Learning, Leadership and Sustainable Development

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Learning, Leadership and Sustainable Development
Dr Jake Reynolds University of Cambridge
Programme for Industry
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Corporate arena

• Story so far

• General acceptance that business can play a key
  role in delivering SD
• Increasing acceptance by business of the many
  cases to be made
• Lots of talk, reports, principles, intentions
• Level of progress debatable

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How we imagine change
Strategy(organisational direction)
Performance(organisational success)
Model A
Practice (organisational impact)
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What really happens
Strategy(organisational direction)
Culture
Performance(organisational success)
Model B
Practice (organisational impact)
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Culture change

• SD is a high magnitude challenge
• Cultural changes are necessary, not desirable

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Helpful shifts
What SD means now What it could mean in the future

Problem Opportunity Cost Saving Source of
risk Source of value Specialist/technical Mains
tream Complicated Common sense Fragmented Inte
grated Reactive Predictive Quick
fix Long-term investment Passing fad Core
business Clever PR License to
operate Vague/ill-defined Clear values and
principles Tactics Trust

• Problem
• Compliance
• Source of risk
• Cost
• Distraction
• Specialist/technical
• Complicated
• Quick fix
• Passing fad
• Clever PR
• Ill-defined, fluffy
• Ducking and weaving

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Models of change

• Power-centred (shouting at plants)
• autocratic culture of instruction, supervision,
  dependency
• People-centred approaches
• dialogue, engagement, guidance, tools who owns
  it?
• Emergent change
• continuous, evolutionary, self-organising
• You cannot direct an organisation, only disturb
  it such that it reorganises.

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Implications

• Give more attention to growing the conditions in
  which change occurs
• Engage with the head, heart and hands

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Leadership

• What does it mean to be an SD leader?

1. Challenge cultural obstacles (by creating
   disturbance)
2. Construct new patterns of behaviour (by creating
   psychological safety)

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Leadership

• Task 1 Create disturbance
• Be as radical as the campaigners, but in the
  organisations interests
• Alert employees to threats
• Expose poor performance
• Get charismatic figures to challenge the status
  quo
• Surface assumptions
• Awaken people to the issues, risks, possibilities

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Leadership

• Task 2 Create psychological safety
• Build SD into the vision and values
• Illuminate SD locally within teams and functions
• Empower staff to come up with solutions
• Create practice fields
• Act as role model, not expert
• Align systems and policies
• Scaffold learning

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www.sdchronos.org
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jake.reynolds_at_cpi.cam.ac.uk www.sdchronos.org