I’ve been thinking about the work of leadership and its role in shaping a sustainable future. Clearly a big question, with few straightforward answers.

While there’s a vast amount of information on the systemic issues impacting natural and human made systems, the way leaders think about these challenges and how this influences their response is less clear.  There have been many valuable contributions in this space, but it is still a nascent area of inquiry.

It’s easy to forget that leadership development is a relatively new concept in humanity’s evolution.  While there’s evidence that early societies organised themselves, the industrial revolution brought with it the need to structure and manage people and organisations in an efficient and productive way.  As we know, this significant transition catalysed profound change shepherding in a period of growth, development and consumption that continues today.

Increasing awareness of the real and unsustainable impact of the industrial era is seeing a shift towards sustainable production and consumption practices.  This is exciting.  Potentially we find ourselves on the brink of a profound transformation in the way we think about, consume and reuse resources and business has a pivotal role to play in driving this.

Which brings me back to the work of leadership.  Embracing sustainable production and consumption offers the potential of large-scale systems change and fundamental reform in production methods, consumer behaviour, business models and global supply chains.  However, realising the promise of great change requires leaders who can see and liberate the potential of complex systems.

Our collective challenge, is that research by David Rooke and William R. Torbert highlights only around 5% of the leadership population have this capacity.  To compound the issue, many of these leaders don’t appreciate the potency of the way they think, make sense of the world and lead.  The result is that these role models are hard to find and learn from.  I think of these high-impact leaders as the new kids on the leadership block as they interrupt established norms, inspire creativity, distributed leadership and collaboration and work towards a vision of a better world.

The good news is that this is not the domain of a few.  Insights into adult development highlight that it can be cultivated much more widely than the 5%.  My research at Cambridge University centres on identifying how to accelerate this developmental process to grow the ranks of high-impact leaders with the skill and confidence to tackle the big issues and nudge us towards a sustainable future. I’ll keep you up to date on my progress.  Exciting times indeed!!