 Hi, everyone and thank you so much for joining us. I am Maria Cortes-Puch, the Vice President of Networks at SBSN. I see that many of you are already introducing yourselves and there's people from everywhere around the world, so this is extremely exciting for us. So today's dialogue is framed within a series of discussions that will take place throughout the next few months. Each of these discussions will revolve around one of the key topics that came out in the recently launched report from SBSN, accelerating education for the SDGs in universities. So at SBSN we believe that universities have a critical role to play in helping implement the SDGs. In fact, we were launched in 2012 precisely to support the implementation of this goal by mobilizing academia. However, we know that the SDGs offer a phenomenal, a comprehensive and also a very complex agenda. It lays out a pathway to a sustainable future, but one that will require deep transformations. And so it's key that universities transform themselves in order to be better fit to support the implementation of the goals. One would think that they should not be that hard because universities have for centuries been the place where critical thinking has happened, where knowledge barriers have been pushed and disruptive technologies have been invented. But the truth is that universities are having a hard time evolving, especially at the rapid and at the very drastic level that the SDGs require. We have 1300 member institutions from around the world, most of them universities, but others research centers and other high education institutions. And we hear from them, we hear from professors, we hear from students, but we also hear from their precedents how difficult it is to break the silos or how tough and how challenging it is to focus on the challenges that their communities are facing because they are immersed in bureaucracy or in other processes that have rapid action. This is precisely why we thought that it would be very interesting to start this dialogue series with this question of how can universities transform themselves and what are some of the key elements that will be necessary to better support the implementation of the SDGs. So to discuss this, we have a phenomenal lineup today. Let me very briefly discuss the agenda right now and then I'll move on to a couple of housekeeping questions and we'll get started. So to begin with, we have Otto Sharmer that is very well known for his theory, you, he's a senior lecturer in the MIT Management Sloan School and a co-founder of the Presensing Institute. He will be giving keynote speech that will be followed by a panel, a panel and all female panel with four phenomenal speakers such as Wendy Parcel from Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and the former president of Plymouth University. We have Luz Bolier, executive director at the Interdisciplinary Research, sorry, Center for Research on Sustainable Development Operationalization. We have Sarah Mendelssohn, professor at Carnegie Mellon and former US representative to the Echo Sock at the UN. And we have Amelia Clark, associate professor and associate dean of research from the University of Waterloo. After the panel, we will hear a brief presentation on this report on accelerating education for the SDGs in universities from Julio Lombreras. Julio is a tenure professor at the Technical University in Madrid and visiting scholar at Harvard University. He is one of the co-authors of this guide and I should say the lead author of the chapter that focuses on the transformation question. The center that he comes from at the Technical University in Madrid has been thinking about this for a while and experimenting with how it could transform itself and the university. So, just the final word on how you can participate. Many of you are already using the chat function. Feel free to continue to do so throughout the event. Make sure to post links to your research or to your work. We want to hear from you. We also have a question and answer tab that you can use to ask questions and also to vote on the most relevant question. So, with these, I'm going to give the floor to Otto Sharmer. And Otto, if you want to turn on your camera and mic, welcome and thank you so much for joining us. The floor is yours. Thank you so much, Maria and hello everyone. So, listening to your opening remarks, Maria, reminds me really also that the issue that you described, all the things we know we should do different and then how little is actually happening in terms of real transformation. That's a real microcosm of our current moment, right? You go to companies today, you talk to governments, you talk to public institutions. Wherever you go, it's the same problem. So decision makers, leaders or people inside the organization, they are quite aware of what we do currently is not sufficient, that we need to profoundly transform. Yet, what we enact, the strategies and the policies and the change efforts, right, are hugely inadequate to the situation, the disruption that we face. And so that's, in other words, what we often end up doing is optimizing what we have, rather than reimagining and reshaping the future and the path forward. So that's, in other words, what we face in universities and higher ed today is just really a microcosm. Maybe you could say an extreme version, but it is a microcosm of the bigger transformation challenge we face as a society. So when Julio and I had the pre-conversation to this session, so basically what he said in the briefing is, talk about the how, right? We know everything about the what, we know everything about the why, but talk about the how. So the how of transformation. And when I really think to my, think about my, so then I sat down and thought about my own experience. How was it in my own life? How did I, what can I really say from my own experience to that on that topic? So I have a, you know, six points, six, maybe seven, we'll see six or seven points that kind of little nuggets that resonate. I think the report is really wonderful. I particularly like the notion of the second operating system that I want to come back to later on. But I want to ground really kind of the issue of transformation in my own experience to make it real. And I'm sure it will resonate with many of your experiences as well. And that could be an opener for the conversation later on. So the first item that I put down is people. I remember when I entered the first university, it was, so I'm just aging myself here. So in the early 1980s in Berlin, free university Berlin. And so after my social service and all of that, I was hugely disappointed by really, I had so many illusions about what a university could be. But there was one person, one visiting professor. So his name was Johann Galturm, the peace researcher and who really embodied a whole other way of a whole different understanding of what science and social science can be. Really in participating and in kind of making the world a better place. Science as seeking and breaking of invariances. And Eleanor Raj later on talked about science must be performed with the mind of wisdom. So when I as a student back then experience, I saw a lot of mediocrity right around me. I was pretty depressed. I saw one single person that operated from a different place. That was enough to switch on a flame within me that never ceased to exist until today. It's really interesting when you think about that. So when you also think about the responsibility that we have as educators, right? The way you show up is actually making a difference, right? So I saw many people or many contexts that made me depressed. It was one person that switched on a flame that put me on a different path. So that's maybe the first principle. It's people and it means how we show up, right? So the inner place that we are operating from. And it's also a pedagogical principle because if you put people in front of, say, other change makers that operate from a deeper place of purpose, there is a funny alchemy at work, right? So when you see these people, they are switching on a deeper resonance within yourself that you didn't even realize was existing before. So I would say that's the first principle, kind of people who operate from that deeper place that can be entrepreneurs, but of course it can be also the way you perform science. Number two is place, the power of place. So when you think about transformation, it's really about the power of place. And I was lucky in my life. I ended up later in a newly founded university. There was very little there, but very high aspiration. And it was kind of an innovative pedagogical concept. Basically student-centric learning, theory, practice, and you know, participate in the world, you come back, reflect and these kind of things. But there wasn't really a lot there except one or two faculty. Who were, who could think that, who could embody that new pedagogical approach and empower students. So what you really need, I mean, the foundation of transforming universities, of course, is our young people, right, its students. But you can only, I remember the path I went through. So this one person, it was really one person essentially believed in our capacity to activate our own agency that I, when I came in, wasn't even fully aware of existing. So a place, so the second component, it really is power of place in a sense that you not only are literate, right, in terms of student-centric learning, but really a power of place of believing in the deeper dormant capacities that we as young people bring into the world and that in the right context, in the right environment can be activated. Number three, practice fields. You need tools, right? If you don't have tools, if you don't have practice fields, these new, and what I mean with practice field is basically a safe environment that allows you to engage in new ways of operating, new ways of, deeper ways of listening, you know, a more co-creative way of having a conversation. And what we learned over the past decade or two really is that for these practice fields when we talk about the deeper transformative capacities, social arts are essential. It's social arts, but it's also the art and practice of deep listening and it's also really the deep dialogue or generative dialogue. So an example in our context for that is coaching circles, right? And these practice fields are small-scale usually. So you need to, it's often groups of five or small kind of face-to-face groups that need to build these safe spaces and go through these experiences. So practice fields in terms of methods and tools that help us to activate our deeper transformative capacities. Number four, partners. So partners, with partners I mean kind of the local or regional or global ecosystem of partners that allow us to connect with living examples of the new but also really with the front line of transformational change that is going on in our communities, that's going on on our planet. And one of the most vital functions I think of the universities of the futures and currently and partly already today is to connect young people with the right kind of places with that entire ecosystem. It takes a village, it takes a global ecosystem. A lot has happened there, a lot is happening as we speak, right? And now broadening the focus of learning from campus really towards that entire ecosystem of societal transformation where we realize that the most important ingredient that we have for learning is what? It's the challenge, it's the challenges that we are exposed to because the challenges, the real world challenges are the surface that allow me to activate some of these deeper dormant capacities. Five, pathways for transformation. What I mean really with that is, I mean, if we go many, I mean, I'm not just reminding ourselves, what is the one thing we have learned from innovation management? Well, where does the new grow? Not inside, you know, the old, if you have really radical innovation, you need to create a place that allows the new operating system or the new way of operating to develop at its own terms. So if you plan these innovations inside the old system, guess what happens? The immune system is basically killing it before it can develop. So the pathways for transformation is really if what we try to do has to do with whole person, whole systems learning basically, which is adults with most of the other activities that are going on on campus right now. Where does that sit? And often it sits actually at the periphery, right, in electives. I think where can we create this kind of second layer? And that's where I thought in the report, this second operating system was a really interesting term. And when you look from a systems perspective at transformation, what do you see? You see that transformation usually happens first at the periphery, right? So it's almost like kind of around the old institutions of education is growing a new layer, right? So the second operating system, at least here and there, where these deep learning practices and our action learning practices are being cultivated and supported and amplified. So examples there that, and the one thing we know is if you want to develop this second operating system, you need a supporting infrastructure there. And so that basically prevents the immune system reaction of the old system to kick in and provides kind of the right kind of practices and new learning environments. So an interesting example that I came across there is Stockholm School of Economics basically boiling down the old system by, you know, from 100% of 66 and then taking one third of the credit points and of the time that students have towards basically the second operating system, right? Towards immersing themselves with the global challenges, developing the deeper personal learning practices and then applying all of that in action learning initiatives that help these institutions in the city and in the country to address SDG-related challenges. So that's one way, right? To just kind of boil down the old structure by, you know, by a third and free up space that is used in a new way. Another one, historically, is basically starting from scratch, right? So it's a possibility as well. So the historical example there is the Danish Fokai School which is probably one of the most successful interventions on a country level or regional level even and has created the foundations for what today is known as the Nordic model, right? So that would be basically totally new places, disconnected from the traditional system, would be the alternative. I think what we saw are kind of pedagogical institutions that 100% operate on the new operating system, right? So that's the alternative, one of those two things, I think. And then the last one, so the item number six here on my list is really maybe the one that should have been first and maybe that is the most important and that is the pedagogy. We need a new pedagogy and I want to just end with sharing, you know, a few images here and a few of my own learnings. So when I developed TheoryU which is like an approach to this second operating system, right? As a pedagogy, I started by listening to practitioners, right? I started by listening to people who created something profoundly new in business, science or society or the creative arts. And by listening to them, I realized that they describe actually a different learning process than we usually, the one that we usually operate by in higher ed or in education today. And one of them, the late CEO of Hannover Insurance summarized that way of operating or his most important learning throughout all his own episodes of leading his company through transformational change with this line. The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener. So he says the success of what I do as a change maker, as a leader depends on the inner place from that I operate. And then of course the question that, so when I heard that, right? The question that was evoked in me is what is this inner place and the way I would describe this inner place today is in terms of these three capacities, open mind, open heart, open will, a.k.a. activating curiosity, compassion and courage. And that's basically what, you know, what are key capacities of awareness-based systems change to go through this cycle of deep connection to, you know, the larger field we are part of, the connection to our deeper source of knowing and then the prototyping and learning by doing. Now, if we look into real reality, what we see, what do we see going on the past few years, mostly the exact opposite, right? What's being amplified is a freeze reaction of the human mind in terms of an amplification of operating on doubt, hate and fear. So rather than, you know, seeing, sensing, letting go, connecting with the emerging future, it's denial, entrenching, and holding on to the past and disconnecting. And, you know, rather than bringing the new into reality, it's like, you know, collectively enacting patterns of destruction and self-destruction. So all of that, I don't need to explain these cycles. All of that is going on today. And I think if we talk about transformation, if we talk about preparing people to what's ahead of us in this century, this is what we need to deal with, right? We need to develop capacities that engage and transform these deeper building blocks, these deeper conditions that are, you know, that capture so much energy today. And that's kind of the condition, the metro condition of post-truth, post-democracy, post-humanity, which I mean basically the spread of disinformation and doubt, architectures of separation that lead to the polarization that we witness in so many countries today, and the issue of, you know, fanaticism and fear and anxiety. And so we as educators, when we see these amplifications up here, we can basically say, what is that really? What is this phenomenon that we are dealing, AKA Trumpism or whatever name you want to give it? And what it is, it's a massive institution of failure. It's a massive failure of education today because what we really need to transform that is deeper learning and leadership capacities that have to do with the essence of science, right? Let the data talk to us, that means we need to listen with more humility. We need to build and hone that capacity in order to move beyond post-truth conditions. Really move beyond post-democracy is we need to build new architectures of connection. We need to cultivate the capacity to sense the social field or to sense the system from the edges, kind of through the eyes of the other partners and collaborators and stakeholders in the system. And moving beyond the fear issue is really has to do what my colleague Eva Pomeroy and I talk, you know, call action confidence. We have, in our institutions of education, we have to build the capacity to, you know, step into our action confidence by which I mean, can you sense and then step into, begin to actualize emerging future possibilities, right? When you deal with disruption, are you holding on to the past or can you really sense and actualize the future as it emerges? I think that's really the challenge because the only thing we know is we are just at the 2020, right, the year of disruption. That's just the beginning. I mean, you know, you just look at climate, biodiversity, social inequality or the other issues. It's the beginning. So the only thing we know is we will see more of this stuff up here, which means we have to be more intentional in building these deeper capacities here. And that's really all I have to say at the end of the day. So if this is what we try to do, planetary healing and civilizational renewal, then the only way of doing that is if we develop the capacity to activate generative social fields, to move toxic stakeholder relationships into a quality of interaction that's co-creative and generative. And the only way of doing that is if we have support structures that help us. I mean, that's the only thing we will learn in the past 80 years of change management. If you want to go through transformational change, you need a support structure. I call it here school for transformation because that support structure, particularly in its vertical, one of the transformation literacy or the vertical transformation literacy, that's precisely what's most missing in our current schools of our institutions of education. So the school for transformation that I think we need as a multi-local global infrastructure inside all universities today has to do with democratizing access to transformation literacy, democratizing access to our capacity to sense and actualize emerging future possibility. And that does require, if you build this infrastructure, it does require I think these six things that I try to describe a little bit. So that's, if I'm honest, right, based on my experience with what I have seen, that's something I have been living through firsthand. So that's kind of true, at least as far as my experience in my own journey, but also in working with institutions is concerned, and I'm looking forward to discuss that with the rest of you, how that resonates or what other, with your experience and what additional aspects you bring into the conversation based on the context that you're operating in. Otto, thank you so much. That was inspirational. I have a thousand questions, but I think if you have five minutes, can I read you some of the questions that our participants are asking and voting for? Sure, absolutely. No, I will stay on also for the later part of the conversation. Wonderful. So one of the questions that has received more votes says how to accelerate universities from the not-progress countries? From the not-progress countries? What does that mean? I have the same question as you. I wonder if it means from countries that do necessarily have the same advanced resources or so? Well, I mean, I think that, yeah, so that could have many connotations that are not progress countries, so you could read that in many ways, but I would say one of the, I mean, we all just are living through this moment, the 2020 moment, and so what used to be a special access only for a few people who live in a few places just got democratized a whole lot, right? So that's really great news. And so there's, in terms of the moving digital more, the positive side is this really the democratization in access and in the conversation. The downside, of course, is it's too flat. It's usually just, you know, here, right, in that box. But that's where we can actually do a lot. And a lot means infrastructure, kind of how to organize multi-local, how to really kind of blend the digital backbone with global ecosystem kind of live sessions with very personal, small, face-to-face groups and practices. And how to also link like a global ecosystem conversation with local place-based initiatives, right? How to mobilize in multi-local ways. I think we have been learning a lot and I think it allows us to, what hasn't happened yet is to integrate these innovations really fully into, let's say, kind of the university curriculum. And I think that is beginning to happen in places and that's exactly where this second operating system that you talk about, Julio and others talk about in the report is such an interesting concept because that's what we need. We cannot mainstream it from zero to a hundred. We need kind of these extra spaces where these new ways of operating are explored together. I think through what we have been the events of this year the playing field has been democratized a lot more than it used to be before. Yeah, definitely one could argue forever what does not progress mean but I think it has become clear that what we consider progress wasn't such when it comes to handling something like the example of the pandemic, right? Yeah, that's also true and it's also that I think there is a learning edge how we organize around ecosystems. There's a learning edge how we develop blended forms of kind of linking local, in-person, connectivity or regional with a global digital web of conversations that also may be quite personal. I think those are methods and tools that exist but that require a certain literacy in how you hold a space I think the whole concept of holding space that's also mentioned second operating system is of such importance because in many ways the conversations and the interactions need to be more systemic on the one hand relating to the real world challenges but they also need to be a lot more personal, right? It's kind of where the personal what is most personal is most systemic these days I think that's a line I once heard my colleague Peter Sengi saying and that's very true today and we can experience that in many places. Indeed, well thank you so much Otto I'm going to propose that we move into the panel because the next few questions I think could be addressed also by our colleagues in the panel so Otto has been mentioning the second operation system as well as the holding environment that are all described in more detail in chapter 4 of the report. Let me then ask Wendy Purcell to join us and to turn her camera on Wendy made a lot of contributions to the guide specifically to promote more this chapter and this theory of change so Wendy over to you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for inviting me along to the SDSN event I wanted to be here. I think the first thing I want to say is that higher education matters what we do here matters and I think never more so than now as we we battle these pandemics of COVID-19 and inequity in our society and I think in these times of volatility uncertainty complexity ambiguity so-called VUCA conditions the SDGs are a beacon to help guide our collective efforts and so with 17 goals and 169 targets I don't want to get lost in the detail rather what the SDGs represent the nearest thing we have to a strategy for the world the world where no one is left behind and their importance for me is their hyper dependent and interconnected nature of the SDGs where the economy and society are nested into the biosphere we can't have a thriving economy with prosperity for all or a healthy society based on a dead planet so looking at the SDGs and institutional transformation the key thing for me is to focus on what we do here our mission as universities and colleges as it relates to teaching learning research and innovation community service and engagement rather than something we add on to an already hectic schedule for faculty staff and students we need to use the SDGs as the lens through which we look at what we do here not something more to do we put on our SDG goggles and we look afresh at the teaching and learning we look again at our research and innovation and we look anew at our community service we need to integrate this higher purpose into the day job so it becomes just the way we do things around here we need to reframe the SDGs as a strategic agenda for higher education universities are full of people excited by problems seeking solutions pushing back the boundaries of knowledge and nurturing the next generation of leaders and scholars so embracing the SDGs is not something we impose on an academic community rather the goals can represent a call to action for faculty students and staff helping us reimagine our purpose and lead through uncertainty driving academic excellence and impact and helping sustain the institution in the face of disruption and global challenges all well and good you may say but how what does this look like really in this new agenda for the university where am I in this and this is where the SDSN's guide for universities colleges and tertiary and higher education institutions comes firmly into play the guide accelerating education for the SDGs is full of information for the sector about the what the why and the how today we're focusing on discussing the enabling infrastructure at the institutional level helping the university or college become transformed so that delivery against and fulfillment of the SDGs becomes part of our academic mission I was pleased to be involved in the development of the guide so let me turn to some practical examples and identify four ways to promote institutional transformation the first is how we can harness the incredible convening power of universities and colleges to bring faculty staff and students together with others from the communities we serve from civil society and business around a shared agenda embracing the concept of the living laboratory the second is through the development of programs and courses that bring together disciplines in novel ways to address the SDGs and equip our students with knowledge learning and skills for the 21st century actually I think the same is true for research problems where again the campus can be a living lab for societal inquiry and when I talk of interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary efforts this is not about dissolving so-called disciplinary silos it's not an anti-disciplines agenda it's about maintaining strong disciplinary communities who can then bring their unique perspectives around a problem this agenda must be driven by intellectual curiosity the third is by creating some sort of structural coordinating hub what we call in the guide a second operating system as Otto mentioned so this is there to support the university or college engage with the SDGs and promote radical collaboration this creates a meeting place for public private and plural organizations in the city wider region as well as globally and it enables innovation within established university systems as these as we know take time to change and finally the university needs to do this on its own terms and connect with its distinctive academic mission in this way it's locally rooted and globally connected to the SDGs and in doing so higher education needs to walk the talk deal with its carbon footprint, its impact investing its promotions criteria and so on this agenda needs to be baked in to the culture and become just the way we do things around here this global SDG agenda framed by the university or college and made personal thanks very much that was very inspirational and again thank you for your contribution to the guide I think we're going to move to the next speaker and move along the panel and then I'll ask all of you some questions so Lewis comes from a center in Canada that is very experienced in this transdisciplinary research we're very eager to hear from your experiences thank you so much Maria thanks for inviting us so I am Lewis Boulure executive director of the CIRAD we are a center located in the province of Quebec in Canada and we are a strategic cluster so this means that we basically group together 14 universities for colleges and our members are full professors who operate and teach in all of these institutions we have 95 members and at any given time between 200 and 300 students who gravitate within this academic ecosystem I feel like Wendy you set the table very well for discussing the way that we do things and so I'm going to move from a more theoretical level to maybe a more operational level so we have the word of organization in the name of our center and we have changed the mission of the center in 2019 when we were funded again by the Quebec research funds we are funded by the FRQNT for nature and technology and FRSC for Société culture and this is very atypical in the case of a strategic cluster and when we started the mission we decided to focus on societal transformation in a sustainable innovation way mobilizing transdisciplinarity and very early on Mohamed Cherrier who is the general director of the center focused on the SDGs and specifically on the agenda 2030 to guide the center's towards socio-economical progress and so very early on in the new life of our center we decided to become members of SDSN Canada to start attending the ICS the international conference at Columbia every year and we decided to that everything that we do would be guided by the SDGs therefore we have established a number of high-level strategic projects that we conduct every year and right now I'm going to talk to you about two strategic projects one of them which is in full swing and about to be published in December and the second one which will be deployed next summer so summer of 2021 is the definition of sustainable innovation sustainable innovation is something that we feel can be a guiding principle for research and development but also for the field and this is something that we felt needed a definition needed tools and needed orientations and this is exactly what we've been working on since last March we have a fantastic team of students who have been doing a literature review on this topic and we have a database that is based on different criteria to define sustainable innovation as it also pertains of course to the SDGs so very soon in December it's going to be published it's going to be published in French and we are considering doing a translation of the executive summary and so this is like one of the first core pieces that we felt would be one of the beacons of the center and we're very happy to be publishing it we've tested it out in an international summit about a week ago with different stakeholders and we're very much looking forward to having some feedback from maybe perhaps people who are here right now in this panel and so the second piece that I would like to talk to you about today is the summer school in societal transformation which will be deployed in the summer of 2021 and I feel like this project specifically addresses a lot of the social practice fields that Dr. Sharma evoked a couple of minutes ago and I think that it's something that ties into many different challenges that we are faced in terms of the operational system of the universities so this summer school we would like for it to be multi-stakeholder it's going to be targeted towards SDGs many of the SDGs which are of course interlinked but mostly the SDGs of cities and communities because the different components of the city is the key competencies in order to achieve the SDGs which are the new ways that students and change agents need to be equipped in order to change this operating system on the one hand the SDGs of course is a guiding principle in the context of cities and so the case studies the experts are going to be city based and the fact of the matter is that the summer school is a way to experiment with a new operational system for universities because the summer school is planned to be around key competencies that mobilize the different disciplines that are taught in the universities to bring them together in an experiential way in order for people to be able to sense the system on the one hand and try and co-create some solutions for the new world that wants to emerge we are not necessarily steeped in the theory you at the moment but we certainly believe in the schools and we absolutely believe that this is the kind of experimentation that has the potential to transform maybe in the midterm or longer term the way that sustainability is taught in universities and the way that this school is going to be evaluated and the way that this school is then going to be scaled is something that we are very much looking forward to after the first deployment because the different components that are going to be experimented with this school can then be lengthened or shortened, adapted to different realities to different sectors, to different organizations and maybe even perhaps have the power to modify, transform parts of the curriculum in different universities whether they be engineering schools or social and humanity schools we believe that this is a model that can then be spliced if we are talking in terms of DNA into different curriculums, different courses and different realities so these are the two main projects that I wanted to present to you but the SIRAD is also a center that has many other different projects and it has decided to transform itself from the first SIRAD which ended in 2019 to for us looking towards 2026 which will be the end of this cycle of funding and so the way that we've decided to transform ourselves is to transform our governance of course we have a direction committee we have a scientific committee in terms of co-creating a comité de orientation mixed so a mixed stakeholder committee bringing in actors from the field to co-govern the cluster with us, bringing in their knowledge bringing in their needs in a theory of change and this is something that's incredibly exciting and it's a time that we've experimented with this kind of governance and we're very much looking forward to seeing what the results of this co-governance is going to be I would also like to talk about the fact that as a cluster operating in many universities we have this unique point of view this bird's eye view of what is going on in these four different colleges in terms of not only sustainability but also the way that education and training is actually occurring and what we're actually trying to do is to be an organization that can add value to all of the institutions to all of the change agents that we're working with in the main different activity polls that we have and what we want to add value is by creating in partnership these different concepts and offering them as a gift to them so that they can implement them in their own organizations so in effect probably acting a little bit like this second layer that was discussed a little bit before there's a lot of different things that I could talk about but I would like to leave some time for the other speakers and also for questions thank you very much Thank you very much Luz we are indeed going to be moving to our next speaker Sara Mendelson that has been working on university voluntary reviews in Carnegie Mellon Sara, over to you Thank you so much there's so many remote meetings where I feel like we can still get our work done but this one I feel it's really a shame that we're not all together it has been incredibly inspirational I'll be brief, I want to talk about why the SDGs are appealing why they're especially urgent now what Carnegie Mellon has been doing a little bit about the voluntary university review and really to be humble about this this is very much a work in progress I'm sort of rifting a bit off of what Otto was speaking about and his experience in Berlin I want to tell you that I come to this as a political scientist, as a Russia specialist as somebody who's worked on democracy and human rights for 25 years plus somebody who spent five years in the Obama Administration four at the US Agency for International Development and was part of the team trying to get the SDGs launched and as an ambassador to the EchoSoc at the USUN when I left the Obama Administration I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do and SDGs and youth were really the things that were driving me in part because I came to this as somebody who'd worked on human rights and felt that human rights were under siege in many places and why was that and what needed to happen differently and listening to the other speakers this morning there are lots of paradigm shifts and there's a reason why in part it's been difficult on some level to get to really create an SDG movement and you all are part of this SDG movement and we hope that your friends and your neighbors and your family will soon also be a part of that the number one paradigm shift and why it's so important is a different conception of sustainability lots of colleagues think of sustainability only in the environmental context and this is about reducing inequality and creating peaceful, just and inclusive societies so yes it's about social justice and it is a non-partisan agenda but I would say it is political it is social, political, economic and environmental and again with this a lot of how we have discussed development in the past has been with a Cold War frame and this is a paradigm shift in that this is development happening everywhere so there's another paradigm shift of this applies domestically and the silos between what is domestic and what is foreign or foreign policy are eroding so development happens in Washington DC it happens in Kigali where Carnegie Mellon also has a campus in Doha where we have a campus and obviously in Pittsburgh so all of this is hugely relevant for right now the paradigm shift I'd like to see involved in both for our students but also for the way in which a lot of the work goes on is one in which listening and responding become absolutely paradigm and again if you're working in global development if you're working in community development that this would be paradigm but it is not how a lot of times the work happens and so trying to generate and grow a generation that is focused on local needs, listening and responding the co-creation that everybody's been talking about is really really fundamental at Carnegie Mellon just to be very practical and within a minute or two we've had a lot of senior support the provost of the university in the summer of 2019 after a lot of discussion within the university community got very excited about a sustainability initiative that was framed around the SDGs appointed a steering committee I'm a co-chair of the steering committee we meet weekly we just were presenting to the student affairs council at Carnegie Mellon there are three of us and we were joined by the person who created the voluntary local review for New York City the concept of VLR taking the VNR how countries communicate to the city level and then we adopted Alex Hinnaker joined us in January 2020 and we issued the voluntary university review for Carnegie Mellon in September 2020 it is an iterative process it looks at education, research and practice for Carnegie Mellon how we align it was a first effort it was done in the middle of a global pandemic and we have lots of challenges in terms of information systems and being able to capture everything that we've found we've launched this obviously at the beginning of the decade of action and our challenges are many including making sure people understand this is not the provost voluntary university review this is everybody's so being able to get everybody involved and understand that it is voluntary and it is a review the way in which people in general are talking about these things I want to end just by saying looking it back to the human rights piece one of the things that we're trying to do is create communities of practice using the SDGs so I'm in discussion with colleagues in different universities but also inside the university of how you would teach and train students interested in human rights differently using the SDGs so this goes beyond legal frameworks rooted hopefully in local conditions in the city and what's nice about I'm coming to you from Washington DC but Carnegie Mellon's main campus is in Pittsburgh and in Pittsburgh we're seeing this incredible ecosystem supporting the SDGs so with colleagues from the University of Pittsburgh we're exploring what this community of practice would be tomorrow the city of Pittsburgh is going to release their full review there are lots of stakeholders in Pittsburgh that are engaged in SDG work and so along with Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh, Chatham University the city of Pittsburgh, private sector local philanthropy it is a living lab and it is happening the challenge for us I think is really being able to show quite quickly what I call the SDG effect are people's lives improving their use, inequities and inequality in ways that deliver for everybody and that is our challenge so I'm going to end there and really look forward to a discussion thank you it's a great way to move into our final speaker Amelia from the University of Waterloo that has quite a bit of experience with living labs and creating these communities I'm going to start with Amelia thank you Maria really a pleasure to be here and it does follow very nicely from the last presentation so I'm going to talk to you about institutionalizing the SDGs at your universities I'm going to start by just opening by explaining a sustainability management system for a campus and then I'll use my university the University of Waterloo as a case not because we have it perfect by any means but just to show an example of how we institutionalize the SDGs so thinking about a campus sustainability management system some of you may be familiar with this concept already it's the same management system as you would see with an environmental management system and in fact many management systems work the same way so it starts with a policy at the university level then you make a plan to implement your policy so some kind of sustainability strategy or sustainability plan often with action plans underneath it then you implement then you check typically through sustainability reporting or perhaps through the voluntary reviews that Sarah was talking about and then you have oversight happening typically through a multi stakeholder committee campus wide and it's a cycle of continual improvement so now coming to the University of Waterloo we worked hard to create text for sustainability policy at the university which has since been adopted now by our board and by our senate so it's institutionalized as a policy and then we created an environmental sustainability strategy to implement that policy and this is where we started to embed the SDGs so within our environmental sustainability strategy we have content on education content on research on the operations, the various operations and on engagement I'll just give you an example here from the section on education where we've specifically called out the SDG target 4.6 by 2030 ensure all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development so within our strategy we have a number of goals and objectives and here's just one example of an objective in 2019 ensure undergraduate students from any program of study have the opportunity to learn about sustainability in their courses so I'm going to come back to that one but now we do an annual sustainability report which is where we document our progress on implementing that strategy and for example here you can see the section on teaching and learning which we've tied to four of the SDGs and you can see from the progress snapshot that 527 of our courses both graduate and undergraduate have sustainability within them. We're also in our sustainability report documenting our research in this space so we've looked at the research of all the professors and tied them to say which SDGs do these align with now implementing the strategy on some of the topic areas we've created action plans so here's an example on the energy and climate change goals where we created a very specific action plan on how the university will shift to be carbon neutral in other words net zero and so the shift neutral plan documents the pathways that we'll get there and the actions that we'll take to get there we have a multi stakeholder committee called the president's advisory committee on environmental sustainability now this committee is made up of faculty members, students staff and senior administrators and they oversee this entire process both the development of the strategy and the implementation of the strategy under this committee are various working groups and at their ad hoc so for example when we were creating the strategy we had a very specific academic working group that created the objectives one of which I read to you and then very consciously we disbanded that working group when it came to implementation and consciously chose to embed the implementation through the existing systems in the university but meanwhile for example in the energy one, the climate plan that I showed you we kept a working group there because there was a need for a multi stakeholder process separate from the existing systems at the university to create that plan and implement that plan so how are we ensuring that all students have access to sustainability well we've launched a new sustainability diploma that's available to any student at the university any undergraduate student it has one core course an online course that since we've launched it in spring 2019 has had 400 students register and then if they want the diploma they have to do another three electives one in environmental science one in social well-being and one in economic prosperity and there's a whole list of options from across campus that make this up now besides the formal curriculum systems there are a lot of other ways that we're embedding the SDGs into campus through the research institutes for example I've just chosen here to highlight our Waterloo Institute of Nanotechnology that uses the SDGs to report on their progress and here you see a poster from an event they're having just this month on nanotechnology for sustainable future student groups as well are embedding it the one I want to highlight here is the SDG impact alliance which is a student group that's actually working to network all of the other student clubs on campus and help them realize how they what they do aligns or could align with the SDGs we've built it into staff training so now staff have the opportunity to do professional development through a sustainability certificate and we've built it into our co-op work placements so University of Waterloo has about 20,000 undergrads in co-op programs and now what we're doing is we're assessing those work placements in relation to how they further the sustainable development calls so there are many more examples I could give you but really the point I want to make is the importance of institutionalizing this process so if your campus doesn't already have a policy if your campus doesn't already have a plan or strategy if you're not already reporting and if you don't have a multi-stakeholder committee these would be places I would suggest you start in order to create that vision for a sustainable future and ensure it gets implemented campus-wide and institutionalized campus-wide great, I'll end there, thank you thank you very much Emilia I'm going to ask all of the speakers to turn their cameras on I think I could not have agreed more with Sara this would have been a wonderful event altogether we could have done breakout rooms to discuss some of the details of this second operation system etc but we have to do with this and indeed the purpose of the guide was to create a community of university leaders interested in these topics that will be learning by doing and sharing these experiences so hopefully this is just the beginning and we will be able to meet together let me ask you the first question so how can faculty interested in teaching about sustainability and the SDGs and incorporating the SDGs throughout the curriculum do it when there is institutional indifference so I think this could be for all of you but perhaps Otto I could start with you because you were referring to this question I'm not sure I'm the most confident on that question I would just say you always need to go with where the energy is usually the energy is with the students and with very few faculties so that's one starting point and the other one is you want to understand you want to apply systems thinking you want to understand where the cracks so where is the old system and the old ways of operating creating results that are not acceptable or even in terms of the system the old logic so where is it that you would get really key support from leadership as well because this is a new challenge and the way we operate right now is producing results that are not acceptable for us understand the cracks of the old system understand where the energy is and align with the forces who already kind of want to do something in a new way I think those would be the directions and also leverage each other I think that's why the whole network is so great because I'm an innovator in my own place no one takes me seriously but if I can reference key initiatives from other universities or from other credible institutions then it creates some currency and that's how we need to work as a network that we reference to support each other and that's obviously another mechanism that can be used for there but I defer to others I think you're probably much more qualified to answer them I definitely agree that peer competition healthy peer competition is very helpful it's very helpful to be able to say oh but this university and this university and this other university are doing it I found at Carnegie Mellon a change in leadership was also a moment to generate new ideas so we had a new president in 2018 and then a new provost and that the STGs were helping to answer problems they were addressing they were built for this moment and that was helpful you're never going to bring everybody along but you don't necessarily need to bring everybody along you need to find the champions and then build out from there I'd add to that just to say that individual faculty have incredible agency and I think they often underestimate their creativity around being learning designers they're designing this learning journey that can happen you don't need a policy or some institutional kind of permission slip to be doing a lot of that you can pick up your own agency and I think engaging as Otto said with the students but also connecting with the professional bodies with the employers and thinking about that broader ecosystem in which you're operating so you can simply sit and have coffee with your curriculum team you can find like-minded people you can connect through to networks such as this but I think realizing your own agency as an individual change maker if you like within your classroom space to be a profound learning designer and embrace this agenda I feel maybe I can contribute in a very operational example out of Université Laval in Québec who is definitely a leader on the SDGs here in the province and this example relates to the faculty of medicine actually my colleague Daniel who is an expert on the key competencies of the SDGs had contacts at the faculty and he worked with two medical students in order to actually implement the key competencies and the SDGs within a number of courses at the faculty of medicine and together they've developed the concept of sustainable health related to one health at the international level it was a bottom up extracurricular activity for everyone but it has become a flagship for the university and it has become an example of the integration of the SDGs and the key competencies within an education program that is reputed to be absolutely rigorous and strict but they have been able to add this DNA to the faculty of medicine which is a great achievement I don't have much to add but I would say start with your own courses which you have control over and I would also say look to your disciplinary profession I'm in a business school and so the PRME is a great support system for us and I know that's true for many other disciplines as well where there's some really excellent thinking and that'll help legitimize it for your school if it's already happening at the disciplinary level there is one question about how can we ensure that local and indigenous wisdom and ownership are corporate and whether the SDGs are in danger of corporate capture do any of you feel inspired by this question? So Maria I missed the beginning of it but are we worried about the corporations using the SDGs? I did mention I'm in a business school so I see that business can be a force for good it doesn't mean they're only a force for good not at all but having the businesses align some of their products and services with helping deliver on the SDGs having them align some of their partnerships with helping deliver on the SDGs is the only way we're going to get to the implementation I absolutely think the private sector has to be part of the solution will they make money off it? Well their businesses and for profit is their mission it's a part of that but could they also have a social mission? Absolutely so I'm not saying that all businesses are good not at all but the private sector in my opinion has to be a fundamental part of implementing the SDGs I'll just build on Amelia's point with a very specific example 5.2, 8.7 and 16.2 are all about trafficking for 20 years we've had a paradigm that is focused on really prosecution to take this to a much more mainstream effort we need consumers we need young consumers demanding slave free goods so the private sector has potentially a huge role to play in delivering on 5.2, 8.7 and 16.2 A slightly different take on the question in terms of the corporate culture of a university if they can be such a thing but I think there is a danger if universities are kind of looking at this agenda if they're not being invitational, if they're telling their staff and students I think particularly faculty nobody likes to be told to do things and so I think as I emphasized in my opening comments that intellectual curiosity that sense of finding your own way towards this I think is really important so I understand the accountability and the audit culture and the measuring and weighing all of this but I do think that we must be cautious not to kind of drive out the passion really and drive out that intellectual curiosity which is really fueling this agenda within universities so that's just a little take on the corporate I think that's a very good point and it's also true for I mean that's something I also thought in reading the report so education for SDGs okay I mean the SDGs are not the end of wisdom I mean that's just going to work in progress there's a lot important things missing in the SDGs so I think it's selling education short because education is a lot more and that's why I started with Plutaric right so learning is about igniting the flame it's about learning to think learning how to communicate how to relate to the world to yourself it's about a much deeper process right activating the essence of our own humanity it's not just being useful for this or that agenda today we call it SDGs tomorrow we call it something else so I think there is a little bit so that really resonates with all also with me even though I think the SDGs are a good first step it's something it's a frame what we have let's use it but there's a lot missing right and basically everything transformational is missing there right so to the question that came up yes there's a big danger right and talk to John Elkington right the inventor of the treble bottom line he issued a recall because everyone is talking about sustainability and all the reports of the world and so on what's changing close to nothing right not the essence so that's why he issued the recall of that concept which is underlying everything SDG if you want right so the whole sustainability agenda I think it's a very important question and it's true that if we business needs to become a force for good but it's more than just you know issuing all these reports and doing all the right thing and saying all the right words and of course SDGs are at risk of you know being just used for that right more of the same so the question is really good and we should and it should be addressed and in the mode of dialogue together with the innovators and business because in business it's just the same like in our place which is it's work in progress in all these institutions and we need to align with the right kind of collaborators and partners I can maybe just address a little bit building on on what was just said thank you so much it was you all had like great interventions about business but I think we're missing the part on the indigenous perspective and I just want to preface by saying I'm not an expert in any kind of way on this topic I very humbly am trying to get informed on how the indigenous perspective can be put into context with sustainability and also with the SDGs and I think for you know to speak to what you just said Mr. Mr. Sharmer one of the pieces that's missing is exactly this this holistic view of the world because we had a number of meetings last year with some indigenous leaders in Canada mostly located in the social innovation ecosystem and what they were saying was that this is not the way that indigenous perspective thinks of things thinks of nature it's more of a one world view and not to have components and different parts and this is something that is a completely different paradigm which is something that we might consider to move towards to move from sustainability to thrive ability and flourishing and to be one and to have you know this continue with the open heart open mind open wisdom to have this holistic view not only of ourselves but also of the world and this is I think a way to move from the dualistic view of seeing the world to a holistic way of seeing the world and again I'm not an expert in any way and I hope that it's a dialogue that we can have with indigenous leaders in that sense and that maybe the agenda 2030 can eventually be reformed into something that is much more holistic colonize right our language around these things can only be found out together that's such a such an important point so we have several more questions that are just super interesting but we do need to give the floor to Julio so can I ask you all to give a sort of 30 seconds thought final thought so that we can close with just one part in thought from each of you. I'll kick off being shy yeah mine is really just to embrace things one is this sense of the kind of connected edgeless university that's embracing radical collaboration I think that's really where the convening power of the university this connectedness of the university and I think the second thing is being invitational I think Otto called on us to be humble in our listening and I think there is such an important part here around the humility that we adopt both with our students but with also within an institutional culture and that goes to how do we operate then within this and we talked about that second operating system and that takes humility to understand that there are different ways of doing things to be those radical change agents cohort 2030 the generation that will emerge over the next decade whatever we're able to do between now and then they will take this forward there will be I think probably something that follows the SDGs so investing now in this generation increasing that literacy is critical thank you I would say use your personal agency so think about your sphere of influence start with yourself is it your family do you have influence on your school how about the whole university what about your local community maybe it's the higher education sector so where where might you have influence and use that and leverage that influence to further the SDGs I might add to that that this pandemic is giving us a tremendous opportunity to look inside and to look at our society and to see where the the leverages where the opportunities are for transformation and I would add you know and this is from personal experience through this pandemic I think it's been I think transformational is certainly a word that we can that we can use for all of us and I know that for myself it has enabled me to look much deeper inside and to really focus on what I can do to be the change that I want to see in the world and I think that these words hold true in the work that we're all doing and I would add also that community and not just the communities where we live but also the community of practice the community of mindsets and the community of values that we can join that we can animate that we can activate are incredibly important to support this this personal and planetary community transformation that we really need. It's very well said and I think to do all these things that you all just summarize one maybe closing aspect that could be added is that at the end of the day we not only need new operating systems and new supporting structures and new learning environments we need a new idea of the university something that's moving from what in the classical university was thought of as the unity of research and teaching and then in the more modern or contemporary university has morphed into really unity of research teaching and application or a mass scaling of really practical skills to something that in the context of this century I think really needs to be updated in terms of integrating research learning information of society and self that's the core and that's why what we now call the secondary operating system at the end of the day needs to be the primary and so that's just but it will not happen from inside out it will happen by moving into these pockets of innovation and then wrapping learning environments around them and bring them back on campus and because these projects that are already going on they need to support structure and that's why societies have something called education and higher ed so that's why we maybe kind of that's something a real opportunity we have and updating to do what you all just summarize at the level of scale necessary today also requires us to update the very idea of the university in this century and I really love you for joining us today it has been really fascinating I'm going to ask Julio to briefly present the guide and while he's getting ready and we say goodbye to our phenomenal speakers I'm just going to let you all know that the table so the place that you were at before will stay open so you can get to meet each other there for the next half hour and we are also going to post an email address in case you want to send any suggestions or any experiences from your university or be in the loop for future events Julio over thank you so much Maria and thank you everyone I mean after these incredibly inspiring and amazing talk it's I cannot say anything so just only five minutes to present the guide we were talking about this and I just want to say that this is just a starting point so normally people think about the report as the end point of something where you present the conclusion some results but that's working progress so we just try to inspire here with some cases to empower universities and to bring some knowledge here to you to all every high education system that want to accelerate the implementation of the SDGs but this is only the first the starting point so what I would want to say is please try to let's work on on creating a community of people interested in implementing the SDGs and let's try to organize more of these discussions let's try to work at the local and regional level to find ways to collaborate Wendy talked about this radical collaboration so let's collaborate between ourselves and let's bring other stakeholders and collaborate at different levels so I would suggest you if you can to read this guide and come back to us with ideas to promote to create this community of people of practitioners of universities that want to really transform their systems to work to the implementation of the SDGs so I just want to say that as Otto said at the beginning the guide is organized in four chapters the first is about the why and we all agree about the importance of this the second is about the what we also agree and we know lots of studies that are interesting and the third chapter and the fourth chapter is about the how and that's the problem because probably we don't still know how to do that and that's why we organize today this session on how can we transform the universities and well the first chapter the why I won't go into the details second chapter as I said the what and third the how and when we talk about the how they said classical theory of change that could be implemented in university but the problem is that with the problems we are currently facing and the need for transformation is not possible to follow a classical theory of change and that's why we propose a different approach which is this second operating system where you can you know so and practice a new way of doing things and as Otto was also saying at the end then move from this second operating system to transform the first operating system and really change the university and as this is hard to even understand and to replicate or to work on this we showed this with through four cases one in Spain, one in Australia one in Malaysia and one in South Africa and just as also working progress and first steps on developing this second operating system and I want to end with Otto's six points because I think the operating system is about creating a space where you can work on these six concepts so bring people together to work in a different way create a place where you can work in this way organize practice fields partner with others like fostering partnerships creating pathways for transformation and implementing in reality this new pedagogy I love these three points of open mind, open heart and open will so create a second operating system in your university to foster curiosity compassion and courage and build from there transform the university from this second operating system because the only way to people to convince them is to practice this and to realize that that's possible and they can experience that it's possible to have this new university this reimagined university that we were talking about so that's it just at the end so that there are some case studies in the guide as well so we did an open call for cases we received more than 100 examples which were amazing and we selected around 50 to reference in the guide and there is a web page where you can read all the cases in more detail you have the QR code there as well if you want to just scan now and go to the page and let's start so go to the page read it and please come back to us with suggestions to stay in touch and to create this community thank you so much thank you Julio all right so thank you all for joining to our speakers but to all of our participants that have been so active on the chat throughout the session once again as Julio rated the objective is to create this community of practice the guide is a kickstart we are very humbled about what can the product itself and what we want is for you to evolve and in fact there is an online repository of case studies I think one of my colleagues has posted it in the chat so you will be hearing back from us because we will be organizing more events and we want indeed to learn from more case studies from around the world and for the next half hour the other room with all the tables is going to be open if you sit in a table you can turn on your camera and your microphone and just talk with the people in the same table share experiences and thoughts about today's session and we are once again thankful for having all of you and we will be in touch thank you so much