Leading For Regeneration

Going Beyond Sustainability in Business Education, and Community

John Hardman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415692458
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136580093
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This book presents the regenerative leadership framework that has emerged from doctoral research and consulting work with successful sustainability leaders and their organizations in business, education, and community. The framework synthesizes the levels of awareness, the leadership styles and behaviours, and the organizational arrangements that correlate most significantly across these domains. Most importantly, the overwhelming majority of the leaders in this work agree that individual and collective consciousness development is critical to transforming the culture of organizations for sustainability and beyond.

The term regenerative has not been chosen arbitrarily, but to provide an alternative to the notion of sustainability, which many of the leaders featured here indicate has become insufficient to describe what needs to be done, economically, socially, and environmentally, if we are to ensure a flourishing world for present and future generations. This work in turn has led to the development of the Regenerative Capacity Index (RCI), a tool designed to assess an organization's readiness to engage in regenerative practice. From this evaluation of an organization's regenerative capacity, it becomes possible to design a strategy for regeneration that considers all levels of its environmental, social, and economic impact, both internally and externally, in the local and global community.

Among its major findings, the book argues that the more evolved sustainability leaders are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the construct of sustainability, and indicate the need for a profound cultural shift towards regenerative human systems. In this framework, regenerative organizations are driven by a sense higher purpose, and leadership is exercised horizontally and collaboratively. Leaders and followers engage in generative conversations to create desirable futures which are then 'backcasted' to eliminate unanticipated consequences. Throughout, leaders emphasize the critical importance of engaging in personal and collective consciousness development or "inner work" in order to make regenerative practices possible.

1    Introduction

Leadership for the twenty-first century

In view of the limited success that efforts to attain and scale up sustainability have shown to date, this books argues that leaders in the twenty-first century cannot rely on traditional approaches to leadership to find effective solutions to current problems which, in the words of Lester Brown (2006), are bringing global civilization close to “overshoot-and-collapse mode” (p. 5). In essence, the leadership challenges of sustainability are contained in the need to balance complex and sometimes conflicting demands for economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable solutions (Ferdig, 2007), which require skills and behaviors that have gone unrecognized or have not been necessary in more stable organizational and social environments.

Traditional leadership models are understood to refer to the accepted roles that leaders adopt when establishing strategies for coping with change within their organizations. Within this paradigm, from the perspective of the pioneers of the time such as the social scientist Kurt Lewin (1951), change is promoted through a transformation strategy where an organization, and people’s resistance to change, is unfrozen, changed, and refrozen. This implication of a well-managed linear transition from an outdated to a new and improved state of equilibrium, in a process where outcomes are predicted in a prior planning process, derives naturally from a rational worldview initially established during the Enlightenment (Gould, 2003; Wheatley, 2004; Wilber, 2000). An extreme example of this perspective may be found in the work of Frederick Taylor in the scientific management of industrial processes, which sought to increase productivity and profit through incremental improvements in assembly line efficiency (Taylor, 2004). The search for profit through efficiency at the expense of other considerations was legitimate at the time. In this context, the potential long-term natural and social impacts of exponential growth in industrial productivity would not have been a factor of concern.

More recently, developmental models of leadership have brought leaders and followers into a more balanced relationship, as in the case of the uplifting nature of the moral paradigm of transforming leadership of James MacGregor Burns (1978), or servant leadership of Robert Greenleaf (1977), where the leader is viewed in a nonhierarchical supporting role for the empowerment of followers in an organization. In rebutting critics (Gronn, 1995; Keeley, 1995) who affirm that transformational leadership may border on the unethical in self-serving leaders, or for being manipulative and undemocratic, Bass, Adams, and Webster (1997) argue that this form of leadership requires a high degree of moral maturity and “trust among leaders and followers,” and that it was conceived to “avoid the tragedy of the commons” (p. 1), a concept closely associated with sustainability and sustainable development (Hardin, 1968).

Spiritual approaches to leadership have become evident in the renewal and sacrifice cycles researched and described as resonant leadership by Boyatzis and McKee (2005); in leadership as “presence in the moment” derived from in-depth interviews with corporate leaders applying what is termed as deep listening (Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, & Flowers, 2004); or leadership as inspired pragmatism, that combines Eastern philosophy and Western practicality to drive effective decision making and organizational change (Link, 2006).

Perhaps one of the most comprehensive analyses of evolution and human society can be found in the work of Ken Wilber. Wilber has devised an Integral Vision (2007) that presents a comprehensive, chronological map of evolution of the biosphere, the individual, and society, since the beginning of time. In this map, which he defines as presenting all quadrants, all levels, all states, and all lines, Wilber has overlaid religion, psychology, sociology, and Eastern and Western philosophy, to present an integral perspective on what he calls, quite simply, everything we know (Wilber, 2000). Using Wilber’s framework in part to support his own work, Otto Scharmer has developed a six-stage process that offers a means by which it becomes possible to create prototypes of desirable futures that offer a clean break from the obsolete patterns of thought and behavior of the past (Scharmer, 2007). These patterns are imbued with assumptions that affect science, society and how we think about systems, and condemn us to applying increasingly inadequate solutions to emerging problems that we have never experienced before as a global species. However, no single theory, whether directed at leadership or at social or organizational development, can respond effectively by itself to the challenges leaders face today. In education, if there were no schools, universities, or educational systems and we knew everything we now know about learning and development, what sort of an educational system would we build? The problem for many of us is that we carry the baggage of having gone through a school system, which predisposes us to replicate something similar to our own experience. The key to this particular conundrum lies in finding a method that will allow us to disengage from all previous assumptions in order to embrace an entirely new way of doing things. But how to do this?

The twenty-first century has brought with it a greater degree of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity to virtually everything that we do. This is true of our family life, our workplace, our communities, and local, state, and national governments. In a dynamic paradigm such as this, merely rational models of leadership are no longer viable. We must look even more deeply “within ourselves” (Ferdig, 2007, p. 26) for the leadership that responds to a complex, highly fluid reality (Stacey, 2002). Margaret Wheatley (2004) defines the current state of reality thus: “This is the era of many messes. Some of these we’ve created (although not intentionally) because we act on assumptions that can never engender healthy, sustainable societies and organizations” (p. 2).

In this context, “pre-conceived strategic plans, or [ … ] the mandate of any single individual boss” (Wheatley & Frieze, 2006, p. 3), go against nature and are therefore unsustainable. On the other hand, change that allows local actions to connect, interact, and engage each other following natural patterns of behavior is far more likely to be transformed into networks, and then systems, a process that Wheatley and Frieze define as emergent phenomena. The resilience and sustainability of these systems, as mentioned before, result from fostering the greatest number of connections and interactions between and among their multiple living and nonliving components (Capra, 1996, 2002). From this perspective, leadership is no longer a position, nor is it limited to a single person or team symbolically located at the top of an organizational chart. Leadership is therefore the natural behavior of every leader in a self-organizing system that is inherently too complex, too unstable, and unpredictable for any one individual to control.

From this multidimensional organizational systems thinking perspective (Bertalanffy, 1950; Senge, 1990; Senge, Cambron, McCabe, Lucas, & Kleimer, 2000; Capra, 2002; Wheatley, 2004), it may be assumed that leaders must approach change and innovation differently. Ferdig (2007) describes the following leadership capacities engaged in promoting sustainability. Sustainability leaders

Create opportunities for people to come together and generate their own answers – to explore, to learn, and devise a realistic course of action to address sustainability challenges. Instead of giving direction, sustainability leaders develop and implement actions in collaboration with others, modifying them as needed to adapt to unforeseen changes in the environment over time … Sustainability leaders recognize that the experience of change itself, and the dissonance it creates, fuels new thinking, discoveries, and innovations that can revitalize organizations.

(p. 31)

In organizational environments that recognize the unpredictable nature of reality, leaders relinquish the prerogative for control. Rather, they accept a reality that shifts each and every day, and yet they cultivate skills and actions that are reasonable within a flexible framework that allows for continual correction and improvement. Ferdig (2007) goes on to indicate that:

Sustainability leaders make the notion of sustainability personally relevant, grounding action in a personal ethic that reaches beyond self-interest. They recognize that all of us can co-create the future through individual ways of seeing, understanding, interacting and doing. Sustainability leaders are informed, aware, realistic, courageous, and personally hopeful in ways that genuinely attract others to the business of living collaboratively.

(p. 32)

From this perspective, it is possible to define sustainability leadership as purposeful action driven from a position of enlightened self-interest, where benefiting others and the planet as a whole means the same as benefiting oneself (Capra, 2002). This follows logically from a mindset that conceives a universe where all things are interconnected, where every personal action affects other actions elsewhere in a ripple effect over a very long period of time. At first glance, this growing awareness of the consequences of our actions can appear overwhelming, and requires leadership capable of mobilizing organizational decisions that balance the common good against personal needs and desires. In the words of Marianne Williamson, attributed to Nelson Mandela, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us” (Williamson, 1992, p. 190).

The dilemmas of leadership at this time become more complex and challenging as conflicting actions and reactions interact. Leaders can no longer depend on the successes of the past to provide solutions for the problems of today, as they discover when diverse cultures are brought into the organizational mix. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (2002) indicate that, as a leader today:

You are supposed to inspire and motivate yet listen, decide yet delegate, and centralize business units that must have locally decentralized responsibilities. You are supposed to be professionally detached yet passionate about the mission of the organization, be a brilliant analyst when not synthesizing others’ contributions, and be a model and rewarder of achievement when not eliciting the potential of those who have yet to achieve. You are supposed to develop priorities and strict sequences, although parallel processing is currently all the rage and saves time. You must enunciate a clear strategy but never miss an opportunity even when the strategy has not anticipated it. Finally, you must encourage participation while not forgetting to model decisive leadership.

(p. 2)

This dilemma-fraught reality fosters the emergence of sustainability leaders who possess a spirit of inquiry and learning (Ferdig, 2007), who share what they learn along the way, and are not daunted by unexpected turns of events. They “take informed and calculated risks; they unashamedly learn from their mistakes and tell others about what they discovered in the process” (p. 33). Far from discarding the approaches of traditional leaders, sustainability leaders take strategic thinking, planning, communicating, galvanizing others, and evaluating results to a new level of awareness. Recognizing the impossibility of commanding and controlling organizational goals and objectives, they engage all followers as leaders in a common enterprise.

Their initiatives are serving to promote more responsible practices related to environmental preservation, to the education of upcoming generations in sustainability, and to the development of a more just and sustainable world. However, all too often these initiatives plateau, or fail to evolve to the next level (Doppelt, 2003; McDonough & Braungart, 1991, 2002). There have been numerous studies over the years of different aspects of leadership in the corporate world, in education, and in community (Waters, Marzano, & McNulty, 2003; Leithwood, Seashore Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004; Laszlo, 2005; Seelos & Mair, 2005b; Esty & Winston, 2006; McEwen & Schmidt, 2007; Quinn, 2007). Some of these, such as McEwen and Schmidt’s (2007) Mindsets in Action, have begun to explore in some depth the developmental experiences of leaders across these different domains to identify those that are most powerful in implementing and sustaining sustainable development initiatives. However, Doppelt (2003) indicates that “discussions about what to do … dominate the public dialogue on sustainability” (p. 16). Little emphasis, he indicates, is placed on “how organisations can change their internal thought processes, assumptions and ingrained behavior to embrace the new tools and techniques” (p. 16). Shortly after his groundbreaking study into what he came to define as Level 5 leaders (Collins, 2001a), a model of leadership that hypothetically could be considered transferable to sustainability leaders, Jim Collins admitted that

We would love to be able to give you a list of steps for getting to Level 5, but we have no solid research data that would support a credible list. We could speculate on what that inner box might hold, but it would mostly be just that, speculation.

(Collins, 2001b, p. 76)

This admission of the inability to map the leadership development process beyond a definition of what makes a leader what he or she is, coupled to the increasing scientific evidence that the human race is rapidly driving nature and society to a state of overshoot and collapse, highlighted the importance of exploring this critical area at this time.

The most comprehensive, if not the only, research to have compared leadership for sustainability across domains was conducted in the late nineties and first part of the century by Bob Doppelt (2003). Doppelt’s qualitative study, revised and updated in 2009, reviewed the “core principles of success” (p. 19) of business corporations, government, and civic society. From working with companies and governments over a period of 20 years, Doppelt identified factors that may lead organizations either to fail or plateau in their sustainability efforts, and to those contrasting factors that underpin successfully evolving sustainability initiatives. Among the factors contributing to failure, he identified what he has called the seven sustainability blunders, which relate, he indicates, to the patterns of behavior that drive leadership decision-making processes, that “poison efforts to reduce and eliminate adverse environmental and socioeconomic impacts” (p. 30).

Doppelt states that the “key to transforming the governance system of an organisation so that it embraces sustainability is leadership” (Doppelt, 2003, p. 37). The organizations he studied demonstrated time after time that this key is found in a leadership style that “kept the organisation focused on its long-term goal of becoming sustainable while encouraging employees to take it upon themselves to work together diligently toward that end” (p. 37). Central to this approach is the notion that a “skillful and equitable distribution of power and authority throughout the organisation unlocks the doors to deep-seated commitment by employees and stakeholders and is a key to changing outdated and harmful beliefs and assumptions” (p. 37). In one of his more recent works, Doppelt (2008) asserts the need for organizations to change their internal thought processes, assumptions, and ingrained behaviors. The regenerative leadership framework presented here is intended to build on this conceptual understanding by delving more deeply into the subjective realm of consciousness development in leaders at all levels that results in engaging organizations in regenerative practices that go beyond mere sustainability. This understanding of the nature of human consciousness and how its development influences our worldview is critical to personal and organizational change. With the appropriate mindset, our minds, hearts, and hands are far more easily aligned with regenerative behaviors. This book therefore offers a map of those aspects of human consciousness and resulting leadership behaviors and organizational strategies which the leaders in the study consistently identified as critical to sustainability process.

Historical background to sustainability

The more recent history of international concern for social, economic, and environmental sustainability can be traced to the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), the United Nations’ Agenda 21 (1992), particularly Chapter 36, which focuses on education, and the Millennium Development Goals (2000), the tenth anniversary review of which concluded recently with mixed results. Education, considered a fundamental factor in eradicating poverty, was brought further into the limelight at the World Conference on Education for All (1990). In 2000, UNESCO launched the Education for All program (2000), with particular responsibility for pursuing the United Nations Priorities in Education, which led to the so-called Decade on Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2015). Parallel to these efforts have been the international climate initiatives that led to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and most recently the disappointing Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009 followed by an equally ineffective outcome of the Cancun summit in November, 2010.

These international initiatives have had important impacts, many of them positive. However, it is also clear that the desired outcomes have not been fully attained, and that the leaders of governments, international coalitions, and organizations are ill-prepared to design and implement long-term solutions to global issues that will ensure an equitable, sustainable, and prosperous society for all. What is also clear is that focusing on the behaviors that should have served to resolve these issues has not worked, indicating that we must look elsewhere if we are to find both short- and long-term solutions to our most pressing problems. The findings contained in this book serve to open up a new approach. From my research and further work with sustainability leaders in corporations, nonprofit organizations, higher education, and government, I have found that the most sustainable outcomes have come from leaders who have been willing to explore the nature and role of their own human consciousness in order to develop a clearer understanding of their place, and that of their organizations, in the greater scheme of things.

2 The regenerative leadership framework

The original research that gave rise to the interest in writing this book was conducted with business, educational, political, and community leaders who were recognized by their peers as becoming increasingly effective in moving themselves and others in their organizations toward more comprehensive or sophisticated approaches to sustainability. This study led to the generation of a substantive theory that sought to conceptualize leadership for sustainability in a manner that made it accessible to those interested in gaining a deeper understanding of how this increasingly important notion could be applied in their own organizations and communities. By applying the qualitative approach known as grounded theory, the first purpose of the study focused on the developmental experiences or personal journeys of these leaders, and their responses are collected in Chapter 3. The second purpose explored the strategies they have found most effective in moving their organizations in the direction of sustainability or sustainable development, and these are reported in Chapter 4.

Expressed very simply, sustainability can be defined as the ability of natural and social systems to continue doing what they...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The regenerative leadership framework
• 3. The inner journey
• 4. Leading regeneration in the organization
• 5. In the field
• 6. Cultivating regenerative leaders in the organization
• Appendix 1. The Regenerative Capacity Index
• Appendix 2. List of regenerative leaders
• References
• Index