Sustainability Leadership and the Emotional Brain: from FEAR and denial to CARE

Monday 13th March at 14.00-18.00 GMT

Price: £50 (excluding VAT)

Climate change is a threat felt very intensely and triggers many aversive feelings in people, such as fear, panic, and rage. Innovation, however, builds on curiosity and playful collaboration with others. How can organisations and leaders innovate to create solutions to address climate change despite the aversive feelings it triggers?

We build on affective neuroscience to understand how these feelings are necessary signals hard-wired in our brain to let us know if our needs are being met. Climate change, with its high degree of threat and unpredictability, triggers almost all these feelings and drives associated with survival.

In this session, Gry Osnes from C-LAN and Dr. Joseph Dodds from the Prague Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies will guide you through a framework for understanding these different emotions and implications for sustainability leadership. Each of these emotions will be explored in detail through cases in different crisis contexts. We also welcome live cases from participants.

• Aversive feelings and climate change. Most of us can relate to the aversive feelings of fear, panic and rage. We discuss and show how these feelings manifest themselves in a case on emergency services. From the case, we draw a link between the urgent care situation to organisations, who in a bleak future, may have to operate in a way similar to emergency services. The lesson is two-folds: (1) how to help organisations who are or are in the process of becoming emergency-like organisations due to climate change, and (2) how, through inaction on climate change, more organisations will become “emergency organisations”.

• Care in leadership. We will also explore how addressing the need for care can help organisations manage and mitigate the effects of the aversive feelings discussed in the previous case. We share examples of how some family owners and corporations are proactively leading the way in integrating care into their strategy and leadership. A new emphasis on the “duty of care” is currently being implemented in some regions in Europe as a response to social justice and sustainability. When embedded at the board level, a duty of care approach can set the tone for a more transformative leadership of the company. We also welcome cases on organisational transformation and leadership that can help us explore the challenges of implementing a “duty of care” or cases in which care is becoming the norm at the board level.

• Innovation capability. Curiosity, seeking, and play are necessary for creating new solutions and new behaviours in an organisation. For each of the cases, we explore how a focus on care was used to mitigate the feelings and state of fear and rage, enabling a group and leaders to shift from negative experiences to playful and curious ones thereby creating the space for developing innovative capabilities.

Interested in this subject? You can read a recent article by Dodds (2022). Dancing at the end of the world? Psychoanalysis, climate change and joy.