At the Royal Roads Climate Action Week last month, I engaged with my peers on my experience in Values-Based Leadership courses, I learned about transition leadership and I reflected on Indigenous rights and how decolonization is a climate solution. These learnings have led me to realize that I need to revise my leadership plan to expand my goal on continuous learning. The original version of this goal is focussed on improving my climate action leadership knowledge and competencies via tangible actions such as completing my Masters degree, finding new employment where I can work full-time on climate action, and making new connections with Indigenous leaders and knowledge keepers to learn more about how to inspire decolonization action as a climate solution. Although these actions have, and continue to, improved my leadership competencies, my learning goal needs to be enhanced to focus on continual growth and evolution of self as an essential part of climate leadership. I can do this in three ways:

1. commit to following through on all four stages of the emergent learning process as a way to make transformational changes in my ability take responsibility for my role in my world; 
2. to develop my transitional leadership capacities and dispositions to become a leader that can guide others through change, inspiring a shift from the dominant culture to an emergent culture; and
3. to tap into my emotions to lead with heart as a way to speed up action and bring awareness to decolonization action as a solution to the climate crisis.

In Values-Based Leadership 510, we studied the Theory of Emergent Learning by Marilyn Taylor (2011), which explains how leaders can transform themselves into better values-based leaders by making the most out of situations that create shock or surprise, such as a conflict at work or a personal crisis. The theory involves four stages of learning. Often people get stuck in Phase 1, the Red Zone of Disorientation, where they are confused and worried about the conflict. However, by maintaining a commitment to engage in unfamiliarity and learning through uncertainty, we can enter Phase 2, the Green Zone of Exploration. Here, we rely on our intuition and trust ourselves and the process. Even if we do not comprehend why the shock happened, we start to wonder whether we can learn from the experience. This curiosity and commitment to learning is what allows movement into Phase 3, the Purple Zone of Transformation, where we research why it happened. We put language around the experience as it relates to our own values, allowing us to reframe the shock as a transformational learning. Here we feel confidence and satisfaction, allowing further transition into Phase 4, the Blue Zone of Equilibrium where our new learning is tested with credible others, and this shared awareness leads to a strong sense of connectedness with them. The commitment to trusting the process and to learning in hard times results in groundbreaking major insights; it allows us to take responsibility for our relationship with the world and to see a whole “new world” (Taylor, 2011, p. 76).

In the Climate Action Leadership Accelerator workshop conducted by Solvable Climate, we learned about the Three Horizons Framework by Sharpe et. al (2016). This framework can be used to explain three potential climate futures: business as usual (continuing to burn fossil fuels) or the dominant culture; disruptive innovations such as new technology that does not quite solve the root problem e.g. electric cars, and the emerging future, or the desired vision with an emergent culture (see Figure 1). As a climate action leader, my vision for the future includes a new culture of decolonization and more people committing to Indigenous worldview. To get there, I must grow my transition leadership capacities and dispositions to guide others through change and towards that future. Some of the key capacities that I want to work on include:

• Pluriversality – the “disposition to envision alternative paradigms in which many worlds fit” and to create comfort about the unknown (Solvable, 2023);
• Hospicing – the “capacity to evaluate and compest what no longer serves, helping it to die well while cultivating the space for something different to emerge (Sovable, 2023);” and
• Self-Responsibility – the “capacity to understand psychological blindspots and the complexities of self: denials, resistance patterns, honest and self-implicating critique, while attending with integrity to the process for change” (Sovable, 2023). I had the pleasure of partnering with Jasmine Feather Dionne during this workshop; she helped me understand how Indigenous students are especially inclined to this capacity, because they acknowledge their responsibilities to local Nations in a compassionate way (J. Dionne, personal communication, 2023). My goal would be to learn more about this capacity from an Indigenous worldview in order to help non-Indigenous people move from a place of entitlement to compassion through self-responsibility. 

To grow my transition dispositions, I will practice attending to them and looking for examples of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous leaders that demonstrate them well. I also plan to read Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (2021), as recommended by my cohort mates.  

Figure 1: Three Horizons Framework by Bill Sharpe (Luc Hoffmann Institute, 2020, 3:00)

Sheila Watt-Coultier, an Inuit woman from Nunavik, encourages heart-centred leadership because, “change will happen at the speed of empathy” and “we can’t think our way out of this problem, we are going to have to feel our way out of it” (Future Pathways, n.d., 28:00). She explains that the transformational change required starts with women, because we are able to embrace our emotions and teach a more sustainable way. She encourages us to honor those places in ourselves and “reimagine a new way forward with intention” (Future Pathways, n.d., 26:00). This need for a society-wide change of heart was also identified by the Elders at the Onjisay Aki Summit on climate change in 2016, when they called for a “change of the heart, rooted in the spirit” (Cameron, Courchene, Ijaz and Mauro, 2021). My new goal is to feel free to share my emotions when communicating about climate impact to encourage others to do the same, to intentionally speed up the implementation of climate solutions built on empathy. Ideally, these efforts will influence others, as I explain in my change of heart blog. 

My overall climate action leadership goal is to use my voice to transform others so that our children’s children can not only survive the climate crisis, but thrive as part of a more inclusive, healthy society and healthy ecosystem. With my commitment to emergent learning, transition leadership and heart-centered leadership I can continue to grow my climate leadership capacity. This focus on changing myself, can help change others. As author Marianne Williamson (2013) so eloquently states, “personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.”

References

Cameron, L., Courchene, D., Ijaz, S. and Mauro, I. (2021). ‘A change of heart’: Indigenous perspectives from the Onjisay Aki Summit on climate change. Climatic Change, 164(43). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03000-8.

Future Pathways. (n.d.). Fireside Chats. Sheila Watt-Cloutier. Cold North, Warm Heart: Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s Activism for Culture and Climate Justice Above the Tree-Line. 

https://www.firesidechats.ca/video/sheila-watt-cloutier#:~:text=%E2%80%9CAn%20outrage%20can%20really%20mobilize,of%20trust%2C%E2%80%9D%20she%20shares.

Luc Hoffman Institute. (2020). Three Horizons Thinking with Nigel Topping, CEO, We Mean Business economic opportunity through bold climate action [Video}. YouTube.

Sharpe, B., A. Hodgson, G. Leicester, A. Lyon, and I. Fazey. (2016). Three horizons: a pathways practice for transformation. Ecology and Society, 21(2):47.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08388-210247

Solvable. (2023). Transition Leadership Capacities & DIspositions [workshop handout]. Climate Action leadership Accelerator. Royal Roads University. 

Taylor, M. (2011). Emergent Learning for Wisdom. Palgrave Macmillan. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/royalroads-ebooks/detail.action?docID=686655
Williamson, M. (2013). Illuminata. Random House. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/191323/illuminata-by-marianne-williamson/9780307833259/excerpt#:~:text=Personal%20transformation%20can%20and%20does,is%20ultimately%20a%20personal%20one.