Advancing sustainability leadership by shifting relational ‘agreement structures’: a transformational higher education change program

ABSTRACT

Delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires leaders to navigate different fields and work across public, private, and plural sectors. Higher education (HE) is positioned uniquely to bring disciplines together and convene leaders from business, government, and civil society by designing customized learning encounters. Here we explore the creation and delivery of a change program for leaders concerned with the SDGs based on a framework for understanding and shifting underlying relationships – termed here, agreement structures.

Informed by meta-analysis of cases integrating social and technical innovations, an immersive personalized sustainability learning program was designed and offered in a university setting in summer 2019 in Spain.  Drawing from academia (students and faculty), business and local government, learning experiences were co-created to help shift the paradigm for creating change among people, place, and planet. Making explicit agreement structures influenced learning design and enabled the co-creation of a customized cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral program for leaders concerned with fulfilment of the SDGs.  Exploiting the unique convening and integrating power of HE, the SDGs provided a shared narrative around which the faculty could communicate and bring their unique perspectives to co-create the program.  Focused on accelerating multi-actor partnerships for delivery of the SDGs, the program focused on enabling a shift in underlying agreement structures necessary for local-global collaboration and transformation. The study describes a program that made conscious the relationships that need shifting to fulfil the SDGs and offers new insights to leverage the convening power of HE to contribute towards fulfilment of the SDGs.

KEYWORDS:

• University
• higher education
• sustainable development goals
• agreements
• transformational change

1 Introduction

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are fundamental to delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; United Nations General Assembly 2015), through their education, research and service activities and their ability to convene multiple stakeholders around a problem (Purcell et al. 2019). The SDGs require a deep set of capacities that extend beyond those of any one actor, whether government, business, or civil society. HEIs provide a perceived neutral space of trust, support for basic and applied research and innovation, education and training courses and programs, with long-term financing and deep relationships with public, private, and plural actors. This allows HEIs to convene diverse groups of people in the same space around a shared problem. This HEI capacity complements the policy and funding capacities of government, the scalable implementation abilities of business, and the depth and breadth of community engagement of civil society. The case study explored here examines the framework and practices of an educational program designed to be transformational co-developed by a global, multidisciplinary team of change agents. The program was co-created with participants drawn from organizations focused on the transformation required to achieve the SDGs and delivered in a university setting in Spain in the summer of 2019.

HEIs bring a unique set of capabilities and provide a contextual setting to examine four themes central to addressing the SDGs, namely: (1) understanding disruption and the global megatrends; (2) positioning the SDGs as systemic solutions; (3) the agency of self to take on the systemic SDGs, and (4) shifting economic, political, cultural and social relationships, termed here “agreements structures” to implement the systemic initiatives.

Agreements are supported by a structure akin to the infrastructure in a building; this structure determines flows and their direction for specific purposes, with structure having two parts, namely content and process. The content of an agreement consists of the rules that govern how self, and others behave in a relationship, and the process of how those rules are established (Ritchie-Dunham 2014a). The complexity of the SDGs, their underlying social, economic and environmental determinants, and the agreement structures in which they are embedded frame the “ask” of HE. Radical collaboration in the development of SDG-focused leadership programs is required to support transformation of social and technological innovation needed to meet the goals. Foundational learning concerning “sustainable self” addresses the need for a fundamental personal shift inherent in work to achieve the SDGs, recognizing the agency an individual has and the way scale is secured by individuals coming together around a shared purpose (Fritz 1989; Agazarian 1997). This exposes an individual’s own agreements, defined here as the set of economic, political, cultural, and social realities accepted consciously and/or unconsciously (Ritchie-Dunham 2014a). Once surfaced by individuals, people can come together in a group to create an “agreement field” (Ritchie-Dunham 2014b) to co-create a new shared reality. These agreements shape environmental and social systems that will need to be transformed to support the transformations necessary to fulfil the SDGs.

Previous research has explored, in different global settings, how groups can come together to make conscious the agreements operating within them so that they might then move to shift those agreements (Ritchie-Dunham and Rabbino 2001; Waddell 2003, 2018; Ritchie-Dunham 2014b). Shifting agreements exposes and changes the foundational assumptions needed to enable new ways of working together that are more impactful and can accelerate change (Waddock 2020b, 2020a). HEIs can contribute significantly to these shifts through their teaching/learning, research/innovation and service (Vorley and Nelles 2008; Purcell 2014; Trencher et al. 2014; Findler et al. 2019). Work with students, as the leaders of tomorrow, as well as executive education programs targeting the leaders of today, can support change agency. Research undertaken, exchanged and disseminated by HEIs can help create both the solutions and enabling societal infrastructure to support systemic change and organizational transformation (Kromydas 2017; Gonokami 2019; Purcell et al. 2019). Higher education programs can bring together unique combinations of teaching/learning and research with reflective practice and group work to design change programs that seek to shift fundamental agreements. Drawing on a breadth of disciplines from decision sciences and engineering, with natural and social sciences and systems thinking, learners are enabled to connect with and shift (social processes) fundamental to agreements structures (ecosynomics; Ritchie-Dunham 2014a; Muoio et al. 2015).

1.1 The SDGs and agreement structures

The member states of the United Nations (UN) adopted a set of goals (SDGs) in 2015, building upon the millennium development goals; the SDGs represent a shared global agenda for change (United Nations General Assembly 2015). The SDGs are of a scale and scope that humanity has not addressed before (United Nations General Assembly 2014) and represent a new frontier for collective human engagement. Despite concerted efforts to deliver against the SDGs, huge disparities persist across economic, social and environmental axes (United Nations General Assembly 2015; Sachs 2020). Humanity does not appear to know how to effect a paradigm shift across multiple axes at one time. This paper frames this worldview as a set of assumptions and interactions, or “agreements” (Muoio et al. 2015).

The 17 goals, represented by Agenda 2030, capture the desired outcomes through which the global community of local institutions and actors can address the megatrends of climate change, economic growth, and inequalities in health and education by fulfilling a suite of 169 target (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2020). The SDGs can be seen as bounding exploitation of human and earth systems (Raworth 2017). Meeting the goals demands a level of collaborative work that crosses traditional disciplinary, professional, and institutional boundaries (Horan, 2019).

The hyper-connected nature of the SDGs (Nilsson et al. 2016) calls for action across different axes simultaneously. Economic growth, health and educational disparities, and environmental impacts represent different dimensions of the interwoven fabric of the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. A major shift in one dimension can lead directly to a major shift in one or more of the others. Delivery of the SDGs will require a shift in fundamental agreements. SDG17, “Partnerships for the Goals”, recognizes this shift is needed and calls for greater cooperation across institutions and regions, with more and better multi-stakeholder partnerships (United Nations General Assembly 2015)

Global megatrends, from demography to technology, from geo-politics to pandemics are creating profound disruption at scale. Being locally rooted but globally connected, HEI’s future-facing activities of education and research are shaped by these trends, with universities pursuing distinctiveness strategies in response (Purcell 2014). More recently, HEIs are embracing the SDGs as a fuel for transformation internally, with new structures and programs of study and research emerging (Moreno-Serna et al. 2020). Universities and colleges are also transforming their external engagement strategies, becoming more connected to the community and wider society they serve (Purcell et al. 2019).

These massive shifts, their interdependence, and their global and local reach require a shift in leadership and innovation (Langer and Ritchie-Dunham 2014; Ritchie-Dunham 2014b). Most human structures for intervening in human-nature interactions express one of four modes, namely: people do things on their own; they coordinate activities with others; they pool resources to cooperate with others; and they collaborate in the same activity with others (Ritchie-Dunham 2014a). The success of these actions requires impacts at multiple levels: individual, organizational, local, regional, network, and global (Waddell 2005).

1.2 Sustainable self and shifting agreements structures for transformation

For a system to change, individuals need to change. Personal values, attitudes and beliefs need to be explored, with actions aligned to values, and the personal resilience and agility necessary to be a successful change agent with the capacities to co-host change with multiple stakeholders (Senge et al. 2008). To shift fundamental agreements, research and practice show that the strongest place to start is with personal experience (Cooperrider and Whitney 2005).

Change has to be more than purely intellectual; it needs to be also volitional and emotional.

The ability to change the systems one works in is a function of how one sees the world (Johnson-Laird 1983), how one interacts with others in it (Mathieu et al. 2000), and how one engages one’s contributions to it (Ritchie-Dunham et al. 2007). How one sees, interacts with, and engages in a system is driven by one’s own values, mental schemata, ability to see and engage others, and the accepted practices that guide those interactions. Successful social change works through these critical elements, starting with the individual, building to teams and the whole system (Senge et al. 2007). From social movements for gender and race rights to clean air and water acts, they have shifted what people see and how they interact within these systems, that is, they have shifted the agreements structures. Whether most of those agreements structures are conscious or not, at the global and local levels, they exist and they influence the behaviour of these systems (Granovetter 1985).

2 Methods

To generate a set of illustrative case studies for the new program, the global multi-disciplinary faculty team developed a set of selection criteria, namely that: the initiatives involved changing agreement structures; delivered against one or more of the SDGs; had a clear process with defined procedural and intermediate outcomes. Against these criteria, the team identified over a hundred change initiatives they had led or co-led in field research, sharing with the team documentation and published articles about these initiatives. To narrow the list down to a smaller set with wide applicability, the team added a criterion that the cases should reflect a diversity of scales/regions with agreement structures to shift. Using these criteria, ten illustrative case studies were determined as follows: two university-community partnerships (Spain, UK); four multi-community to state-level (two from the USA, with one from Ethiopia and Mexico), and four regional examples (three from the USA, one from Europe) (Table 1).

Table 1. Key features of the selected illustrative case studies.

Scale	Geographical Region	Group	Stakeholders Engaged	Agreement Structures to Shift
University-Community Partnership	Spain	Technical University of Madrid itdUPM	Faculty staff, and academic assets from across the university	From university-defined research, to creating a university center for social-environmental systems, built on close collaboration with city and national government, artists, researchers, and businesses
University-Community Partnership	UK	Plymouth University	Local community with regional and national business, government, civil society	From university- or city-led innovation to tactical, operational, strategic partnerships for innovation with growth, social inclusion, and sustainable development
Multi-community to State-Level	USA	Vermont Energy Action Network	Civil society, government, business across the state	Shift from zero to 100% renewable energy generated within the state by 2050, for electricity, heating, and transportation
Multi-community to State-Level	USA	Open Opportunity Massachusetts	Stakeholders across K-12 public education system	From independent initiatives to improving outcomes to a coordinated, systemic initiative for thriving for all students
Multi-community to State-Level	Ethiopia	Alianza Shire	Energy companies, multilateral and government agencies, and academy with local leaders	From aid dependency to energy access for refugees, through collaborative co-creation of regenerative capacities locally
Multi-community to State-Level	Mexico	Renewable Energies Program	Rural universities, local indigenous communities, global finance, academic innovation ecosystem design	From resource-poor dependency to resource-rich generation of renewable energies through rural innovation ecosystems
Regional	USA	RE-AMP	Eight midwestern states with 130 nonprofits and foundations	Eliminating greenhouse gas emissions in a multi-state region, through collaborative action on climate change and energy policy
Regional	USA	SIE Health Working Group	Leaders representing communities, patients, payment systems, foundations, insurance, national and state policy, and medicine	Collaborative to address the burden of chronic disease in vulnerable communities across the country, through health-care systems for prevention and treatment
Regional	USA	Cancer Free Economy	Working across medicine, market mechanisms, community engagement, and legal policy	National, systemic effort to rid the economy of carcinogenic toxins, in the short to long term
Regional	Europe	BUILD UPON	10,000 stakeholder groups in energy and building sectors across Europe	Engaging city-level stakeholder groups, across Europe, to dramatically scale building retrofits and energy efficiency

The team shared the lessons learned from the design and implementation of these ten cases, from which they developed a framework for transformational change through shifting agreement structures. The framework comprised four themes that were used to co-create a bespoke HE program offered to leaders drawn from academia (students and faculty), business, and local government. The immersive sustainability learning program sought to shift agreement structures among participants and enable the exploration of change through complex interactions among and between people, place, and planet. Briefly, the ingredient case studies are outlined here, followed by details of the framework with its four themes, with the HE program developed described.

The program was undertaken June 25–27, 2019 with the 50 participants selected from among the partner ecosystem of itdUPM. The composition of the group was faculty 26%, company managers 26%, innovation centre staff 18%, and university students 30%. These participants varied in terms of:

1. Professional status: This program was offered to students, professionals, and faculty members. Within the student participants, undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD levels were present. Professional participants came from big international enterprises (e.g. Telefonica, Iberdrola) as well as small consultancy firms. Faculty members (university teachers and researchers) came from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and Universidad Auténoma de Madrid (UAM). Innovation centres participants were members of itdUPM or Aguirre Lehendakaria Center (ALC).

2. Age: The age range of the participants was wide and ranged from early 20’s to over 70-years.

3. Multiple Disciplines: Participants were drawn from a wide range of disciplines and included, Industrial, Chemical, Mechanical/Agronomic Engineering, Architecture, Law, Psychology, Politic Sciences, Sustainability, Communication and Business Finance.

2.1 Illustrative case studies

The following ten case studies met the criteria. They were all initiatives that were complex, system-level projects being disrupted by global megatrends where innovative ways were being enacted by leadership seeking to engage resilient collaborative action for change that relied on shifting agreement structures.

2.1.1 University-community partnerships

Two case studies, one from the UK and the other from Spain, focused on complex, systemic change at the local community level delivered by the local university in partnership with regional and national actors from business, government, and civic society. Plymouth University, UK over the period 2007–2015 developed tactical, operational and strategic partnerships with the local community, regional business and innovation actors within the regional enterprise ecosystem to deliver growth and social inclusion in line with sustainable development (Purcell 2014). Examples include the creation of regional Innovation Centers, University Schools, Social Enterprise Hubs, and economic development initiatives such as its Growth Acceleration Innovation Network (Purcell 2019a, 2019b). The Technical University of Madrid (UPM) developed an internal “second operating system” to bring together faculty, staff and academic assets from across the university to create a Center for Innovation in Technology for Development (itdUPM; Moreno-Serna et al. 2020; SDSN, 2020). The centre enables the university to work closely with the city and national government, as well as local artists, researchers, and businesses to research, educate, and implement social-environmental systems interventions that engage the individual in their own agency, while changing the overall agreements structures. Examples include national discussion forums like “El Día Después”, large-scale art-research installations, and green-space designs (Moreno-Serna et al. 2020).

2.1.2 Multi-community to state-level

A set of four cases focused on multi-community to state-wide collaboration, namely: Vermont’s energy sovereignty; northern Ethiopia’s energy access for refugees; rural Mexican innovation ecosystems, and Massachusetts’ K-12 public education system.

The Energy Action Network in Vermont (USA) focuses on framing its agreement structures to convert Vermont’s energy infrastructure, in electricity, heating, and transportation, into 90% renewable by 2050, in ways that create a more just, thriving, and sustainable future for Vermonters (Colnes 2013). The unifying agreement underlying this work was that Vermonters needed the autonomy to decide their own energy future, which they did not at all when the process started. The network supports the interweaving of simultaneous shifts in policy and regulatory reform, public engagement, capital mobilization, and technology innovation, through collaborative efforts across the network.

‘Alianza Shire‘ is structured as a collaboration and innovation space, bringing together organizations from very different cultures and histories to improve energy access for people living in refugee camps in Northern Ethiopia. This includes the technical knowledge of leading energy companies, multilateral and government agencies focused on humanitarian aid for refugees, the itdUPM acting as the facilitative designer of the collaborative space, and local partners to support implementation. Alianza Shire started in the Adi-Harush refugee camp, and is now operating in four refugee camps and their respective host communities, developing energy access for refugees in northern Ethiopia (Rojo et al. 2017).

The Renewable Energies Program brought together rural universities and local Indigenous communities to address Mexico’s challenges of sustainable energy (Acuña et al. 2018). Indigenous communities in rural Mexico brought their local natural and social capital to engage in equitable ways with global systems. This included financial, social and environmental metrics, as well as intellectual capital. An ecosynomic analysis of these underlying agreements showed how participating faculty were able to integrate social, natural, intellectual, and economic capital in energy-innovation ecosystems within their communities, driving wealth creation for future generations. This initiative showed that large-scale initiatives addressing multiple SDGs could be developed and implemented by rural Indigenous communities and rural universities by democratizing access to expertise and financing (Acuña 2015; Acuña et al. 2018).

Open Opportunity-Massachusetts (OOMA) brings together stakeholders from across the K-12 education system in Massachusetts, USA to shift from 52% of its students scoring proficient or better on state comprehensive assessment exams to thriving for all students in the public system. The OOMA initiative started with a large-scale, strategic systems approach to identify collectively key advantage points for intervening in the system. To shift its agreements structures, OOMA created space to connect, coordinate, and align existing efforts across the education field. Through a network approach, OOMA connects grass tops with grassroots organizations while placing community expertise and leadership at the centre of improvement efforts (Open Opportunity — Massachusetts 2020).

2.1.3 Regional level

Four cases at the regional level highlight convening many stakeholder groups to create and then implement a long-term, network-based strategy for shifting the energy future of the US Midwest, the built environment across Europe, chronic disease in the USA, and a cancer-free economy in the USA.

RE-AMP is a regional initiative across the US Midwest (Mcleod Grant 2010) of eight states and includes 130 non-profits and foundations focused on eliminating greenhouse gas emissions in their region by 2050, through collaborative action on climate change and energy policy. For example, since 2003 the RE-AMP work has led to over 150 coal plants being slated for retirement (Carroll et al. 2018).

BUILD UPON is a European-level initiative focused on scaling building retrofits and energy efficiency by engaging city-level stakeholder groups across Europe in designing, implementing and achieving net-zero carbon buildings by 2050. Europe’s building stock accounts for 40% of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) (Nägeli et al. 2018). The BUILD UPON network of 10,000 stakeholder groups across Europe’s building and energy-efficiency sectors seeks to reduce by half the impact of Europe’s building stock on GHG emissions across all member states of the European Union. To achieve this shift requires deep collaboration, the first step being to agree on a deeper shared purpose for which the contribution of each stakeholder was necessary. The BUILD UPON leadership took up its own capacity building to explore and support the broader cross-sector network of leaders to reflect of their sustainable self, coming together to collaborate across 10,000 stakeholders (World Green Building Council 2016, 2020; Metcalf 2017; Ritchie-Dunham 2017).

The Social Impact Exchange Health Working Group, a national group of leaders across the USA health care system came together to address the burden of chronic disease in vulnerable communities, from the prevention and treatment perspectives of communities, patients, payment systems, insurance, national and state policy, and medicine. They considered the existing agreements structures were in part responsible for the increased burden, in years of life lost, of chronic disease in vulnerable communities of low and fixed income (Ritchie-Dunham and Rossides 0000). To shift these agreements structures, the group defined a shared purpose of choice in resilient health for everyone, towards which they are designing a unified strategy of high-leverage interventions to shift the agreements structures and resulting behaviours over the next generation (Goncalves et al. 2017).

The Cancer Free Economy network is a national effort to rid the USA economy of carcinogenic toxins. The initiative seeks “solutions that are broader and deeper than what we as individuals or organizations can accomplish by working in isolation. Together, we can move beyond small, incremental changes to transform the underlying mindsets and incentives that will encourage people to produce and use chemicals that do not make anyone, anywhere sick” (Cancer Free Economy Network 2020). The network extends across medicine, market mechanisms, community engagement, and legal policy levels. It is using systemic, collaborative processes to move towards their vision that “Within our generation, we will lift the burden of cancers and other diseases by driving a dramatic and equitable transition from toxic substances in our lives, communities, and economy to safe and healthy alternatives for all” (Cancer Free Economy Network 2019).

2.2 Framework and its four themes

From the ten case studies, combined with over a hundred other initiatives members of the team had led/co-led, a framework to understand and then shift underlying relationships (i.e. agreement structures) necessary to enact change at scale was defined that had four key themes, namely that (1) disruptions generated by global megatrends highlight significant differences between desired and actual levels of social and environmental outcomes, requiring systemic and systematic changes, for which (2) the SDGs provide a set of compelling and clear starting guidelines. This systemic change requires collaborative leadership, which research and practice show necessitates shifts in (3) individual commitments and mindsets, and in (4) agreement structures in an organization’s processes, structures, and values.

Collaborative “glocal” action requires leadership that is comfortable with complexity and ambiguity to deliver strategic systemic collaboration. The strategic systemic leadership approach defines the common impact people desire and the unique contributions that require that a group of stakeholders to work together to effect complex, systemic change (Ritchie-Dunham 2008; Ritchie-Dunham and Puente 2008). This approach requires resilient, collaborative agreements structures (Mcleod Grant 2010; Muoio et al. 2015).

2.2.1 Global megatrends

In each of the case studies, global megatrends create the disruptions that provided stimuli for change, with clear evidence for the difference between the desired levels of social and environmental outcomes and their current levels, on a global to local basis. The focus on the urgent needs to address the impact of these megatrends with interventions that work demand systemic and systematic approaches.

2.2.2 Sustainable development goals

With 191 UN Member States as signatories to the SDGs represents a global call to action reflected in most of the case studies featured here. Framing of the SDGs, with clear definitions and measurable outcomes, provides a clear starting point for engaging individuals in taking up collaborative systemic projects seeking solutions. Using the lens of the SDGs, these collaborative initiatives reflect social and technical innovations to address the global megatrends on a local basis (Purcell and Lumbreras 2021).

2.2.3 Sustainable self

The framework highlights the requirement of individual change for systems change. The individual is only capable of experiencing, perceiving, inviting, and engaging a world that the individual is capable of inhabiting, authentically (Agazarian 1997). A different, more collaborative world requires different, more collaborative individuals. This “sustainable self” calls for an alignment of values with actions, of perception and experience with worldviews. To be successful change agents, collaborative leaders must develop personal resilience and agility, along with the capacity to co-host others in a space that supports emergent co-creation. Co-hosting relies on the ability to discover and connect individuals to a deeper shared purpose, as a group, seeking the unique contributions each individual perspective brings to that purpose. This ability requires engaging and respectfully inquiring into what each individual experiences, sees, and holds as their truth, their sustainable self. The co-hosting process requires a capacity to hold the tension between the certainty of finding the group’s purpose and contributions with the uncertainty of what it is, trusting in the process while working through the tension (Gantt and Agazarian 2005).

2.2.4 Agreement structure and shifting agreements

In large-systems change efforts, most fail at: (1) bringing together the stakeholders critical to the core dynamics of the problem, the required shift; (2) getting the stakeholders involved to agree on a guiding purpose, vision for an outcome, or the core dynamics generating the problem; and (3) aligning the actions of the involved stakeholders to shift what they each do, in coordination with the others, to substantially shift the core dynamics together (Table 2). Frameworks that have succeeded in all three have focused on creating an innovation ecosystem with the requisite set of stakeholders critical to shifting the core dynamics of the problem, who can work together to generate coordinated technical and social innovations within the same system at the same time (Lundvall 1985; Acuña et al. 2018). These frameworks focus on a process that develops a deeper purpose that unites the stakeholders, engaging them in an inquiry that requires their differences in worldview and capacities to be front and centre in the innovative solutions they co-develop, test, and evolve together over time (Muoio et al. 2015; Ritchie-Dunham 2023).

Table 2. Taxonomy of agreements relevant to partnering.

Agreement Structure	Observable Dimensions	Impact on Partnership Effectiveness	Case Study
Purpose (organizing principle)	Existence and clarity of deeper shared purpose	Most initiatives contain groups at cross purposes, each with their own agenda. When asking why they do what they do, eliciting and naming a deeper, shared purpose unites these separate agendas, showing how they combine into something deeper that animates what each perspective brings to the initiative, and finds a common, deeper purpose they share.	BUILD UPON united efforts of 10,000 stakeholders around a shared purpose of dramatically improving the environment, health, and economic opportunities, at the local level, across Europe.
Engagement	Commitment to purpose, connecting with requisite perspectives	Connecting the requisite perspectives to a shared purpose, through a process of respectful, collective inquiry increases the effectiveness and efficiency of commitment, interaction, sharing, and synergies.	Through this process, the Vermont Energy Action Network succeeded in defining a pathway together, across often conflicted partners, from 0% to 100% control of their shared energy future.
Transformation	Ability to learn and adapt, towards more efficient and effective interventions	The partnership has learning structures and processes in place to adapt to what it is learning, across the different perspectives together, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the partnership.	RE-AMP has built a collaborative, long-term learning structure, through which it adjusted to achieve its medium-term goals, and then pivoted to longer-term goals once those were achieved.
Transferring	Intended recipients of the work want what is offered, and they want it in the form it is offered	The partnership builds processes and structures where the intended recipients are integrally involved throughout the design, implementation, and assessment phases.	Alianza Shire co-designed the initiative with the energy companies, aid agencies, and refugee-camp leaders, ensuring that they wanted and could use what was developed

Leadership therefore comprises the cohosting, connecting people to a deeper shared purpose and to the unique contributions each brings, then seeing what set of perspectives they perceive as possible, can agree on as probable, and collectively committing to contribute their unique gifts, accesses, and capacities. These leadership challenges require integrating social and technical innovation, through research, teaching, and practice, representing adaptive leadership challenges (Heifetz & Linksky, 2002) where higher education can make a unique contribution.

2.3 Program design

The framework and its four themes determined the design of the program design and its research-led approach. The program itself was also part of the team’s research inquiry into the field, with ongoing engagement to determine longer-term impact. The interdisciplinarity required to address the SDGs was exemplified by the integrative nature of the program design. This started with the integration of faculty representing disciplines critical to understanding and designing research and interventions that can address the SDGs, such as biology, decision sciences, economics, ecosynomics, engineering, environmental health, social processes, and systems sciences. The SDGs provided a shared narrative around which the faculty could communicate and bring their unique perspectives to co-create a program focused on accelerating multi-actor partnerships for delivery of the SDGs. The resultant program represented an integration of disciplinary materials woven into a seamless articulation of change agency.

This course drew on field research led across the ten case studies, engaging participants through a series of thematic “reality labs” (see Figure 1). In its design, the team used feedback that each faculty member had received from students in previous classes and leaders involved in the field research. In the process of delivering the course, feedback for this design was solicited from participants, in effect co-designing shifts in the course. Feedback was also solicited through a survey afterwards, to inform its next iteration.

Figure 1. Road map of thematic sessions and reality labs].

1. Global Megatrends. Participants contextualized change by reference to global megatrends and global risks, situating change across societal, economic and environmental axes.

2. SDGs. Participants defined a sustainable development issue they were concerned about and described some technical and social innovations they knew of in the system that contextualized the issue. They described how a systemic strategy might add value to the innovation processes necessary to co-create solution(s).

3. Sustainable Self. Through a series of self-assessment exercises, participants reflected with others and journaled their learning insights. Participants led an exercise in co-hosting another’s contributions, with others in the group observing and giving feedback on each other’s co-hosting leadership. The participants then explored basic elements of agreements, and how to see them and choose them in everyday life, with the implications for those shifts.

4. Agreements Structures and Shifting Agreements. Participants described agreement structures in a system they were concerned with, identifying the key elements in those agreements structures. They considered what could be done now, in one-year and in five-years to close the gap and then examined how this was different from their current efforts.

Each thematic session began with a critical dialogue with the participants about the key themes and processes to be explored in that session. Following the principles of appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider and Whitney 2005), the participants were grounded in their own reality, connected with what they already knew, and invited to reflect alone and then in small groups on their own experience around the theme and process. Participants were asked to “Describe basic agreements you have seen change, that you have been part of changing. What do you know to be true about possible shifts in agreements structures, from your own experience? What are some of the common and unique elements we see across these experiences?”

The group then collectively inquired into these experiences, what was unique and what was perhaps a shared understanding. The learners then applied this understanding, through exercises, to a change agency project they were concerned with. The whole group debriefed these exercises, seeing what questions these exercises opened up, building up the next theme to be explored. This dynamic was repeated with each theme over the course of the program.

In addition, some “reality labs” were held. These sessions consisted of workshop or experiential activities aimed to discuss with their protagonists, opened to incoming guests (other students, faculty, public officials). The reality labs included an evaluation session of the itdUPM Massive Online Open Course “SDGs: the Unavoidable Transformation”,¹ a workshop to analyse the Alianza Shire² partnership and a guided visit to Ecovisionarios,³ an international exhibition of modern art framed in climate change challenges.

3 Results and discussion

Higher education has a critical role to play in achieving the SDGs. Traditional approaches to “Education for Sustainable Development” (ESD) (Egana Del Sol 2019; UNESCO 2020) have typically emerged from the environmental sciences, with a focus on technological innovation. On occasion, the liberal arts have been added to support reflections on policy needs and social innovation. We support that the new term proposed by the SDSN of “Education for the SDGs” (EDSG) better reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the education required (SDSN, 2020). To ESD’s traditional focus on technological innovation, ESDG adds a focus on the interdisciplinary integration of fundamental technological and social transformation, in concert with leadership for sustainability, a key enabler of change at scale (Purcell et al. 2019; Waddock 2020b).

Here, a framework derived from a suite of change agency projects relating to the SDGS was used to inform program design, using its four thematic lenses to support the personal and professional development of change agents drawn from multiple sectors in working together. In the manner of a “living laboratory” (Wulf 1993; Evans et al. 2015; Purcell et al. 2019), the program modelled cross-sector multi-disciplinary approaches to change and focused on enabling a shift in underlying agreements necessary for generous collaboration. We have already shown that such approaches yield significant impact in terms of collaboration towards delivery of the SDGs (Acuña et al. 2018; Purcell et al. 2019).

Faculty requested individual and group input and reflections from the participants, and from each other, throughout the course. The faculty integrated this input into shifts in the course design, during the course, in effect interactively co-designing parts of the program with the participants. Feedback, for the next iteration of the course, was requested after the course, using an online survey. Feedback from participants suggests that the course was impactful in two main ways: first, from the content and structure point of view and, second because of the individual’s self-reported growth experience. The course content drew on real cases and experiences from reality labs.

From the personal experience perspective, in reviewing exercises performed during the last day, participants highlighted the collaboration activities that led to the listening and empathy experience that was fostered by the course designers. These attitudes of listening and empathy were critical for the co-creation of the course content and the shift in agreement structures necessary for personal and professional growth. At the end of the course, participants were asked to select a word to describe the experience, and the outcome included concepts related to integration, dialogue, collaboration, resilience and ethics. Altogether, the participants described the experience with the following phrase “If we are continuously changing, we need to invent new structures, new processes, and new words”.

In addition, this course was a tipping point in the relationship among the organizers and participants. From the UPM perspective, it was an opportunity to pilot a new summer school approach connected with sustainability challenges, oriented to experiential courses, and designed and implemented in collaboration with Harvard University. Regarding the organizing units (itdUPM, SDG Group at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and ISC), this experience fostered a set of collaborative initiatives in supporting and advising new multi-stakeholder projects such as “El Día Despues”,⁴ the development of the SDSN education guide “Accelerating Education for the SDGs in Universities: A guide for universities, colleges, and tertiary and higher education institutions”,⁵ and participation in the UPM Seminar “University-City Collaboration Models for Climate Neutrality”.⁶ Besides, this collaboration led to joint scientific papers (see Moreno-Serna et al. 2020, 2020) and a doctoral stay of an UPM research at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

An important outcome of the course was a shared understanding about the need of adaptive leadership and agreement making was created among participants. Thus, leadership and agreement making are not framed simply as a property of individuals. This was expressed in the feedback course session and materialized in some recent multi-stakeholder initiatives fostered by itdUPM as “El Día Después” or ‘Madrid Clean and Healthy City Demonstrator⁷ that most of the course’s participants have joined as partners. From the initial program, the team has since expanded into new collaborations (i.e. new courses on abundance-based leadership, new research assessments of emerging, COVID-driven explorations, and assessments of local collaborative networks in Madrid), as well as collaboration on continuing initiatives in Harvard’s environmental health and SDG Solutions Group.

Together with course participants, faculty reflected on lessons learned. Firstly, the diversity of students and the opportunity to work on real cases provided by participants were key. Secondly, a balance needed to be struck between inspiring master classes and the emergent work of the class. And, finally, space needed to be created and curated in the program to ensure the rich lived experience of the participants could emerge and inform the collective sense of purpose. In these ways, the program focused on realizing and then potentially shifting agreement structures by creating the conditions to make conscious the agreements and then shift them for greater impact and resilience. This was achieved within this cohort by practicing, in a living-lab classroom, their ability to:

1. Clarify their individual and collective values and intentions.

2. Identify the gap between global megatrends and the desired outcomes, expressed in their values.

3. Frame possible interventions.

4. Take sovereignty for the possibility of change through self-agency.

5. See how to design specific, collaborative interventions.

6. Support shifts in the agreements structures that enable scalable collaborative networks.

The development of the program highlights the need for future research on pedagogic and curriculum development focused on change agency and agreement structures. In particular, exploring the agreement structures underlying (1) traditional organizational initiatives to address systemic issues, and those underlying (2) collaborative initiatives. What structures might unite the principles of collaborative, social and technological innovation at the local level, across the globe? There is great promise in bringing diverse stakeholders together to address deep, systemic issues, from the local to the global level. However, more attention needs to be paid to the curation of such convenings and the facilitation and holding of the dialogue and action planning that emerges.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the Garfield Foundation for supporting the Institute for Strategic Clarity’s CHOICE program, which is developing the agreements structures for collaborative networks. The Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard brought the global, multi-disciplinary team together, under Julio Lumbreras’ leadership.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The authors are pleased to share, by request, non-confidential non-personnel data with academic parties seeking to further research inquiry in the field.

Notes

1. http://www.itd.upm.es/cursoODS/.

2. http://www.itd.upm.es/alianzashire/.

3. https://www.mataderomadrid.org/en/schedule/eco-visionaries.

4. https://diadespues.org/.

5. https://resources.unsdsn.org/accelerating-education-for-the-sdgs-in-universities-a-guide-for-universities-colleges-and-tertiary-and-higher-education-institutions.

6. https://eventos.upm.es/58031/detail/university-city-collaboration-models-for-climate-neutrality.html.

7. https://www.climate-kic.org/community/madrid-a-city-turning-eco-fictions-into-eco-futures-through-systems-innovation/.