Leadership for sustainability requires the courage to fail. It requires opportunistically responding to unpredictable black-swan events. It requires acting without perfect information. Leaders help create direction, alignment and commitment among a diverse group of well (and sometimes not well) intentioned stakeholders without fully knowing where things will end up. Leaders help stakeholders deploy strategies to change systems in ways that matter to those stakeholders. Leaders, therefore, don’t need magical insights into the future stakeholders are creating, instead they have the courage to help stakeholders define and create that future.
More often then not, leadership comes from stakeholders. Accept and embrace your responsibility for leadership. Leadership happens by starting from where you are. You lead by assisting or resisting the future being created by the system in which you are embedded. Everybody can lead from where they are. Target a system you care about and in which you are embedded. Use and build your personal expertise and network. Identify the stakeholders invested in that system. They dwell in multiple sectors, at different organizational scales, possessing a range of power and influence. Stakeholders can be individuals, teams, organizations, partnerships, coalitions, and even institutions. Identify the strategies they are using to affect change, and the strategies they are neglecting. Help stakeholders find direction about the type of change they want. Help them align their resources towards its resolution. And help them build commitment for implementing and learning from the strategies they deploy. Learn to hear and to trust others and to respect their differences. Then have the courage to act, fail, innovate, and try again. Most importantly, have the courage to try again.