This past Saturday we concluded another Evolutionary Leadership for Sustainability public workshop. Manuel, Alexander and I celebrated our first year of collaboration offering this leadership development program. Since October of 2006 we have trained more than 200 individuals committed to be leaders of change in their organizations and communities and we have offered the course in the San Francisco Bay Area, Chile and Mexico.

What is unique about Evolutionary Leadership for Sustainability is the connection between authentic leadership -- emerging from who we are and what we care about -- with the commitment to contribute at the level of the interconnected global problems. Social and environmental sustainability challenges are becoming widely recognized. Poverty and global warming are not isolated problems or concerns of only less developed countries. And yet, the conversations about their solution tend to be focused on technological fixes: GMOs can feed the growing population and provide bioengineered foods to satisfy nutritional needs; green technologies and renewable energy sources will allow us to reduce carbon emissions while providing with the energy necessary to continue to fuel economic growth.  The question that arises is: are these truly systemic solutions?

This is an evolutionary leadership question: it requires to take a long term perspective and to consider the ethical consequences  at the human, social and environmental levels for present and future generations of all beings. Otherwise, we relegate key decisions to a technical level in which solutions bring about “side effects” in the form of new unexpected problems.

Jonas Salk wrote a book in 1973 called Survival of the Wisest. As a true evolutionary systems thinker, Salk points out that we humans face the challenge of learning how to act wisely – with foresight, imagination, and guided by human values -- in order to improve the quality of life and our ability to survive on this planet. Bela Banathy, my dear mentor and advisor, identified the increasing gab between our technological intelligence and socio-ethical intelligence as the root of our crises.  So while it is extremely important and uplifting to learn about the scientific and technological innovations that can truly address many of the social and environmental problems, it is important to remember that ethical social innovation is equally if not more important. True organizational and cultural innovation – reinventing the ways we organize and relate to each other within our human institutions -- is much more difficult to attain and its success depends on our willingness to engage in a transformative exploration to redefine what it means to be human, to identify what is important, worthwhile and meaningful, to articulate what will be our legacy for the common good.

This is the human dimension of sustainability: the quest to expand our wisdom, to learn to collaborate, to listen and care for each other, to discover joy in creating a sustainable world.

In syntony,
Kathia Laszlo