Sustainability Today
Thought leadership from ISSP members.
Sustainability ROI Workbook
The Sustainability ROI Workbook: Building Compelling Business Cases for Sustainability Initiatives is the third "book" in a series of publications by Bob Willard. Cleverly disguised as an Excel workbook, the comprehensive, fill-in-the-blanks Excel workbook is the e-book. To expedite its use by global legions of sustainability champions, it is a self-published, free, open-source resource. Others are encouraged to use it as a foundation on which to create additional tailored versions for specific sectors or users, for other technology platforms, in other languages, and in simpler formats. (Note that during the beta period, this e-book was entitled Sustainability Advantage Ultbook.)
Other valuable resources by Mr. Willard include: The New Sustainability Advantage (2012), The Sustainability Advantage (2002), The Future Fit Business Benchmark, The Sustainability Champion’s Guidebook, and The Next Sustainability Wave.
In addition, Mr. Willard is a contributing author to the ISSP-CSP Study Guide, writing about the business case for pursuing sustainability.
Regenerative Leadership
Regenerative Leadership: An Integral Theory for Transforming People and Organizations for Sustainability in Business, Education, and Community (2017) presents a research-based framework that goes beyond sustainability. This new theory emerged from a rigorous, systematic qualitative study of successful leaders in corporations, community agencies, governments, and institutions of higher education. The study’s major finding, shared by all of the participating sustainability leaders, is that we cannot create a prosperous, equitable, sustainable society by focusing on the behaviors that have led to our current and often combined environmental, social, and economic challenges. The conclusion of the research is that the dysfunctional behaviors that have given rise to these challenges are symptomatic of a deeper problem rooted in human consciousness, our inner operating system.
In response to this challenge, the Regenerative Leadership Framework, and the Regenerative Capacity Index that came after it, propose a practical approach to activating the critical `inner work' we must engage in as individuals, organizations, and communities in order ‘to redefine who we are so that we can redesign what we do’. Among other things, this inner mindset shift involves reconnecting to a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, to understanding systems, to developing a global ethics, to engaging multiple stakeholders more effectively, and to designing strategies that can help us transcend ingrained assumptions about how things work. The leaders who participated in the study have found that this shift in focus has allowed them to co-create new solutions to old problems, and to integrate their personal and professional lives in ways that have made it possible for them and their organizations to tread more lightly on the planet. For more information on this work, visit http://regenerativeorganizations.com.
A Behavioural Competency Model for Sustainability Leaders (2016)
Research findings suggest that Sustainability Leaders need a wide-ranging and divergent mix of behavioural competencies to be effective. Where leaders have more developed competencies, they are able to respond to sophisticated challenges in a way that others are not. This paper, authored by ISSP Member Beth Knight, and published by Cambridge University, provides insights into those behaviors. Download a copy of the research paper.
IEMA Special Report: Skills for A Sustainable Economy: Preparing for the Perfect Storm (2015)
ISSP is pleased to highlight the work of IEMA, its partner organization in the UK, and its Perfect Storm report, which highlights the need to improve the sustainability skills in organizations everywhere in order to make sustainability standard practice worldwide. This work dovetails with ISSP's creation of a Sustainability Professional Certification. Download a copy of the report.
