News Updates

By Tamara Connell

[Apologies for a late posting on these last few days - I got a bit sick]

Day 9 started with our last breakfast in Thredbo. Leaving our little home away from home, we ventured south now… checking constantly on the latest fire reports. We drove through areas devastated by fire - just brick chimneys standing where there once was likely a house, a barn, a play yard for the children. We drove along, humbled by nature’s power.

Further down the road, we encountered entire ‘forests’ of standing black trees - created, we assumed, by the changing water tables and salinity of the Murray Darling River Basin. Stopping at Hume Dam, we heard about this river basin and the challenge of balancing pre-existing water rights during a time of long-standing drought.

Next we took a tour through the Barnawartha Biodiesel Plant, where they are converting tallow to market-quality biodiesel for use in Australia. They have a great process, using or selling almost every single by-product of their entire processes.

From Biodiesel to Wines - we spent some time getting an introduction to (and taste of!!) organic and biodynamic wines at Pennyweight Wines. What I found most interesting here is that somehow their products have been more or less left alone by ‘pests’ and birds. No netting is needed for their grapes - which sounded like a large savings in terms of both time and materials.

Finally this evening ended with an outdoor dinner, sauna and swim at the luxurious Lindenwarrah Estate, an elegant 5 star resort adjacent to a vineyard. After many nights of YHA bunkbeds (although for a youth hostel, YHA is quite good), having my own bed with crisp sheets was heavenly. Zzzzz.

New bright green technologies are bursting forth to help us leap towards a bright green future. What are also emerging are new mental and social ‘technologies‘ and tools, like new paradigms and frameworks (e.g. The Natural Step, Resilience), new cultural norms (e.g. slow travel, short showers), and new ways of conversing and collaborating. The process of how the recent Hallbarhet2009 events were created and unfolded, demonstrate the value of some of these new technologies, and suggest the greatest technology of all may be community.

Hallbarhet2009 was a co-creation, with no single person leading, nor any one who knew everything that was being done in the lead-up. Everything from planning the schedule, site visits and menu, to facilitating workshops and hosting presentations were done in a ‘create and learn as we go along guided by a common vision‘ way. This process can be seen as a microcosm of the type of process we are embarking on as a whole, with societal sustainability as the project. So, communication technologies like Skype, Basecamp, wikis, Google docs, Maratech, shared calendars (using the iCal standard) and email groups are also likely to be globally relevant tools for ‘us’ to learn and act together across cultures, languages and time-zones.

Collaboration can be great fun, but can also be frustrating and unproductive if done without a common frame of reference or shared vision of success. Fortunately the group on the Hallbarhet journey were all pursuing the same goal of ‘scaling up our impact by ten times‘, and trusted and understood the same language and concepts from our education (e.g. sustainability principles, backcasting, strategic questions, systems thinking). We are all also familiar with some of the social and collaborative technologies that enable groups to think and act together, such as Dialogue, asking Powerful Questions, Open Space Technology, World Cafe, peer coaching, presencing and Theory U.

Though the guests we met during the Halllbarhet2009 event in Australia were diverse, they all expressed a common interest in new ways for us to think and act through and for the ‘whole’. It seemed to me that more important than the engineering and scientific technologies we saw such as biodiesel plants, intelligent buildings run on solar thermal power, biodynamic agriculture, and permaculture community centres were these social and mental technologies that enable collective thinking and action. Consider the following examples, from the ancient to the modern:

• Aboriginal people inviting visitors to their traditional lands to participate in welcoming ceremonies, a kind of spiritual technology: circling a sacred fire and breathing in the smoke generates a visceral sense of respect and connection with each other, other species and creation.

• Scientists are organising through forums like the Wentworth Group, IPCC, and IGBP to provide timely, consensus recommendations that are driving national and international policy.

• Universities (e.g. BTH, UTS and RMIT) are encouraging transdisciplinary research - a new mental technology - to enable innovation across departmental, sectoral and epistemological boundaries.

• Community, business and government are working together through institutions like the Murray Darling Basin Authority, and using new market mechanisms for trading water rights to protect the long-term health of the world’s third-largest river system.

• Activists and NGOs are using new political tools, pushing elected representatives to respond appropriately to the climate emergency.

There are so many flavours and forms of collaboration that make so much sense to Web 2.0-savvy readers, so you might wonder why it is not happening more. That was actually the question considered at a ‘network of networks’ Global Sustainability Dialogue at RMIT at the end of the Hallbarhet2009 journey. Some of the barriers we identified included;

• The desire to ‘get more done urgently, now‘ rather than taking the time to really connect, listen and build the trust that underlies collaboration.

• While democracy and consensus are always the best way to decide and collaboration always the best basis for action, total democracy and collaboration can be problematic. Knowing when and how to lead as an individual within a group is a challenge.

• While teamwork was important, critics can emerge if you appear to surrender your values and commitments in favour of group consensus e.g. take activist turned Labor politician Peter Garrett as a case study.

• Being too identified with your own profession/network/clique, and its language, symbols, models, paradigms and habits can seriously inhibit inter-network collaboration, even within the sustainability movement.

These barriers to sustainability are real, and at least as important to the barriers to adoption of new engineering or technical solutions. So, is the greatest tool or technology we have for sustainability actually ‘community’ itself? Sharing, co-creating, supporting is now, as it has been throughout most of human history, not just a warm fuzzy concept but actually critical to our survival. We are now a global tribe whether we like it or not, with no enemy except ourselves. So while individuals need to act strategically, authentically and boldly, doing it alone is not enough to reach our own potential (as Gladwell argues in ‘Outliers’), let alone our collective potential.

A shift in focus from individual heroes to mass collaborative leadership and action is required, but challenges how attached we are to most our primary identity as independent, autonomous individuals. Perhaps it’s important to remember that sustainability is not the characteristic of one organisation, rather that of the whole system, and so with leadership: it’s relevant as a role of individuals at certain times and certain ways, but ultimately the sustainability challenge is about what we can and must do together.

So, if we really want to change the world, let’s celebrate and use all the ancient and new technologies that create community. Like collaborative blogging?

Blog Post:  2/10/09

by Georges Dyer

Gloucester, Massachusetts is an American town with a lot of history, and it represents a lot of things - a fishing town, a hard-nosed New England culture, a tight-knit insular community, an inspiration to artists, a renowned bird-watching site, the oldest working waterfront in the country.  One thing it is not is a winter-time destination. 

But it was not the negative 5 degree (Fahrenheit) that turned the Northeastern US into a virtual gathering, though I’m sure it didn’t help.  It was simply a confluence of changed travel plans, family matters, and last-minute responsibilities that whittled the group planning on spending the weekend in Gloucester below critical mass. 

While we missed out on the personal contact, chilly walks on the beach, and fried clam feasts, the MSLS grads of the Northeast still managed to connect and set aside the time to take a step back, check-in with our regional network, learn from each other and recharge.  And, we happily avoided some growth in our carbon footprints. 

We started with quick updates on what everyone has been up to professionally - always an exciting undertaking with other Strategic Leaders:

Archie Kasnet (’05) debriefed on the progress with Aedi Group, the holding company with a portfolio of sustainability-oriented businesses in the technology and real estate spaces, and an associated non-profit, Village Corps, focused building a network of communities around the world creating and implementing sustainable development solutions.

Back in Baltimore, Geoff Stack (’08) has been pleased to see so much going on, and is taking full advantage by getting himself out there for as many speaking engagements as he can - an effective strategy for connecting and building his new practice - ThreeIn Consulting.

Michelle Dyer (’06) ran through her work as Vice President of Second Nature, a non-profit with the mission of making sustainability the foundation for all learning and practice in higher education.  Her initiative in building a rapidly growing team, building the Presidents’ Climate Commitment (over 600 college presidents committed to pursuing climate neutrality and sustainability education), and launching a new green building initiative for under-resourced institutions is having far-reaching impact.

Jennifer Woofter (’05) updated us on the continued success of her business, Strategic Sustainability Consulting, after four years.  Her work with small and medium sized businesses and non-profits has had a tremendous impact in engaging organizations on measuring their impacts and creating meaningful action plans.  The learning curve has been steep on being an entrepreneur and developing the difficult disciplines of meeting clients where they stand and building trust, and her insights were helpful to us all.  SSC continues to grow, having success with a network of associates that can build customized teams for specialized projects and client-needs.  And on top of all this, she was up most of the previous night looking after a new puppy.

Tim Nash (’08) gave an overview of his MSLS thesis work on Strategic Sustainable Investing - and a the resultant tool for evaluating how companies are using backcasting and approaching sustainability to better assess their true and long-term value.  Given the economic climate, Tim’s decided to be bold, and jump right in with a consulting practice to help green funds and investment shops educate their analysts, portfolio managers, investment advisers and clients on sustainability and what makes a “future-proof portfolio.”

Finally, I gave a quick update on my shifting role from working primarily with Michelle at Second Nature to focusing more and more on working with Archie at Aedi Group.

These updates transitioned nicely into our two discussion topics:

• 1) How have we been using the Framework for SSD, and what’s been working and what hasn’t, and
• 2) How can we scale up our impact towards sustainability 10-times?

 Of course we’re all using the framework, either explicitly or in-the-back-of-our-minds, in our work and personal lives.  Some key points emerged from the usual talk about what in the framework resonates with people and what doesn’t, different ideas about how to present the five levels and principles, etc…

We came to a real focus on the importance of stakeholder engagement - between sustainability practitioner and client (or partner, organization, community, etc.), and taking the time to really understand the motivations and values of the people we’re working with and build trust.  Stakeholder engagement is key between the group moving towards sustainability and its stakeholders, but also between the sustainability practitioner and the group he or she is trying to help move towards sustainability.

On a related note, we underscored the importance of the organizational learning concepts that can help people open up and understand the framework, and then start using it.  Concepts like dialogue and listening are often foreign to busy people in fast-moving businesses, especially it seems, here in the Northeast of the US.  

Improving the way we can facilitate these interactions and engagements of organizations and groups around sustainability is key to the art and practice of the sustainability practitioner, and central to scaling up our impact 10 times.

Other notable ways we felt we, as the MSLS alumni network, could scale up our impact turned out to be a couple of pretty straight-forward, tangible ideas:

 1) Visual aids - we noted how year over year the ways of representing the core concepts of SSD visually have continued to improve at a healthy clip. The Powerpoint slides, the thesis summaries and tools, promotional materials, videos, and the like - they keep getting better and better, and that’s a very good thing. The development of an effective online collaboration space will be huge helping us all to access and share all of these ever-improving resources, and help us work together on (a) creating more of them and (b) creating an effective platform - a one-stop-shop - that will enable the rest of the world to swing by, check them out, scale up their own positive impact.

2) People-focused - this was something that came up quite a bit in the ‘06 class, and it was reassuring in a way to hear that other classes had reached some similar conclusions - that in really driving the message home that social and ecological are two sides of the same coin, nested systems, the same “bus,” profoundly interrelated… however you want to say it - it is important to clearly communicate that sustainability is, as Geoff put it, “not just about birds and bunnies, it’s about us.” We revisited the approach of presenting the 4^th sustainability principle first and talked about Adam Werbach’s Birth of Blue speech which is a good way of helping people see this (though, personally, I think “green” is emerging as a short-hand for sustainability, including the crucial social element, but where that’s not clear, this kind of terminology could help). This point is particularly relevant in the US now, as so many more people are focused on the near-term issues around the economy and jobs, and it is critical that we as sustainability practitioners keep our message relevant and meet people where they are standing.

The conversation was fruitful and too short, and hopefully served as a warm-up to more in-person gatherings in the region in the near future.