From Incremental to Transformative Change

Since 1970, humanity has increasingly exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity while failing to equitably maintain the well-being of our population. Consequently, many of our public institutions are struggling with accelerating global change and increasingly complex challenges, including climate change, growing inequity, economic uncertainty, and a steady stream of global shocks that most adversely affect already marginalized communities. Local governments have been overwhelmed, commonly responding to these complex issues by deploying sustainability-, climate- and equity-focused offices and planning processes with limited budget or influence.

The current paradigm of relatively siloed, financially focused, and short-term-oriented strategic management knowledge, methods, and tools was not designed to match the increasingly complex challenges emerging. To move beyond incremental change, local leaders must transform strategic management practices, but to this point, have had limited access to evidence-based solutions designed to enable a just transition. An international community of scholars and innovators has been developing a new generation of knowledge, methods, and tools that combine leading management expertise with systems theory, as well as the natural and social sciences. These Systemic Management Innovations redefine how core functions like planning, performance management, and stakeholder engagement are practiced. This session will introduce the growing international field of disruptive, Systemic Management Innovations, the unique experiential learning program that has been developed to capacitate local leaders who will need to facilitate this transition, and a case study profiling the eye-opening experience of an ambitious Canadian city that has become the first in the world to apply a sustainability performance management system that integrates best practice in management accounting with the principles of context- and thresholds-based sustainability.