Leadership for Sustainability

Strategies for Tackling Wicked Problems

R. Bruce Hull, David P. Robertson, Michael Mortimer

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642831689
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Solving today's environmental and sustainability challenges requires more than expertise and technology. Effective solutions will require that we engage with other people, wrestle with difficult questions, and learn how to adapt and make confident decisions despite uncertainty. We need new approaches to leadership that empower professionals at all levels to tackle wicked problems and work towards sustainability. Leadership for Sustainability gives readers perspective and skills for promoting creative and collaborative solutions. Blending systems thinking approaches with leadership techniques, it offers dozens of strategies and specific practices that build on the foundation of three main skills: connecting, collaborating, and adapting. Inspiring case studies show how the book's strategies and principles can be applied to diverse situations:

• Coordinating the activities of widely dispersed individuals and groups who may not even know they are connected, illustrated by the work of urban planners, local businesses, citizens, and other stakeholders advancing ambitious climate action goals via a Community Energy Plan in Arlington County, Virginia
• Collaborating with diverse stakeholders to span boundaries despite their differences of opinion, expertise, and culture, as illustrated by the bold actions of a social entrepreneur who transformed the global food service industry with the "plant-forward" movement
• Adapting to continuous change and confounding uncertainty, as a small nonprofit organization mobilizes partners to tackle poverty, water scarcity, sanitation, and climate change in rural India

Readers will come away with a holistic understanding of how to lead from where they are by applying leadership principles and practices to a wide range of wicked situations. While the challenges we face are daunting, the authors argue that these situations present opportunities for creating a more just, healthy, and prosperous world.

CHAPTER 1:

Introduction

Career success and professional impact, as well as the hope and promise of sustainable development, increasingly depend on skills and practices that help solve wicked problems—skills and practices that this book calls wicked leadership. Wicked problems are extraordinarily difficult to define and even more difficult to solve. Traditional problem-solving tools, such as technology, expertise, rationality, and authority, are not up to the task. Wicked problems are wicked in large part because people are both the cause and the solution. As humanity increasingly dominates the biosphere, more and more challenges will be wicked.

Solving wicked problems requires three sets of leadership skills and practices explained and illustrated in the chapters that follow—the abilities to connect, collaborate, and adapt (Figure 1.1). Specifically, leadership skills and practices are needed to help people connect and coordinate the actions with others whom they may never meet, don’t have authority over, and may not even know exist: people located in different organizations, sectors, time zones, countries, and supply chains. Also, skills and practices are needed to help people collaborate across widening differences of opinion, identity, expertise, and culture—differences being fueled by filter bubbles, echo chambers, network propaganda, confirmation bias, and motivated reasoning. And, skills and leadership practices are needed to help people adapt to confounding uncertainty and accelerating change, avoid analysis-paralysis, fail forward, and learn by doing.

Figure 1.1. Wicked leadership. The three types of leadership practices needed for wicked situations.

Importantly, you can practice wicked leadership, regardless of your position, whether you are the person in charge at the top of your organization’s hierarchy, a midlevel professional in your company’s organizational chart, or a stakeholder engaging in a community planning effort where no one has authority over others. Moreover, wicked leadership skills and practices can be learned; they are not an outcome of genetics or upbringing. You can learn wicked leadership skills and practices by reading this book.

Embracing Wickedness

Environmental and sustainability professionals working in business, government, and nonprofit organizations of all scales, from local to transnational, use and need wicked leadership. To be successful and relevant, these professionals must embrace global interconnectivity, take a long-term view, navigate polarizing conflict, and manage unpredictable risks and opportunities that many people ignore, including climate, water, poverty, economic development, human rights, public health, and supply chain vulnerabilities.

If you work, or aspire to work, within an organization and community on these sorts of challenges and opportunities, then this book is intended for you. Although the book targets professionals that address environmental and sustainability challenges specifically, it provides examples, practices, and principles that will help anyone influence wicked situations they confront in their workplace and in their community. For example, later in the book we provide stories illustrating wicked leadership in the following situations:

• Imagine that you are trying to influence fickle and distracted consumers to change what they buy and what they eat in ways that reduce environmental impact and promote sustainable development. You know that facts don’t convince most people to act, so you use choice editing and identity management to drive change. This story explores how chefs and foodservice professionals use these strategies to alter menus and recipes that change diets and reduce environmental impacts of conventional food and agriculture systems, especially meat production.
• Imagine that you are working with talented and motivated people from multiple organizations and communities and you come up with a great plan that, if implemented, will reduce water risks, empower women and girls, alleviate the ravages of poverty, improve sanitation and public health, and otherwise change communities for the better. But like many good plans, it risks sitting on the shelf and gathering dust. How do you translate all that good energy and hard work into action? This story describes how a small nongovernmental organization helped rural villages in arid, poverty-stricken regions of India generate the direction, alignment, and commitment needed to build and restore source water management systems that dramatically improve villagers’ access to water and their quality of life.
• Imagine that wildfires and other forms of human-induced climate change impacts are destroying biodiversity and human communities because the people and organizations that need to collaborate are mired in inertia, skepticism, and inaction. This story explains trust building and community of practice strategies that helped these stakeholders learn by doing and coordinate action across dozens of organizations and large regions of North America.
• Imagine that you are one of the many stakeholders in a city’s effort to mitigate climate change; perhaps a real estate developer, city planner, or member of a local civic organization. The many stakeholders who need to coordinate their actions have different agendas, competing and overlapping capacities, and limited tolerance for change; and most, such as residents and commuters, aren’t easily engaged. This story explains how one city is using collective impact strategies to make these connections and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent.
• Imagine that you want to improve the sustainability of your organization’s operations and supply chains. You need to coordinate the actions of many widely distributed stakeholders, including investors, customers, and employees in different facilities around the world, as well as the siloed internal divisions of your company, such as engineering and finance. You don’t have direct authority over any of the people you want to influence. Many of the stakeholders will never meet one another, and some won’t realize they are connected to the sustainability goals you are advancing. Leadership strategies such as accountability and transparency work in this situation, and this story explains why and how a major multinational corporation and a global investment advisory service use them to lead industry-wide change.
• Imagine trying to trigger a large-scale change needed to limit global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. You convene a group of entrepreneurs to engage in collaborative innovation. You target soil, where most of the world’s carbon is stored. This story explains a carbon farming initiative with the potential to sequester enough carbon to significantly alter the world’s total greenhouse gas budget.
• Imagine that your community does not have the resources to manage the floods and pollution caused when storms overwhelm its infrastructure. This story illustrates how a community used a public–private partnership strategy to provide benefits, such as local jobs, as well as green infrastructure to manage its stormwater, create open space, and save money.

The Anthropocene

We live at a time when humans dominate the planet, including the climate, and are remaking life on Earth in our own image. It is a time of accelerating change, confounding uncertainty, great risk, and enormous opportunity.

Over the past few decades, real incomes in low- and middle-income countries have doubled, poverty rates have halved, two billion people have gained access to healthy drinking water, and maternal mortality has dropped by half. Today, almost as many girls get educated as boys, most children are vaccinated, and infant mortality rates are low. The population bomb has fizzled, and human numbers are stabilizing and even declining in many parts of the world. Health care is improving and communicable diseases are receding even as the threat of pandemics remains. Our technological capacity to solve problems is accelerating. Life is good and getting better for billions of people.¹ These positive trends can continue.

But Earth’s climate is changing. National governments are paralyzed by tribal politics. Water tables are dropping. Unequal opportunity is disrupting politics. Species are going extinct. Rural to urban migration is overwhelming city infrastructure. People remain trapped in poverty. Agricultural productivity is not keeping up with demand. Resource scarcities are creating price volatility and disrupting supply chains. Approaches to solving problems are piecemeal, stalled, anachronistic, and corrupt.

This book unpacks these characteristics of the Anthropocene, in chapter 2, because they present humanity’s greatest challenges and opportunities. Two narratives dominate most presentations of the Anthropocene: decline and breakthrough. We emphasize breakthrough because it invites collaboration, innovation, and action (rather than fear, despair, and helplessness). It is easy to be overwhelmed by the challenges, but we want to make sure you see the opportunities.

The declinist narrative is popular among some environmentalists and news outlets trying to capture attention with fear-filled headlines. It is a story of population explosion, finite Earth, species extinctions, ecological degradation, social decline, pandemics, and related catastrophes that are supposed to be inevitable if we don’t reverse course and head back to more natural, communal, traditional conditions. The...