Systems Thinking for Complex Sustainability Challenges

Two female students sat at a table in the foreground, one making gestures with her hands and smiling. Four women and one man are in the background sat and stood around other tables.

This Lab invites participants to develop critical skills around systems thinking, regenerative mindsets, and framing transformative systems change. The Lab explores a variety of different sustainability systems problems, their features, and how to engage with them.

Dates

March 10-11 2025.

Duration, format and location

Two-day professional development residential seminar; Cambridge, UK

Applications for this programme are due to close on Wednesday 19 February. Apply now to avoid disappointment.

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Fee

The course fee includes accommodation and meals. Discounts may be available for multiple delegates from the same organisation or participants from not-for-profits or developing countries. 

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Register your interest in CISL's Leadership Labs

Sustainability Leadership Labs

The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) Labs bring together professionals to test and challenge cutting-edge responses to emerging global problems.  

The Sustainability Leadership Labs offer an opportunity to learn from and network with other senior practitioners from different industries and sectors in an immersive two-day programme. You will hear from thought leaders and expert practitioners, engage with peers through group activities and peer-to-peer coaching, and use journaling to reflect and process different perspectives on leadership as they relate to your context.  Participants leave the course having created a personal leadership plan that they can then put into practice.  

Read more about the Sustainability Leadership Labs, and details about fees and applications.

The challenge/opportunity

Many sustainability challenges prove complex, interconnected and cross-disciplinary. To avoid “pushing the problem around” - solving one problem whilst creating another – or addressing symptoms rather than root issues, professionals need a holistic view on their business activities and interventions. Systems thinking can help organisations and professionals embrace and celebrate the complex nature of sustainability challenges and enable a radically different perspective on the solution space, often leading to surprising areas for impact.  

This Lab will specifically focus on systems thinking through the lens of nature – using insights from ecosystems like a forest.

Systems thinking for sustainability

This Lab invites participants to develop critical skills around systems thinking, regenerative mindsets, and framing transformative systems change. The Lab explores a variety of different sustainability systems problems, their features, and how to engage with them. It addresses questions such as: 

  • What is a system, what are its features – how to define it and its boundaries 
  • How can we use systems thinking to map and understand different kinds of recurring, deep problems for sustainability? 
  • How can a regenerative mindset help to unpack sustainability challenges? 
  • How can we use nature to think differently about sustainability solutions? 
  • What is the role of business in driving systemic change for sustainability? 
  • Who has agency in shaping and creating systems? 

Previous speakers

  • Nora Bateson, President, International Bateson Institute 
  • Dr Tanja Collavo, Senior Teaching Associate, CISL 
  • Liz Corbin, Co-CEO and Founder, Materiom 
  • Justin DeKoszmovszky, Founder and Managing Partner, Archipel&Co 
  • Joshua Entsminger, Co-founder and Research Director, Net Positive Labs 
  • Emma Fromberg, Course Director, CISL 
  • Chris Grantham, Founder, Regenovate 
  • Adam Lusby, Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship, University of Exeter Business School 
  • Dr Kate Simpson, Director of the Systemcraft Institute (hosted by Wasafiri) & Principal Consultant 
  • Dr Niki Wallace, Course Leader, MA Global Collaborative Design Practice, University of the Arts London 
  • Ken Webster, Fellow, CISL 

Who should attend?

This Lab will convene a range of individuals who are committed to delivering systems change for sustainability. It will benefit individuals in business who are seeking to enhance their impact in wider society, including those working in management and strategy roles, those working in sustainability/ESG/CSR looking to refine their understanding of holistic and systemic change for sustainability. 

Benefits of attending 

The two-day short course is highly interactive with group discussions, practical exercises, reflection, and insights from thought leaders from business and academia. 

As a participant, you will: 

  • Unpack different types of systems and how you might encounter these in the sustainability space. 
  • Understand how metaphors can shape how you think about solutions to complex problems. 
  • Take the first steps in developing a regenerative mindset. 
  • Experiment with strategies that help redesign existing systems and designing new ones. 
  • Engage in scenario mapping for systems thinking. 
  • Participate in dialogues about industry case studies.
  • Learn about how to communicate complex challenges in sustainability in a compelling way. 
  • Reflect on your agency in driving systemic change at different scales and time horizons. 

Register your interest in attending this Lab.

Faculty

Adam Lusby

Adam has spent the past decade dedicated to exploring the intersections of innovation, technology, and the idea of a regenerative circular economy. He enjoys creating engaging workshops that challenge participants to acquire and apply new knowledge through hands-on experiences. As a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at the University of Exeter Business School, Adam serves as academic lead on two cutting-edge innovation spaces, the Skydeck and the CQ, where participants can experience the power of innovation and entrepreneurship first-hand. Adam co-founded InnoPlay, which leverages the power of play and design to drive innovation in education and beyond, and Regenovate, a new type of agency that helps organisations build their capacity for regenerative growth. 

Chris Grantham

Chris is a founder of Regenovate, a new breed of agency created to help organisations build their capacity for regenerative growth. They help individuals and teams develop their vision, key value indicators, design muscles and mindset through immersive ‘design sprints’ that combine natural world inspiration, model building and future visualisation.

He as formerly Circular Economy Executive Director at IDEO, where he led IDEO's consultancy business in the circular economy and worked with organisations like, H&M, IKEA, VF Corps, Solvay, SAP and Danone on their circular economy strategy, organisational transformation and product innovation. As well as working with individual companies, Chris’s work has involved adapting IDEO’s collaborative design methodology (CoLab) for circular economy innovation across industry value chains and the development of a close partnership with The Ellen MacArthur Foundation including creating The Circular Design Guide which has been used by over half a million users in over 150 countries.

Emma Fromberg

Emma Fromberg is a Course Director for the Postgraduate Certificate in Sustainable Business (PCSB). She has a background in design engineering, with expertise in learning design and circular economy. As a Course Director, she is interested in how business professionals can deliver system-level change to allow a transformation towards a regenerative circular economy. Besides her work on PCSB, she is doing her doctoral research where she explores how learning can allow a cognitive shift to grasp the systemic nature of sustainability challenges. Before joining CISL, she was part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation where she focused on design and learning.

Kate Simpson

Dr Kate Simpson is the Director of the Systemcraft Institute and lead author on Systemcraft: an applied approach to making systems change happen; and she is also former Managing Director of Wasafiri.  As Managing Director she led Wasafiri’s growth from an ambitious start up into a flourishing business; she also pioneered the development of Wasafiri’s ‘adaptive operating model’ drawing heavily on the principles of self-management. As a consultant she works with a wide range of public private and not for profit organisations and is focused on creating collective solutions to complex problems. She brings an expertise in leadership, organisational and people development and designing systemic change interventions. Across her career she has worked in over 15 countries and with a range of global organisations including Swiss Re, Barclays, World Economic Forum, FCDO, Sony, FAO, The Forward Institute and HelpAge International amongst many others.



Kate’s career has encompassed international development, environmental management, academia and corporate organisational development. Through this work she has woven together a commitment to creating cross-sector collaborations for social change; she is an expert in asking “what if...” and helping clients to try new ways of doing and thinking. She holds a PhD in social geography from Newcastle University, is an accredited Executive Coach, ultra-runner and occasional blogger.

Niki Wallace

Niki is a designer, writer and educator with a background in communication design, interaction design, service design, and design for transitions. Their research focuses on design’s contributions to transitions towards social, racial and climate justice, with a particular interest in the complex collaborative design engagements that facilitate these transitions. In 2019 Niki founded Net Zero Lab to address the everyday challenges posed by transitions, and is currently contributing to UAL’s transition towards regenerative systems through UAL’s Climate Emergency Action Group. Niki is attentive to the social aspects of transitions and collaboration. This sensitivity to the principles of relationality, co-operation and communication, and to the redistribution of power in co-creation processes, all inform their approach.

Phoebe Tickell

Phoebe is a biologist and systems thinker developing methodologies and approaches suited for a better world. She works across multiple societal contexts applying a complexity and systems thinking lens and has worked in organisational design, advised government, the education sector and the food and farming sector. She has a first class degree in Biological Natural Sciences from Cambridge University, and she brings this training in understanding biological networks and systems thinking into governance, organisational structures, narratives and imagination. She has been designing and delivering learning programmes worldwide, as a freelance facilitator, learning designer and educator. She is a co-founder of the DGov Foundation - a community of distributed governance practitioners and Member of Enspiral, a community that innovates in decentralising power and developing decentralised tools and technologies to do so.