Friday 20 March 2009

revised version of earlier text - the failure of leadership

Surprising as it is, most schools, colleges and universities are doing remarkably little with regard to educating their communities about the ecological crisis. Instead we seem to be turning out vast numbers of students who have little or no sense of the interrelatedness of us humans to the rest of the planet. Noel Perrin - the Dartmouth College Professor who died in 2004 once said 'neither the trustees nor the administration seems to believe that a crisis is coming.' He argued that they comprehend the situation intellectually, but they have no capability to act, to actually do anything directly to attend to the problem. 
I don’t think that much has changed in the subsequent years.

Thinking about this further it is perhaps the greatest example of what Otto Scharmer (2008) at MIT calls leadership ‘blindspots’ - a manifest failure of leadership across our entire education system to attend to the most pressing issue that faces us – be we student, teacher, parent, business or whatever. It is not a simple add on component of the existing operational approach, it is a profound realignment - I feel that the world beyond education is getting this much, much quicker, than the world within education. 


What I think we need to do is to build a new constituency for the future - a means to an end that will ensure the centrality of eco-literacy in all educational activity from building design, to curriculum, to training.

To achieve this I think we need to push on a number of interconnected fronts, there are many ways forward, but here is one route, what I call the five ‘p’s.

Principles: What guides educational practice if we take seriously the idea that all education is environmental education? We can have a dialogue in all schools and school communities on the values, principles, knowledge and perspective that illuminates the point that the crisis is of education, not in education.

Purpose: Why are we doing this? We can pursue the idea that all education is a preparation for life, and an understanding of ecology and environment is a vitally important thing for all of us to learn – and not simply geared to the pursuit of an ever expanding economy, continuous growth in wealth and the creation of the next generation of passive consumers, but for quality of life. We need young people to understand how human systems interrelate to natural systems, how we can build ecologically resilient communities and ecologically literate economies. These can be financially viable, but they need to be symbiotic with nature, not exploitative of it.

Priorities: What do we focus out limited time upon to get best effect? Leadership is about making choices, and those choices can be profoundly influential upon organisation. Margaret Wheatley (2005) reminds us that the type of leadership style we adopt can have immense effect upon the organization that is created. From developing relationships with a shared sense of purpose, exchanging and creating information, learning constantly, paying attention to the results of our efforts, coadapting, coevolving, developing wisdom as we learn, staying clear about our purpose, being alert to changes from all directions, we fashion a particular type of operational culture, and we choose to work in this way it is not an accident. Living systems provide us with the insight that whilst we might give some form to our organization through the relationships we choose to prioritise as important, it is highly predictable that the organization will evolve from these ways of working and forms into something new, because of exquisite capacities to create meaning together, to communicate, and to notice what’s going on in the moment we can adapt and grow from this approach to learning and leading together. These are capacities that give any organization a sense of energy and possibility, it derives from a choice to work in particular ways, ways that support self-organisation. This approach to knowledge construction and use, focuses leaders attention on the centrality of their role in creating the conditions for others to consider, design and generate novel solutions.
Practice: What do we do? We can have a renaissance of practical, simple ideas that focus on creating the connection for all people - from things like designing the edible school playground (1) as a place of direct ecological education as a connection from self to soil, to a review of how all elements of the curriculum are focused on making connections and seeing the interrelatedness of all things, to the fundamental pedagogic approaches we adopt to inform out work which can adopt the lessons of living systems and apply these insights into real life challenges.

Presence: How do we sustain and manage what we do for future benefit? Presence is an intimate way of looking at profound change and learning developed from an original idea from Peter Senge (2006) and colleagues.
In this case we can use nature as a guide and teacher, rather than something to be exploited. We can learn that sustainability is a community practice - it challenges us to learn how to connect and work collectively to solve problems together, we can learn that the real world is our optimal learning environment, it offers us a vast array of ways of learning by doing, we can learn that sustainable living is rooted into a profound knowledge of place - knowing ourselves in our environment teaches us how we can see others and see how we influence the lives of others. 


Our current educational leadership discourse fails, completely, to make this simple set of connections - it is time to begin to learn and apply these lessons.

Reference
Scharmer, O. (2008) Theory U: Learning from the future as it emerges. Cambridge, MA SOL
Senge, P. (206) Presence – Human purpose and the field of the future. Cambridge, MA SOL
Wheatley, M. (2005) Finding our way: leadership in uncertain times. Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc. San Francisco

(1) contact me for more information at paul.clarke@iqea.com

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