30 MBA Students from across Canada convene for 5-day experiential learning

On the fourth day of a five-day Sustainability Leadership bootcamp hosted by The Natural Step Canada, some of the 30 MBA students attending were asking for more homework and longer days.

According to The Natural Step principal adviser Pong Leung, this is one example of how the organization that helps companies embed sustainability into their operations was able to achieve its goal of engaging a critical stakeholder group — future leaders of tomorrow.

“The passion and the energy of the students I think were really amazing,” says Pong, adding it was one of the reasons The Natural Step wanted to engage business students who are already interested in sustainability practices.

Held in Calgary, the first-ever Sustainability Leadership Bootcamp took place Feb. 22-26 and saw business students from across the country convene to learn from The Natural Step about how to become sustainability champions in their future workplaces.

The bootcamp used a teaching approach called dialogue education, which recognizes people learn best when they’re engaged in the material they are trying to understand. Students were both participants and educators, learning through dialogue, visuals, touch and group work.

“We find it very powerful to honour the knowledge in the room,” says Pong, adding the learning approach also gets away from traditional PowerPoints.

Students would learn theory and then be asked to apply the knowledge to real-world challenges.

The event was sponsored by three of Canada’s largest energy companies Suncor, Cenovus and ENMAX, who participated by sharing the sustainability challenges they were grappling with.

For Ashley Hilkewich, who is an MBA Student at Schulich School of Business, the opportunity to sit down with a company’s leaders to co-create sustainability action plans was valuable.

“We’re all finishing up MBAs so sometimes it can get really academic and this was a really practical look at how you take these concepts about sustainable and responsible business and actually put them into practice,” says Ashley.

“It’s not very often you get to sit down with the VP and see how they are trying to tackle (a sustainability challenge).”

Ashley says the experience helped prepare her to view sustainability as a long dialogue as opposed to something she can jump into and change right away.

“It’s really more about being a change agent more so than anything and we we’re given a lot of good insights and training on how to start those conversations and make that happen,” she says.

Bob Willard, a board member at The Natural Step Canada and author of Sustainability Champions, presented on the final day of the bootcamp. Bob, who was named a leading thinker on corporate responsibility by The Globe and Mail, shared what can derail sustainability initiatives, as well as tools to gain organizational buy-in.

For Houston Peschl, who is an operations manager at DIRTT Environmental Solutions, hearing Bob’s experience was “phenomenal” and taught him new approaches he can use in his work.

While DIRTT is already a progressive organization, Houston says its clients, which include Facebook, Google and Bank of America, are demanding increasingly high-levels of sustainability and proof of the practices.

“Bob’s ability to start moving some of these processes was very valuable and he presented it in a very simple non-complex format,” says Houston, adding business must embrace its role in leading sustainability.

"Business has to be a leader in this, and businesses that don’t are going to go the way of the dodo bird."

The Natural Step plans to run future Sustainability Leadership bootcamps in Toronto and Montreal later this year.

Written by Camille Jensen for Axiom News.