Sustainability 202 for Government: Taking Action to the Next Level

At the Audubon Habitat Education Center and Wildlife Sanctuary, Belmont MA

June 14-15, 2006

This 2 day advanced intensive is tailored to graduates of Sustainability 101 or experienced practitioners who are ready for the next level of leadership. To find out if you are ready for this more advanced content, click here.

By Application Only.

Pre-work: If your are accepted, a few weeks before the seminar we’ll send you a link to a confidential on-line survey to help you assess your professional and departmental readiness and key issues. These can then be a focus of your participation in Sustainability 202 for Government.

For a printable 1-page overview of Sustainability 202, click here

Seminar Content:

Day 1:

• Sustainability and massive change
  
  • What might your agency and government as a whole look like in a sustainable future, and how can your work align with such sweeping forces? What structural changes would make your work more effective, and how can you move these forward?
    
• Guest speakers on Government Sparks a Revolution
  
• Readiness, barriers & opportunities
  
  • Work in small groups to address your professional and departmental readiness, and gain insights on key issues using SSNE’s unique “Search for Insight™” process.
    
• Advanced strategic questioning
  
  • Strategic questions are open, engaging, and invite further learning. They make people say, “Wow, that’s a great question, I’ll have to think about that!” and help turn “You should…” into “How might we..?”. We’ll spend time getting you beyond the initial framing of strategic questions and into the nuts, bolts and nuances of who should ask whom, when, where. We’ll dig into the different categories of strategic questions, e.g. observation, analysis, visioning, etc.

Day 2:

• Goals, strategies and results: systems thinking & environmental management
  
  • Environmental management systems are wonderful tools. Pair them up with a deep understanding of principles of sustainability, and you can take EMS to a whole new level for greater impact.
    
• Participant case studies and problem solving: The SSNE Sustainability Clinic
  
  • All of SSNE’s seminars are designed to focus significant time and energy on your situation. Our unique “Search for Insight™” process combines hundreds of years of participants’ experience with powerful strategic questioning to reveal the key questions and provide the high leverage resources you need.
    
• Live-in-person government case studies
  
• Way Beyond Leadership: Creating High Performance Workgroups
  
  • We are all involved in work groups, many of them trying in some way to make our troubled world a little better. Yet very few people have learned the most basics elements of how to create and maintain an effective work team. Worse still, as time and resources get stretched these groups are asked to produce more and more with less and less. Thus we often find ourselves leaving meetings frustrated, depleted and with diminished hope. If we are fortunate enough to be in a high performing team, we often find outside pressures make our tasks increasingly difficult, and/or the group gets less effective over time. So what does it take to be a high performing socially responsible (SR) team?
    
    • It’s now proven statistically that knowledge and skills in work group development mean stronger group cohesion, productivity, better margins, and even better health care. Unfortunately, some socially responsible (SR) community tendencies undermine great teamwork, while others help. Which is which, and what should you do? You'll fill out a confidential questionnaire to learn your team’s stage of development, get an introduction to the 5 stages of work group development and learn what needs to be addressed to achieve or maintain high SR performance. Then we'll discuss how to use this tool to drive progress on internal SR benchmarks and other goals.

To insure personal attention, space is limited! Apply now.