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Leading for sustainability when times are tough
- 1. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK Being a sustainability leader Penny Walker Postgraduate Certificate in Sustainable Value Chains 7-10 November 2016
- 3. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice." Theodore Parker.
- 4. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK Leading from wherever you find yourself.
- 6. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK Leaders provide: • Compelling vision of the better future. • Successful action and progress. • A sense of unity, common purpose. • Attention to individuals. Scouller
- 7. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK Personal qualities Action logic • Impulsive • Opportunist • Diplomat • Expert • Achiever • Individualist • Strategist • Alchemist (magician) • Ironist Rooke and Torbert, Wilber
- 8. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK What we need from leaders now • Change the context, change the system You are not the boss of me. • Radical innovation We’ve never done this before. • Resilience I may not get there with you. • Authenticity Be the change. • Values Lash yourself to the mast. • Step up Don’t turn away.
- 9. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK Change the context, change the system Leading when you’re not the boss
- 11. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK Leading when you are not the boss Collaboration, partnership, systems, communities • Enables the system, the group, the collaborators to do their thing. • Skills in process, mediation, backbone. • Trusted by all – no agenda. • Has convening power, rallies the collaborators. • Knowledgeable, connected, charismatic. • Has an agenda for ambition. Ansell and Gash, 2007 Honest Broker Organic leader
- 15. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK Knowing is necessary • Environmental limits, ecosystem services, feedback loops. • Inequality, hunger, diversity, repression. • Markets, supply chains, legal and political context, consumers and customers. • What’s already happening in the system. • How my organisation works, culture, rules, reality. • My own strengths, weaknesses, preferences, passions.
- 16. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK Knowing isn’t enough It’s not my responsibility, I don’t know how, I can’t do it alone, people and circumstances are getting in the way.
- 17. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK Resilience I may not get there with you.
- 18. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK "It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either." Rabbi Tarfon
- 19. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK Take responsibility It’s not my responsibility, yet still I will take responsibility. I don’t know how, and I will find out. I can’t do it alone, so I’ll collaborate with others. People and circumstances are getting in the way, and I won’t let that stop me.
- 20. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Mary Oliver
- 21. PENNY-WALKER.CO.UK Yourself What needs to happen? What needs to change? What leadership is missing? What qualities and skills can I bring or develop? What opportunities can I make or take? Where I step up to lead The system
Editor's Notes
- Being a sustainability leader... when times are tough.
- You’ll probably recognise this as the source of Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s famous quote, woven into the Oval Office carpet by request of President Barack Obama. It’s also in the library of the UK’s Supreme Court. The original is from Theodore Parker, who was a Unitarian minister. I like this version because of Parker’s admission that he “cannot calculate the curve”. At the moment – two days after the US presidential election won by Donald Trump - I can’t see how we more further towards justice and sustainability. But I choose to believe that the moral arc still bends towards them.
- There are different kinds of leadership. Here are some examples from my own experience. It’s not (just) about where you are in an organisation. Friends of the Earth - Campaigners – communicating, building a narrative; analysis of the system, the problem, the solutions, the players; formal and informal coalitions of organisations and people; combative, combining carrot and stick, push and pull, critique and praise. Aiming for system level change rather than change inside the organisation. Board of Growing Communities – Board Chair – formal authority, legal responsibility; stepped into it because of crisis; in practice holding the ring for the founder to combine strategic insight, vision and practical problem solving to get the job done. High-level legal compliance, ‘got your back’, real work when there were existential problems to solve. Growing Communities itself – leadership through just getting on with making the future, despite the context favouring the status quo. Thought leadership and creating a practical alternative food trading leadership. Not giving up. Thought leadership – authoring books, creating and curating insight, cross-fertilising ideas. Working Collaboratively - http://www.dosustainability.com/shop/working-collaboratively-a-practical-guide-to-achieving-more-p-27.html Change Management for Sustainable Development - http://oldsite.iema.net/shop/product_info.php?cPath=27_29&products_id=8455 Penny-walker.co.uk/blog Main day job – supporting, motivating, convening, facilitating – bringing process skill to enable others to do their best work. Flood defences managed realignment; collaborations to protect water quality; low carbon communities. Credits: All author’s own.
- Scouller, Four Dimensions of Leadership A shared, motivating group purpose or vision. Action, progress and results. Collective unity or team spirit. Individual selection and motivation. Unclear what, if any, academic research backs up this model, but it appealed to me in providing a useful checklist of the functions of leadership.
- Rooke and Torbert, Wilber An individual has these qualities, or not. Individuals can move through the hierarchy (usually from impulsive through to Ironist, but people can ‘regress’). Not everyone will get all the way through. Movement can happen ‘naturally’ as people grow up, mature, learn from life experiences. People can also intentionally undergo self-development experiences (coaching, group learning, reflection) which help them shift. Torbet and Rooke found that successful leaders (in formal leadership roles) were mostly strategists. Diplomats and experts had less success at transformational change. Achievers succeeded in implementing incremental change. Individualists are more likely to break rules that don’t help achieve their vision. Seven Transformations of Leadership, David Rooke & William R. Torbert, Harvard Business Review April 2005 Issue.
- Leaders are not always or only found in positions of formal authority or power. This is what we need from all kinds of leaders, now: Change needs to be bigger than individual organisations, which means change by consent, with different players coordinating and collaborating. Leadership is much more by consent, persuasion and trust-building than by wielding power. We have never made the shift from planetary unsustainability to sustainability before. We don’t (yet) know how we’ll do it. So we need multiple experiments and we need to find positive ways of saying “I don’t know”. Leadership is comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, and helps others to be, too. It’s going to take years. It won’t be easy. It won’t be pleasant. We’ll sometimes feel defeated, failures, pessimistic. Leadership is retaining courage, strength, hope even while knowing “I may not get there with you.”, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. We’re asking people to contemplate huge changes to business as usual. Leadership is showing that you mean it, through small personal decisions and choices as well as big ones. Know what your values are and hold strong to them. They are your moral compass, the mast you lash yourself to during a storm. Step up. You are here, you are already doing good, in small ways and in big ways. You are not alone. You can step up.
- Looking at just a few of those in a bit more detail.
- “Who will make sure it doesn’t fall over?” This was the question asked by someone in a workshop about protecting the quality and quantity of water in an English catchment. The room included regulators, water companies, local authorities, environmentalists, business representatives. The group was discussing how to work together collaboratively, to meet all their needs in the catchment. The regulator had done the initial convening, but was really keen that people understood that this was intended as a collaboration, not just a consultation on what the regulator should do. People weren’t quite sure that they understood or believed this intention. Someone said “But..... Who will make sure it doesn’t fall over?” In other words, who’s in charge? When I’m deciding to deprioritise this work, who will push me to stick to my commitments? Who can I mentally shift the burden to? People can flounder without a boss to set priorities, confirm how to approach things, and keep them accountable for achievements. So leadership in collaboration is about establishing and maintaining mutual accountability, and demonstrating that you will do what you said you’d do. Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tof2006/
- A bit more on the kind of leadership that’s needed in collaboration. "Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice" by Chris Ansell and Alison Gash. Ansell and Gash identify leadership as one of these critical variables. They say: "Although 'unassisted' negotiations are sometimes possible, the literature overwhelmingly finds that facilitative leadership is important for bringing stakeholders together and getting them to engage each other in a collaborative spirit." What kind of person can provide this facilitative leadership? Do they have to be disinterested, in the manner of an agenda-neutral facilitator? Or do they have to be a figure with credibility and power within the system, to provide a sense of agency to the collaboration? Interestingly, Ansell and Gash think both are needed, depending on whether power is distributed relatively equally or relatively unequally among the potential collaborators. It's worth quoting at some length here: "Where conflict is high and trust is low, but power distribution is relatively equal and stakeholders have an incentive to participate, then collaborative governance can successfully proceed by relying on the services of an honest broker that the respective stakeholders accept and trust." This honest broker will pay attention to process and remain 'above the fray' - a facilitator or mediator. "Where power distribution is more asymmetric or incentives to participate are weak or asymmetric, then collaborative governance is more likely to succeed if there is a strong "organic" leader who commands the respect and trust of the various stakeholders at the outset of the process." An organic leader emerges from among the stakeholders, and my reading of the paper suggests that their strength may come from the power and credibility of their organisation as well as personal qualities like technical knowledge, charisma and so on. While you can buy in a neutral facilitator (if you have the resource to do so), you cannot invent a trusted, powerful 'organic' leader if they are not already in the system. Ansell and Gash note "an implication of this contingency is that the possibility for effective collaboration may be seriously constrained by a lack of leadership."
- Davos, 2000. Every year, the world’s business leaders - seriously powerful men and women, with the resources the world’s biggest companies at their behest - gather in Davos in Switzerland. At their conference plenary session in 2000, they had an electronic poll - using interactive handsets - ranking the issues which they thought would have the biggest impact on their businesses in the future. It was the early days of this technology, and I imagine the organisers were no doubt excited and nervous about using it. The list of issues included unrest in the Middle East, and uncertainty in stock markets. The vote was taken, and to the organiser’s surprise, climate change won. They actually thought this was due to an error with the technology, so the vote was taken again. Climate change topped the list again, by an even bigger margin. So the world’s most powerful business people showed very clearly that they are not ignorant of this huge challenge. But - and here’s the paradox - the workshop session on climate change was the least well attended of the whole gathering. Credit: Davos town - https://www.flickr.com/photos/morton1905/ Davos in session - http://www.china.org.cn/business/davos2010/2010-02/01/content_19341948.htm Gadget - www.voxvote.com
- Climate change topped the list again, by an even bigger margin. So the world’s most powerful business people showed very clearly that they are not ignorant of this huge challenge. But - and here’s the paradox - the workshop session on climate change was the least well attended of the whole gathering. Credit:
- Of course you need knowledge. You won’t get far if you believe what you read on twitter or facebook without doing some more credible research. From how our planet works, to your own internal self – know stuff.
- But if, like the world’s most powerful people meeting in Davos, your knowledge doesn’t lead to action, then you’re not a leader.
- Leadership is the taking of responsibility, whether anyone else has assigned it to you or not. When faced with not knowing, find out – often through experimentation. Build coalitions, collaborate, share risks, responsibilities, credit. Face obstacles and find ways to make progress anyway.
- So take a bit of time to consider the system – the challenge you’re working on, the context you’d like to change. And to think about yourself – as you are now, and as you can be. The things you’re willing to do or the action you’re willing to take. Where those two things intersect, is where you will step up to lead. Think about this yourself, then get together with another person and share what you’ve been thinking. We’ll meet together again before we close.
- Take a post-card and an envelope. CISL will post this to you in the New Year. Write your name and address on the envelope. On the post card, write yourself a reminder of the leadership you’re planning to show. Put the card in the envelope and put it here. Thank you for joining in. Thank you especially for the leadership you have committed to showing. Good luck with it, and I look forward to seeing the results. Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/petitzozio/ postcards