Rethinking Leadership for a Green World

Andrew Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000548686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

First James Lovelock, and recently Prince William and David Attenborough believe that we have reached a tipping point in the process of climate change. Whether they are right or not, it is certainly true that the impact of humankind upon the ecology of the earth has reached a point where real changes in human behaviour are required. If managers are to be enablers of planetary survival then we need to develop a new approach to risk, which explicitly includes ecological limits upon economic behaviour. This implies a fundamental reorientation of their role in allocating resources to minimise risk and maximise reward.

This book brings together some of the brightest contemporary thinkers on leadership, complexity and sustainability to consider the big ideas that we will need to make the changes required, and to outline the major themes that can inform a new approach to constructing a green world. It looks at how to ensure that local models of sustainability are able to flourish in the context of global networks and presents specific case studies of markets and organisations that offer insights into the development integrated solutions and the leadership lessons we can learn.

Combining both theory and practice, this book serves to guide business managers and provides deeper insight and critical perspectives on some of the key issues facing leaders moving towards the green economy. It also provides useful supplementary reading for students in business and environmental studies.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003190820-1

Andrew Taylor

As foreseen by Creswick and Williams (1979) and others, complexity and uncertainty are rising both in our daily lives and in business. In business, many of those accorded guru status, such as Charles Handy (1990, 2002), Henry Mintzberg (1989) and more recently Dave Snowden (2007), are discussing a future with less order and structure, whilst the scientists Jared Diamond (2005) and James Lovelock (2007) have both made strong and well-researched cases for this being a tipping point in human history. As Tett (2016) puts it:

if you look around the world today, our twenty-first-century society is marked by a striking paradox. In some senses, we live in an age where the globe is more interlinked, as a common system, than ever before. The forces of globalization and technological change mean that news can flash across the planet at lightning speed. Digital supply chains link companies, consumers, and economies across the globe. Ideas—good and bad—spread easily. So do people, pandemics, and panics. When trades turn sour in a tiny corner of the financial markets, the global banking system can go topsy-turvy. We live, in short, in a world plagued by what the economist Ian Goldin has dubbed the ‘Butterfly Defect’: a system that is so tightly integrated that there is an ever-present threat of contagion. ‘The world has become a hum of interconnected voices and a hive of interlinked lives,’ as Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, observes. ‘[This is a] breakneck pattern of integration and interconnectedness that defines our time’.

(Tett 2016, p. 2)

Diamond (2005) concludes that if we, as a species, are to avoid ecological collapse, we must change our way of thinking and challenge our cultural and economic assumptions about life.

The Covid-19 pandemic is an unpleasant, if timely, reminder that we remain a biological component of the earth’s ecology and certainly not its master. It is increasingly clear that the Covid-19 pandemic is merely the breaking of a wave of related diseases. SARS, swine flu, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), bird flu and Ebola have all emerged as ecological push-back against the treatment of nature as little more than a unit of production (Shiva 2020). It is, of course, not only the rapid spread of disease that indicates that our species is overshooting its resource base (Meadows, Meadows & Jorgen 1992). Climate change, first suggested by James Lovelock (1979, 1988), is now causing changes in weather patterns and events that are materially affecting the way that we live and organise. From warming British summers, which make holidaying at home so much more fun for Londoners, to floods in Europe, melting glaciers in the Himalayas, fires across Australia and California and sinking islands in the Pacific, the evidence is stacking up and becoming tangible to everyone. Plastic pollution of our seas has caused the formation of a dead area in the Pacific covered by a floating plastic island that in 2018 was three times the size of France (ABC News 2018; Liu 2018). Air pollution is a chronic problem across most urban areas. Even in developed countries such as the UK, 70 years after the introduction of legislation to end the great smogs that hung over cities, The Times has, throughout 2020, run a ‘Clean Air for All’ campaign to do something about the causes and fatal consequences of air pollution in the UK. Even as we continue to discover new forms of life in the deep jungles and oceans, species decline continues at a catastrophic pace (Lewis 2020). The breadth and scale of environmental impact ‘signal a fundamentally broken relationship between humans and the natural world’ (WWF 2020). Whilst we are busy arguing over the rules of trade that increasingly define power in the world, the environmental foundation of that power is being eroded; and we cannot argue that this is taking place unconsciously. We are like passengers on the Titanic struggling and bickering over access to the first-class deck whilst the ship is sinking. If it were not so serious it would be laughable.

Our attempts to organise the world along nice, neat lines of cause and effect have been over-simplistic, reductionist and naive. The world is far more complex than economists’ minds and, as Oliver James (2007) notes, so are people. Whilst business process re-engineering, with its neat flow diagrams and cost-cutting, may deliver economic efficiency, it has done so at the expense of ecological resilience. Trying to stuff all of the world’s ecology into the concept of economics has simply failed (McBurney 1990). The world will function perfectly well without economics, but economics cannot function without ecology. In fact, as Lovelock (1979, 1988) has pointed out, Gaia (the name he gave to the earth’s self-adjusting ecology) is indifferent about whether humans walk the earth at all. It is the consequences of their actions that leave scars on the earth that are far more damaging and concerning than their presence (1988).

If managers, as the controllers of much of the world’s resources (Senge et al. 2008; Doppelt 2008), are to be enablers of planetary survival then we need to develop a new approach to risk and value creation, one which explicitly includes ecological limits upon economic behaviour. This implies a fundamental reorientation of their role in defining risk and reward. One of the arguments of this book is that we need to shift away from the simplistic cause-and-effect view of the world that has grown out of utilitarian modernism and its focus upon economics as the basis of value. It requires no less than a shift away from the anthropocentric world view that has characterised the post-enlightenment era (Dobson 1990), to a more ecocentric model of organisation that roots humans within ecological systems and embraces their complexity, not just as metaphors, but as models of organisational design. As Diamond (2005) puts it ‘a lower impact society is the most impossible scenario for our future except for all other conceivable scenarios’.

This book seeks to look at the challenges of providing leadership at a time when ecological feedback loops, such as climate change, species decline, extreme weather and virus pandemics are conflating globally and being experienced increasingly directly. This book uses case studies to explore the challenges of addressing environmental change individually in terms of values, systems and practicalities and it brings together some of the brightest contemporary thinkers on leadership, systems thinking, complexity and sustainability in order to:

• First, consider the big ideas that have informed the discussion of environmental leadership;
• Second, think about the relationships between people and values and the ideas and practice that have got us to where we are today;
• Third, define and explore those relationships as complex systems and as a key component of going beyond a best practices approach to leadership;
• Fourth, consider whether local models of sustainability are able to flourish in the context of global networks and specific case studies of markets and organisations that offer insights into the development of integrated solutions and the leadership lessons we can learn.

Chapter 2: David Collins reveals the importance of narratives and sensemaking that flows from storytelling for leaders of all types. Specifically, he reveals, through case studies, the parallels between counter narratives told by big tobacco and climate change deniers. Both are shown, for example, to fund sympathetic research and to demand, on the grounds of balance, that their counter narrative is heard. The impact upon the debate, the individual scientists and the organisations that they work for is captured through the case studies which not only reveal the risks that must be taken to reputations, but also underlines the importance of controlling the narrative and its presentation, which is as important to the leadership of environmental challenges as the facts themselves.

Chapter 3: Chris Rose and Pat Dade use their model of motivational states to provide a structured approach to understanding how, why and when different groups of people are motivated to engage with issues. In so doing they reveal how and why Brexit leaders outmanoeuvred their opponents and, after reading David Collins and Elesa Zehndorfer’s chapters, it is not hard to see how effective use of this knowledge has enabled Trump and other climate change deniers to ensure their continued relevance. Furthermore, they reveal the importance of leaders understanding which group they are talking to, when to do so and how to engage if environmental change is to be delivered and with the guidelines for doing so.

Chapter 4: Bharati Singh defines environmental leadership as distinct from both leadership and activism. This is key if we are to develop models and practices that go beyond both business as usual and describing problems rather than developing solutions. Importantly, such a model explicitly makes space for a profit motive, but it positions commercial behaviour as valuable to the extent that it is able to reduce environmental impact and create positive ecological feedback loops. Discussion of two young leaders endeavouring to sustain and drive forward business organisations provides both insights and practical substance to the chapter and the wider issues raised within this volume.

Chapter 5: Heather Crawford and Adam Bronstone explore the tensions between economics and environment in America that define the iconic idea of the West (and the wilderness that it represents), which lies at the heart of American culture. They show, through specific examples, the conflict between a political system driven by money that is often constrained by business and the global thought leadership that has emerged through writers, musicians and protest groups. The chapter seeks to capture both how united America is in its attachment to its natural environment as a cultural icon and how, simultaneously, it is so divided on ideas of how to engage with it socially and economically. It is pulled between populations on the coasts which seek to protect and those in the middle that seek jobs, the artists who seek inspiration and business that seeks to exploit. America’s status as both a global power and as the leading emitter of greenhouse gases positions these debates on the global stage, with consequences for us all.

Chapter 6: Elesa Zehndorfer explores how climate change denial, which formed a cornerstone of President Donald Trump's term in office, was combined with development of charismatic authority (Weber, 1968) as a form of leadership. The case study allows a closer look at the phenomenon of how, and why, charismatic populist political leaders tend to rely on the denigration and demonisation of climate change scientists and other intellectuals as a central part of their political strategy. In so doing, the author provides clear insights into how the leadership of climate change denial has connected with its base to form an almost cult-like devotion.

Chapter 7: Ligia Cremene introduces the reader to systems thinking complexity and the relationship to feedback loops and the externalities that they drive. She shows how a continued reliance upon linear deterministic systems is wreaking ecological havoc and how it is increasingly irrelevant economically in a networked digital world. The author demonstrates how effective leadership of both contemporary economic and ecological change requires us to learn new tools to identify and channel emergence, rather than apply predictable best practice. In so doing she provides a toolkit for leaders to focus upon feedback loops as the source of both future sustainability and value creation.

Chapter 8: Personified by Greta Thunberg, Amanda Gregory and Jonathan Atkins explore the explosion of interest in climate change by young people. The emergence of these young leaders and the issues that they are addressing are not easily explained by traditional theories of leadership. The nature of complex problems is that they are systemic in nature and, as we see with the pandemic, do not respond in predictable, linear ways to robust action. Complex systems require leadership that is defined in systemic terms. Traditional theories do not adequately differentiate between leadership and authority, thus the authors propose Critical Systems Practice as a way to enable emergent leaders to structure their instinctive systemic response to wicked problems.

Chapter 9: Yasmin Merali adopts an interdisciplinary a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Shaping the leadership challenge
• PART II Systems and complexity
• PART III Looking forward
• PART IV Further reading
• Index