Leading in a Complex World

Leading in a Complex World

Develop the skills to think long-term, adapt to complex challenges, and build resilience in your leadership. Explore how to navigate sustainability dilemmas and create meaningful, lasting change in your organization and beyond.

Introduction

In an age of climate disruption and growing complexity, leadership must adapt to meet unprecedented challenges. Sustainability issues demand more than technical fixes; they call for rethinking systems, building partnerships, and reshaping business practices. This course, grounded in adaptive leadership theory, encourages you to tackle complex sustainability challenges with courage and purpose. Together, we will explore how leadership can address the profound impact of human actions on the organization, environment and society. By embracing long-term thinking, adaptability, and emotional resilience, you will learn to develop leadership practices that foster a sustainable and thriving future.

Content

This course invites you to explore leadership as a contextual and relational practice, focusing on mobilizing energy for development and navigating complex challenges that require learning, collaboration, and innovative solutions. Leadership is seen not as an individual trait but as a dynamic practice shaped by each situation. It requires asking difficult questions, challenging entrenched routines, and confronting privileges and loyalties that may no longer serve the broader purpose.

Through Leading in a Complex World, you will engage with practical tools, frameworks, and real-world examples to develop your capacity for long-term strategic thinking and innovation. The teaching combines short lectures, group exercises, reflexive conversations, and experiments in your own organizational context, creating a direct link between theory and practice. This approach enables you to foster meaningful, lasting value in addressing sustainability leadership challenges.

Key Benefits

After completing the course, you will have:

• Identified key sustainability challenges in your own context and a roadmap for addressing them

• Tangible tools to distinguish between and address adaptive vs. technical challenges in sustainability leadership

• Frameworks and capabilities to balance exploration (innovation and risk-taking) with exploitation (optimizing current resources) in your sustainability leadership practice

• A clear understanding of complexity in sustainability challenges and illustrative examples of how to engage with them in your context.