Collective Leadership for Sustainability
Leading for sustainability is not an act in isolation. It requires leadership by various individuals towards a similar goal on a collective scale, sometimes without knowing about one another, rarely with central coordination and always as a collective learning journey. The capacity for leading, initiating, facilitating and sustaining the construction of meaningful futures is enfolded in all of us.
Research Project: Collective Leadership Blog
Starting in March 2012, we will begin a research process exploring more closely what Collective Leadership for Sustainability means in practice. Over the course of the next months, we will be interviewing practitioners from private sector, public sector and civil society who brought forward essential steps in sustainable development. Our guidance for this exploration process is a model for Collective Leadership that emerged from the last couple of years of our work in Stakeholder Dialogues, cross-sector-partnership and responsible business practices.
The results of our research will be gradually published in our blog.
Petra Künkel, executive director of the CLI was recently asked to write an online column for the Guardian Sustainable Business Hub. In this column she shares news and insights about our research process. Read the first article here.
Collective leaders create pathways for collaboratively finding innovative solutions to the challenges of sustainability and for implementing them in a spirit of collective responsibility. This includes collaborative action and collective input into the creation of a future that many can own. They know that this requires personal maturity as much as the capacity to lead structural change.
In building this capacity we need to travel an inner path and an outer path, and we need to do this in conjunction with fellow-leaders who are also prepared to take responsibility for a more sustainable future.
The inner path is the basis for the way we place ourselves in the context of the task and our way of leading. As a result we participate more consciously in the movement towards regeneration and sustainability.
This requires that we develop our capacity to access our own humanity, with all potentials and limitations. Only then can we open up to the underlying humanity that connects us all in the world, no matter how much we differ in approach, opinion, color, culture, skills or wealth.
It also leads us into our growing ability to not only conceptually understand the fact that there is interdependence in the world, but the ability to grasp this web of interdependent relationships: a faculty that can be described as our growing capacity to sense the whole.
Grasping the web of relationships in a deeper way leads us into a more profound realization that we cannot travel the path towards sustainability alone. No matter how important our contribution may be, it is our capacity to open up to collective intelligence that will help make the difference.
The outer path is the engine for the way we drive the change in consciousness and behavior. With our individual competence and expertise we can lead towards sustainability in conjunction with others – and make a difference.
This requires that we develop our capacity to lead future possibilities, with all our experiences, knowledge and skills. Challenging the impossible and always seeing new possibilities is a faculty that we can cultivate. Inspiring others to access their creative potential then naturally follows.
This helps us to develop our capacity to spot innovative solutions. Sustainability requires innovation on a large scale – we cannot walk into the future with our minds focused on problems. We need to learn from the past, but if we limit ourselves to variations of existing solutions we try to overcome the challenges of sustainability with the very solutions that have led to these challenges.
Even the best of solutions are futile if not enough people take them up. The proof of sustainability lies in its implementation. Considering the need for collective intelligence and our experience that change comes about fastest in a web of relationships between people who are committed to making a difference, we need to develop our capacity to engage. People who have been part of creating solutions will be active drivers in implementation. We can learn to make our co-creation more consciously sustainable.
Both paths are intertwined, traveling the inner path prepares us for the outer path, traveling the outer path strengthens the inner path.
Collective Leadership for Sustainability
Collective Leadership for Sustainability is the capacity of a group of leaders to deliver their contribution to a more sustainable future through assuming joint and flexible leadership in service of the common good. At the core of collective leadership is the human capacity to dialogue and transform differences into progress. It enables the transcendence of self-centered views, a prerequisite for successfully addressing the challenges of globalization and sustainability.
