What I Learned from Coaching on the World's Largest Climate Innovation Summer School

I spent the month of August as a Learning Coach on the European Union’s Climate KIC Journey. “The Journey” is the world’s largest Climate Innovation Summer School, and every year over 300 post graduate students and young professionals spend a month going through a personal leadership development journey whilst learning how to create innovative solutions to address climate change.

Unlike traditional university courses which are largely theoretical and classroom-based, during “The Journey” you travel through 3 different cities (in our case, Leoben, Munich and Budapest), spend time in the field, learn by doing and reflecting, and cultivate a wonderful community in the process. I had the opportunity to lead 40 students through one journey along with my fantastic co-coach Richard Bubb, and wanted to share some key takeaways.

A safe, inclusive, and kind environment is perhaps the most fundamental ingredient for learning & transformation. 

In designing workshops, trainings, and courses, a lot of importance is often given to finding expert speakers with great credentials, nailing the right topics or agenda, and developing robust pedagogies. These aspects certainly are important, but I realised far more important is the quality of learning environment that is created. 

 “I felt supported to take every opportunity to present and work through my imposter syndrome” . “I have never experienced such a kind and accepting environment, it helped me find my voice and place in the group”. “The group helped me see that the limits I have are imposed by myself and no-one else and I now feel I can push past them”

These were the kinds of comments we heard in our final day reflections where it struck me just how much of the transformation our students experienced was enabled by the safe, supportive and kind environment we created. This allowed them to step out of their comfort zones and take risks, be vulnerable, challenge many of their deeply held beliefs, work through insecurities and take charge of their own learning. I’d go as far as to say even if there was no external content but a quality environment, the transformation a group would experience could be huge! Much of this comes from the subtle aspects of facilitating, the presence one brings, the values one embodies, the way in which a facilitator co-creates the experience and culture with a group, practices to help a group feel settled and connect authentically with each other and so forth.

Be in the field and create experiences that challenge worldviews.

As much as we can learn facts and theory, watch videos, read books, being in the field and learning from experiences cannot be substituted, particularly on issues regarding climate change. In our first city, Leoben, we visited a large iron-ore mine and the following day an iron factory, through which we witnessed the mining of iron and the processing of it into tubes to transfer oil. Witnessing the extraction of resources from the mountain was very confronting and highly juxtaposed with the pristine lakes and mountains that surrounded us. Acknowledging our role in the system, and how the products we buy contribute to these industries opened up many conversations and perspectives that may not have emerged from a talk or classroom lesson. It’s experiences in places out of our usual surroundings and conversations with people we don't usually interact with (in our case miners) that shake our mental models and force us to consider new ones. 

It doesn’t have to come at a high cost, but taking learners into the field, be it a local recycling plant, seeing the journey of their waste, to local national parks, and coupling this with reflective conversations, can help us expand our perspectives and grapple with environmental issues at a personal, emotional and logical level.

Question the paradigms that our tools stem from.

10 odd years ago when the business-model canvas was popularised, it was a bible for entrepreneurs -- a useful tool to navigate the process of starting a business and getting an idea off the ground. Similarly the design thinking process which has gained much traction in the past decade is also extremely useful in creating new products and services and increasingly used to work on social and environmental challenges.

These are some of the most useful and popular tools on the shelf today in taking an idea forward, yet we came head on with their limitations. Take one of our teams wanting to clean our oceans using technology they had developed. Unfortunately the technology is difficult to profitably commercialise, and there isn’t a clear “pain point” for a human or organisation that it’s meeting. So it doesn’t really make “business sense” to take forward along with many other ideas we had. Yet inherently, we know that we need to clean our oceans. 

Many of these tools have arisen from a capitalist paradigm, and one where humans are central and superior to nature. When it comes to complex problems, with multiple interconnected drivers, many stakeholders including humans and our planet itself, and environmental problems that people are not willing to pay for, a lot of our existing tools and processes are limited. As we begin to rethink our current capitalist system and human-centric ways of living which have led to our current environmental crisis, so too it is critical that our tools and approaches to solve problems and take ideas forward evolve also (which we're starting to see with approaches like Earth Centred Design). 

(I’ve also loved developing a new way to approach complex problems which we’re piloting in our upcoming Oceans Lab - do reach out if you're keen to learn more)

All in all, it was inspiring to do this work and I am very grateful to all that made it possible especially Eleanor Saunders who revamped this journey from a climate entrepreneurship course to a systems innovation course, my co-coach Richard and the amazing cohort of students on our journey whom I learnt much from.

At a time where the impacts of climate are felt heavily, building capability in systems innovation and personal leadership is critical to enable us to tackle climate change. I’ve been working on this mission with a few colleagues here and would love to see more such courses in New Zealand and the Pacific. Let me know if you’re keen to help make this happen!