eco-representative in its reiteration as education for nature rather than simply for nature’s dominant species. If we are to live in harmony with the planet, we need to learn and to teach from a clear and distinct commitment to ecocentrism.

In order to learn from other cultures, it is necessary to be open to different ideas and experiences, even those that might at first seem odd or alien.In order to lead by example, there need to be those who are willing to follow, to learn and to act on that learning.

Indigenous cultures in many parts of the world offer opportunities for learning and for leadership.

Whether in Australia or North America, storytelling is central to indigenous culture. The way in which human beings are part of nature is passed on through the generations by stories told by the elders. Human beings talk of being with or becoming animals, of the wind whispering, and of the spirits communicating knowledge of the sacredness of the Earth.

Life is part of a natural cycle and is itself inherently cyclical. The indigenous worldview is essentially connective, with understandings of both time and space frequently expressed in oral and visual metaphors.Spirituality is timeless, and linear time—beginning, middle and end —is but part of the aboriginal person’s circular understanding of a time continuum.

Stories are retold, become acknowledged, and, through the experience of time, place, character, event and purpose, are shared communally and made real. As Fixico (2003) writes in The American Indian Mind in a Linear World, the logic of the Native American’s worldview combines the physical with the metaphysical, the conscious with the subconscious.

This is real, this is profound, and knowledge of it only becomes truly meaningful if it is used to help the community.To learn from this, people in the developed world will require a change of mindset, including the desire and capacity to rethink, re-evaluate and challenge their long-held and fundamental assumptions about the world, about the nature of intelligence, about leadership and about themselves.

 As environmental educator Chet Bowers (1995, 2003) says, unintelligent behaviour is really any action, way of thinking or moral view that degrades the environment. We therefore need to think and understand relationships in similar ways to that of many indigenous peoples, applying ecological principles of interdependence, sustainability, ecological cycles, energy flows, partnership, flexibility, diversity, complexity and co-evolution.

We need to rethink the mechanistic linear root metaphors we live by and recognize that the dominant target-driven, goal-directed managerialism is neither realistic nor effective. It has disconnected humanity from the source of its meaning and, if the process of sustainable development needs leaders, then these leaders should perhaps best be perceived as actors, as agents, as people with the wisdom to create and to conserve.

As writes in the book Treading Lightly(2006) : The Hidden Wisdom of the World’s Oldest People, the Aboriginal people of Australia have a sophisticated culture that has enabled them to live sensitively with the rhythm and dynamics of the Earth for 40,000 years, and they have done so without leaders.

Or rather, they have done so by recognizing the value of respect for all of nature, that knowledge is embedded in nature and the way we tread upon the Earth. It is through the wisdom of the elders that a human social environment may be nurtured, enabling consensus and the empowerment of all people through sharing.

 The elders have no power as understood in the developed world, but they do have a responsibility to empower by fostering participation, discussion, dialogue and agreement.

Survival requires balance. We need balance.

Instead of looking ahead, we need to look around us, for only by examining our environment and all our relations, our‘context’, will we be able to see what is to come.The moral lesson offered is that in studying and reflecting upon indigenous ways of life, we must recognize that other, quite different, and probably better, ways of understanding the world and the human condition are possible.

We need to examine our present situation at the most fundamental level, recognizing the harm we have done to the planet and being determined to change our ways if we are to have any hope of achieving a fulfilling, equitable and sustainable existence.

Summary

For the last section of lectures, we explored the concept and practice of leadership for sustainability. Much of the academic and professionally orientated work on leadership seems to have its roots in either the experience of business, the military, and to a lesser extent politics and government.

This is reflected in the ideas and the writers discussed here, but it also accounts for a tendency for some sustainability practitioners to eschew the concept of leadership altogether or to interpret leadership very powerfully as an extension of facilitation, guidance and spiritual learning.

Sustainability leadership and learning may look for role models outside the world of politics, business and government, and see the most significant teacher and leader to be the natural environment itself or those indigenous peoples who have over time co-evolved in respectful sympathy with the natural rhythms, affordances and gifts that nature frequently bestows.

Leadership may need to be positively deviant or basically accommodative. It may also need to be inspiring, but good sustainability leadership requires an ecological intelligence, a respect for non-human others and an understanding of sustainable development that we have yet to fully achieve.