SWoN Training Series
3-Month Acceleration Program towards Sustainability-as-the-World-Needs (SWoN)
Cohort 3 dates will be announced by the end of November 2024.
Cohort 2 is now in progress: September 10 - December 10, 2024.
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Were you looking for our bite-sized training options instead?
What You’ve Been
Up Against
You see the gap and feel the frustration:
Attaining real-world sustainability outcomes (a liveable future and a just present for all) commands an immediate, radical systems change.
Yet much of our jobs amounts to protecting, growing and green-washing business-as-usual.
You want to step up and act for radical change - while still making a living.
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You’re tasked with nudging or green-washing the core business, without the mandate or authority to truly address its lack of sustainability.
You sense you’re wasting time while it’s “now or never”, and feel moral injury, frustration, rage.
You know a systems change is necessary for attaining real-world sustainability outcomes. But engaging and motivating the C-Suite & the Board to take on radical action has been proving hard.
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Your clients are preoccupied with compliance and public disclosures, but you know a systems change is necessary for attaining real-world sustainability outcomes.
You might lack the required arguments to advocate for radical, transformative action or feel uncertain about having the confidence, authority, or influence to challenge key decision-makers.
You might also find it challenging to navigate potential defensive or emotional responses, which can make these situations difficult to handle.
You feel torn between making a living and doing what the world needs.
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You’re increasingly aware of the polycrisis and its dire forecast for the world, and see the necessity of an authentic, swift, radical sustainability transformation. But you sense you don’t understand the issues well enough and/or do not have a toolkit to affect change within your organisation. The pressure to grow business-as-usual torments you with cognitive dissonance.
Read more about who the Series is intended for.
Our Offering
A highly outcome-oriented Training Series designed to upgrade your ability to show up to our global predicament: by learning to gain access to, influence and begin mobilising C-Suites and Boards towards radical transformation and co-orchestration of a systems change.
Read more about our theory of change.
Attending the 3-Month Acceleration Program for SWoN leaves you better equipped to do what the world needs - working towards a radical systems change - starting from your current position. In doing so, it may help you (re)claim your agency and strengthen a sense of integrity - without waiting for a dream green job to come true.
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High level insights, practical tools, social skills and emotional readiness necessary to launch 5 interventions for mobilising business leaders towards an authentic sustainability transformation and taking on Corporate Systemic Leadership.
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It combines alignment science, ethics, a systemic perspective & strategic business acumen to draw a much more realistic - and urgent - picture of future scenarios and the rapidly closing window of opportunity for us to turn things around, providing a foundation for a grounded assessment of which approaches to transformation may be viable, and which not. This sets us apart from most training offerings in this space.
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Engaging learning on all 3 levels: Head (insights), Hands (tools, skills and practice) and Heart (emotional processing and personal growth);
Catering to folks in different places across the thinking-feeling Head-Heart continuum;
Offering live sessions in 2 time zones that span most of the globe, and multiple price tiers and scholarships to match different levels of privilege.
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A global community of professionals navigating similar challenges to you and committed to a shared goal, working towards the same theory of change. The SWoN Series offers an online environment for collaboration, knowledge sharing, resource pooling, mutual support and inspiration.
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Our team brings together a wealth of expertise across various disciplines and geographies.
With thought leadership in sustainable business strategy, as well as experience in climate law, business psychology and building purpose-driven enterprises, our SWoN Team members collectively offer what it takes to help translate SWoN into business reality.
Our global presence across continents encourages a broad spectrum of perspectives from which to engage with complex sustainability issues.
The Program’s key features:
Read more: How the Series Stands Apart?
A liveable future and wellbeing for all cannot be achieved without an immediate radical systems change, with specific urgent milestones attained by 2030, before mass-extinction outcomes are locked-in (become unavoidable).
Big Business CEOs and Board Members possess unique privileges and predispositions that enable them to play a leading and critical role in co-delivering this transformation. Even more so, without their active “Systemic Leadership”, attaining the necessary 2030 milestones may not be at all feasible.
Co-delivering a systems change and the 2030 milestones is in fact a matter of business imperative and fiduciary duty - as future conditions conducive to shareholder value retention fully depend on this swift transformation.
Once provided with relevant insights and information flows, Big Business CEOs and Board Members will recognise this business imperative and form a Cohort of First-Movers, to begin actively intervening in the system, towards the 2030 milestones, in multi-stakeholder alliances with other actors.
These relevant insights and information flows therefore play the role of building a bridge across paradigms - enabling the potential to transcend paradigms.
Our Theory of Change
Who is the Series intended for?
The Series is relevant for aspiring change agents who see the necessity of sensitising and mobilising business leadership towards an authentic sustainability transformation and corporate systemic leadership - and wish to learn how they can do that from within their current jobs.
We look at our mutual fit through 2 perspectives:
Your current role and intent on the job
Your predispositions and broader calling in life
Your current role & intent on the job
Chief Sustainability Officers and senior in-house Sustainability Champions keen to close the gap between corporate sustainability-as-usual and the core business (i.e.: business strategy, principal business model), while also connecting their mandates to real world outcomes based on a liveable future and a just present for all.
Mid-senior and Senior Sustainability or Strategy Consultants with existing or attainable access to clients’ business leadership, who wish to close the gap between What-the-World-Needs and the advice and services they deliver on the job - upgrading from a focus on compliance, public disclosures and/or the Net Zero by 2050 agenda towards monetising a true strategic and swift transformation;
Senior or Mid-career Business Generalists (strategy, product or revenue officers, risk managers, program managers, investor relations managers) increasingly aware of the polycrisis and upcoming meta-disruption to business, and hence aware of the critical importance of informed, authentic and radical corporate sustainability action, who wish to pick up the acumen and skills necessary to influence their C-Suite and Board in this direction;
Sustainability Specialists & Subject-Matter Experts who sense they need a more strategic, end-to-end, systemic or business-savvy grasp to effectively influence corporate sustainability agendas, and who may aim to carry out the recommended interventions via internal advocacy and alliance building.
Is this not you? Sign up to be notified of our future training offerings! We aim to roll-out targeted training opportunities for junior sustainability in-house champions/consultants as well for the C-Suite and Boards in 2024.
Your predispositions & broader calling in life
You are head-first, or you see that 'all Heart without Head' rarely works in business contexts
You primarily relate to the world through thinking (rational reflection) and rely on intellectual understanding first as a starting point for deeper change or radical action. You do not feel at home in overtly Heart-first or what appears to be esoteric training programs and communities of practice, or you may question their ability to drive change.
Or, you may be a heart-first person, who relates to the world through feeling the most, but you sense you also need more rational argumentation in your toolkit in order to drive change with business leadership.
You agree with the following: If not Big Business, then who? If not now, then when?
You principally agree with our theory of change [link] - you have played the movie till the end and agree that attaining a systems change via the democratic process or via hitting social tipping points across the general global population seems implausible in the time we have. You agree we need a paradigm shift, and simultaneously see that overtly heart-centred articulations of a new paradigm may not move business leaders enough. You sense a need for a bridge across paradigms - to enable us to transcend them.
You intend to drive real change
Beyond boosting your credentials, you are looking to actively work together with us and fellow SWoN alumni to swiftly mobilise a large enough cohort of first-mover businesses and business leaders towards a radical transformation and corporate co-orchestration of an immediate systems change. To this end, you should be keen to engage with your fellow cohort members and alumni collaboratively and synergistically even after the Series is over.
If you don’t quite know what is yours to do, you’re welcome to join the Series regardless - perhaps immersing with our Series will help you discover that.
Who the Series is not for…
People who do not aspire to engage in orchestrating a systems change
People who do not think big business has a critical role to play in co-orchestrating a swift and radical systems change, along with a radical business transformation
People looking to become subject-matter experts in merely one specific subdomain of corporate sustainability or one specific aspect of systems change, such as degrowth policies or regenerative practices, without looking for a strategic, umbrella understanding of how to trigger systems change from the current status quo.
People who wish to continue to singularly focus on “climate action”.
Read also What not to expect from the Series
What is SWoN?
Sustainability-as-the-World-Needs (SWoN) Approach
Derived in opposition to sustainability-as-usual (current mainstream corporate sustainability practice), SWoN is a novel approach to corporate sustainability, recalibrated to make the discipline aligned with the objective of attaining real-world sustainability outcomes.
The SWoN Approach combines four necessary facets:
Alignment with science,
Alignment with ethics,
Applying a systemic perspective,
Applying strategic business acumen.
The approach guides us through translating real-world sustainability imperatives into corporate sustainability agendas and business strategy imperatives.
Its application enables authentically integrating real-world sustainability and business strategy, closing the hitherto gap between the two.
Corporate Sustainability-as-the-World-Needs (SWoN) Agenda
Informed by the SWoN Approach, a SWoN Agenda or ambition level for corporate sustainability is the answer to “how sustainable is sustainable enough”.
It centres around actively driving two critical imperatives:
Attaining the state of all business globally being zero harm business by 2030 - and further business transformation towards fully regenerative business models and system value creation afterwards.
Achieving an interim transitional system in place, a precondition for the above, by 2030, and further system transformation towards a fully regenerative system in the subsequent decades, until a sustainable society is achieved.
Therefore, a Corporate SWoN Agenda is radically different from our current notions of “each business doing their part” within their operational or value chain boundaries through incremental change.
Why Now?
What time is it on the clock of the World?
6 out of our 9 planetary boundaries have been breached, and we are in the danger zone (possibly 8 of 9 measured - pending peer review of latest research).
We are in ecological overshoot, which is accelerating the Sixth Mass Extinction event. These combine to create an evolutionary bottleneck through which all of life on Earth, including humans, needs to squeeze, just as our Holocene Epoch living conditions - relatively stable for almost 12,000 years - are disrupted by more frequent extreme weather events, shifting climate, and pollution, during what is now called the Anthropocene Epoch.
At the same time, of the 12 social foundations (such as such as Health, Food, Social Equity, or Education), barely any country has been safeguarding all, and our current economic model existentially depends on systemic exploitation of supply chain workers and other underpaid groups, predominantly in the Global South.
No plausible future scenario can decouple GDP growth from environmental destruction or by-pass the shrinking of the global economy within the limits of the planetary boundaries - whether by design or disastrous negative feedback loops.
No morally acceptable future scenario can perpetuate current inequity and injustice.
In order to secure a liveable future and a just present, science clearly states we need an immediate, radical systems change. Yet that is not what mainstream consultancies and sustainability functions are working towards - not anywhere near.
If not now, when?