Course Details
Course Fee
$4100
Program Structure
The program starts September 9 - November 25, 2024.
Of this time requirement, 25 hours will involve asynchronous learning (scheduled at your own convenience) while 43 hours will require synchronous learning (live group work, faculty discussion and skill building with advanced scheduling).
During this time, participants are required to keep up with weekly requirements so they can integrate their learnings and practice into their respective professional contexts as the program progresses. There are three rest weeks included in the program designed to enable time for catching up if needed.
We have provided the schedule below so that you can lock all required synchronous learning dates and times, along with rest weeks, into your schedule.
Our program participants are selected from all over the world. Doing synchronous learning together across vastly different time-zones requires a combination of considerate design and forward planning by attendees. To this end, participants will work in timezone compatible working groups of 25 - 35 participants. Once you have completed the registration process you will receive your Working Group Session time allocation, and you will have 48 hrs within which to let us know if you have significant scheduling conflicts and need to be reassigned to another group with a different time allocation.
Through this program, leaders learn powerful new strategies for enacting high-impact sustainability leadership that positions sustainability as a driver of organizational engagement, authenticity, agility, innovation, and change-capability.
Our focus is on organizational design to optimize and accelerate impact for sustainability and innovation.
What is sustainability?
We define sustainability as the triple bottom line enterprise of achieving economic and social wellbeing derived from a mutually regenerative relationship with our planetary life support systems. We also define sustainability as the ideal adaptive challenge for building your organization’s fitness for the 21st century.
The single most unique leadership demand of sustainability is the sheer pace, volume, and depth of change it requires. To rise to this challenge there is a profound and immediate need to provide senior leaders across all sectors with sustainability-centric executive education that empowers high-impact sustainability leadership.
To date, the most prevalent senior leadership response to sustainability has been the adoption of goals and metrics associated with environmental impact reductions that amount to simply ”doing less bad.” There is an urgent need to go beyond this incremental “command control” approach. It is failing to produce the pace, volume, and depth of change needed because it is failing to produce the engagement, innovation, agility, and change-capability needed.
We are looking for senior leaders and sustainability professionals ready for a new kind of high-impact sustainability leadership dedicated to driving sustainability into the core of their mission and business by unleashing new levels of organizational effectiveness. This will place new leadership demands on senior leaders and sustainability professionals, as well as on the very structure and design of their organizations.
We welcome leaders who are new to sustainability, and those who are already fluent in it. We are seeking leaders with an appetite for mastering a new kind of high impact sustainability leadership that will transform their organizations into agile, innovative, and profoundly change-capable enterprises. The crucial mindset we seek is that of wanting to go beyond positioning sustainability as “doing less bad” and moving towards the triple bottom line of economic and social wellbeing based upon a mutually regenerative relationship with our planetary life support systems.
To this end, the critical leadership conversations encountered in this program will include:
- Unleashing human potential across your enterprise through purpose-driven engagement
- Creating clear pathways for good ideas to come from anywhere and to take root
- Leveraging positive social dynamics and social learning to increase engagement, idea flow, and organizational learning
- Revolving loan funds and other mechanisms to ensure finance and accounting processes enable innovation and engagement
- Engaging millennials
- Working with the strengths and weaknesses of your command control operating system to advance change-capability
- Decision-making agility to allow for good ideas to be scaled up quickly
- Change management as a practice of reducing risk and instability
By preparing leaders to generate the right organizational fitness for the sustainability triathlon (social, economic, and environmental), many other complex 21st century problems will also become easier to address. From this viewpoint—and with the right leadership application—sustainability can be the “problem that solves your organization.” The value proposition of this new kind of sustainability leadership is enormous.
The program is offered once a year, typically in a 5-day residential format, but this year in a longer term virtual format, with the intent of having participants experience the content and apply the tools first hand, develop strong networks within their cohort, and interact directly with the faculty to optimize their learning experience and their effectiveness as a sustainability leader “on Monday.”
Attendees gain mastery in a powerful new framework and lexicon designed to increase rates of engagement, change and innovation across their organization through purpose-driven organizational design and idea flow. The program delivers a strong balance of guiding principles, case stories from the field, and activities & direct application grounded in the core framework of adaptive organizational design. Dynamic networking across sectors and the sharing of best practices are key elements of the program design. Our selective admissions process ensures that you will be as stimulated and inspired to action by members of your cohort as you are by the course material and program faculty.
This program is connected to a growing global network of collaborators and trainings, all sharing and co-evolving the open-sourced content, tools and case stories.
Our program will enable participants to:
- Evaluate what has and has not been working with efforts to take sustainability from the margins into the core of your organization
- Learn a powerful new framework for increasing your sustainability leadership impact
- Position sustainability as a driver for innovation, agility and effectiveness
- Unleash human potential through purpose-driven engagement
- Design pathways for good ideas to come from anywhere and to take root
- Advance your ability to make the sustainability business case
- Align finance and accounting structures to drive innovation, engagement, and change-capability
- Leverage positive social dynamics and social learning to drive idea flow and organizational learning
- Increase decision-making agility to allow good ideas to be scaled up quickly
- Engage millennials by leveraging your sustainability enterprise
- Reduce risk and instability by mastering sustainability change management
- Deepen the engagement of other senior leaders and the entire leadership system within your organization
- Embed an adaptive capacity for stable change across your organization
- Engage in meaningful thought partnership on shared problems and opportunities regarding this critical leadership challenge with senior leaders from diverse sectors