 for these wicked problems that we face, the tools need to help connect and influence people who aren't in the same organizations because no one has power or authority over everybody. So how do you connect those different actors? How do you influence them? Many of them don't even know they're connected in the case of the rainforest issue. You know, they don't know they're connected to deforestation when they're eating a hamburger or something. And so you need to connect all those actors somehow. So we've got a bunch of tools that help that. Another is to work against the divide, right? There's so much polarization. It makes collaboration really difficult. There's identity protective reasoning and, you know, echo chambers and network propaganda and fake news and all this other stuff. So you need tools that work against help collaborate across these differences. And then lastly, with your expertise and chaos and systems change, you know, we need to work in a very fast changing environment. So we need to adapt. We need to constantly figure out how to learn by doing fail forward, make sense of things that don't have clear causation. And so you need a bunch of tools that help adapt. So these three sets of tools, and there are strategies underneath each of them, connect, collaborate, and adapt that we illustrate and find lots of examples of around the world. Dr. R. Bruce Hull is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Bruce writes and speaks about organizations, communities, and leaders constructing sustainable development in the face of converging demographic, environmental, governance, and market transformation. He is the most excited when learning and sharing lessons about innovative leaders who are forging collaborations among governments, business, and civil society. He is a senior fellow in the Center for Leadership and Global Sustainability. Obviously, Professor, Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, President of the Board of Directors of Climate Solutions University, Advisory Committee for the Center for Communicating Science, Curriculum Committee Chair Interfaces for Global Change Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Programs. And his book that we're going to be spending most of the podcast discussing today is Leadership for Sustainability came out in November 2020, Strategies for Tackling Wicked Problems by Island Press. And I definitely need to thank Island Press for all the wonderful authors that they always send my way. This book, Leadership for Sustainability was also co-written or penned by David P. Robertson and Michael Mortimer. Just a little touch on the book, Leadership for Sustainability gives readers perspective and skills for promoting creative and collaborative solutions, lending systems thinking approaches with leadership techniques. It offers dozens of strategic and specific practices that build on the foundation of three main skills, connecting, collaborating, and adapting. Inspiring case studies show how the book's strategies and principles can be applied in diverse situations. And I guarantee you, just like I did, you will come away when you read this book with a holistic understanding of how to understand and lead from a much different way by applying leadership principles and practices to a variety of wicked situations. Thank you so much for being here, Bruce. It's wonderful to have you on the show. Yeah, well, thanks. Appreciate the work that you do to bring voices and share voices with everybody. It's great opportunity. Thank you. You're most welcome. I have two other books. You know, Infinite Nature was published in 2006 by Chicago Press, and then another book from Island Press Restoring Nature in 2000, Ecological Restoration as an Inherently Challenging Endeavor. So you have not only been a professor, academic author, speaker, educator for quite some time topics. I've watched numerous of your video lectures and lessons, and they're so nice. Not only do you have the most wonderful music always in the background, but you used to have the geological timeline behind you and always the drawdown book behind you. So I can definitely tell that you're in the leadership thought of what are the solutions? How can we get good leadership and solutions to fix the wicked problems that we have in this world? And as I read your latest book, I tell you what, it is like you've so eloquently said in the book, it is a rich toolbox for anyone out there to take those tools and apply to leadership and make some things happen. Let's change and fix some of these wicked problems with good leadership principles. Some that have been around for a long, others that are kind of uniquely tailored. So I really love that. Having said all of this with your breadth of knowledge and where you have come from, what you've been doing, how in the hell have you weathered this crazy time? Pandemic, inauguration, Black Lives Matters, on and on, has any of that teaching knowledge given you some resilience to get through these crazy times? No, anything, it's a challenge. Personally though, of the age and class and status that it's actually, the pandemic's been pretty easy. Teach online, still have a paycheck, do what I can to minimize my footprint, feel good about that, but in terms of addressing the challenges we face, the tools of collaboration, of connecting across differences, people in different organizations in different countries, you know, with all the polarization that's going on and a rising concern about inequity, all legitimate concerns, but that's making the task more difficult, right? Poverty's increasing, malnutrition is increasing. So it's the challenges that I'm interested in addressing if anything are more problematic. But, you know, there's hope, right? The Green Deal, infrastructure projects seems like a bit of a, at least talk about transforming capitalism by the CEOs and stuff. There's awareness out there, which is good. And we need that, absolutely. Now, so since you touched upon it, so this awareness for the change in these leadership styles or plans, you talked about the Green New Deal or mentioned it, what in your opinion are the best plans for the future that are currently out there? Is it donut economics, is it planetary boundaries? Is it the New Green Deal or is it the sustainable development goals? What are your thoughts or opinions out of the chute? Well, yeah, we can dig in this. I know from your podcast that you have the SDG badge, you know, and so I've got mine actually delivered by somebody who helped develop the SDGs. So, I mean, I'm a fan of the SDGs and Oxfam's donut is fine. Planetary limits, I think is a little more problematic than we might be able to get into that. But I mean, I think the SDGs are really aspirational. It's nice to have a stick in the ground about where we want to head, but it's really not a plan in terms of how to get there. That change doesn't happen at a global level. And it's, soon I would like to define and talk about the concept of leadership, which is how things get done. And the SDG is really not a plan for getting things done. It's more of helping people see what direction we're going. It's a way to construct the dialogue to get there, which is incredibly important. But when you get down in mechanics of change, of systems change, of working across sectors of multiple organizations to make things happen, that's leadership. The SDGs are informative, but they're not prescriptive. They're not really a plan of how to get there. So I think they're great for planning. For thinking about what we want to do. But ultimately, what we do and how we do, it's got to be co-constructed by the participants. I agree with you and there's, I mean, we also mentioned the new Green Deal, the Green New Deal, however you're wording it, it's also kind of the same thing, very toothless, not a lot of actions, not a lot of roadmap. How does leadership, is there a leadership model out there currently, a plan even on local levels? I like what I see out of the chute from Biden and his Biden-Harris administration. So do you have some things that you're hopeful with or is it, and we're gonna definitely get into the leadership. I'm just wondering, are there some leadership models? You know, I mean, W. Edwards Demings, total quality management, you know, there's some, definitely management leadership principles or philosophies out there, but is there currently some now that we have floating around that you can raise our awareness of, that I say, hey, that's the one? Well, yeah. I mean, that's basically the aha of the book or led to the book, led to the program that we're working on where we work with professionals that are in the sustainability space trying to affect this change. And so the short answer is yes, but to sort of put that in context, let me sort of differentiate between the leadership at the sort of top-down level, the Biden, the new Green Deal and those sorts of things, which is certainly important, but somewhat, let's say polarized and fractured and struggling at this moment and probably inefficient or insufficient to the task at hand. So that, you know, that's the, there's somebody in positional authority, somebody with charisma or money or power, they got the corner office or whatever it is and they change the organization if they're a CEO or they change the nation if they're a president or it's somehow they affect some change and the followers follow. That's a model of leadership. It's sort of the standard one, but it really doesn't address the wicked systems change problems that we need to address. And so there's this top-down model. Let me contrast that with sort of the bottom-up model, which is where we all are inspired to act as individuals to be conscious consumers and green voters. And maybe we protest to go to a climate protest or maybe we live in a tiny house or change our consumption patterns and we cheer Greta and that's important too. But again, that's short-lived. It's not gonna really have the impact. It's not a leadership model either. The leadership model that I'm promoting and that we have just a number of great examples. I mean, really, if you know what you're looking for, you find these examples everywhere. It's sort of from the middle out. It's that systems level change where people are actually working within an organization and looking out and saying, okay, what's outside this organization or across the silo or who are we working with to change maybe the energy system within a city or maybe the farming practices within a region or maybe the eating habits of a restaurant or a supply chain. And so it's that systems level change where people are at the middle and working out. And they're pretty much anytime leadership has occurred. That is when a group of people have gotten together to make a change, whether it's a team that's made a change, whether it's a nation or whether it's an organization, pretty much any scale, any place, anytime, anywhere. If change has occurred, that's leadership by my definition. And three things are present, direction, alignment and commitment. That is the people have decided which direction we wanna go, what goals we wanna achieve. They've aligned their activities to get it done and they've been committed to help one another and make that happen. And that direction, alignment, commitment can be inspired by a great leader up above or maybe it can bubble up from below. But where we focus in this book and where I think the most power isn't where the most changes is in this middle out where people are working to affect change within their system, within their collaborations, stretching out a little bit further to affect energy change, food change, water change, equity change. That's where leadership has to occur. I totally agree with you. So I wanna distinguish a couple of things and also ask you for some more definitions. So in that middle out concept, it could be very similar donut economics. It could be very similar to planetary boundaries because that's also a model where so you've got the planetary boundaries or you got the donut economics but it also starts in the middle and works out from the safe operating space of planetary boundaries and then pushes out and then there's that fine center that really where a lot of action happens. But I don't wanna compare apples to apples orange to oranges. There's definitely a distinguishment. Do you mean something similar to that or is it even much more different than that? No, it's different. And that, I mean, the donut, in some ways it is middle out because it's a donut. So that kind of lends itself to that. But that's not what I'm talking about because change does not occur globally. That is the world is not gonna suddenly live the donut, live like the donut or the SDGs, right? Change occurs within systems or subsystems, within supply chains, within city energy systems, within utility where they get their water or energy or how they deliver it. That's where the change occurs. That's at that middle level. And while Oxfam, the donut, SDGs are useful big picture goals, they really do not have much utility at constructing the leadership and affecting the change at this smaller scale. That's expert to expert, it's community to government. It's somebody in civil society working with a business, procurement person working with a government regulator to tweak the system a little bit to improve things incrementally. That's where the change is occurring. And it's occurring lots of places rapidly. And that gives me hope. And so I definitely do not want to disagree because I know we're aligned on many things, but I want to kind of maybe poke and project. I want to go even deeper. I want to kind of unpack this. So I'm also a big systems thinker, graduate Fritz Hof Capra, the systems view of life, Donnella Meadows, the limits to growth, systems dynamic model on and on, chaos theory, complexity sciences and on. So I believe I know where you're going, but I want to go a little bit deeper because couldn't somebody come back and say, okay, well, yeah, the leadership doesn't occur globally or the plan as the global, the sustainable development goals or donut economics is not a global thing, it occurs locally. What happens if I'll give you a bad system? Old scenario allows the rainforest to burn, but that rainforest burning is affecting us in Germany. It's affecting us all over the world, through those actions of a local leadership, whether it's Univer, Nestle or some big meat conglomerate that's letting the rainforest burn, chopping it down to put up agriculture. And now the ripple effects of that local decision or that local bad leadership, whoever you want to put the blame on is now having a global effect on us for climate change. And so I want you to help us distinguish how that's not global and how we shouldn't have an influence on that local leadership decision. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's a great example because it differentiates between thinking from a systems perspective, sort of as a scientist and understanding how things are interconnected and what the impacts are and how they ripple through and how some of them can be understood and predicted and many can't because of chaos and inability to see causation. But that, again, is different than leadership in terms of when a group gets together to get things done. So how does change occur? How do people co-construct directional alignment commitment to make things happen? And it's not gonna happen from outside people saying, hey, the rainforest is burning or it's being cut down and replaced with soybeans or whatever it is. And I'm concerned about that because it has impact on me because I'm affected by climate change. That's awareness, but that's not leadership. So then we have to get down, okay, well, actually how is the rainforest being burned or cut down? Okay, so people are growing soybeans or grazing cattle and that stuff is being bought by a conglomerate, perhaps Cargill or some other big bungee, some other big commodity buyer and that's rippling through a supply chain to big buyers like McDonald's. And so how do you tweak that system? So how do you get maybe an NGO like the Nature Conservancy to come in and help help farmers in Cargill and McDonald's all coordinate so that they can actually change. They can have, you know, rainforest friendly beef or soybeans. That's changing the system. How do you get those people to get directional on the commitment to change how actions are actually happening on the land so the rainforest is not cut down and instead farmers are rewarded. They actually get more revenue for not cutting it down for rather producing soybeans or beef or whatever it is that Cargill will promise to buy that McDonald's will promise to buy for Cargill. How do you change that system? That's where change occurs. That's where we need to focus. And I'm totally in alignment with you and I'm glad that you clarified that because a lot of people would think, you know, that activism or the loud voices globally saying, you know, we're against this. And why is that? That has nothing to do with leadership. That has also nothing to do with telling those leaders what ways should they act different or what other opportunities they have to change their models or any of those things. So I'm so glad you touched upon that. I think all those things are important. Awareness is important, right? But actually change on the ground is where I'm focused in terms of leadership and get a direction on it can I make that to change those systems? So then two things. I want to get your definition of leadership more with a wicked leadership. And also, I know there's at least 17 different definitions of sustainability, seven within the UN for sure. As I've said, there's only seven within the UN for sure as I've been growing up everything from the Bruntland report on up. But I'd also want to get your definition of sustainability, what is sustainable? If you don't mind kind of give us those two as well. So as we dive deeper into the book. All right, well, let's just make sure we wrap up on leadership. And I think as we go through the discussion we'll have examples to come back to illustrate it. But again, anytime, anywhere, a group has gotten together to get something done. I'm calling that leadership that they've managed to get something done. And in pretty much every case direction alignment commitment has occurred. So then the question is how do we facilitate direction on the commitment? What are the tools and strategies that make a group get direction on the commitment? And that's the toolbox, right? There are lots of those things. It could be somebody from above with power and authority or money, may kind of stew it or maybe there's some revolution from below that makes it happen. But most of often it happens at this middle out level. And for these wicked problems that we face, the tools need to help connect and influence people who aren't in the same organizations because no one has power or authority over everybody. So how do you connect those different actors? How do you influence them? Many of them don't even know they're connected in the case of the rainforest issue. You know, they don't know they're connected to deforestation when they're eating a hamburger or something. And so you need to connect all those actors somehow. So we've got a bunch of tools that help that. Another is to work against the divide, right? There's so much polarization. It makes collaboration really difficult. There's identity protective reasoning and echo chambers and network propaganda and fake news and all this other stuff. So you need tools that work against help collaborate across these differences. And then lastly with your expertise and chaos and systems change, we need to work in a very fast-changing environment. So we need to adapt. We need to constantly figure out how to learn by doing, fail forward, think, make sense of things that don't have clear causation. And so you need a bunch of tools that help adapt. So these three sets of tools, and there are strategies underneath each of them, connect, collaborate, and adapt that we illustrate and find lots of examples of around the world. So that's, you know, leadership probably over defined for your audience. I can launch into the sustainability bit or do you wanna follow up on the leadership? No, I guess I wanna even set it up a little bit more for my listeners. So I do not wanna give them the cliff notes of your entire book. I want us to give some teachings. I love your book. I think it is a fabulous book of toolbox and actual stories of leadership that you put in there of which I'm gonna address. But I get the question quite often. So Mark, how do I get in with the UN? Mark, I wanna make this my life. I wanna work with food and sustainability and environment. What do I need to do? Well, you need to be a leader. You need to have the tools to know how to lead and what to do to set that vision and to move forward. And so my recommend, they need to get your book. They need to get that and start applying those tools and many others. And you also kind of touch on them in the book as well so that they can have those tools. You do graduate education, you're all this professor and teach a lot. And so your books kind of more academic but also providing the tools, the knowledge, the frameworks so that people can have that better understanding of systems thinking of complexity science and how it all fits together to achieve better results. And in the past conversations, I usually always say, it's really complex, it's hard, whatever, but it's a better business model. It's a better operating system, a better model for success. Your results will be much better than just being an activist or just being loud or we need that, we need the awareness. But I think you'll have better results with these tools with that better understanding of how the world works and how business works, how leadership period works, whether it's NGO or government or whatever. And it's leadership from wherever you are. That is everybody can practice leadership with these tools. You don't need the corner office or the power or the charisma. That's the redefinition that I find so empowering and the people I work with find so empowering is that I can lead from where I am. Everybody can lead from where I am. You can think about how to get directional alignment commitment in your system. That means you don't have to wait until you're at the point in your career where you've got the corner office or the budget or the elected position or whatever it is. We all need to lead from where we are. And I love that. There's a saying in German, Demention dort abholen wo sie sind and that's exactly what you're saying, lead from where you are. I mean, I have to wait till I get this certificate, this degree, this job. No, you don't. But this book would definitely help you to start where you're at and give you the tools. And you take the tools out of the toolbox that you need and can apply to your situation. So I love that. I really think in the beginning, you also touch on the Anthropocene, but if you have, for me, sustainable is more always tied to the sustainable development, but I would like to go back and have you kind of give us your definition or what your thoughts are on sustainable is. Yeah. And so there are a couple of really easy answers here. We can define it as the SDGs, the sustainable development goals. I mean, there are some pretty good definitions out there, Oxfam, whatever. So I don't really, I don't, we don't need to go into those details. I ultimately think sustainability or sustainable development or whatever you wanna call it is defined by the people engaged that is co-constructed by the stakeholders. That's what it is. So we're really talking about good process that promotes some of these larger goals that we're concerned about. So it's co-constructed by the collaborators, by the stakeholders. And for me, I like to sort of step back and think about the bigger picture where sustainability or sustainability, sustainable development fits in. And there are really three big narratives that we would usually fall into one of the three. One is this sort of accelerating innovation that we're gonna, we're on the treadmill, it's getting faster, we're innovating new technologies, we're thinking our way out of it, we're developing our way out of it, we're the ultimate resource is not soil or oil, rather it's human creativity. And that we will figure out all these solutions. That's sort of, we're head rushing, head forward into the future. That's sustainable development, we're gonna develop our way out of it. Or some would say, we're lemons and we're gonna run off the cliff. But there's this innovation narrative that a lot of people buy into. Another way of visioning a bigger narrative is sort of let's conserve, let's be cautious, let's slow down, let's be preserve all the pieces small is beautiful sort of thing. And that's a retreat, if you will, from the future. It requires us to recognize that a lot of people aren't gonna join the middle class through economic development and ending poverty. So it's a very different narrative. And then there's what I think is, we're searching for is another narrative that brings more people into the tent, which is this sort of breakthrough narrative where we recognize that business is not sustainable, business as usual, right? Government and market institutions are not sustainable as usual. There are, we can see on the horizon these major obstacles of climate change and inequity and food system decay and water stress and these kinds of things, we can see them, right? And they're converging pretty quickly and that our development trajectory is gonna be disrupted by them. So we've got to steer our way through. But if we get to the other end, 2050, 2060, 2070, 2080, maybe 2100, the tools are there, we can navigate these challenges and then life's gonna be pretty good at that point, right? There's gonna be a lot of wealth, there'd be much less inequity, we'll have figured out climate change, population will be maybe bending down towards six billion or so. We can break through some of these challenges and that's a much more empowering narrative, it's a much more inviting narrative of how I can, how do I participate in that transition? How do I change the arc of our development trajectory so that we can avoid the worst things of climate change and water stress and inequity to get to this future that seems like if we get there, the limit will be good. That's a third narrative that I really try to promote because it invites more people and leadership is about inviting people in so they get direction on the commitment and they can see their role in changing things. And that breakthrough narrative is much more inviting, I think, than the sort of conservation and preservation, let's stop development, let's just sustain things. So that's how I think about sustainable development in terms of defining it in terms of these narratives, is which one do you wanna buy into and how do you participate in making that happen? I love that, I'm in a line with you, I probably would have phrased it just a little bit different, but there is. So when you say, let's pull back, let's kind of, there's this one way that we could say a lot of people say pull back, let's slow down, let's take a look at it, which is also not bringing people up to equity and equality as well and out of poverty and many other ripple effects there. A lot of the time, I used to say I'm a sustainable futurist or I'm a resilient futurist, people say, what the hell does that mean, Mark? You know, I thought you're an environmentalist, a tree hugger, an activist or whatever, hippie. And what they don't really realize and the three things that you just mentioned, although you said it in a little bit of a different way is what is sustainability? For me, it's one economics, I would say the, let's get the elephant in the room, it's about economics, which is business and movements of our economies, but it's not the business as usual, the economics that we're used to. I look at it as ecological economics or some other twists of ecological economics that work for all of us and give us that equality for all of us that through business and good leadership that we can really get to that place that we need to. Obviously the one you mentioned first, innovation, for me, sustainability is all about innovation, advancements of humanity, doing things better, not with more resources, but better within planetary boundaries, smart, ecological, true cost, fair trade, true value, total environmental costs, things like that that are very innovative. And then the last one is, I have the strong view of the future. So in order to be sustainable, I have to have a clear vision of what that future is gonna look like for all of us and how we're gonna get there, what kind of leadership and vision, why, purpose do we have to solve those wicked, complex, systemic problems we have and apply those things? And I really, I think that most people don't get that. They're like, oh, I've got to be vegan if I'm gonna be activist or environmental, I've got to do this, I've got to do less, I've got, it's miserable life. I might as well just go back in the hole. Doesn't invite people in, right? It's not inspiring why I want to sacrifice now because the world's gonna be better in the future, right? But you need a narrative story of vision like you're saying that invites people in to create this better world. And like you said, development, better development, wise development, development that respects equity and opportunity and hope. That's the vision, that's the type of development we need. And I don't know if I'm jumping ahead of myself, but in your book, I really liked your leadership stories and obviously three of them were the biggest hit with me. I liked choices for sustainable food. I really liked innovative carbon farming really rang home with me. And just, I believe there was one other, it wasn't, it was, yeah, innovative carbon farming and partnering for clean water and community benefit that those stories were just unbelievable, wicked leadership. And back to what I said, again, it's a better operating system. The results are there. I mean, people are always saying with sustainability, well, that's gonna be expensive. We're gonna have to make all sorts of sacrifice. I see it in a much different way. I see it as a better leadership model. I see it as a better operating model, business model, so to say, with so many tools. And what do you think out of all your stories are the ones that you like the most? Is it carbon-farbing or do you kind of, you're not bias in that direction at all? Well, I like them all. And then more, of course, that we couldn't include just for space limitations, but this model of leadership is when you realize what to look for where people are working from the middle out and getting directional on the commitment and changing the systems, you find examples everywhere that are really inspirational all the way from getting water to poor Indian villages and empowering women to working on a citywide energy system that helps it get to net zero emissions, right? And then the ones that you mentioned, changing diets, so that we're moving plant proteins forward and meat proteins further away from the center of the plate, right? And then the carbon-farming one, which maybe we can talk about in some detail, because climate change is sort of the existential challenge of the day. Please tell us a little bit more about that carbon-farming because I just, matter of fact, I just had a conversation with one of my good brands. He just, his name's Marcus, so not Mark, but Marcus, he just started a tree project basically where they're planting trees and to do carbon offsetting and kind of give back. And I was telling him, you know, there's this new trend for a couple of years now that really we've got these carbon farmers that are, it's the new vision of farmers that are doing just as good as the tree planners. And so I'd like to hear more. Well, it's sort of the classic example of the middle-out sort of leadership where change is occurring, you're not because of some top-down thing or anything bottom-up, but because the actors that are in the supply chain are getting together to reimagine how business and governance should work. And in this case, it's addressing climate change, right? And there's really not a scenario out there in terms of getting to a future that's two degrees or less warmer, right? There's not a scenario out there that doesn't have a lot of sequestration, of taking carbon out of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sticking it somewhere, right? So we need mechanisms to extract and soil happens to be like the second or almost the largest sink or repository or holder of carbon. The ocean is another, but it's filling up, right? And the soil, we're losing carbon through tilling and erosion and all kinds of other stuff. So how do we get carbon back in the soil? One way, the obvious way is plants, right? Because plants, basically that's what they do is they suck carbon into the atmosphere and they stick a lot of it in the soil. Well, farmers, the agricultural system is the main mechanism by which carbon gets lost. We harvest it and turn it into food and what have you. And so how do you tweak that system? How do you incentivize the farmers? How do you incentivize the companies? How do you incentivize the buyers to change the system so that the people who are the stewards of the soil carbon, the agriculture industry, the farmers are rewarded and want to do it, right? And so that requires figuring out some way to... So this is what sort of the aha is that the people were looking and say, okay, we've got to change that system. We've got to change that sort of supply chain. And while let's get the people in the room that are associated with business, farmers, investors, all these other people, people that can help measure it and figure out what needs to change. So this is a collaborative innovation process, a group called Co-Creative worked on it and a group called Green America worked on. Got kind of stakeholders together and worked through a process of collaborative innovation to figure out how to change the system. And some things needed to happen, like we needed a better accounting system of actual carbon so that we could, we not just know whether we were succeeding but pay people for doing it. We needed somehow to remove some of the barriers that farmers faced. They needed technologies that allowed them to do this. So different cropping strategies, different planting strategies and what have you, different varieties, et cetera. And so some technological innovations need to occur. But mostly it needed to change at the investor and the business level and somehow to encourage the buyers of these crops to reward the farmers to use carbon farming practices that actually produce more crops, require less inputs, require less water, less energy, less fertilizer because the soil is more productive. They give the, it makes the farmer better off, right? They're not only being more productive per hectare, they're also not spending as much in inputs and they're sequestering more carbon. And so we're paying them to sequester the carbon. So pretty much everybody's better off but it requires tweaking the system, requires innovating the system in some ways that connects all these dots. So this carbon farming project is associated with a larger effort of regenerative agriculture and there's a lot of movement in this area now and it's spreading widely in part because the little bit of system change you got a few examples of where, hey, they're doing it over in that region with those companies and those farmers and those investors, hey, I'm a farmer or I'm an investor, I'm a company, I can do it over here in my region. And so boom, boom, boom. That leads to the larger global systems change that then affects SDGs and other sorts of things. Bit of a soapbox there, sorry, I got going. No, no, there's never, sorry. So I don't know how long it took. I know you wrote the book or you published the book during the pandemic. So it came out, what did I say? November 2020, something like that. First of all, that's an accomplishment. It's not the funnest thing to release a book during lockdown but it also probably gave you plenty of time to finish things up and to get it out there. It's not your first book with Island Press which they have plethora of climate, environment, education, great sustainable leadership tools and I love to see a part of that. I wanna go just a tad deeper now because you're really local, we're talking about middle out leadership which is almost kind of local. There's not this global way but it can have a global effect. Some of these supply chains are global. So I'm not necessarily advocating localism. I am suggesting that people need to stretch beyond what their organization is and particularly work in that cross-sector space because that's where the innovation, things like carbon farming are happening happening in that cross-sector space, yeah. And so this is the reason I kind of, I'm leading into this question a little bit is because I wanna know, are you a global citizen? How do you feel about the removal of walls, borders, nations, limitations, divisions of humanity, one from another? But I wanna do it more because I'm a businessman, I'm an entrepreneur as well as an academic but all around the world I'm from New York, I live in Germany and really the COVID was a global citizen, food was a global citizen, species were food, water, energy, that's a global citizen but yet we weren't and so I kinda wanna tie it to not only the book and leadership and how business works on this scale but what your thoughts and feelings are is there any kind of solution or hope for that type of those bigger models that you're talking about with wicked leadership at all? Yeah, well I think that you hit the nail on the head in terms of some of the bigger challenges we face that the institutions that we have now aren't really working because of this global interconnectedness and so am I a global citizen? I guess in terms of being a part of the commons and all the systems, absolutely. And I travel probably too much in terms of carbon footprint. I work with sustainability professionals, working professionals who a part of the programs that we offer sort of require them to go internationally and so I take, we take them, usually to rapidly developing countries, China, South Africa, Brazil, I most often travel to India. There's just so much innovation and change going on there. It's absolutely fabulous. And so through the travel and through awareness of systems, yeah, I'm absolutely global, a global citizen and respect others and cultures and a try as much as possible to think that way. But I'm also human and we're wired to be somewhat tribal, to be concerned about our own. We're identity protective reasoning is gonna make us patriotic or inward focused and differentiate us from them. So there's a challenge with being global because it's hard for people to identify with like the SDGs, these global things. That's nice, but it's not just me. It's not my group, it's not us. And so we need to address these issues, absolutely. That is how to work across borders. Our nation states still viable. You know, there are only a couple of hundred years old, Westphalia, whatever, it's four or 500 year old institution. Maybe we need some other ways. That's the sort of transition we're going through. I think cities are rising up in terms of power and influence. And so we may see all kinds of different governance over the next hundred years or so. I don't know what that future would look like, but it's gonna have to recognize the global interconnectedness, absolutely. Gonna have to respect these different cultures and diversity, absolutely. But it also has to recognize that people are wired to be tribal and belong to something that they can see and feel membership with. And that's a challenge. I think on the other side of that coin, the bigger challenge for me, a bigger issue is the failing of states, the climate migrants that are really stressing the borders because people are having to relocate. That's where the nation-state system doesn't really function anymore. And you can see the pressures at the borders of the US, certainly at the EU, these are deep, deep problems. So how do you overcome that? I think you have overcome that by fixing the problems where they are, right? Fixing the failed states, fixing climate migrants so they don't have to leave. But eventually, yeah, be nice if we didn't have borders. But getting there, I don't see the path forward at this point, but at some point in time, I'm sure we can figure it out through good leadership. And really in the first part of your book, the reason why I asked this question is because you talk about our human development progress and the wicked problems that we face, urbanization, food, agriculture, energy access, climate change, linear economy, biodiversity, on and on. And on the other end of it is sustainable development, population bomb in the middle. And we've got to get through that to the other end, hopefully, and along the way, we're gonna be faced with some of the, we already are, but we'll be faced with probably even more wicked challenges on that journey. And what we're seeing throughout the time is that these civilization frameworks, these models that we have, Green New Deal, Brexit, whatever SDGs that they're not always working for. So we don't understand them. They haven't been explained to us enough to kind of understand what the journey that we're on regardless of whether we want it or not. And for me, the sustainable development really means the birth of all development is, whether it's residential, commercial, or city, community-wide type of a development. How do you get your resources? How do you transport your energy? How do you move around that type of a development? And then how do we build up a community city going on that is a sustainable development that's gonna be around in the future? So for me, I look at it as the built environment and I feel that worldwide, globally, our built environment is way behind. It's built a lot around cars and majority of the world's just extremely lacking in the basic needs. And so that's a transition that we're gonna go, but we've all got to go that. If only some of us do, then we're gonna continue with these problems that we have. And so that's one reason why I wanted to bring it out. But also, maybe if you wanna touch more on sustainable development in that respect, or if you've covered it all there. Well, I mean, you hit on one of the many, what I call them, the bottlenecks, right? So we're accelerating rapidly towards this future and climate change and water and food and egg and inequity are kind of converging there in the bottleneck. We've got to steer around them. One of those is urbanization, right? How we develop them well. Cause we're an urban species, right? We're now 50, 60% urban or so, and there's gonna be another 20 or 30% urbanization over the next 30, 40, 50 years. Some statistics are just overwhelming. Like we're gonna build everything that we've built already again in the next 30, 40, 50 years. That's an immense amount of development in the sense of urban development. But the good news is, is we actually know how to do it well, right? And even the better news is that there are really fewer levers, fewer systems change things that matter more than urbanizing well, right? If we urbanize well, we use less energy, we use less materials, we emit less carbon, we use less water, we save more biodiversity. So in poverty gets better, in equity gets better, human rights gets better. So urbanization is a good thing when it's done well. And we know how to do it well, but it requires a lot of reform, a lot of leadership, a lot of politics to do that well. And that's leadership sort of one, not even one city at a time, but maybe one development at a time, one collaboration between a city and developers in that city to promote good development, physical development that is walkable, that is carbon neutral, that does save all the water. We know how to do that, but that requires leadership at that middle out level where government and civil society and developers, the market are collaborating in some way. So yeah, I mean, that's how we urbanize is a huge issue and it needs, and there are lots of examples of this good leadership happening. So I wanna ask you, it's gonna be a little bit personal. So you wrote infinite nature, you wrote restoring nature, did, were those books influential for you to rewrite a sustainable leadership? Is that kind of, was that logically the next step or was that they just totally separate that had nothing to do with one another? Or did you say, hey, we need a better form of leadership to handle these wicked problems. And I'm seeing this from my other courses, I'm seeing these from my books and learn this over time. Yeah, more of the latter. I mean, I've always been concerned about environmental sustainability sorts of issues. I'm a boomer, you know, Earth Day kind of stuff. So I've got that in me. And I thought I was contributing by the teaching and research and consulting I would do that did restoration ecology. And that led to the restoring nature book. And then helping people think about envision nature differently and pluralism. And that was what the infinite nature was all about and kind of removing some of the myths and mythology and romanticization about nature. So I thought that was making contribution. But then I sort of reached the peak of the academy in terms of being a professor. You know, there wasn't much else up there in terms of progress or advancement other than administration. And that's not me. And I said, what can I do to make a difference? And, you know, that was empowering professionals to be more effective at their jobs, to change things. They didn't need more information. They didn't need more science. They didn't need more awareness. What they needed was leadership tools. They needed capacities that helped them be more influential in their job. And so I made a major redirect in my own education and my own teaching. We started a whole nother program inside the D.C. Beltway who worked with all these professionals. It was an amazing learning journey for me and finding all these people and all these really great success stories and then trying to figure out some way to piece them together in a way that really helped people grasp and help professionals grasp them. And that's what led to this book, is that it's not about science or awareness or teaching or all that kind of stuff. It's about building capacity in professionals so that they can be more effective at reaching out across their style or across their organization to have this cross-sector influence, to have middle-out impact, building capacity in them. That's what they need. And that's leadership. So I'm going to ask you the hardest question that I always ask when we guess and that you'll have today. And it's the burning question, WTF. And it's not the swear word that we've been saying to ourselves this last 12 months or more. It's really what's the future? And so it's also what's next from you? What's next on your journey? Well, I continue to try to collect stories of successful practice of these sort of leadership concepts, both because the more stories we have to share, the more likely people are to find, oh, I could do that. And so it empowers people. So I'm always looking for more examples. And there are just great stories to tell. And I'm also, I guess, struggling with the polarization, with the fake news, with the network propaganda stuff that is really paralyzing almost all forms of leadership, even the middle-out. And so how do we reconstruct how we think about our role in these things? I'm trying to think of a way to make more of a contribution there. Because ultimately, what the future is, I believe strongly, is that it's what we make it. It's co-constructed. We don't know really, we don't know what the future should be. As we move forward into the future, as we create it, we decide whether we like it or not, and then we redirect. So the SDGs, Sustainable Development Goals, are an example of things we think we would like. And we need to figure out how to move forward and collectively say, OK, that's what I want. That's what I don't want. But it needs to be co-constructed. And so we need to build capacity in the main actors, the professionals, the folks that are engaged in business and government and civil society that are doing this middle-out leadership, because they're constructing the future. And make it accountable, create a narrative that we can all participate in, make it transparent so that we can influence it weak collectively and can build that story. So it's something we have to construct. That's what the future is. I know it'd be nice to have a vision of what the utopia is. I don't have it. I think it's the journey. But I'm hopeful we can construct it. Well, definitely. I'm not a big fan of neo-liberalism, neo-darwinism. I'm a big fan more of Lin-Margolis symbiotic earth and the symbiosis that we can figure out our place in this world where all crew members on spaceship earth instead of passengers, we just find this collaboration, cooperation, working together to make it happen. And it will go further. It will be much better. It will be something that we've taken part in. So I really like that message for sure. I guess there's an even deeper message that's very similar to what you just answered. But maybe it's not. What does a world that works for everyone look like for you? And really, we're talking about that there's this civil unease, this unrest with our current civilization models and frameworks. Do you think there's a model out there besides the answer you just gave as a world that would work for us all? So it's pretty much the same answer. I mean, I like the question because it kind of invokes John Rawls and the idea of the venal ignorance where, you know, imagine yourself in a world where you lose your position and status and even gender or whatever. And then everybody comes back into some other location. What do you want that world to look like so that, you know, you may come back in a very different country with a very different set of capacities so that what do you want that world to look like that you have an opportunity? And so, you know, that I think that John Rawls, veil of ignorance is a powerful way to think, envision what that future should look like, but ultimately it's co-constructed. So I think my vision of the future is one that empowers all of us to participate in creating it. And that's directionality and that's leadership. That's empowering people to affect change, not relying on somebody at the top to give us that vision or maybe even more destructively letting the mob decide what to do because the mob's not very smart, right? And it's got to happen from the middle out. We've got to co-construct it. Without giving too much more away from your book, what are some tools in the toolbox that you would like to maybe tease us on or say, you know, they reach out and get your book, they look at it, they study, and hear some things that you're going to find in the book that maybe you want to tease? Well, everybody's got a different situation. So it's hard to pick a tool or strategy, but I guess the biggest take on for me is this, think about leadership as something you can do from where you are in the system. And it's, you can help, if you're in a situation and it's sort of foundering, it's not getting stuff done, you can use the direction alignment commitment model to diagnose it, right? And actually add some value. You can say, okay, do we have, have we agreed on the goals, right? Do we know what we're all doing or why we're doing it? And if not, then there are some tools that help us get there. Have we assigned tasks that we, or are some tasks being left undone? Are we aligned on what we're trying to do? And maybe some things are too risky. And so the return on investment isn't, isn't right. So let's fix that, or maybe some things are too mundane and nobody's getting credit for it. So nobody wants to do it. So let's, you know, let's use some tools to get alignment. And then commitment, how do we, how do we get people to do the buy-in or people dragging their feet or we're sabotaging it? How do we, how do we diagnose that? So the direction alignment commitment is, is a very powerful diagnostic strategy. You can add value and influence. But then you can also pull from this larger toolbox that helps you achieve these things, get direction on the command. They're just countless tools and we've got a couple of dozen of them in the book. But the most important thing is lead from where you are, right? You can have influence, which is not just great for sustainable development because you're going to have more impact that needs to be had, but it's also good for your career. I love it. The last three questions I have for you are really for my audience. If, if there was one message that you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change our life, what would it be your message? Yeah, I'm sounding like a broken record. So I lead from where you are, right? You can have influence from where you do not wait until you get to the corner office and do not rely on the vision from above, right? Construct it, engage it, work outside your silo, collaborate with others in the supply chain or in the city or in the next organization that are going to create that middle out change. Lead from where you are. What have you experienced or learned in your journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start? I would have liked to have known the power of leadership and the power of story. And I believed in science and information was somehow going to solve the problems. And so I devoted a lot of time to producing that information and injecting it in the minds of others. But no, it's not, that's not the, we need leadership. We need to build capacity of people to engage in change. So I wish I knew that earlier. I think I would have, well, I know I would have been a better storyteller would have more stories to tell I've been able to engage more in the sort of changes that I write about in research now. So I'm part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It's online graduate level MOOC courses of Professor Sacks and many others. So Columbia and MIT everybody is in there with edX. The question really is, are you happy with the past centuries of our education system and learning and what ways forward, if you had the magic wand, what would you say where we need to be in the future when it comes to education and learning to really help? And this is a sustainable takeaway, I hope for our listeners. If you had that magic wand, what would you give them advice, but also what would you do to make a better learning system so that they can create the knowledge that they need from where they are to get to where they want to be or to even find that purpose and direction? Yeah, it's a really exciting time in that space that is in the education space, especially for professionals because careers change increasingly rapidly. So what you learned 10 years ago doesn't necessarily help tomorrow. So it's constant, right? We need to constantly figure out a way to build capacity and the institution of the higher education universities globally are pretty medieval, right? They're ancient institutions and the disruption is coming, right? It's coming, it's right around the corner, COVID I think hastened it, but we haven't seen anything yet in terms of residential campuses and getting credit from sitting in seats a certain number of hours and the idea of semesters and all that is going to change as we move into competency-based accreditation and when all the IT companies finally fully move into education, I think just yesterday announced some new certification processes and it's amazing. And so I would encourage professionals to look for programs that meet them where they are, which is the program that we redesigned. We literally had to move out of the mothership of the university and move 100 miles away to create a center that served the professionals where they were, right? In their working environment. That's how the universities, that's one way universities have to change. It's not just online, it's how do you build the cohort and the peer-to-peer learning, the opportunity for this transformation and questioning and inspiration that education is possible of creating and building that capacity to be a change agent. That's how education has to change and it's part of it's going to be demand-driven. People are going to demand it and universities, I think will resist it because it's different, right? Universities are medieval, yeah. They're definitely medieval and that's probably the biggest takeaway I had from your book and what I like from your other books and the tools that I found from you online in our show description. I'm going to put your links where people can go out and find your materials, your videos and get in touch with you through the university if they want to find your materials. But it's really wonderful because there's tools. No matter what situation you're in, if somebody were to ask the question that I mentioned earlier in the show, I would say, here's the tools. Whatever situation you're in, this is going to help you go from there forward, move forward and find some success and that's really what we need. I remember I graduated many times but sometimes I felt like I was ready to go work at McDonald's when I was done, that there was not a lot of takeaways and partly that's my fault but partly it's the fault of the type of learning structures and environments that were created and so I love that answer. I really appreciate your time and that we could get into this great conversation and that's all I have for you unless you would like to depart any words with and before leave or ask me anything before we go. No, I'm good. I am curious about the books behind you though. This is a canvas, a kind of just a tapestry of it's one of the libraries in Trinity College at Oxford. Yeah. Just bought it online and thought better in the virtual background with my crazy hair, it's hard to do that. Yeah, well it's great because you're in the business of sharing knowledge and you've got sort of the old knowledge back there and this is sort of the new frontier if you will, we're all trying to figure out how to build capacity to engage and change and I appreciate what you're doing to help shape that so thank you for involving me in the conversation. Anytime Bruce. I appreciate it and when your next book comes out or even next year I'd just like to have a follow-up with you and go even deeper when you have more time. I really appreciate it, thank you so much. Look forward to it, thank you. Take care.