Essential, Elusive Leadership II (London version)

25 Aug 2011 – Mark Lee

I am in the United Kingdom presently, spending time with colleagues at SustainAbility’s Holborn office in central London. I spent the two weeks immediately prior to this trip on a blissfully quiet vacation with family and friends. Plugging back in, I find myself somewhat reeling trying to comprehend the various forms of volatility which erupted while I was away: in the markets, on the streets of this city and in other urban centers around Britain, and in Libya, where the opposition’s final advance into Tripoli proved so rapid as to stun most observers, leaving online media scrambling to post headlines like Qaddafi’s Final Hours while such hours still existed.

Leadership Vacuum(s)

With these economic, social and political events and their questions around accountability as backdrop, SustainAbility Chairman Geoff Lye and I convened a breakfast roundtable on leadership, trust and value in our London offices on Tuesday, August 23. In addition to SustainAbility founder John Elkington, we were joined by guests from Barclays, BT, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Forum for the Future and InterfaceFLOR. As at a similar event held in Washington, DC earlier this summer, our purpose was to facilitate exploration of the intersection and interdependence of the topics above and to investigate their influence on the sustainability agenda. (For a summary of the DC discussion, and some explanation as to why SustainAbility is particularly interested in these issues in advance of Rio+20 and other events on the 2012 calendar, see my original Essential, Elusive Leadership blog post.)

The conversation that unfolded during our meal was laced with near equal parts urgency and optimism. The urgency – and anxiety – on one side of the ledger stemmed from general agreement with the view I posited to frame the meeting: that leadership on the sustainability agenda, regardless excellence demonstrated by particular organizations or in certain regions, has not been anywhere near sufficient. Simply said, humanity and our activities collectively put more stress on ecosystems than the planet can bear long term (think biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions accumulation and/or ocean acidification), while also fostering tremendous inequity as measured by Gini coefficient and other means.

More positively, faced with this far-less-than-desirable evidence, no one round the table accepted that we are in any way fated to allow the planet and society to become yet less sustainable. So taking both anxiety and optimism in hand, we held a discourse about how we have arrived at this junction and where to look for future leadership – leadership capable of building the trust among all parties to the sustainability agenda that confident action requires, and able to describe and demonstrate how moving boldly on sustainability will create rather than destroy value for individuals, organizations and society as a whole.

Collective wisdom

While the group agreed with the broad strokes of the sustainability present-state analysis I’d offered, there was a strong assertion that the past two decades had produced incredible wisdom and experience – that is to say, even if macro indicators have continued to trend the wrong direction, we in the sustainability field now have to hand deep knowledge as to what the key challenges are and how to address them. The present issue is more how to harness and activate that knowledge. A few of the highlights of the conversation that followed – part assessment, part remedy, plus further query – are listed below. If any point of view expressed here provokes complimentary or divergent thinking from you in response, I’d love to hear from you, as we will continue this roundtable series in coming months, and I am keen to evolve and improve the theme and the process of inquiry.

Here we go then – Tuesday’s highlights, at least from my point of view:

• See the system: Every organization and individual is a ‘creature of context’, limited by what shareholders, peers, employees, regulators and other stakeholders expect and will therefore allow in terms of change. Progress means pulling multiple levers at once – networks are ‘the new black’.

• Don’t count on incumbents: Related to the system factors expressed above is the realization that the system puts the greatest constraints on incumbents, whose very success and current pole position creates internal and external resistance to experimentation and evolution (or, even more so, transformation). It’s not impossible for incumbents to reinvent themselves, but Gerstner titled his book on IBM’s transformation Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? precisely because he knew how challenging it is for people to imagine pachyderms in pirouette.

• Busy on the fringes: My former boss and past President & CEO at Business for Social Responsibilty, Bob Dunn, used to say that ‘the most interesting things happen where the edges meet’. He proved this by bringing together thought leaders of all kinds to work collectively on sustainability challenges; with his guidance, people who previously had mistrusted or simply ignored one another would discover how much more they were capable of doing when their diverse ideas and approaches were pooled. The fringe is always evolving, but it is still the place to look for new thinking. Our breakfast club spoke admiringly of social entrepreneurs, and especially of the facility of emerging digerati at creating and evolving networks and movements using social media.

• (Too) civil society: Similar to the conclusion of our July roundtable in DC that campaigning organizations are not presently vociferous enough was the view in London that civil society organizations have been somehow almost too successful accessing government and business in recent years. The issue? Danger of co-option aside, the intensity of such elite-level consultation consumes tremendous resource, leaving inadequate energy for either (literal and necessary) confrontation on the most time-sensitive sustainability challenges or engaging the public – the latter so critical to convincing politicians and business leaders alike to act in these poll-cum-Facebook ‘like’ dominated times.

• Remember the wins: Midst tendency (the fault of my own facilitation?) to focus on problems and how to overcome them, we reminded one another too of victories enjoyed. These included the overall knowledge and experience gained already mentioned, and also: engaged employees; room to discuss values alongside value; vastly improved (that is to say, reduced) packaging; first steps in terms of positive choice editing in realms like children’s nutrition; significant shifts in urban and mobility planning; and genuine leaps in learning about innovation processes and how to apply innovation skills within the sustainability realm.

Brace yourself

Alongside the belief that we can and will get sustainability right before it is absolutely too late was caution regarding the nature of the change we will go through. Word choice speaks volumes, and language tossed out Tuesday included ‘dangerous moment’, ‘convulsive’, ‘huge [change and challenge]’ and ‘crash’. So hang on – it’s going to be a heck of a ride – but at least one small group of thinkers who met this week in London thinks we’re going to make it.