Evolutionary leadership focuses on seeing things systemically and designing for sustainability. It involves developing six key competencies: personal evolution, systems thinking, design for sustainability, collaboration and innovation, emotions and language, and syntony and flow. Evolutionary leaders act as stewards, facilitate emergence of life-affirming realities, and are competent in systems thinking, feeling and being. They focus on co-adaptive challenges rather than technical problems. Sustainability means designing solutions that meet current needs without compromising future generations' ability to meet their own needs.

2. Evolutionary Leadership:
From Systemic Sustainability
to Integral Thrivability
Alexander Laszlo
TheLasz@me.com
ITBA Graduate Student Forum
!!

3. 3 Key Frames
 Evolutionary Leadership
o Knowing how to choose among
existing alternatives as well as how to
create new ones
 SystemsThinking
o Seeing things in terms of connected
relationships, patterns and processes
and not just in terms of separate
objects, structures, positions
 Sustainability Strategy
o Understanding the objectives of
sustainable business practice and
knowing how to design for them

4. Follow the Leader

5. Six Competencies ofThe Evolutionary Leader
Personal evolution:
Committing to expand and intensify our
consciousness, engaging in lifelong
learning, becoming a different observer,
defining our role as evolutionary leaders
Systems thinking:
Understanding patterns of change, our
interconnectedness, and the leverage
points to transform social systems
Design for sustainability:
Applying sustainability principles and
practices, creating solutions to economic,
social, cultural and environmental problems,
designing living institutions
Collaboration and
innovation:
Bringing people together, harvesting
diversity, engaging in conversations
that translate the vision into actions,
creating evolutionary learning
communities, innovating for the
common good
Emotions and
language:
Becoming aware of the
narratives, vocabularies and
speech acts that we use to
affect change. Facilitate effective
communication to enable
emotional intelligence
Syntony and flow:
Developing a syntony sense — moving
from walking the talk to dancing the
path; embodying evolutionary
consciousness.

6. Evolutionary Leadership
 Mindset - know-why
o Emergent Worldview
• Visions of evolutionary leadership
o Systems and evolutionary thinking
• Interdependencies of global dynamics
 knowledge
 Skillset - know-how
o Collaborative skills
o Strategic conversations for effective communication and action
o Sustainability principles and practices
 practice
 Heartset - care-why
o Learning from nature
o Syntony Sense: creative and intentional aligning with the dynamic
harmony of our broader environment
 awareness

7. What Do Leaders Do ?
 Leaders are people who normally declare possible
what other people do not
 They declare a vision for a future, they generate
the future, they mobilize others to create new
realities
 Leaders work on adaptive challenges not on
technical problems
 They think big and use a systemic and strategic
vision
 They inspire and promote learning, change, and
evolution

8. Evolutionary leaders
 Are stewards of people,
organizations, communities and
ecosystems,
 Facilitate the emergence of life-
affirming, future-oriented and
opportunity-increasing realities.
 Are competent in systems
thinking, feeling and being
 Focus on co-adaptive challenges
(that require the creation of
new knowledge) rather than on
technical problems (that can be
solves with existing knowledge)

9. Sustainability

10. Sustainable Development
 Forms of development that satisfy the
needs of the present, while at the same
time safeguarding the capacity of future
generations to meet their own needs.
o From the Brundtland Report (convened by
the UN in 1983 as part of the World
Commission on the Environment and
Development (WCED)) published as Our
Common Future by Oxford University Press
in 1987.

11. Sustainability is
the possibility that
human and other forms
of life will flourish
on the Earth forever.
— John R. Ehrenfeld
Radical
Sustainability

12. Systemic Sustainability
 A process of development (individual, corporate, or
societal) can be said to be socially and ecologically
sustainable if it involves an adaptive strategy that ensures
the evolutionary maintenance of an increasingly robust
and supportive environment.
“What is consistent with nature is sustainable”
– Janine Benyus, 1997
• Curating Systemic Sustainability involves the
responsible stewardship and creative cultivation of
resources — social, cultural, financial, and natural —
to generate stakeholder value while contributing to the
well-being of current and future generations of all
beings.

13. What does Sustainability mean to you?
Sustainability is the role I play in sustaining and
fostering the ability of [ ] (whom?)
to be able to [ ] (have/do what?)
for the next [ ] (how long?)
as the result of my actions in the present.

14. The Funnel
(The Natural Step)
Sustainability
Robert, K-H. 2000
Time
Increasing resource demand
Diminishing resources
Sustainable Demand
Available offer
Regenerative Economy
Sustainable Society

15. Sustainability
Robert, K-H. 2000
Time

The Funnel

16. Laszlo © 2010
From Scarcity to Abundance
Current
reality
Planning
Scarcity Abundance
Problem
solving
Design
and
innovation
Evolving
Sustainable
System
1
2
3

17. The Sustainability Learning
Compliance - reactive stance
seeks to comply with regulatory standards
Beyond Compliance - anticipatory stance
seeks cost avoidance strategies
2nd Stage
1st Stage
3rd Stage
4th Stage
Eco-Efficiency - proactive stance
establishes profit centers
Sustainable Development - interactive stance
mainstreams environmental goals
time
5th Stage Evolutionary Development - integrative stance
embodies and enacts conscious syntony
conserve
restore
regenerate
(co)create
SAU
BAU

18. Integrated Quadruple Bottom Line
Social
Financial
Environmental
S u s t a i n a b i l i t y
Cultural
Integrated Quadruple Top Line

19. socially desirable
culturally acceptable
psychologically nurturing
economically sustainable
technologically feasible
operationally viable
environmentally robust
generationally sensitive
capable of continuous learning
Sustainability Criteria
IntegratedQuadrupleBottomLine
Social
Financial
Environmental
Sustainability
Cultural

20. Evolutionary vision
 It is no longer sufficient to be a smart
organization, one that can scan the commercial
environment, detect variations, and react
accordingly. If we restrict ourselves to reacting
to signals when it comes to human impact ... we
may well end up focusing our organizational
resources just on minimizing the pain of
irreversible damage. Our business organizations
need to become conscious of the evolutionary role
business plays in the future of the planet and to
take responsibility for that role.
o Nattrass & Altomare — The Natural Step for Business:
Wealth, Ecology and the Evolutionary Corporation

21. Evolving Development
 The new concept of development takes
account not only of economic growth but also
of all those parameters that reflect the quality
of life, full enjoyment of creative capacity and
observance of human rights, which the principal
decision-makers should take into account so
that development is not owned and dispensed
by a few but is a common undertaking on an
international, multilateral scale, with the human
being as its centre, its sole agent and its
beneficiary. All that is needed is a new look at
the world, and different premises.
o Federico Mayor — Summary Records from the 131st session of
the UNESCO Executive Board. Paris, 1990. Arts. 104-108, pp. 34-36.

22. The 3 Purposes of Evolutionary Development

23. Evolutionary Development
 Seeks to:
o Do more with less
o Increase quality of life
o Create a sustainable economy
o Protect the natural environment
o Promote lifelong learning and innovation
o Foster community — connections and
meaning
Evolutionary development is a call for integration,
for applying what we already know, for innovating
with the future of the planet in mind, for
reinventing what it means to be human

24. The 5+n Rs of Sustainable Product Stewardship
1. Reduce 
2. Reuse 
3. Reclaim
4. Recycle 
5. Refuse
n Redesign
0 Reframe

25. A Better Compass…
๏ As a society, we have to learn better how to
learn – I call it social learning; it is the
dynamism for change that could lead us to a
new kind of society that will not destroy itself
from its own excesses… for we must share
a vision for a new society before we can
realize it. Designing a better society and
maintaining a good life require deep thought
and sustained effort by all of us. Reasoning
together is the only way we can bring it
about.
• Lester W. Milbrath – Learning Our Way Out, 1989

26. Playing the Macro-Violin
 To describe hisTheory U, Otto Scharmer quotes the
violinist Miha Pogacnik recounting the insight he gained
during his first concert in Chartres:
• I felt that the cathedral almost kicked me out.‘Get out
with you!’ she said. For I was young and I tried to perform
as I always did: by just playing my violin. But then I realized
that in Chartres you actually cannot play your small
violin, but you have to play the ‘macro violin’.The small
violin is the instrument that is in your hands. The macro-
violin is the whole cathedral that surrounds you.The
cathedral of Chartres is built entirely according to musical
principles. Playing the macro violin requires you to listen
and to play from another place, from the periphery. You
have to move your listening and playing from within to
beyond yourself.

27. Conversation as Strategy
Conversation for relationship
Conversation for learning
Conversation for possibilities
Conversation for action

28. “First, be the change you want to see in the world” – Gandhi
“Before we can change the way
we live, before we have saved
the rainforest and the whales, we
need to change ourselves.
Humanity with all its different
races is one.We and all other
living things are nourished and
sustained by the same earth.
This is our salvation, this is our
responsibility. How can we turn
our back on Mother Earth?”
– Rema, a 14 year old girl from New
Zealand

29. Be the systems you want to see in the world…
• Evolu'onary
Leadership
for
Systemic
Sustainability

30. A Systemic Process
Emergent
Self-organizing
Interdependent
Synergetic
Evolving

31. Sustainability is a journey,
not a destination
 Talking the Talk
 Walking the Talk
 Living the Walk
 Dancing the Path

32. Evolutionary Leadership
Quotes

33. “Leadership” is a concept we often resist. It seems
immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of
ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are
made for community, then leadership is everyone’s
vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is
not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem
called community, everyone follows and everyone
leads.
– Parker Palmer

34. The wise leader does not intervene unnecessarily.
The leader's presence is felt, but often the group
runs itself...The leader's personal state of
consciousness creates a climate of openness...The
leader who knows when to listen, when to act, and
when to withdraw can work effectively with nearly
anyone...To know how other people behave takes
intelligence.To know myself takes wisdom... It
puzzles people at first, to see how little the
able leader actually does, and yet how much gets
done... Run an honest, open group... It is more
important to tell the simple, blunt truth than it is to
say things that sound good.
– The DaoDeJing

35. Because of our obsession with how leaders behave and
with the interactions of leaders and followers, we forget
that in its essence, leadership is about learning how to
shape the future... Leadership exists when people are
no longer victims of circumstances but participate in
creating new circumstances. Leadership is about
creating a domain in which human beings continually
deepen their understanding of reality and become more
capable of participating in the unfolding of the world.
Ultimately leadership is about creating new realities.
– Adam Kahane, quoting Peter Senge in his introduction to
Synchronicity:The Inner Path of Leadership by Joseph Jaworski

36. The very highest leader is barely known by men.
Then comes the leader they know and love.
Then the leader they fear.
Then the leader they despise.
The leader who does not trust enough will not be
trusted.And so it is that a leader is best not when
people obey and acclaim him, but if — when the
work is done — the people say, 'we did it
ourselves'.
– Laozi

37. The Work of Evolutionary Leaders
“The key challenge of this new century — for social
scientists, natural scientists, and everyone else — will
be to build ecologically sustainable communities,
designed in such a way that their technologies and
social institutions — their material and social
structures — do not interfere with nature’s inherent
ability to sustain life.
The design principles of our future social institutions
must be consistent with the principles of
organization that nature has evolved to sustain the
web of life.”
– Fritjof Capra
The Hidden Connections

38. The most meaningful activity in which a human
being can be engaged is one that is directly related
to human evolution.This is true because human
beings now play an active and critical role not only
in the process of their own evolution but in the
survival and evolution of all living beings.
Awareness of this places upon human beings a
responsibility for their participation in and
contribution to the process of evolution.
Acceptance and acknowledgement of this
responsibility and creative engagement in the
process of metabiological evolution consciously
would bring forth a new reality.
– Jonas Salk
The Need for Evolutionary Leadership

39. We undergo the evolution that we envision
for ourselves.
» Theodore Roszak