Here's some lyrics that have been rolling through my head a lot recently.

"Never Be Ready"
-Mat Kearney

Come on and lay down these arms
All our best defenses
We're taking our chances here on the run
The fear is an anchor
Time is a stranger
Love isn't borrowed
We aren't promised tomorrow

We'll never be ready if we keep waiting
For the perfect time to come
Hold me steady, we'll never be ready
When we don't know, though we can't see
Just walk on down this road with me
Hold me steady, we'll never be ready

I can really relate to this song, and the feeling of always wanting to wait for the perfect time before jumping in. Especially with this master's program in Sweden. One of the main points of this program is to learn key steps to implementing sustainability initiatives in businesses, organizations, and industries. Of the 75 people in the program, I am one of the youngest. It seems a bit crazy to expect someone with minimal experience to advise those much older than myself on key sustainability issues.

It feels as if I should wait a few months for the program to fully develop before fully jumping in. But hesitation is a hindrance and by waiting for the perfect time to come, I may miss out on some key issues.

Hold me steady, we'll never be ready...

Fortunately, I have already developed some really neat friendships here (in addition to Matt who came along with me) that I'll be able to walk through all of this with. In fact, I think that's one of the key aspects to sustainability. At least for me, I know how much more reassuring it is to see others go ahead and blaze a trail in which I can follow on. It's scary to "just walk on down this road" not entirely sure what the future may bring. By having friends to walk the road with you, the unknowns in life don't seem so big anymore.

I guess that's one of the goals of this program as well. A key difference that we have been discussing is the difference between forecasting and backcasting. We are most used to forecasting, which involves taking our current trends, knowledge, and experience and forecasting it into the future to imagine what a sustainable society might look like. Just like weatherman do to predict our weather for tomorrow. The innate problem for sustainable development with this concept however is that it ties a sustainable future to our current behavior.

Backcasting on the other hand releases us from the trends of today and starts by envisioning what a sustainable society might look like. For example rather than imagining what renewable energy may look like in the future, we could imagine what energy in general would look like in the future.

Backcasting then takes the envisioned sustainable society of the future and determines strategic steps to make towards that point.

Love isn't borrowed
We aren't promised tomorrow...

This was an interesting line that took me a bit to think over in my head. I'm still not entirely sure what it means and would love to hear thoughts from others. For me, it seems to be talking about taking responsibility for the way we live our lives. We can't simply borrow someone else's love. We can't borrow someone else's experiences or joys or fears. Our lives are meant to be lived by us, and we must remember that the good and bad come together in a single package. It's easy to find excuses because of the fears or unknown paths ahead. But it's on those uncharted paths that we will find tomorrow's joys. We aren't promised tomorrow though, so we need to start the journey today.

With regards to sustainability, it is also easy to fall in the trap of recognizing primarily the bad on the path ahead. It's important that we keep our eyes open and recognize both the good and bad. Our eyes and way of seeing have the power to manipulate reality, and we must be careful to objectively and fairly view sustainable development around us.

Every now and then it's encouraging to be reminded that we are all unsure of what the future holds. We are all unsure of the steps to get there and unsure where the high and low points will be. But regardless, tomorrow is ours and we can choose when to start that journey.

It gives me reassurance when thinking about the next step from this master's program. The next year will be a learning and growing experience. The ball is surely already rolling, and we'll see where it goes from there.

p.s. you should check out the rest of Mat Kearney's new album "City of Black and White" - it's awesome!

So I leave the country for just a year and in that time, Playing For Change decides to go on tour. I expect all you people still in the States to go and see them for me.

So I thought it would be helpful for me to start writing down some of my thoughts from lectures here at BTH on my blog. Classes started last Monday and so far, we have gone over the basics of the program, a really innovative way of discussing lots of issues in detail through a process called 'open space', and an introduction to the Natural Step approach.

Our program is entitled Master's of Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability (MSLS). Karl-Hendrik Robert (the founder of the Natural Step) has been lecturing to us for the past few days. He started by introducing his framework for analyzing and implementing sustainability into our companies, governments, and cities. The following day, he then went on to discuss the physics and chemistry underpinning his framework.

But before I get into what was discussed in the lectures, let me give you a very brief overview of the Natural Step (TNS). TNS was started up 20 years ago in Sweden in an effort to bring scientists together in consensus on sustainability. From this point, we would then be able to develop a common language in which to effectively discuss the 'un-sustainability' around us. From that vision, a network of multiple Natural Step's have popped up all over the world in numerous countries to help guide and facilitate companies, governments, and municipalities towards sustainability. This framework, referred to as FSSD (framework for strategic sustainable development) is based upon understanding the systems holding everything together. A common frustration is that we as a people like to specialize in 'things.' And although this is needed in our society, it creates problems because we rarely take the time to look up and see what others are doing in other specialties and fields around us. Such a mindset makes it very difficult to approach sustainability and it is the FFSD that attempts to bridge this gap.

Now back to some of the details from the lecture.

Karl-Hendrik introduced three questions that are key in evaluating 'un-sustainability.'
1) Do you have a definition of sustainability?
2) Referring to that definition, what is your gap?
3) What are you doing to bridge that gap?

The first of these questions is probably the most important. With sustainability being such a hot-topic nowadays, it seems silly that we very rarely actually talk about what sustainability means. Sure we talk about things such as water scarcity, soil degradation, and climate change, but we rarely define sustainability. Without a common definition of the term, it is hard to approach the larger picture, and we end up specializing too soon on the sub-problems rather than the larger picture. After a definition is agreed upon, we can then begin to analyze a our given situation and find ways of striving towards sustainability.

Once answering these questions, we can then move on to look at various strategies for achieving success. Here is the path which KHR suggested:

Step 1 involves understanding the system. This is where understanding basic chemistry and physics is important. This step involves understanding the rules of the game.

Step 2 then defines what success looks like for this specific example. If you don't understand the system well enough (and have a common language to communicate back and forth between one another) then it is impossible to determine what you want (success). This is one of the most commonly lacking aspects of sustainability in the real world.

Step 3 then determines a strategy. It is most often unrealistic to immediately transition to full-sustainability. Just as in chess, it is rare (if not impossible) to win in 1 or 2 steps. However, each move you make (even if it sacrifices one of your own pieces) ideally moves you towards winning. This is the same for making sustainable decisions. Although the intial move may not be fully sustainable, it may facilitiate and allow your next step to achieve success.

Step 4 then identifies those specific actions needed to be taken.

And step 5 includes the tools to get there.

So that is the basic overview of the framework, and then there are numerous steps within this bigger framework which we will be discussing in further detail throughout the year. Some of these we covered in the first lectures but I don't have the time or space to write all of that out at this moment.

However from the lectures, there were some interesting other thoughts that were raised. Here are just a few of them.

"We're looking for knowledge, but we're drowning in detail."
- This refers back to the specializing issue developed in our society. We are so accustomed to knowing more and more but we tend to always look to the detail rather than the system. KHR describes it like a tree - where the trunk and branches are the unifying system and the leaves represent the details. Sometimes we focus so much on our leaf that we forget to look at the leaves around us and more importantly, the branch connecting us to the bigger picture.

"We do not want to become poor now to become rich later."
- Many individuals view sustainability as a poor economical decision. The reality is however that if companies end up making fully sustainable solutions in their company too aggressively, then they will soon drive themselves to bankruptcy and no longer be able to impact those around them. So in fact, it is not in the interest of the company or 'sustainability' to try and push sustainability too fast. The best method is to start by looking for 'low-hanging fruit,' solutions that are financially smart, have a flexible platform, and are in the right direction.

"We don't live our lives to avoid cancer, nor do we live our lives to avoid un-sustainability."
- KHR was originally a medical doctor performing cell and cancer research. For this reason, many analogies and examples of his tend to revolve around cancer or the medical field. This example tries to illustrate how we don't consciously avoid cancer at every second of the day. Sure there are things that we do such as putting on sunscreen and not smoking that help avoid cancer, but most of the time we don't make a conscious effort to avoid cancer. In the same way, many of us don't live our daily lives in a way to be sustainable. Yet there are certain things that we just do such as recycling because it has become a regular habit. The reason we do these unconscious things is because we have developed a framework to understand them - what is needed is to further this framework to better understand the details. This is why there are thousands of cancer researchers throughout the world, now we need an equal amount of sustainability researchers.

"Sustainability is neither top-down or bottom-up."
- Sustainability does not work by educating the politicians and government to make smarter decisions. Neither does it work by educating the general public and expecting them to change the direction of the entire whole. Rather, these must both happen simultaneously. The first step to starting up TNS in Sweden involved something known as the 'Big Mailing.' This involved KHR mailing out a consensus document written by leading scientists on the issues agreed upon relating to sustainability to all households in Sweden. In doing so, KHR put himself in the position to start influencing the upper administration to get things done with the entire public as a witness.

There were plenty of other interesting topics brought up but I won't bore you with all of them right now :) I'm really excited to see how this framework applies to projects and issues I've been involved with in the past. In particular, I am excited to explore how to funnel 'sustainability' into our current culture.

We (at least in the US) are fast-paced and constantly desire to be entertained. This makes it difficult to explain frameworks such as FSSD and other methods to the general public, in less they go out of their way to better understand it. It isn't feasible to get the message across in a short 2 minute overview on CNN. I'm hoping this can tie into my interest in better understanding how organizations such as Disney can impact the public. Walt Disney has a quote "It is not higher education that interests me so much as general mass education." -WD

Disney was one of the first to distinguish that either education can be entertaining or entertainment can be educational (tied to edutainment). How does a structure such as Disney influence 'un-sustainability' - that's what I hope to further explore this year, we'll see where it leads.

Check out my other blog Swedish Stories to read a few updates from my first week in Sweden. Things have been quite exciting and a lot has happened so far.

With surprisingly no complications or delays, Matt and I made it into Sweden with very few problems. Minus the fact that one of my wheels starting falling off on my massive suitcase and that we tend to just point at food items we want to buy when we get hungry - we're doing half decent. Our question of whether or not we need to learn Swedish was quickly answered after checking out the town of Karlskrona and finding that all of the signs are written in Swedish. I think our hostel is on Dropatinginthebucket road or something like that, so we may need to touch up on our Swedish over the next few weeks. For now we'll have to resort to hand signals and trying to communicate with numbers.

Now that we have got our stuff settled into the hostel, we're strolling around the town for a bit to get our bearings and then will hopefully try and get a good night's sleep after all the flying. We managed to feed ourselves, so that was a success. Tomorrow will be the real test though when we have to try and find a place to shelter us, soon we'll have all of our basic needs covered!

Well that's all of the major updates for now, we really have only been here for 2 hours so we can't have too many crazy stories yet - give us time though. We'll hopefully check in soon with updates on the housing search. Hope everything is well back in PA!

Spud

Tomorrow's the big day - I'll be heading to Newark and flying off to Copenhagen where I will be picking up a train which takes me to Karlskrona, Sweden! Once I arrive, the adventure to find housing begins. Fortunately, because I'm one of the later people to arrive, everyone else has done most of the work and put together some quite helpful documents to assist in the whole process. So hopefully it won't be too bad - if not, living in hostels is always a blast!

I've still got quite a lot of packing to do (if not most of it) and have to move out of State College today. Otherwise things are pretty much ready to go! I'm not sure when the next time will be that I have internet, but as soon as I get the chance to update all of you fine folk, I will make sure to do so.

If any of you are on Skype or gmail, I'm sure I'll be able to video chat with you while abroad. Until the next post - farval!! (swedish for farewell)

Lyrics to think about from Playing for Change:

~ Biko ~
You can blow out a candle, but you can’t blow out a fire
Once the flame begins to catch, the wind will blow it higher