A week ago we had a teaching weekend at Presidio School of Management. This residency was held at the Marin Headlands Institute in Sausalito — where we also conduct some of our public workshops like the Evolutionary Leadership for Sustainability. The weather was amazingly beautiful and the views of hills and ocean were the perfect background for engaging with MBA students in Sustainable Management who are so passionate about integrating social and environmental considerations into business practices.

Alexander and I see our involvement as faculty members in graduate schools as a key component of our work. We are intentionally engaged in a collaborative inquiry that involves learning by teaching and learning by doing. Our inquiry on the human dimension of sustainability takes place through the experiences we have with our students in the real or virtual classroom as well as when we engage in projects and programs of Syntony Quest.

The two classes that we teach at Presidio are heavily influenced by the body of knowledge and practices that gave rise to Syntony Quest. Both classes are part of the people strand: the set of four courses that focus on leadership, communication and organizational skills.

Evolutionary Leadership, Collaboration and Systems Thinking is a class that we designed as a distillation of many years of teaching and research in the areas of leadership and strategy. Alexander jokily says that if students can remember the title of the course by the end of the semester they deserve to pass. ELCoST, as we call it within the school,  integrates many of the threads that inform the tapestry of our work: personal inquiry into who we are and what is our life purpose; collaborative and dialogue skills, ability to facilitate dialogue among diverse groups of people to foment learning, design and action; and systems thinking to perceive the interdependencies of our world.

Because each class is a whole day (7 hours) of learning, our role is to design an interactive and participatory experience for students to reflect on the readings, to make connections between theory and application, and to practice the skills of the course.  Last month we had our friend Eugene Kim facilitating a workshop on collaboration. We met Eugene through ISSS when we were part of the local organizing committee of the 2005 conference on Complexity, Democracy and Sustainability in Sonoma. Eugene is a fantastic facilitator.  If you read his blog ,reflecting on his experience and disclosing his emotions and thoughts as he went through the experience,  you will be able to understand why we invited him:he is also on the evolutionary leadership journey!  

This class brings forth a dimension that is usually ignored in business programs: the importance of authentic and adaptive leadership grounded in a dynamic systems perspective. Systems thinking is one of the core tenets of the educational philosophy of Presidio, so it is integrated throughout the curriculum. Our contribution is to link the most recent developments in systems theory and practice – technically speaking they are called soft systems thinking and emancipatory systems thinking or in plain language they are the systems approaches looking at human values, power structures and cultural differences to generate desirable futures– with the personal and organizational challenges that a leader committed to bringing sustainability will face.  It is our view that the real challenge of sustainability goes beyond changing the light bulbs or inventing clean technologies. Technological and infrastructural changes are a must to reduce our ecological footprint and address global warming, there is no question. However, from our perspective, the real challenge of sustainability is personal and social transformation: Are we ready to reconsider what it means to be human in an finite planet? Are we prepared to change our patterns of consumption and our lifestyles? Are we prepared to learn new ways to relate to each other in peaceful and respectful ways? Are we capable of designing new communities and institutions for the common good of present and future generations of all beings? Are we open to bring meaning and love to everything we do?

Evolutionary Leadership is about evolving leadership to respond to the adaptive challenges of our times, is about going beyond “leadership as usual” to question the purpose and impact of our actions. Evolutionary leadership is collaborative. The more we teach about it, the more we learn how this is not a static field but an unfolding inquiry about redefining our individual and collective roles in this time of transition… and doing so with grace, joy and alacrity.

Kathia Laszlo