ESLs: Change-Makers Living the Change Challenge
The tension between “what is” and how to realize large system change was
fundamental in a GOLDEN Ecosystems Labs (ESL) meeting hosted by the Smith
School for Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford. The event followed a similar
meeting at MIT, both with the goal of advancing the ESLs’ development. A Concept
Note on the Labs, developed in conversation with many large system change experts
including those at the meetings, formed the basis for discussion.
In broad terms the Concept Note proposed a strategy to take on the enormous
change challenge of integrating sustainability into the “systems” that support and
inhibit companies to become “sustainable enterprises”. These are economic
systems and markets, political systems and public policy-making, and social systems
including values. The ESLs complement labs focusing on individual and
organizational change, as part of GOLDEN’s strategy to accelerate transformation of
today’s corporations to sustainable enterprise.
Dilemmas
Several fundamental dilemmas with the Concept Note were identified, all associated
with something well-known to change-makers: the messiness of “emergence” of
true innovation. One dilemma arose with the definition of “sustainable enterprise”.
GOLDEN uses the name as a placeholder to describe how value creation for a firms’
stakeholders will occur in a sustainable future. Out of concern for the need to keep
deepening understanding about what “sustainable enterprise” might look like,
GOLDEN refers to a few generally accepted dimensions of sustainability, like longterm decision-making orientation, equal consideration for economic, social and
environmental implications of business decisions, redefinition of the purpose of the
business enterprise in terms of satisfaction of the interests of a plurality of investors
in various forms of capital (social, human, political, natural, etc.), rather than just the
financial type.
A similar dilemma arose in discussion about framing of the ESLs around specific
industries. The Note proposes creating change labs1 around industries like
agriculture/food and finance by bringing together diverse stakeholders working on
the industries’ sustainability, in order to create an industry-wide change perspective,
enhance coherence and connectedness to develop the scale and effectiveness of
effort necessary to realize the scale of change required, and to support actions that
current change efforts overlook.
Oxford participants pointed out that the identity and definition of the industries
themselves is an “old” way of framing that inhibits needed innovation – the very
definition of specific industries needs to change. The MIT meeting similarly
questioned whether the industry framework rather than a “public commons” (eg:
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The methodology is associated with Adam Kahane and Reos Partners.
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water, air) organizing frame would be best. As well, concerns arose about problemfocused rather than opportunity-focused action.
Another issue is one familiar to any change practitioner: taking on powerful entities
like an industry as a change object with a frontal strategy is unlikely to succeed.
There are simply too many vested interests. Rather, creating new spaces to
experiment and organizing change advocates to take more powerful action are
usually much better strategies.
And yet, community organizing principles point out that it is important to start with
“where people are” in terms of identity and the way they think of the world. And for
GOLDEN as a whole, the focus is transformation of today’s corporation. How can the
future be explored in a way that supports people to re-imagine it? This is, of course,
a basic dilemma that is producing methodologies to address it such as the “U
Process” and futures “post-normal science” scenario development. Questions about
how to transition from today’s definition of an “industry” to tomorrow’s sustainable
world are core to GOLDEN.
Another dilemma with ESLs development is, as one participant said, the “…need to
be much more clear about which community of scholars I am joining.” A
foundational rationale of the ESLs is that the community necessary to realize the
needed scale (impact breadth and depth) does not exist and that the ESLs aims to
support its development. Core qualities of the people invited to the meeting also
reflect thoughts about the qualities that the community has to have. This can be
summarized as crossing many current divides (as change experts know, this is a
core element of most true innovation), including academicpractitioner/implementer, cultural, knowledge disciplines, methods/tools,
strategies and issues. The unifying element is a focus on designing, experimenting
with and facilitating large system change toward aspirational futures.
What’s the Distinctive Value?
What can GOLDEN offer to many valuable change initiatives underway? The Note
offered a number of ways a GOLDEN ESLs platform might support those initiatives
by:
(1) bringing together leading experts from different traditions and schools of
thought with practitioners to combine the strengths of complementary
approaches to the development of futures and experiment with large system
change;
(2) offering some of the existing sustainability initiatives a platform for
exchanging positive and negative experiences, distilling insights and
collaborating on new, refined, experimental efforts, and building on
collaborative learning processes;
(3) stimulating the development of novel understanding and experimentation
on large system change that can take on the scale of challenges facing the
planet.
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This would not be done through centrally-driven and massively coordinated action,
but rather as a platform that can identify highly strategic action to advance these
goals, while creating opportunities for change initiatives to work collaboratively and
realize greater impact. One originally envisioned role was as a platform for
analyzing sustainability change action in a particular industry arena, to support
identification of, and taking, strategic change action. In change language today, the
goal is to step up the “emergence” of new capacity and large system innovation.
Mentioned as exciting potential aspects of the ESLs included:
 A great way to look outside of the box: crossing levels of analysis; looking into
actual changes, not only in retrospect; changing corporate practices.
 Linking organizational- and eco-system levels;
 A great mix of disciplines; good to have an academic-practitioner mix;
 A different set of spectacles, for people to look at their own work and data in a
different way and helping people to understand work in their system (eg:
awareness raising within companies: climate change is real; there are poor
people).
 Being a steward of change making. Role as a convener of conveners: crossfertilize, more than the sum of part.
 Change readiness accelerator. Help people in the system to understand change
dynamics (frustration leading to change in system).
 The fact that it is international with good names.
Metamorphosis
The Oxford discussion morphed into taking on “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” (BHAGs). The example provided by Reos as a real project it has initiated and is looking
for ways to advance, is reducing carbon emissions by a gigaton within two years (to
address climate change, cuts of about 44 GT/year are required). This would have
several benefits by being future- and aspirational-oriented and of scale that would
require a “stretch” interesting for change-makers.
But how are the B-HAGs to be identified in a way that they will be “owned” by a set
of stakeholders with some reasonable possibility of addressing them? How do we
avoid limiting imaginations by the current sense of “reasonable possibility” in a way
that dampens innovation? Also, how would this actually help developing knowledge
about how to transition from today’s industries to a sustainable future?
In the B-HAG suggestion, is there an implicit suggestion about one possible future,
where instead of industries we have value-creating activity around specific human
needs – such as the need for climate stability? How can the big “transition-tosustainable enterprise” question be connected to current industries to ensure
meaningful engagement without limiting innovation?
This raises a profound question about how current “large system change experts”
are themselves working. Are inertia and their own current frameworks and
identities limiting their own potential for impact? Can a group of change experts,
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based on their currently unassociated work, be a “change lab” in themselves, with
the “change domain” being “large systems change and futures work”? This connects
back to the earlier MIT meeting, which concluded that a critical need is to build
capacity for large systems change.
Other Issues
Oxford participants raised important other issues, including:
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The Financing: Enel Foundation, associated with one of Europe’s largest energy
companies, is providing 200,000 euros for an “energy lab”, still to be defined.
This however, is really seed and planning money, considering the scale of the
work. Both GOLDEN and the ESLs are still in formation as a platform of leading
academic institutions, and leading action researchers, change experts and
practitioners. They could have significant ability to attract major funding for a
large system change platform focused on accelerating the transformation to
sustainable enterprise through political-social-economic systems change. The
vision is to leverage university personnel, and attract corporate, foundation, high
net worth individuals and government financial support. NOTE: All these are
envisioned as potential stakeholders participating in the ESLs, as well.
Participants’ Financial Relationship: People who have met with the ESLs have
a wide variety of ways earning income, and these will result in a variety of
financial relationships. The general vision is to identify, fund and staff specific
activities.
Governance: “Who” is GOLDEN and the ESLs, and how do they interact? The
current structure is a core work team of three, guided by three founding
institutes at three university investors2; the vision is to evolve into a multistakeholder governance structure. Currently the ESLs is lead by core work team
member Steve Waddell on a part-time basis, with the intention that the EcoLab
participants will develop its own structure. ESLs’ lead participants must be
diverse, crossing many divides, but the unifying element is a focus on realizing
large system change and aspirational futures. The relationship between ESLs
and GOLDEN as a whole is envisioned as a mutually accountable network.
However, at this time the governance is purposefully loosely defined in order to
develop it drawing from practice of working together effectively on specific
initiatives.
Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Vienna University of Economics and Business.
Center for Research on Organization and Management at Bocconi University, NorthStar Initiative for
Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Minnesota
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The Principles: What will be the guiding principles of the ESLs’ design and
operations? A draft set of design principles was part of the Concept Note (and in
an Appendix here), but further discussion is required, such as including healthas-resilience, growth-as-efficiency, and a commitment to change that reflects
systemic impacts.
The Theoretical Perspective: Effective action is usually guided by either
explicit or implicit action. The theoretical perspective of GOLDEN as a whole,
and the organizational level in particular, has been the focus of GOLDEN to date.
Further work is needed on the ESLs to support the development of theory,
reflection and generalization; its development should be a key part of the ESLs’
work.
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Appendix A: GOLDEN Design principles
GOLDEN’s activities are based in a deep analysis of the change challenges and opportunities
associated with sustainability and a particular approach to change that emphasizes the need to work
at the individual, organizational and ecosystems level concurrently. Its activities are designed around
essential principles. GOLDEN’s analysis suggests that all these principles are necessary, and therefore
they go far beyond traditional strategies and methodologies to accelerate transformation to
sustainable enterprise.
These draft principles and GOLDEN’s design have arisen out of two years of discussion amongst
leading scholars in innovations and change, sustainability, organization development and strategy.
They have developed the principles in discussion with corporations and other stakeholders. They
believe that all of these principles must be part of a successful response to the challenge of
developing sustainable strategies.
1.
Complexity: The term “complex” has a very specific meaning, and contrasts with “simple”
challenges that can be addressed through a hierarchy, and “complicated” challenges that require
multi-party networks. With those types of challenges knowledge is already defined and complete
– although complicated situations require putting it together in new ways. In complex situations,
however, knowledge is incomplete (indeed, there is the problem of not knowing what we don’t
know), the variables are always changing, and there are multiple potential pathways. This type of
situation requires basic research with action.
2.
Multi-level: “Level” refers in this case to individual, organizational and industry/ecosystem
levels. The sustainability challenge requires change at all these levels. For individuals it
involves change in the behavior and way individuals look at information and make sense of the
world; for organizations the challenge involves changing their definition of purpose and how to
realize it; and change in industry ecosystems includes changes in how stakeholders interact.
This proposal focuses on the last of these three levels.
3.
Global: Although a company may do business in a restricted geographic location, markets and
production systems today are tied into global relationships. This requires a global reach to tackle
questions related to sustainability-driven change.
4.
Cross-functional: The whole firm is being affected by changes in resource availability and
stakeholder expectations, and therefore all the key functional lines connected to sustainabilitydriven initiatives must be engaged.
5.
Coherence: GOLDEN is a platform that supplies an inexorable focus on developing strategic
sustainability change action and gives coherence to participants’ work. It provides opportunities
to connect and build synergies to ensure consistent change and improvement in the direction of
sustainable enterprise.
6.
Engaged scholarship: GOLDEN’s strategy is based on the innovative principles of engaged
scholarship, aiming to develop rigorous and disciplined collaborative activities with corporations
and stakeholders to experiment with possible futures. Therefore, it describes its activities as
Labs, occurring at each of the three levels.
7.
Collaboration with existing initiatives: GOLDEN is far from being the first initiative to take up
the economic and business system sustainability challenge. But to be successful, GOLDEN must
work with, and support efforts of, other initiatives to create efficiency and effectiveness in the
change initiatives at the corporate and ecosystem levels.
These principles also reflect a core value of systems-aware action. By developing a global platform to
share data about the responses to the sustainability imperative, GOLDEN will improve and speed up
change through sharing and integrating lessons in innovative ways. Moreover, GOLDEN will reduce
the costs of developing the necessary knowledge and change capacity, since it will reduce the “reinventing the wheel” problem connected to repeated mistakes by multiple, unconnected, actors.
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