You could spend endless hours reading about sustainability and how you should respond as a leader. But our Sustainability Leader’s Kitbag means you don’t have to.
We have been working on sustainability since the 1990s and over the years have read thousands of books and articles. Among these we’ve found a few, crucial elements that are essential to leading change for sustainability and these are what you’ll find in our Kitbag.
We call it a ‘kitbag’ because it echoes our experience of journeying in wild places. We travel light with just the most useful, essentials items that can be used in different circumstances and adapted as necessary. Our kitbag evolves as we come across new ideas and approaches worth adopting or when the situation changes. But for now our Sustainability Leader’s Kitbag contains:
- Part 1: Three profound realities
- Part 2: Three helpful models
- Part 3: Three essential attributes and skills
Part 1: Three profound realities
Most people who care deeply about the environmental crisis and the plight of fellow humans, and who have tried to do something about it, will have been told time and again to “get real”, and “that’s not how it works in the real world”.
This so-called “real world” may exist in people’s minds. It may also exist in the traditions, institutions and assumptions that form our society. But when we strip away these socially constructed realities and replace them with fundamental facts grounded in hard, practical evidence, it opens up whole new ways of looking at the world that illuminate the potential for transformative change.
So first in our Sustainability Leader’s Kitbag are three different ways of understanding reality:
Reality 1: We are part of nature
We are part of nature, but our culture leads us to think and behave in ways that deny this reality with disastrous results. Sustainability leadership requires a deep emotional and psychological shift in how we understand and relate to rest of the living world.
Reality 2: Humans are naturally kind and caring
We live in a society that glorifies the worst of human nature, making us believe that people are inherently selfish. This suppresses our natural instinct to look after each other. By recognising the reality that people are kind and caring we can break this vicious cycle.
Reality 3: We live in a world of abundance and potential
There is no fundamental shortage of the resources needed for good lives for all. By tackling over-consumption by the few, and switching our focus to what really determines wellbeing, natural systems will recover, allowing us and the rest of the living world to flourish together.
Reality 3: We live in a world of abundance and potentialRead More
Part 2: Three helpful models
Sustainability Leadership is a journey, and like every journey into the future much is unknown. But even rough maps can help us work out where we are now and how we might best reach our destination.
Even though conceptual models are, like maps, gross simplifications of reality, that simplification often allows us to see the wood for the trees, to get the overview we need.
We’ve selected three different models for the Sustainability Leader’s Kitbag. Models that can help us to map the territory of sustainability, to understand the processes of social transformation, and to catalyse and support effective change that takes us in the right direction.
Coming next in the Sustainability Leader’s Kitbag – Model 3
Model 1: Environmental ceilings and social foundations
We need re-imagine and re-shape the economy so that we can all thrive in the environmentally safe and socially just space between the environmental ceiling of our planet and the social foundations of our society.
Model 1: Environmental ceilings and social foundationsRead More
Model 2: Three Horizons of Change
We need a mental model to help us understand how change happens and to know if our work on sustainability is helping bring about positive, enduring change. The Three Horizons of Change Model really helps.
Part 3: Three essential attributes and skills
Coming soon…
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(Header image by Tomáš Malík on Unsplash, Kitbag image by Larry George II on Unsplash, map image by oxana v on Unsplash, notebook image by David Travis on Unsplash)