Structured Comprehension for Systems Thinking, Learning and Leadership towards Sustainability

The Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) Karlskrona, Sweden, will begin a new Master’s programme focusing on sustainable development in September 2004. The programme is intended to contribute to a growing international network of sustainability practitioners, including early and mid-career professionals, resource managers, executives and political decision-makers. As with many programmes of this type, this one will require coverage of numerous complex economic, social and ecological issues. In so doing, it will cover a number of interrelated disciplines concepts and tools (e.g. environmental science, system dynamics, public policy, business strategies, corporate social responsibility, dematerialization and ‘green technologies’). Various sectors of the sustainability arena will also be studied including agriculture, transportation, health, energy and product development. To deal with the high complexity inherent in sustainable development, we intend to test the enhanced learning capabilities of three unique and interrelated aspects of this Master’s programme including: (1) a structured comprehension of sustainable development, using “Backcasting from Basic Socio-Ecological Principles of Sustainability”; (2) free creativity within basic constraints established by the structured comprehension and (3) a learning process that ‘walks the talk’ with respect to free creativity within basic constraints. Recognizing that “society within the biosphere” is inherently a complex system, the programme will revolve around a generic, structured model for planning and decisionmaking in any complex system. The model is adaptable to any system at any scale – e.g. an organization, a football game, and in this case, “society in the biosphere”. The programme distinguishes five essential system levels including: (i) the system; (ii) success; (iii) strategy; (iv) actions and (v) tools. Second, a structured comprehension, anchored to basic principles at the success level – the ‘trunk and branches of sustainability’ – allows for and promotes free creativity on actions in a particular context – the ‘leaves’. Third, the students will be exposed to a learning process of creative use of actions and tools that the model allows for in any organization – sharing the basic trunk and branches and practicing free creativity amongst the leaves. The programme’s learning process will facilitate a systematic approach to analysis of all kinds of current sectors and problem areas through envisioning of solutions and finding strategic paths of actions and tools towards sustainable outcomes within those sectors. It will culminate in a thesis, following the same general structure, during the last-half of the programme