Future of sustainable business
In brief
| Time commitment | 8 weeks |
|---|---|
| Location | Online |
| Fees | £1,500 including VAT |
| Future course dates | August & October 2023, February & May 2024 |
Overview
This course builds your knowledge of our greatest sustainability challenges for reaching net zero and meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It introduces you to the expectations and opportunities for sustainable businesses of the future, helping you explore the emerging tools to facilitate leadership in the creation of a positive sustainable future.
Throughout this course you will understand the scale and potential severity of the challenges we face, but also be empowered to adopt a mindset of seeing these challenges as opportunities for change and leadership.
- You will see the diversity of impacts from climate change and unsustainable development framed from different organisations and global perspectives.
- You will be introduced to the latest thinking about economic systems, technologies, finance, and policies to accelerate a sustainable transition.
- You will gain insights into navigating the multiple often conflicting objectives sustainable business demands.
- The course prepares you to understand, participate in, and create a future in which the businesses that contribute to sustainability thrive.
Course details
Five themes underpin our approach to this course:
- Intellectual curiosity: keeping an open mind, appreciating diverse worldviews, perspectives and possible solutions to the net-zero and sustainable development (NZSD) challenge
- Application in practice: being able to understand concepts and apply them practically, with confidence
- Integration and application of interdisciplinary knowledge:understanding and accounting for the way in which NZSD challenge – and possible solutions – intersect across multiple disciplines
- Personal connection and purpose: finding your unique connection to NZSDG – both personally as well as within your domain of professional practice
- Leadership for complex challenges and impactful solutions: leading impactful change within enterprise – and beyond – to tame wicked problems
An introduction to the future of sustainable business
Video transcript
I think it's a fantastic course, I think every business leader needs to understand sustainability. In this course we're going to give you a solid grounding in the essential things you need to know, so that you and your organisation can not just successfully navigate the future, but play a proactive role in the transition to net-zero sustainable development. I think people should absolutely take the chance of attending this course if they really want to gain a better understanding of the current research on sustainability, but also gain an eclectic view on what sustainability is and how we should actually transition to net-zero. We're going to equip you with core principles, core understanding of the issues so you can go and apply this learning to any other sustainability problem you encounter. It is a way of getting us a really sort of condensed insight based on from people with different experiences from different industries, in different countries. So I think the main reason for any future leaders to take a course like this is to think expansively.
Modules
Introduce yourself to your fellow cohort and meet the Facilitator, who will be providing support to you throughout the duration of the course. Learn more about what the course offers and how to navigate through it. Tell us more about yourself by answering the questions and posting to the discussion board.
- You will be able to define key terms and concepts related to net-zero and the sustainable development goals (NZSDG)
- you will be able to engage with these concepts and confidently apply them in practice
- you will be able to appreciate and account for conflicting objectives and tensions between interests, actors, and geographies in relation to NZSDGs
- you will situate and reflect on your own motivations and objectives related to NZSDGs.
- Understand how current conceptualisations of enterprise and the environment are the product of historical events – including key “tipping points”
- Evaluate previous corporate responses to social and environmental issues and analyse why these responses are failing to meet our current challenges
- Account for the significance of social and environmental irresponsibility to business; and
assess how robust different business approaches are for achieving sustainability.
- Define net zero, understand its scientific underpinnings, and account for the interdependence between ecological, social, and economic systems
- Understand the changes to our energy systems as part of a low-carbon transition
- Understand the essential ideas of systems theory and thinking in systems
- Identify possible solutions for transitions to net zero; appreciate the interplay of policy, markets, behaviour, and technology to enact them.
- Define the concept of Planetary Boundaries and outline its key features
- Understand interconnections between the SDGs , net-zero and enterprise
- Identify the SDGs important to your business or contexts of importance for you and understand possible strategies for addressing them.
- Understand the role of financial markets as both a cause of – and solution to – unsustainable development and greenhouse gas emissions
- Identify the key instruments currently in use to leverage and align financial systems and corporate finance to sustainability
- Consider how to translate knowledge of net zero and the SDGs into financial strategies for a sustainable future.
- Define the principles of regenerative and circular economy and conceptualise them as solutions to the linear economy
- Evaluate the challenges and opportunities of business transformations inclusive of factors such as the changing nature of work, emerging technologies, and managing innovation
- Explore different approaches to facilitate and manage innovation and transformation in business.
- Understand how socio-technical interventions can accelerate the transition to NZSDGs
- Learn strategic question to use in your evaluation of new technologies emerging to address sustainability and transform business
- Situate the relationship between business and different scales of policy and global governance for sustainability considering how they present opportunities and risks
- Understand the role of the law for supporting NZSDG, particularly in relation to businesses.
- Identify the styles of management and leadership for sustainability best suited to you and your enterprise
- Evaluate how you plan to change your personal leadership for sustainability
- Identify stakeholders of different organisations, understand their intentions, and formulate a strategy for engagement.
From the Director & student
In brief
| Time commitment | 8 weeks |
|---|---|
| Location | Online |
| Fees | £1,500 including VAT |
| Future course dates | August & October 2023, February & May 2024 |