Thoughts on sustainability and leadership

In my article on Sustainability through learning and teaching that was published in FE News in October 2011 I talked about the need for a particular kind of leadership to bring about the level of change that is needed in society to get back on course of being sustainable. I am not just talking about the leadership of individual institutions but what if education took on a leadership role across society?

In the last few days the population has reached the 7 billion mark with a prognosis of 9 billion by 2050. Already we are making use of available resources and sinks as if we had 1.5 planets available to us. We are living on an ecological credit card and like financial debt, ecological debt has the potential of multiplying exponentially hence creating an unexpected tipping point that could catapult us into a very different climate and ecosystem state. Clearly how we manage our society is not sustainable – not in environmental, social or economic terms.

How could leadership bringing about the scale of change required?

Ronald Heifetz, from the Harvard Kennedy School, pioneered the idea of adaptive leadership and distinguishes between technical and adaptive challenges. Technical challenges, according to Heifetz, may be complex but they are problems that we have learnt to master and know how to solve. I don?t find the term technical challenge particularly useful as it can conjure up challenges that are technical or have to do with technology. Therefore I prefer to refer to them as easy problems. Adaptive challenges on the other hand are highly complex, the stakeholders may not even agree on the problem definition, let alone on ways of responding intelligently to the challenge. We certainly do not know how to solve the problem. Such a challenge requires reflection, a change in values and beliefs and hence large amounts of learning. Nevertheless governments, organisations, communities and individuals keep trying to deal with our multiple environmental, social and economic problems as if they were easy ones. In the last few weeks I have been looking at a range of sustainability and environmental policies of colleges, universities and local adult education providers. The majority focus on the reduction of carbon emissions, water and other resource usage and waste. Even though problems rarely fall neatly into one or the other category of easy or adaptive challenge, and we can view it most usefully as a continuum, issues such as reducing waste, water and energy usage are more prominently on the easy side of the scale even though the behaviour change that needs to go alongside requires adaptive change. But by and large we actually know what to do – we need to monitor consumption, install insulation, turn off equipment and lights, replace irreparable equipment with energy efficient ones, make better use of buildings and rooms and install room controls and thermostats. Managers tend to be well-versed with managing easy problems for which we have well-established solutions. The problem is identified alongside a set of solutions, action plans are put in place with targets, and actions, responsibilities and timescales. Success can be monitored and evaluated against the targets set. The tendency to approach all problems as if they were easy problems, is not surprising when we consider that this usually brings clear direction, certainty rather than ambiguity and the reassurance that current norms can be maintained. So one the main contribution that leaders could make to bring about change is to be real and honest about the types of problems we are dealing with. This is key if the post-16 sector wants to play a leading role in bringing about a sustainable society.

However, it appears quite obvious why we fail to tackle adaptive issues and as a consequence fail to adapt. “…People fail to adapt because of the distress provoked by the problem and the changes it demands. They resist the pain, anxiety, or conflict that accompanies a sustained interaction with the problem.” According to Heifetz there are another two key reasons. Threats may be misperceived. As humans we have a tendency to think that change happens incrementally and we do not pay enough attention to time delays in systems nor to the effect of exponential growth factors. We are actually hard wired to respond to immediate threats through fight or flight. So we may simply not respond because we cannot as yet see the effects of climate change or ecosystem destruction on our daily lives. Alternatively we may simply lack the adaptive capability to adapt.

So if people resist the unpleasant side effects of a sustained interaction with a problem situation, then for leaders to tackle adaptive problems means taking risks, and they need to be prepared for that. Key stakeholder may feel that their values and belief systems are questioned, they may feel uneasy about a growing level of uncertainty and ambiguity and a need to re-evaluate and current norms. Hence there is a tendency for organisations not to face adaptive pressure until it threatens the organisation itself. If post-16 education wants to be a shining beacon in sustainability, then the first step is to reflect on its own values and structures and how they can be transformed to bring about a new reality. Collectively we need to evaluate which structures and values keep the current unsustainability in place and what new structures and values need to replace them to get different results. This requires us to see the big picture and to appreciate the interconnections at play and to be able to step back when we are getting too embroiled in the detail. Leaders need to let others get on with the easy problems and spend their time on adaptive challenges. For the post-16 sector one of the most difficult challenges is how to be a leading light in co-creating a sustainable society within a policy framework that re- enforces the very root causes of unsustainability.

In “Leadership Without Easy Answers” Heifetz cautioned that the term adaptive leadership may not carry the right connotation “…because adaptation is metaphor from biology where the objective is survival, leadership as “activity to mobilize adaptation” may connote an overemphasis on survival.” I quite disagree, as things are, I feel as a society we cannot put emphasis enough on the point.

Andrea Gewessler is director of Change that Matters Ltd, an independent company working with organisations and communities to bring about transformational change through dialogue, collaboration and innovation, and is particularly active in the sustainability field. Her work is inspired by systems thinking, the U-process developed at MIT as well as some of the emerging social technologies such as Future Search, Open Space, Change Labs and World Cafe. You can also follow Andrea on Twitter

(Photograph credit: Seamus Ryan)