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.

By Tamara Connell

Today we started off with some morning dance meditation, ate our breakfast, and the majority of the group heading up the mountain to summit Australia’s tallest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko. Having caught a bit of a cold, I stayed back to get some much needed rest, but the photos look spectacular. Hopefully someone else can share about this hike.

Once joined back at the hostel (which we have by day 3.5, completely taken over as if it was our collective home  - it is really quite amazing to have the opportunity to stay in one place for several days, all to ourselves), we set out to create action plans to take forward to the larger alumni group. We got a bit stuck on the ‘we’ question… and spent a solid amount of time exploring various options of where the ‘networks’ lines may be drawn. Finally though, I think we came to some good conclusions and hope to work more on this over the remaining days.

By Tamara Connell

The Monday morning started with a sobering acknowledgement of the tragedies of the forest fires burning nearby - the death toll nearing 90 at that time. We shared our reflections on this, and other results of our global unsustainable activities. It was emotionally quite heavy and a strong reminder to many of us that we need to take action now, not rest on our laurels. ‘Scaling up’ - isn’t that what’s needed? Is 10 times enough?

We connected again with the Vancouver group to hear from them about some of their thoughts on these three questions.

We proceeded on our ‘Thredbo workshop’ to brainstorm actions that we felt we could take - anything, big or small, short term or long. We freed our minds and wrote furiously. Categorizing these, we set ourselves up for Action Plan topics in the following day.

We filled our bellies with more home-cooked food and joined a ‘Storytelling from the future’ exercise to share what it is like some time in the future.

By Tamara Connell

We rose early this morning to meet up online with other alumni groups in Karlskrona, London, Vancouver, and Boston. The current students have spent several months working together with an outside contact to create the structure for an online sharing platform, so they spent some time sharing this work with us, and fielding questions from the larger group. It promises to have an incredible amount of functionality for the MSLS alumni group, including project collaboration, connected blogs, resource libraries of all types, etc. etc.  This looks like a great step ahead for us, potentially allowing us to work better together to scale up our positive impact. If you’re an alumnus, watch for this in the coming months!

For me, this call was a real technological feat, connecting us around the world - on quick count I think we had at least 5 locations and roughly 100 people on the same call. Amazing! (We later connected again with Ottawa, and had further online discussions with Boston and London.)

Follow the early regional check-in, we connected live with Dr. Bob Willard from his home in Ontario, Canada. Bob shared with us some the main ideas of his current work in progress - the third of his books, intended to be a ’sustainability champion’s guidebook’ for helping to transform your company - and we followed with a great discussion of related topics.

We then heard presentations on BTH (Göran Broman), MSLS (me), and The Natural Step (Richard Blume). Some great information was shared on the past, present and future of these 3 groups.

Overall, it was a day filled with many familiar faces from other parts of the world, and it inspired us to get to work answering some of the questions at hand:

How can we scale up the impact of SSD (Strategic Sustainable Development) 10 times?

• Who are ‘we’, and what is our work?
• What is the impact we want to scale up? Why? Where are we now?
• What do we do together which we could not do alone? How can we support each other, and what is our unique contribution? With whom can we collaborate?

We capped the afternoon off with a swim in a nearby creek. We were all alerted by the obvious smoke rolling into the valley from the reported forest fires.

For dinner, we were joined by Acacia Rose and her partner Peter, both local activists of the area. Acacia told us of her stories of fighting for the Snowy River to be maintained within public control. She shared the sobering reality that the water flows at a mere 4% today. She’s had some wins - one quite recently - but it appears that we need to really step up the charge to maintain the ‘commons’ in the hands of the communities, and to be more transparent in our governance and decision making.

While some went to bed, others stayed up to watch the Man from Snowy River, having just heard so much about the plight of this water supply.

Canberra to Thredbo - Day 5.

By Richard Blume and Tracy Lydiatt

Its been a day of tears, deep emotional connection and growing recognition of the severity of the sustainability crisis in Australia.

After farewelling Ella Lawton and David Cook, spontaneity led us to visit the Aboriginal Tent Embassy (our original plan to hike up Mt. Kosciuszko didn’t seem such a great idea with extreme temperatures predicted). This tent site, consisting of a campsite in front of the nation’s parliamentary precinct in Canberra, is a perpetual protest to recognize Aboriginal rights and indigenous custodianship of the Australian continent.

We were invited to a welcome ceremony where we connected with fire, water, air and land. The smell of eucalyptus infused the air as we circled a campfire and breathed in smoke said to have a healing effect when it enters the bloodstream. The men and women were split into groups, the men on the inside of the circle walking in the direction of the sun and the women formed an outer ring, encompassing the men (as all men were created from woman) and walked in the direction of the moon. While circling the fire in barefoot to connect with the earth, we were gently sung to by one of the Aboriginal men in both english and his native language. Some of us were moved to tears and felt a deep connection to the land and our spirits. A calmness covered our group once we were finished the circle.

We heard stories - alarmingly recent (1960s and 70s) – of when Aborigines were considered part of the local flora and fauna, when they were excluded from the national census, when they were refused the right to vote and when their children were forcibly removed from their families. And we heard of the ongoing struggle for land rights, reconciliation and economic and social wellbeing that continues to this day.

Auntie Judie Kelly made us feel welcome and explained how the smoking ceremony was an invitation to leave footprints on the Australian soil, and would serve as protection for our visit. She also explained that she was separated at birth from her parents as part of the Stolen Generation, the effects of which span at least three generations.

Auntie Isabelle Coe, an internationally renowned pioneer of indigenous rights recounted the history of the Tent Embassy and her epic struggle as a resident at the site since its establishment 37 years ago. Her story is profound.

The significance of last year’s national apology from the Federal Government was very clear. Limited action since then is a disappointment, particularly as other sustainability issues such as climate change, water rights and the economic downturn have taken the focus elsewhere.

A systems perspective might help. In fact, there is no more poignant a demonstration of the interconectedness of social, ecological and economic sustainability issues than the plight of Indigenous Australians. For a start, learning to live within ecological limits is something these people have mastered over 40-60,000 years (to put this in context, European civilisation has sprung up since the last ice-age 10,000 years ago). We have a lot to learn.

The Natural Step system conditions help to further demonstrate the link between sustainable development and indigenous culture. As Australia has sought to meet its needs as a nation, indigenous cultures have suffered deeply: every one of their basic human needs (Identity, Subsistance, Protection, Freedom, Participation, Understanding, Affection, Creativity and Idleness) have been affected by unsustainable development. Read more.

As a first step to show our support, we were invited to send postcards to them at the Tent Embassy. It might help to know we’ve personally seen their mailbox – a 44 galon drum painted with the Aboriginal Flag and rocks used to hold down their mail. We want to make sure they have to find some bigger rocks in order to hold down all the mail they will get from us!

As we now enter the retreat phase of our journey, this visit was a sobering experience that left many of us reeling. Nearing Thredbo, we stopped to hear a short presentation from the local waterkeepers on the state of the Snowy River (now flowing at just 4% of natural flows). Just another sobering experience to add to the day.

Now the retreat begins. Its time to get serious and use these experiences to help us develop our visions for scaling up!

by Tamara Connell

We were off to an early morning start once again, this time leaving Sydney for good and travelling south to Canberra, the nation’s capital. We began our time in Canberra by a ‘Welcome to country’ by Agnes of the Ngunnawal people. For me this connection to the Aborigines of Australia (and our car-ride discussions on the way) brought to light striking similarities between both the Australian and Canadian aboriginal policy, and their complex effects on the social and ecological sustainability of the affected communities.

After a short discussion with Agnes, we were toured The National Gallery of Australia, learning about the famous Ned Kelly as well as some of the history of Australian art. We enjoyed a delicious packed lunch in the garden - luckily a large installed mist sprayer was on hand to help cool us down in the 40 degree heat.

Despite having a rather large federal spending press announcement earlier in the morning, the Hon. Federal Member for Kingsford Smith, activist, and former Midnight Oil frontman, Mr. Peter Garrett joined us in the park for a discussion on leadership and creating positive change. It was a great pleasure to have been graced with a few moments of his time, especially under the circumstances.

Then we took a quick jaunt across town to visit the Swedish Ambassador to Australia, Mr. Sven-Olof  Petersson who welcomed us warmly with ‘fika’ in his residence. No IKEA furniture was spotted, but it was definitely nice for some of us to be ‘back in Sweden’, so to speak.

Finally, in a day filled with great leaders, we met up with Prof. Will Steffen, of the Australian National University’s Climate Institute, one of the world’s most pre-eminent climate change scientists, for a roof-top pizza party and social evening. Highlights included: a discussion on related research into ecosystem service valuation to help make decisions in trade-off situations on the way to low-carbon communities; the proposal that the climate solutions are not held back by technical problem but rather political will; and his personal motivations and approaches to maintain that motivation under some challenging statistics and prospects. For me personally, this was a real highlight of the trip so far!