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Seven Principles of Sustainability

We highlight and elaborate on the seven principles of sustainability in educational change and leadership.

The seven principles of sustainability in education change and leadership are depth, length, breadth, justice, diversity, resourcefulness, and conversation. 

1. Depth

Sustainable leadership matters. We must preserve, protect, and promote in education what is itself sustaining as an enrichment of life: the fundamental moral purpose of deep and broad learning (rather than superficially tested and narrowly defined achievement) for all in commitments to and relationships of abiding care for others. The first principle of sustainable leadership is leadership for learning and leadership for caring among others.

2. Length

Sustainable leadership lasts. It preserves and advances the most valuable aspect of life over time, tear upon year, from one leader to the next. As Collins and Porras remind us, “All leaders, no matter how charismatic or visionary, eventually die.” The challenges of leadership succession, of leading across and beyond individual leaders over time are the heart of sustainable leadership and educational change.

3. Breadth

Sustainable leadership spreads. It sustains as well as depends on the leadership of others. In a complex world, no one leader, institution, or nation can or should control everything. Sustainable leadership is distributed leadership, which is both an accurate description of how much leadership is already exercised across a classroom, school, or school system and an ambition that encompasses what leadership can, more deliberately, become.

4. Justice

Sustainable leadership does no harm to and actively improves surrounding environment. It does not raid the best resources of outstanding students and teachers from neighbouring institutions. It does not prosper at other schools’ expense. It does no harm to and actively finds ways to share knowledge and resources with neighbouring schools and the local community. Sustainable leadership is not self-centred; it is socially just.

5. Diversity

Sustainable leadership promotes cohesive diversity. Strong ecosystems are biologically diverse. Strong organizations, too, promote diversity and avoid standardization. In sustainable communities, alignment is an ugly word. Alignment perpetuates hierarchical dependency in linear systems that are brittle and that break. Sustainable leadership, in contrast, fosters and learns from diversity in teaching and learning and moves things forward by creating cohesion and networking among its richly varied components.

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