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Mandate Capital—Blend It Before You Spend It!

Leith Sharp, Director of our Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership program, contributed as a guest blogger for the Walk of Life Careers website. 

It’s helpful to think of mandate as a kind of capital. We use it in our organizations to get things done. Mandate uses the power of directives to push down the chain of command to execute out on what needs to be done. The official story goes something like – if you can get the mandate – you can get it done. The actual story however is much more nuanced.

Our work has unearthed a powerful relationship between the use of mandate capital and the impact on the social health of our organizations, which we will call our social capital. We think of social capital as the health of the relationships between people, the levels of engagement, psychological safety, trust and shared purpose.

Read the full post online

Date:
September 12, 2017

Credit: 
Walk of Life Careers

Author:
Leith Sharp

Photo by Pixabay | geralt | Public Domain

Put simply, we are in the wrong organizational vehicle for the 21st century

By Leith Sharp, Director of Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership, Center for Health and the Global Environment

 I’ve been asking senior leaders this question: “Is there a clear path for a good idea to come from anywhere in your organization?” The general consensus is no, there is no clear path for a good idea to find its way forward from anywhere, not for universities, corporations, airports, government agencies, nor non-profits alike. There are some specific exceptions, but they are specific and they are exceptions. Instead the general agreement seems to be that the success of a good idea depends mostly on the sheer tenacity of its champion.

I’ve also been asking senior leaders, “Do you think management-driven hierarchy, or the command control operating system that predominates almost all sectors, is adequate for tackling a complex adaptive challenge like sustainability? Or is it adequate for tackling our other complex 21st century challenges?” No one is saying yes. Add to this anecdotal avalanche the empirical nugget that 70% of the US workforce is disengaged at work (Gallup  State of the American Workplace Report 2013), and there you have it. 

Nobody actually seems to think that our predominant mode of organizing is going to get us through this century effectively.  Put simply, we are in the wrong organizational vehicle for the 21st century. 

This is big news. It begs the question for the sustainability-minded, why are we all still running around the deck of this sinking ship, tossing out water and trying to change direction, when the ship itself might be our most immediate problem? One of the biggest reasons, of course, is that if we are going to talk about the deep work of organizational transformation, then we must have the involvement of enough senior leaders. Otherwise, it’s great dinner conversation, but there is no sleeve rolling come Monday. Senior leadership engagement around sustainability has been hard to stir up in any consistent way and the bandwidth senior leaders have dedicated to it has often been consumed by low impact leadership.

Senior Leadership Bandwidth Must Be Directed Towards High Impact Sustainability Leadership

To use Ron Heifetz’s highly effective dance floor and balcony metaphor for adaptive leadership, it seems that sustainability has been so new that we’ve collectively stayed on the dance floor, in the midst of the action. We haven’t found the sustainability balcony to perceive the bigger picture and the patterns. One result of this is that senior leaders have been peppered with individual sustainability battles, little victories and incremental goals towards doing less bad. As a result, many leaders have sensed in sustainability a bottomless pit of need that fills them with dread.

But that dread goes away as senior leaders find their way up onto the balcony to check out the dance floor action from above. From here they can see a way to lead within the constraints of their own bandwidth that will have lasting and expansive impact. There is a sense of liberation and possibility.

From this higher-level vantage point, it becomes possible to see how the right kind of sustainability leadership can transform an organization into an agile, innovative, and profoundly change-capable enterprise with the fitness to go beyond simply doing less bad towards a mutually regenerative relationship with our planetary life support systems.

Along with this new fitness comes the enormous value proposition of making other complex adaptive problems easier to solve as well. After all, sustainability is the ultimate complex adaptive problem, so developing the right organizational fitness to truly take on the sustainability triathlon (social, economic and environmental) pretty much guarantees relevant fitness for all of our other adaptive problems.  Viewed and lead from the right elevation, sustainability is the problem that can solve your organization.

It’s Not About Throwing Out Command Control, It’s About Complementing It

To be clear, the sustainability balcony does not confer a spontaneous altered state of consciousness upon those that stand on it. Senior leaders remain understandably hesitant to explore uprooting the command control systems and structures on which their organization relies. But a significant number of leaders will entertain the idea of creating a second complementary operating system, an adaptive operating system, that can be harmonized with command control to bring about a new era of organizational engagement, agility and change-capability so that large numbers of good ideas can come from anywhere and take root, continuously and stably.

Defining Core Business Innovation for Sustainability (CBI-S) 

The commitment to go beyond treating sustainability as an add-on and settling for doing less bad. It’s about taking up the qualitatively different leadership challenge of driving sustainability into the core mission and business of the organization by unleashing the profound motivational force that is sustainability and ensuring there are productive ongoing pathways for its full ongoing expression. A high-impact sustinability leader positions sustainability as a driver of organizational transformation to advance engagement, agility, systems-thinking, change-capability and innovation. The organization integrates and harmonizes adaptive cycles of engagement, collaboration and applied learning with command and control routines of scaling, execution and accountability. In summary, these frameworks transform or re-invent organizations to unleash the full potential of people to address complex adaptive problems.

Six Common Reactions to these Big Ideas 

In the last 9 months we’ve shared these big ideas with over 500 senior leaders and sustainability professionals from different sectors at a variety of different conferences and workshops. Here is a short list of commonly observed reactions:

• Most leaders are relieved that instead of proposing the end of command control we are proposing the integration of the two operating systems.
• There is a widely shared intuitive understanding of the adaptive  operating system (left in diagram), its potential & importance.
• Leaders who have been leading in this direction have been going it alone, intuitively & without a shared language or shared understanding.
• There is enthusiasm for using the language, graphics & framework to help make organizational transformation more of a team sport.
• Leaders are quick to identify the larger value proposition as being agnostic and applicable to other complex adaptive problems.
• Leaders affirm this framework will be best learned through applied exploration, ideally in the company of other senior leaders on the same path. To this end, there is agreement that sustainability is a very fertile laboratory for this applied organizational transformation process.

Aspects of This Are Not New in the Sustainability Space

Sustainability professionals exposed to this conversation are noting that the most successful sustainability efforts within large organizations have exhibited a recurring theme of the emergence of the adaptive operating system along with a Shakespearean-like struggle to integrate it with the existing command control operating system. The Shakespearean dimensions are generally shared over about the third drink as such riveting tales of heroism, tragedy and farce that one wonders why a sitcom hasn’t come out of it yet.

Sustainability professionals have also noted that their struggles have been greatly compounded by being without a shared language or shared understanding around the work of transforming organizational systems, processes and structures. They also agree that having this will be a game changer, effectively enabling change leadership for sustainability to advance from amateur sport to professional sport.

We Need An Army of High Impact Sustainability Leaders

We need large numbers of senior leaders and sustainability professionals from all sectors to become high impact sustainability leaders engaged in applied CBI-S experimentation and shared learning.

One powerful on ramp for anyone ready to engage in this critical leadership work can be found in the form of Harvard’s selective 4-day Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership programs. This program is designed for senior leaders and sustainability professionals from all sectors and is delivered by Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

We hope you can make it to Harvard but if not, stay tuned as the network of leaders, conveners and offerings grows.  Stay connected by signing up for our mailing list.

Leith Sharp is the lead faculty and program director of Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership at The Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Date Created:
April 2, 2015

High-impact Sustainability Leadership

Our course shared the knowledge and tools sustainability leaders need to drive down negative environmental and human health impacts across all sectors.

In our rapidly changing world, ensuring that our planet will continue to sustain our children and future generations is an all-hands-on-deck endeavor. The impacts of climate change are already upon us, and the gap between rich and poor is such that the richest eight people in the world now own the same wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion, according to a recent report from Oxfam. 

With these two dimensions in mind, Leith Sharp, Director of the Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership (EESL) program at the Center for Health and the Global Environment, convened her fifth intensive EESL course in mid-November. Over 70 sustainability leaders from the business, education, non-profit, and public sectors arrived on Harvard’s campus to confront the challenge of making their organizations and communities sustainable for the long term. They left with tools that foster the rapid innovation essential to implementing change at the pace, scale, and depth needed to make a difference for current and future generations.

“This is our evolutionary test; we literally stand at a fork in the road,” Sharp said during her opening remarks. “We were born into the century where humans will either evolve back into alignment with nature, or our planetary life support systems will evolve in response to our impacts, and then we’ll be playing a very dangerous game of catch up.”

Organizational Design as a Human Health Intervention

Sharp maintains that this crossroads requires us to forge a different kind of relationship with our planet, and to do it in a way that is equitable. If this sounds like a heavy lift, Sharp believes it is far from insurmountable. She holds faith that we can do it by streamlining how organizations foster innovative sustainability ideas from inception to implementation.

“Humankind is absurdly creative,” Sharp said. “Think of the ways in which we can move information and energy through social agreements, and how we can work on ideas that span over centuries and continents, at every scale from the subatomic to the cosmic. How we set up our organizations greatly impacts how we tap our vast powers of human creativity.”

That is why Sharp designed the EESL program as a 5-day intensive course that examines how we can transform organizational structures to address our most threatening environmental and global health challenges.

Sustainability as the Driver of Worker Engagement

Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workplace poll revealed that 67% of American workers are either not engaged at work, or are fully disengaged.

The EESL program teaches leaders to position sustainability as the driver of organizational engagement, innovation, and change. By creating effective processes for all employees to join in the protection of human and environmental health, leaders can rally workers from every corner to generate new ideas that can create significant positive impact.

To do this, we must radically increase the volume of innovative ideas conducive to improving life on our planet.

How much faster do we need to increase the pace? Sharp took a real-time poll of EESL’s 2017 cohort. Seventy-five percent said we need to at least quadruple our rate of innovation and implementation. 

But how do we do it?  To EESL attendees, this is where the magic begins.

Transforming Organizations by Charting ‘Idea Flow’

Sharp helps senior leaders achieve a radical increase in purpose-driven ideas by paying attention to the way ideas wend their way through an organization or community.

She has mapped the journey of over 1000 ideas by asking people to visually chart every move they made to take that idea from inception toward implementation. Sharp has unearthed patterns in journeys that experienced friction—when several attempts resulted in wasted time and effort—versus life cycles that experienced idea flow—when every move elevated the idea toward full implementation.

Sharp uses the idea-flow mapping process to determine which moves were dependent upon the more traditional and hierarchical command–control operating system (CCOS) of the organization, and which moves were dependent upon what she calls an adaptive operating system (AOS),an agile network-based system that stimulates shared purpose and non-hierarchical relationships.

Sharp trains leaders how to implement idea flow within their organizations and communities by tapping into the synergy between both operating systems.

From Theory to Practice

At the heart of Sharp’s EESL program is a commitment to activating high-impact, applied leadership that improves human health and the global environment.

Zeyneb Magavi, a leader at Mothers Out Front—a grassroots organization working to ensure a liveable climate—attended one of Sharp’s sustainability leadership courses in 2016 and returned this year to share her success story.

Prior to the course, Mothers Out Front had tried for years to sound the alarm about roughly 16,000 natural gas leaks across Massachusetts. While these leaks don’t pose a safety risk, they do emit methane, which is a more potent heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide. Magavi credits the class for preparing her to navigate a complex collaboration between Mothers Out Front, regulatory agencies, and utility companies to measure, rank, and repair methane gas leaks throughout the state.

“Working with Leith and engaging in the EESL curriculum gave my collaborators and I the tactics, framework, and confidence to engage enormously diverse individuals and organizations in solving a complex shared problem,” said Magavi. “For decades we’ve had this problem in our midst. Why did we succeed now? Because we had the right people, tools, and the right leadership approach. This enabled us to engage the entire stakeholder ecosystem in getting to work. This is powerful, it is replicable, and we are going to use it again and again to take on these large-scale, complex human health and climate challenges.”

The impact of this work has set the stage for a reduction of 5% of greenhouse gas emissions in Massachusetts within two years.

Next year’s EESL offering will take place on Harvard’s campus November 5-9, 2018.  Learn more here.

—By Marcy Franck, Communications Director, November 30, 2017

Photos by Skye Flanigan and Nicole Bellisle

Idea Flow Mapping

We teach Idea Flow Mapping to map the journey of a new idea, from inception to implementation, including how it was impacted by its organizational and social context. The process enables leaders to better diagnose and reduce friction and optimize the healthy flow of new ideas from anywhere in the organization. Idea Flow Mapping helps with designing pathways for new ideas to go through healthy processes of de-risking, socializing, and scaling. This can lead to profound improvements in organizational design.

The essential demand placed upon humankind by myriad global environmental, social and economic imperatives is the demand to change almost everything we do, quickly, stably and constantly. This epic amount of stable change can only be achieved by the ongoing application, scaling and adaptation of enormous numbers of new ideas. Ideas of all scales, ideas that involve all disciplines, ideas that emerge within and across all types of organizations.

Ideas in themselves are mere vapours of possibility. Like seeds thrown to the wind, ideas follow the contours of a destiny shaped by a complex mix of conditions and forces. It is through the application, scaling and adaptation of ideas (or new knowledge) that real value and impact is generated. To this end, it is helpful to talk about Idea Flow.

Idea Flow considers the full life cycle of an idea from its inception to its robust implementation and continuous adaptation. Idea Flow concerns both the nature and quality of the path or process experienced by a new idea going through its full life cycle within its organizational/social context.

The Secret Life of Ideas

Every new idea, project or enterprise has a life cycle from inception to completion that is as unique as a fingerprint. This is because every idea exists within a unique context, faces a unique constellation of risks and opportunities and requires the engagement of a unique constellation of stakeholders to engage. As the idea progresses through its life cycle it passes through different stages. Each stage results in either the end of the idea life cycle or its progression onto the next stage. Early idea life cycle stages include things like sensing emerging need/possibility, idea inception, activation of champions or early adopters, etc. Middle stages of an idea life cycle often involve deeper learning efforts, piloting, iterating, de-risking and clarifying implementation requirements. Later idea life cycle stages include things like official approvals, funding allocations and scaling. By becoming explicitly and consciously engaged in understanding and designing the life cycle of an idea, friction can be reduced and Idea Flow increased. This allows people to bring more purpose-drive ideas to life with reduced levels of effort and social friction and increased levels of engagement and empowerment.

Idea Flow as a Human Health Intervention

The 21st Century has revealed a catastrophic gap in our societal capacity for addressing the later stages of Idea Flow, the stages of application, scaling and ongoing adaptation. One cataclysmic exemplar of this societal imbalance between knowledge creation and knowledge application – we know a lot about the sustainability imperative, its human health impacts and what we must do to secure the health and wellbeing of current and future generations, but we have applied, scaled and adapted very little of what we know.

What our Sustainability Leadership Program has been teaching us about Idea Flow

The problem we face right now is that our organizations are not designed to handle the emergence of large numbers of new ideas. They are not able to create Idea Flow. To understand more about this, we’ve been asking senior leaders this question: “Is there a clear path for a good idea to come from anywhere in your organization?” The general consensus is no, there is no clear path for a good idea to find its way forward from anywhere, not for universities, corporations, airports, government agencies, nor non-profits alike. There are some specific exceptions, but they are specific and they are exceptions. Instead, the general agreement seems to be that the success of a new idea depends mostly on the sheer tenacity of its champion. What’s more, leaders tend to concur that this level of dependence on tenacious champions is far from ideal.

If you’ve ever been one of those tenacious champions of a new idea – you know first hand, the exhaustion that results from navigating an organizational context that seems, at times, to go out of its way to inhibit anything new. Whether you are leading from the top, middle or grass roots – the work of championing a new idea through your organization is typically exhausting and fraught with discouragement.

Currently, most of our organizations, across all sectors, are designed primarily to ensure the efficiency and accountability over existing operations. They do not provide conditions for high volumes of Idea Flow. In essence, our dominant organizational model lacks a kind of fertility that is proving to be central to our future survival.

Idea Flow is something that can be learned, led and hardwired into our organizational DNA. The process begins with gaining an understanding the current state of Idea Flow within your organization. For this purpose, we have created an open source process we call Idea Flow Mapping.

The Official Story and the Real Story

See if this trend sounds familiar: Often in retrospect, when we try to explain how an idea came to fruition in an organizational context, we tell the story as a simple linear narrative, glazing over the complexities and the arduous dips and curves, the 3 steps back to our 2 steps forward, that were endured as we or others pushed for the idea’s implementation.  We may not even be conscious about our tendency to literally iron out all of these zig-zags and curly-cues when we think back on the idea’s path on the individual level, perhaps because it was so exhausting to endure the first time we are not so ready to commit those parts of the tale to memory. The devil is in the details, as they say, and why would we want to relive the seeming tedium of this effort!  Or maybe it is because the operating systems within which we conduct our business demand of us a linear, rational-seeming narrative. But, if we can make it a conscious practice to recall and document the REAL STORY rather than the OFFICIAL STORY, mapping the true complexity, we find that there is real value in seeing the path for what it truly was.  By mapping the real story of what contributed to an idea’s successful implementation, patterns come into view that can become invaluable roadmaps for improving future Idea Flow.

We ask leaders and champions for important new ideas and innovations to step back, see the bigger picture, and unravel the workings and pathways within your organization, to better understand how decisions actually get made (rather than how we are told or assume they get made) and use this new understanding to bolster the efforts of those trying to push ideas of sustainability and innovation in our workplace.  If we can see more clearly the rationale of decision-making and Idea Flow logic within our organizations, we can use this to foster the conditions for important ideas to successfully take root and blossom.  This is key to the success of sustainability initiatives in particular, which may come up against old (outdated) organizational (ir)rationalities which believe sustainable practices to be antithetical to or outside the realm of the mission and vision of the organization.

How Do We Teach Idea Flow Mapping?
 

During our executive education sessions, we don’t just prescribe a remedy for your organizational woes that may or may not work when you get back to the office on Monday, where you may find it has no actual meaning or relevance for you in your work setting.  We want you to use these 4 days to help co-create and (re)discover what we have already found to be an effective game changer for sustainability leadership, this concept of Idea Flow Mapping.  We offer our cohorts the opportunity to run a diagnostic on their own past examples of an idea’s passage through an organization using our mapping template – to better understand how ideas have come to fruition in their respective sectors and organizations – and as a group attempt to tease out the trends and find the commonalities on how a good idea takes hold.  And by conducting “forensics” on past successful idea flows, we are better equipped to understand and support the process of idea flow for future ideas, and to create the structures and conditions for the idea to come out on top and be enacted. In doing so, we are minimizing the “friction”, and enhancing the possibility of “flow”.

It is our hope that by cultivating these skills during our 4-day Exec Ed course, working with your peers from across a variety of sectors, you will walk away with a new understanding for how to effectively promote Idea Flow within your organization or network and be an effective sustainability leader adept at orchestrating and cultivating the conditions for meaningful shifts to occur. 

Impact

Over the years, we’ve had the privilege of seeing our Fellows grow from junior scholars to leaders in their schools, agencies, and communities. Looking ahead, we’re confident our Fellows will continue advancing fairness, equity, and justice—strengthening the program’s legacy with innovative solutions for health equity and environmental justice. Thank you to all our supporters, partners, and community members for your commitment. Together, we’ve helped shape a new generation of environmental health scholars.

Contact Us

The Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership course is a program at the Exposure, Epidemiology and Risk, Department of Environmental Health at Havard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 

For questions, please contact:

Email: SustainabilityLeadership@hsph.harvard.edu
Phone: 617-384-7276

Leith Sharp, M.Ed. Director, Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership

A dynamic change leader with 25 years of practice, research and teaching, Leith has taught leadership for sustainability at Harvard University for 18 years, earning numerous commendations for distinguished teaching performance.

Leith founded the Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership program at Harvard in 2014. This cross-sectoral, residential leadership program brings sustainability leadership, human well-being, purpose, biomimicry, agility, integrated business models and organizational design together.

In 2017, Leith co-founded Leaders on Purpose to engage global CEOs in defining and scaling a new leadership paradigm and business logic with the fitness to deliver on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Global CEOs from Paypal, Siemens, Mastercard, Ikea, P&G, Sodexo, Danone, Mars, Best Buy, Phillips, SAP, BMW, L’Oreal and many more have contributed.

Leith is well known for founding Harvard’s Office for Sustainability, where over a period of 9 years she led Harvard to become a global leader in campus sustainability. In 2010, Leith became the founding executive director for the Illinois Green Economy Network, working with the state’s 40 college presidents to raise $24 million for green workforce development.

Leith has consulted with over 200 organizations and has received numerous awards internationally, including Young Australian of the Year, NSW Environment Category and a Churchill Fellowship. Leith has an environmental engineering degree (UNSW), a master of education (Harvard) and is currently completing a Master of Science in Biomimicry (ASU).

Alumni Perspectives

Participants often walk away from this program talking about the unique and transformative experience they have had during the offering. But don’t take our word for it: Watch, hear, and read for yourself what your peers are saying.

Written Testimonials

Read what past participants have said about their expereince with us. We’ve organized their powerful words by sector:

Virtual Info Session

Upcoming EESL2025 Info Sessions

• Monday, July 14. 4:30pm ET, Register via Zoom
• Tuesday, August 5, 4:30pm ET, Register via Zoom
• Wednesday, August 6, 8pm ET, Register via Zoom

Can’t attend a live session?  You can still register to watch on-demand.

Past EESL2025 Info Sessions

• Tuesday, May 27, 8:00am ET, Watch on demand
• Thursday, June 5, 4:30pm ET, Watch on demand
• Monday, March 24, 4:00pm ET, Watch on demand
• Tuesday, February 4, 4:00pm ET, Watch on demand

Info sessions are intended for prospective attendees of the program or others wishing to promote attendance to senior leader in their organization or network, or for those just wanting to learn a bit more about what we do.

The organizing team will provide an overview of the course frameworks which center around organizational design and Idea Flow concepts to optimize and accelerate impact for sustainability and innovation. We will then have the opportunity to hear from several program alumni who will describe their experience and the lasting impact of the program on their approach to sustainabilty work. We will round out the session by sharing the nuts and bolts of the next course offering which runs virtually September 8 – November 24, 2025.

To learn more, contact us at SustainabilityLeadership@hsph.harvard.edu or call (617) 384-7276.

Previous webinars: for EESL2024

• Tuesday, April 2, 4:00pm ET – Watch on demand
• Monday, August 5, 4:30pm ET, Watch on demand
• Monday, July 15, 4:30pm ET – Watch on demand
• Monday, June 3, 4:30pm ET – Watch on demand
• Tuesday, May 7, 4:00pm ET – Watch on demand