Annotated Table of Contents for Leadership for Sustainability

Annotated Table of Contents Leadership for Sustainability Strategies for Tackling Wicked Challenges

By R. Bruce Hull, David P. Robertson, and Michael Mortimer

Chapter 1: Introduction Career success and professional impact, not to mention the hope and promise of sustainable development, increasingly depend on leadership skills and practices that help people solve wicked problems—these skills and practices are the focus of this book. Science and technology are not enough. Environmental and sustainability professionals working in business, government, and nonprofit organizations of all scales, from local to transnational, use and need leadership strategies to solve the pressing, and wicked, challenges of the Anthropocene. It is a heady time for professionals working on these sustainability challenges. This is your opportunity to provide leadership and influence as never before.

Roadmap for the Anthropocene Chapter 2: Challenges of the Anthropocene The challenges humanity faces are real and intensifying: water, food, inequality, climate, energy, urbanization, and a take-make-waste linear economy. If things don’t change, any one of them can derail sustainable development. But along with these challenges are trends we want to continue: growing prosperity, ending malnutrition, declining poverty, more accessible education, improving health, and a stabilizing population. This chapter uses a “breakthrough” narrative to frame the challenges of the Anthropocene in a way that inspires leadership and action, moving beyond the tired, fear-mongering, and de-motivating framing of population explosion and environmental collapse. This breakthrough storyline invites people to join in overcoming challenges,

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pursuing opportunities, innovating solutions, and creating a bright future. It is a story that invites broad participation by business, government, and civil society. It invites people like you to play an active role transforming humanity’s development trajectory, so we overcome challenges and turn them into opportunities.

Chapter 3: Opportunities of the Anthropocene Your influence and relevance depend, in part, on being in the right place at the right time. You risk being left behind or swept away if you don’t see the challenges and opportunities coming your way. The Anthropocene is causing tectonic transformations in markets and governance. The emerging landscape is reshaping organizations, professions, and careers. Businesses, cities, and the supply chains and other networks that connect them are emerging sources of inspiration and innovation. This chapter outlines these changes and the impacts they are having on careers and professions.

Toolbox for Wicked Leadership Chapter 4: Leadership Basics Leadership requires the creation of three conditions: direction, alignment, and commitment. These three conditions exist pretty much any time and any place a group of people manages to get things done: people agree on the direction that defines what they want to achieve, align their efforts and resources to achieve that direction, and commit to helping each other and maintaining the work over time. Importantly, this conception of leadership places responsibility for leadership on the shoulders of stakeholders—all of us can and must lead from where we are. We can’t rely on the people with elected positions or corner offices. Wicked problems require a different type of leadership than the types that work for tame problems or crises. This chapter helps you think about wicked problems as a leadership challenge and sets up the next three chapters, which present tools and strategies designed for meeting the challenges that wicked problems create.

Chapter 5: Connecting across Space and Time Problems are wicked, in part, because their causes and solutions are distributed across space, time, and cultures. No one has authority over all the stakeholders who must be engaged because they are embedded in different organizations, nations, and professions. Many stakeholders will neither meet nor interact, and some may not even realize they are connected; yet their actions must be coordinated if the needed systemwide change is to occur. This chapter explains wicked leadership strategies that connect widely dispersed stakeholders: accountability, storytelling, community of practice and learning, train-the-trainer, scaling up, diffusion, collective impact, and social marketing.

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Chapter 6: Collaborating across Differences Wicked situations exceed the capacities of any one organization, and even any one sector (e.g., market, government, or civil society). Stakeholders must collaborate despite vast differences in their values, assumptions, personalities, disciplines, professions, generations, cultures, and sectors. Yet, most stakeholders are trapped in silos of similarity that are self-reinforcing and protectionist, accentuating differences that hinder efforts to collaborate across those silos. Collaboration is further complicated because the wicked challenges of the Anthropocene are exceptionally ambiguous and ill-defined. Stakeholders rarely agree on what the problem is or what outcomes they want to accomplish. But stakeholders must do this difficult work; it can’t be done for them. They must voluntarily share, defend, and change their interests and positions. It must be voluntary because no stakeholder has power or authority over all other stakeholders, and because changes in value cannot be enforced or imposed if commitment is to be sustained. Psychological barriers that make collaboration difficult include confirmation bias, filter bubbles, identity protective reasoning, and echo chambers. Strategies promoting collaboration across differences include picking battles by targeting elites, using facts cautiously, and avoiding propaganda feedback loops.

Novel leadership practices include managing identity by triggering group membership, affirming self-worth, saying yes-and, and nuancing the story. Traditional leadership practices include becoming self-aware, respecting differences, active listening, and focusing on interests and not positions. Other key tools include building trust, repairing lost trust, and forming partnerships.

Chapter 7: Adapting to Change, Uncertainty, and Failure Uncertainty is on the rise because the environmental stability of the Holocene is waning while disruptive technological and social innovation are accelerating. Impacts ripple back and forth through globalized, interconnected systems in unpredictable ways.

Dynamic and emergent situations make causation less knowable and control less possible. Solutions that worked in the past may not work in the future. New technologies and strategies will be needed, some creating novel impacts that compound uncertainty. The fickleness of stakeholders adds yet more uncertainty: stakeholders learn and change as they encounter each other and as they encounter the new conditions created by their interventions. Their changing values and actions will be feedback loops that create new, unique system dynamics that require new interventions and course corrections. Problem-solving approaches that rely on analysis, prediction, and control will struggle in these conditions. This chapter explains leadership practices for dealing with these conditions: sensemaking, learning by doing, innovating, being disruptive, striving for resiliency, anticipating the future, and sharing lessons.

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Storybook of People Practicing Wicked Leadership Chapter 8: Introducing Leadership Stories An overview of the lessons illustrated by real-world examples provided in each chapter 9-15.

Chapter 9: Changing Tastes: Influencing Identity and Choices for Sustainable Food Of all the things humans do, agriculture has among the biggest impacts on water, biodiversity, and climate. Imagine that you are trying to influence fickle and distracted consumers to change what they eat in ways that make agriculture more sustainable.

You know that producing protein from meat not only raises ethical issues, it is hugely inefficient, consuming much more water and contributing much more to climate change and deforestation than producing protein from plants. You also know that facts don’t convince people to act, so you use choice editing and identity management to drive change. This real example explores how chefs and foodservice professionals use these strategies to alter menus and recipes that change diets and reduce environmental impacts of conventional food and agriculture systems. Key actors include NGOs, food consultancies, Fortune 500 companies, restaurants, chefs, institutional kitchens, and, of course, foodies.

Chapter 10: Leadership Is a Key Ingredient in Water: Getting Direction, Alignment, and Commitment in India Several billion people don’t have convenient access to clean water and sanitation.

Someone in the family, typically a female, must devote 25 percent of their day to fetching water, which means they aren’t able to attend school or engage in more economically productive or enriching activities. Already fragile economies and communities struggle and suffer as a result, worsening poverty. Imagine that you are working with talented and motivated people from multiple organizations and communities and you come up with a great plan that, if implemented, will reduce water risks, empower women and girls, alleviate the ravages of poverty, improve sanitation and public health, and otherwise change communities for the better. But, like many good plans, it risks sitting on the shelf and gathering dust. How do you move the plan into action? This case study describes how a small nongovernmental organization helped rural villages in arid, poverty-stricken regions of India generate the direction, alignment, and commitment needed to build and restore source water management systems that dramatically improve villagers’ access to water and their quality of life.

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Key actors include an NGO, community groups, philanthropists, technical experts, and government agencies.

Chapter 11: Collective Impact for Climate Mitigation By some accounting, cities are responsible for over 70% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Fortunately, many cities around the world are working hard to be smarter, cleaner, and greener. Imagine that you are one of the many stakeholders in a city’s effort to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. To succeed, stakeholders will need to coordinate their actions, resolve differing agendas, overcome competing and overlapping capacities, and engage residents and commuters who tend to ignore and resist pleas for change. This case study illustrates how stakeholders in one city are using the collective impact strategy to drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Key actors include city planners, local politicians, real estate developers, consultants, local civic organizations, and residents.

Chapter 12: Innovating Carbon Farming Soil is one of the world’s largest carbon sinks, making farmers and farming one of the most powerful leverage points in efforts to sequester the carbon needed to limit global warming. This real example illustrates an initiative that can sequester enough carbon to significantly alter the world’s total greenhouse gas budget. Strategies illustrated include collaborative innovation, sensemaking, and stakeholder engagement. Key actors include entrepreneurs, farmers, NGOs, certifiers, consultancies, and major businesses in all aspects of the food system, from production to consumption.

Chapter 13: Accounting Makes Sustainability Profitable, Possible, and Boring Most every organization, whether a business, government agency, or nonprofit, has significant, negative impacts on water, energy, pollution, and waste. To reduce the impacts of your organization, you’ll need to coordinate the actions of many widely distributed stakeholders, including investors, customers, employees in distant facilities, and other organizations that support your energy and material needs, as well as the siloed internal divisions of your organization, such as engineering and finance. You don’t have direct authority over many of the people you need to influence. Many of them will never meet one another, and some won’t realize they are connected to the sustainability goals you are advancing. This real example illustrates how the leadership strategies of accountability and transparency helped organize the actions needed to make meaningful, measurable impacts on sustainability goals while increasing profitability. Major actors are Host Hotels & Resorts (a multinational corporation),

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SASB (a global investment advisory service), accountants, engineers, C-suite executives, and consultants.

Chapter 14: Fire Learning Network Wildfires are destroying biodiversity and human communities. Climate change is just part of the problem. Many of these landscapes evolved to burn regularly and naturally.

Problems arise when humans don’t let them burn. The resulting bone-dry, fuel-rich conditions are ripe for hot, uncontrollable, destructive fires. Experts know this, but only a small fraction of the preventive burns planned for each year get implemented because the organizations responsible for regular preventive burning are mired in inertia, skepticism, and inaction. The Fire Learning Network provides a real illustration of how trust building and community of practice helped stakeholders learn-by-doing and coordinate the action of dozens of organizations across large regions of North America get fire back on the land and in doing so protect human communities and restore ecological health. Actors include various government agencies (local, state, and federal), place-based communities, NGOs, and private landowners.

Chapter 15: Partnering for Clean Water and Community Benefit What can you do when your community does not have the resources to manage the floods and pollution caused when storms overwhelm its drains and sewage treatment systems? Green infrastructure is an option, but it is expensive and must be maintained.

This real story illustrates how a community used a public–private partnership strategy to generate local jobs and open space, met EPA stormwater requirements, and save time and money. Key actors include local politicians, multiple departments in a county government, an innovative business consultancy, local NGOs, local churches, and lots of local businesses, residents, and school children.

Chapter 16: Conclusion A summary and invitation to act.

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