Leadership for Sustainability: Strategies for Tackling Wicked Problems

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

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642831672
Publisher:	Island Press
Publication date:	11/17/2020
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

R. Bruce Hull is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability at Virginia Tech, which provides graduate education and professional development opportunities for sustainability professionals working at the intersection of business, government, and civil society. He has authored and edited numerous publications, including two books, Infinite Nature (University of Chicago Press) and Restoring Nature (Island Press).
 
Michael Mortimer is Founding Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability at Virginia Tech. Dr. Mortimer works with professionals and students on sustainable development questions in locations around the world, and his most active research and writing is centered on the role that global cities can play in leading and solving sustainable development challenges.
 
David Robertson is Founding Director of the Executive Master of Natural Resources graduate degree program and Senior Fellow at the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability, Virginia Tech. Dr. Robertson is also a founder and principal of Educene, a travel education, upskilling, consulting firm.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

I Roadmap for the Anthropocene 13

Chapter 2 Challenges of the Anthropocene 15

Target the intensifying challenges that will otherwise derail sustainable development: prosperity, urbanization, food, agriculture, water, climate, energy, the linear economy, and inequality.

Chapter 3 Opportunities of the Anthropocene 37

Position your organization, community, and career for success by understanding how markets, governance, and governments are transforming.

II Toolbox for Wicked Leadership 59

Chapter 4 Leadership Basics 61

Lead from where you are by facilitating direction, alignment, and commitment.

Understand the special leadership challenges and practices that apply to wicked problems.

Chapter 5 Connecting across Space and Time 81

Connect highly dispersed stakeholders using accountability, storytelling, community of practice and learning, train-the-trainer, scaling up, diffusion, collective impact, and social marketing.

Chapter 6 Collaborating across Differences 103

Overcome psychological barriers that make collaboration difficult: elephant riding, confirmation bias, filter bubbles, identity protective reasoning, and echo chambers.

Pick your battles by targeting elites, using facts cautiously, and avoiding propaganda feedback loops.

Manage identity by triggering group membership, affirming self-worth, playing nice, saying yes-and, and nuancing the story.

Navigate differences with self-awareness, respecting differences, active listening, and focusing on interests not positions.

Build trust and form partnerships.

Chapter 7 Adapting to Change, Uncertainty, and. Failure 139

Respond to confounding uncertainty with sensemaking, learning by doing, innovating, being disruptive, striving for resiliency, anticipating the future, and sharing lessons.

III Storybook: People Practicing Wicked Leadership 165

Chapter 8 Introducing Leadership Stories 167

Illustrations of leadership practices in the messiness of real-world situations.

Chapter 9 Changing Tastes: Influencing Identity and Choices for Sustainable Food 171

Identity management and choice editing techniques are applied when business and NGO actors coordinate to influence consumer demand and shape social impacts.

Chapter 10 Leadership Is a Key ingredient in Water: Getting Direction, Alignment, and Commitment in India 179

Techniques for creating direction, alignment, and commitment, as well as train-the-trainer skills are used to create access to water, requiring large-scale coordination from highly dispersed and diverse stakeholders and NGO actors.

Chapter 11 Collective Impact for Climate Mitigation 189

Collective impact practice is applied in a case requiring coordination of many different government, business, and NGO actors.

Chapter 12 Innovating Carbon Farming 201

Techniques for collaborative innovation, sensemaking, and stakeholder engagement are applied by business entrepreneurs, farmers, and NGO actors for carbon sequestration.

Chapter 13 Accounting Makes Sustainabihty Profitable, Possible, and Boring 211

Accountability and transparency are used in a multinational business to coordinate actions of distributed stakeholders, including investors, managers, engineers, and consumers.

Chapter 14 Fire Learning Network 217

Trust building, learning communities, and learn-by-doing techniques are applied to diverse and widespread organizations and government actors promoting biodiversity.

Chapter 15 Partnering for Clean Water and Community Benefit 225

Partnership techniques are used to help government and business actors install and maintain more green infrastructure than they can do alone.

Chapter 16 Conclusion 235

Notes 239

Editorial Reviews

"Sustainability is the challenge of our time. The problems are complex, interconnected, and play out across temporal and geographic scales. They are also solvable. This book focuses on the how, providing examples and tools to help readers turn problems into opportunities and opportunities into solutions."

Janet Ranganathan

"I cannot imagine a more timely, useful, and tested collection for sustainability professionals. Teaching beside the authors for nearly a decade, I continuously marvel at how effectively their tools, strategies, and stories transform professionals of all backgrounds and aspirations into effective changemakers."

Jerry Abrams

"It's easy to fall into the chasm of despair when contemplating the wicked challenges of sustainability. Hull, Robertson, and Mortimer neatly leap that chasm with practical leadership tools to influence you and those around you to deliver the solutions we all need. Whatever those solutions are, they will come from us—the decisions we make and the way we lead. This book is a valuable guide to that future."

Kevin Rabinovitch

"This is a handbook on how to lead individual, organizational, and societal actions toward a more resilient, interconnected, compassionate, and thriving future. It tells an optimistic story of a future unwritten and full of possibilities for a better world. It gives all of us the tools and examples to become agents of change and actually achieve that vision."

Beth Gibbons

[Leadership for Sustainability] provides a roadmap of the challenges and opportunities of the Anthropocene, a leadership toolbox, and a storybook of wicked leadership in practice. This practical guide provides clear leadership strategies that support emerging and seasoned planning and design professionals alike.”

The Dirt

"Although here presented through the lens of sustainability, the leadership practices laid out would apply equally to all wicked problems, making this a useful guide for practitioners and theorists in a variety of fields."

Choice