EVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP FOR SUSTAINABILITY

An innovative leadership development program for

Business, nonprofit, and government leaders…

Helping you design your role in creating a sustainable future

Download the flyer for the June 2008 training in San Francisco.

_{This program has been developed in collaboration with Manual Manga of the Center for Evolutionary Leadership in Boston}

The purpose and unique offer of this leadership development program is to expand the understanding of leadership by placing it in an all-encompassing context of global interconnectedness and long-term viability of humans in partnership with Earth. It focuses on the development of core competencies that comprise the mind-set, skill-set and heart-set of the evolutionary leaders.

 Why is Evolutionary Leadership important?

Individuals, communities  and organizations everywhere are under stress and facing complex and unprecedented challenges including  unmet human needs, economic disparity, cultural obliteration, ecosystem destruction and global warming. How leaders in the private, public and social sectors respond to these mega-trends will determine not only the future of their institutions, but also of entire societies and our planet as a whole. While there exists no clear roadmap for navigating these challenges, one thing is certain — conducting 'business as usual' is no longer a viable leadership strategy for the well-being of either present or future generations.

A new paradigm of leadership is required — one that places a premium on creating human and environmental well-being.  Evolutionary leadership involves new ways of perceiving, thinking, and acting that are deeply concerned with an integrated triple bottom line: economic, social, and environmental sustainability.

Evolutionary leaders are multi-dimensional leaders who understand that leadership is a way of being, perceiving, and acting in the world. They understand their crucial role in facilitating society's transformation toward economic, social and environmental sustainability — acting from within any of the three sectors, at all levels of organization, and fostering collaboration among them. Evolutionary leaders are stewards of people, organizations, communities and ecosystems, seeking to facilitate the emergence of life-affirming, future-oriented and opportunity-increasing possibilities.

They embody personal integrity to guide and support others in the collaborative learning and design necessary for sustainability.

Evolutionary Leadership competencies

Evolutionary leaders focus on adaptive challenges rather than technical ones. What this means is that evolutionary leadership is not about solving problems for which solutions already exist – this could be a technical challenge – but rather, it is the leadership necessary to respond to an unknown situation that will require learning, knowledge creation and collaboration to come up with possible solutions. The competencies of evolutionary leadership are organized in three sets:

Mind-set — Know-why competencies

The mind-set of the evolutionary leader is grounded in a systems and evolutionary view of the world. Evolutionary leaders are competent at:
•    Think systemically
•    Understand the complexity and interdependencies of global dynamics
•    Perceive the patterns of change
•    Consider the ethical and long term implications of their decisions
•    Embrace a participatory and co-evolving emergence of new realities
•    Declare new possibilities for organizations, communities and society
•    Live their talk by showing integrity between their worldview and the way the are in the world


Skill-set — Know-how competencies

Evolutionary leaders are able to translate visions into actions. They do so by bringing people together. Their leadership style is flexible and adaptive, covering from the visionary guide pointing to new possibilities to the enabler empowering individuals and communities to make the vision a reality. Evolutionary leaders are competent at:

•    Have and facilitate conversations to build trust and commitment toward a common goal
•    Create the conditions for effective collaboration
•    Ability to draw lessons for human systems from the way ecological systems work
•    Include sustainability principles and practices in their vision and action plans
•    Develop sustainability strategies that
 

Heart-set — Care-why competencies

While the mind-set and the skill-set and generally incorporated into most leadership development programs, the heart-set is usually ignored or taken for granted. Clarity of values and the personal mastery of the leader are, however, core aspects of effective evolutionary leadership.  In this regard, evolutionary leaders are competent at:

•    Listening actively to others and to nature
•    Engaging in difficult and missing conversations
•    Manifesting a syntony sense or an ability to creative and intentionally align their actions with the dynamics of living systems

The workshop Evolutionary Leadership for Sustainability

Evolutionary Leadership for Sustainability is available in two formats: 1) as a public workshop and 2) as a customized workshop for in-house trainings.  

The public workshop is a 3 day learning experience. It is addressed to an audience of organizational consultants, executive coaches, social entrepreneurs, and champions of sustainability within the business, nonprofit or public sectors. In other words, this training is for individuals interested in becoming effective leaders for organizational change toward sustainability.

The custom version can be expanded or contracted to fit the needs of specific organizations. The particular leadership needs and sustainability priorities of the organization are brought to the foreground and the modules of the workshop are adapted to facilitate the development of the evolutionary leadership competences, the articulation of the vision for the organization and the definition of the strategy to bring it to action. For example,
→    ELS can be a powerful training to empower teams within corporations to develop high performance practices and promote innovation for sustainability that would enhance the integrated bottom line.
→    For pubic and nonprofit organizations, ELS can assist in developing skills and practices that support the achievement of their mission in relation to  global sustainability and in identifying opportunities for collaboration with the other sectors.
→    For educational organizations, ELS can be an effective training for teachers and educational administrators looking for ways of developing curriculum and redesigning schools to address systemic and sustainability challenges in the communities they serve.

The Evolutionary Leadership for Sustainability workshop is comprised of 5 content dimensions. The public workshop combines all 5 while customized version can bring to the foreground or to the background some of the elements in order to respond to individual needs and organizational priorities. These content dimensions are:

I. Visioning: Creating a shared vision by connecting to your interests and priorities

Why do we care about sustainability? What does sustainability mean to participants – individually and collectively?  Through the exploration of some basic principles that show the dynamic of unsustainable systems, participants are able to articulate a vision of the future that they want to bring about. Among other things, leaders declare possibilities. Participants reflect on the concerns and cares that motivate their work as leaders for sustainability .

•    What are your concerns? What do you care about?
•    Making meaning around the notion of evolutionary leadership
•    Creating your own definition of sustainability: connecting global sustainability challenges to your work and life
•    Visions of possibility
•    Your purpose as an evolutionary leader
•    Declarations of leadership: from vision to action


II. Evolutionary Systems Thinking

Systems thinking is a core competency for evolutionary leadership. Systems principles such as interconnectedness, embeddedness, and self-organization are explored in the context of the relationship between human, social and ecological systems. Systemic understanding requires both analysis (e.g., scientific and fact-based) and synthesis (e.g., creative and intuitive). Participants learn to identify different types of systems and how systems change over time: the evolutionary perspective. The implications for the role of leaders in the transformation and design of social and technological systems are explored. The role of people and institutions in the “big moving picture” of our history and our future is used as the action context for a new kind of leadership. 

•    An interdependent planet and why we have unsustainable systems
•    An extraordinary moment: our evolutionary choices
•    What is a system?
•    Systems thinking: analysis and synthesis
•    Types of systems
•    Experiencing self-organization
•    From system thinking to systems being


III: Collaboration and Communication

Participants learn about the ontology of language: as human beings, we create our social realities through language. Participants practice making assertions, assessments, requests, promises, offers and declarations for effective communication. Evolutionary leaders apply these speech acts in conversations for relationship, for learning, for possibilities, for action. We reflect on the narratives that inform life in current social systems and the need to introduce new language and new conversations for creating sustainability. Evolutionary leadership is not an individual journey but a collaborative venture between multiple actors in society. Traditional conceptions of a powerful and entitled leader that will guide the masses to a better future are not always appropriate to respond to the complexity of social and environmental sustainability challenges. Evolutionary learning communities are introduced as a way to bring people together around a common purpose to generate commitment to learn and work in joyful ways to make sustainable choices.


•    Relationship between leadership and language
•    Speech acts: the building blocks of effective conversations
•    Types of conversations: relationship, learning, possibility, action
•    Narratives and the construction of our social realities
•    How to facilitate collaboration (using the World Café dialogue approach and other dialogue and collaboration approaches)
•    Identifying opportunities for multi-sector (business, government and civil society) collaboration and for creating evolutionary learning communities


IV: Sustainability Strategy

Evolutionary leaders do not focus on technical problems (problems that we already know how to solve) but on adaptive challenges (problems that require the creation of new knowledge to achieve their solution). Sustainability is an adapting challenge. There are many sustainability frameworks that offer tools and perspectives that offer a foundation for defining the strategy for effective change management in diverse contexts.

•    The Natural Step sustainability framework
•    Sustainability cases
•    Design for sustainability: learning from nature to design social and technological systems
•    Creating your own definition of sustainability: connecting global sustainability challenges to your work and life
•    Sustainability Strategy: From vision to current reality   bridging the gap


V: Personal Mastery

At the personal level, evolutionary leaders cultivate syntony. Syntony is the capacity to create systems and processes in alignment with living evolving dynamics. At the individual level, syntony means the need to learn and remember how to live and relate in sustainable ways: from walking the talk to dancing the path.

•    Centering and embodiment
•    Somatic practices to reconnect with self, others and nature.

Testimonials from past participants

It was a sweet, gentle, generous, useful week. Powerful information and group connections, exercises leading to growth and inspiration in my work and my personal life. Thank you – Expect great things from me!
– Judith Seton, Pachamama Alliance

The workshop was a delightful and enlightening mix of practical tools, visionary strategies, and
collaborative and experiential practices. I came away with a positive vision of a sustainable
future and with the practical concepts, tools, and strategies to help make that vision a reality.
– Janet Beazlie, sustainability consultant