Text of talk given to the Fellows of IEMA event 7th December 2017.
With acknowledgements and thanks to Lee Matthews for his contribution to the ideas in the talk.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s my honour to be invited here to make a contribution to the discussion this evening.
As the Head of a Business School I’d like to address my remarks to the question of how we develop the next generation of leaders so that we ensure they place principles of sustainability at the heart of their thinking, as they take their places in society.
First I ought to say a bit about why Lincoln would have any claim to insights on our discussion. Well, As a B School, it’s a commitment that we take very seriously, by making it core to our educational strategy. You may be aware that the UN has an initiative known as PRME, Principles for Responsible Management Education. The six principles therein set out broad objectives to which B schools can subscribe and report on progress every 3 years. The first principle is as follows: “We will develop the capabilities of students to be future generators of sustainable value for business and society at large and to work for an inclusive and sustainable global economy.`’ My school has been subscribed to PRME now for 6 years, and that has allowed us to embed sustainability education in all our products, under an initiative we call the “Lincoln Responsible Degrees Initiative”. The Sustainability agenda therefore is built into staff development, curriculum development, skills development, assessment , and learner outcomes.
OK all very well, but I want to give some examples of how we do that, and thereby offer one or two insights on my theme of educating the generation we know vaguely as ‘millennials’. They do possess certain characteristics that challenge us all, as educators, as business leaders, and dare I say it, as parents…
A 2016 survey by the UK HE Institute and the NUS suggests that over 80% of students in the UK believe that sustainability should be actively promoted by Universities, and incorporated into teaching; perhaps surprisingly the positive response from International students was even higher.
Us older generations may wish to take note; 18 year olds, are idealistic, values driven in the choices they make, and passionate about sustainability. So we’re pushing against an open door here L+G: let me offer a few thoughts about how best to get through that door by considering what we deliver and how we deliver it.
First, we argue that the effectiveness of leadership in driving sustainability is constrained by two important factors; a lack of appreciation of the evidence base, and second, a lack of ambition for change; most organisations tend to take an incremental, rather than a transformational, approach to sustainability, concentrating relatively narrowly on the particular impact of their product or service, rather than a wider view of their role as custodians of our environment.
So with our young learners, we begin by sharing with them the data and evidence to understand the scale of the sustainability challenges, something we ought to be good at as a University of course. We then look at the transformational role that business and management can play in helping us transition towards a more sustainable economy. The second critical element of this approach is how we deliver it, that is the means by which we encourage our students to learn effectively, and that is through the combined processes of action research, and action learning. Millenials simply aren’t content to swallow information presented to them; they are highly sceptical of experts, whether academics or industry professionals, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. They also want to be fully involved in the design of and the process of their own learning. So how does that work in practice?
Well, we create our progammes with our students, and give them the freedom to travel on a voyage of discovery, guided by us. One example from our undergrad curriculum would be the Community Organisation, Sustainability, and Development module, Their assignment is to produce a case study of a non-profit organisation, demonstrating and critiquing the contribution of the chosen organisation to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This requires a good working knowledge of the goals, the wider goals of the non-profit organisation, and an understanding of the opportunities and constraints that organisations face when addressing global challenges.
For a second example of this action learning process in practice I can draw on our corporate partnerships. We recently worked with the young employees of a large manufacturing company to help the company understand why the employees weren’t buying in to their sustainability strategy, and found that they simply didn’t understand what the Company meant by sustainability. Through this action learning project we helped not only the employees to engage with the agenda, but also the company to redefine and clarify the concept of sustainability.
With a large Grocer, we helped them to understand how sustainability practices were being diffused within their supply network. They struggled to understand what practices were being shared, how they were being shared, and why. We helped them to create a forum to facilitate interactions between their organisation, their suppliers, and sustainability experts,
So a common theme of our action learning and research work is assisting corporations with the difficulty of translating the nebulous concept of sustainability into ‘on the ground’ practice. Ironically perhaps, academics can play an important role in doing this.
As I alluded to earlier, because many corporate sustainability strategies are based on relatively vague definitions of sustainability, they are not equal to the scale of the challenges we face (this is the ‘storm warning’ that IEMA mentions in its literature). We know for example that carbon emissions need to be reduced 80% by 2050 against a 2000 baseline but only a minority of companies have sustainability strategies in place that are commensurate with the scale of action required.
So in conversation with the IEMA senior management team we’ve identified three main themes, where we believe value can be added to organisations through an action research intervention to help meet these challenges.
First, we can improve our collective understanding as to why companies frequently adopt these incrementalist approaches to sustainability and therefore help them to develop strategies that would more radically increase their resource productivity.
Second, better understand why sustainability strategies often lose momentum, and therefore help companies to better sustain them.
And finally, and returning to the theme of leadership development, work to ensure that every leader in the organisation can become a ‘sustainability professional’. With this group of Fellows as thought leaders and educators, we think there’s a huge opportunity to engage with the next generation to turn sustainability into good business practice at every level of our organisations. Thank you for listening.