• Thinking strategically means considering what and why before deciding how and when, shaped by context, the organisation’s mission and vision, focused by strategic intent, and made practical by intermediate goals or challenges. A case study shows how this approach helped an umbrella organisation to reshape its future to better serve its members in providing health care. A final case study integrated three model types enabling the US response to unrest in the Middle East.

Decision trees show sequences of decision and event outcome nodes, and can describe consequences with multiple objectives or criteria. Case studies describe a choice problem of a junior engineer, and a board-level decision about a possible new product. Structural relationships between the act-event-outcome ingredients are emphasised by relevance diagrams.

In the 1970s, two senior underwriters from a major UK insurance company attended an executive course on decision analysis I had been teaching at Brunel University. At the end of the course, they told me that decision analysis makes explicit all the things an underwriter does implicitly when assessing a risk. Since then, I’ve heard the same thing from experts in many areas, which reinforces my view that the 10 ingredients of good decisions make intuitive sense as well as being derived from a theoretical analysis of coherent preferences. Thus, they provide the elements of a framework for helping a decision maker in almost any field do a better job of creating the future.

In this chapter, we discuss five common misunderstandings about sustainability leadership - we speak of myths - that muddle the discourse and stand in the way of understanding and application. As myths to dissect, we consider the idea that sustainability leadership is all about money, that it is about perfect institutions and that expertise is the key. The idea that morality is fundamental and the narrative that prioritizes innovation are dismissed as myths as well. We look at the implications for leadership functions and roles to emerge in those myths, and try to discern, positively, what we can learn from the myths about the realities of sustainability leadership.

In this chapter, we explore the creation of meaning through metaphor. We pay special attention to the expansion of meaning through metaphors establishing connections between semantic domains, explaining one phenomenon in terms of others, while carefully articulating the trade-offs always involved. Metaphors, just as narratives, can travel, sometimes conspicuously without their narratives, sometimes accompanied. They can gain and lose strength, and they can encounter resistance. We then consider the importance of metaphoric understandings of leadership, community, environment and good governance, concepts central to the understanding of sustainability leadership.

What can leadership for sustainability mean? Sustainability leadership is a creature of governance and establishing conditions for good sustainability governance enhances its chances to survive and thrive. Against this background, we consider which roles and functions of leadership might prove more helpful when building sustainable communities, and, while eschewing formulaic recipes or heroic figures, we come to delineate four roles which can be taken up, in distributive leadership, under conditions where sustainability asserts itself as an urgent policy priority. We provide suggestions for both the analysis and crafting of leadership narratives, in the knowledge that both are highly dependent on the context of the community, its problems and the coevolutions in its governance system.

In this concluding chapter, we give community strategy its due place in sustainability governance and recapitulate key insights from the previous chapters. Narrative appears in a variety of roles yet is unlikely to do its work as a catalyst of community action if it does not take its place within strategy. Such institutionalization does come with risk, including ossification and the introduction of blind spots. We coin a new leadership function, tightly coupled with the role of strategist: The management of goal dependencies and reality effects associated with community strategy. Strategy appears appropriate as a topic to conclude our interpretive account of sustainability leadership as it is, in part, a narrative itself and as the building of strategic capacity in a community is the culminating point of leadership work, requiring other features of good sustainability to be in place.

In this chapter, we interrogate the notion of sustainability, and ask ourselves what sustainability could mean, which other concepts or narratives need to be brought into the scope of investigation. We discuss common metaphors and narratives of sustainability and connect them to notions of (good) governance, community and system-environment relations. Sustainability governance, it is argued, requires governance systems equipped with high institutional and adaptive capacity, reflexivity and the possibility to entertain images of the future and devise strategy based on such strategic work. Finally, we remind ourselves of the distinctions made earlier, between stories of sustainability in the community, in theory and practices of sustainability governance.

In this chapter, we get acquainted with the concepts of leadership, sustainability and governance, concepts we will need to develop our perspective on sustainability leadership. Leadership to move communities in a more sustainable direction will have to go through governance, through the process of collective decision-making that can place communities on a different development path. What amounts to good leadership will depend on the community and its stories about good governance and about leadership itself.

In this chapter, we delve deeper into the realm of stories, or narratives. This endeavor is particularly worthwhile if we acknowledge that our knowledge of the world is largely shaped by narratives. We discuss several functions of narrative which are relevant to our study of sustainability leadership, in and through governance. Narratives create meaning, they define problems, solution and methods and they connect values, feelings and ideas. Even more fundamentally, narratives create community, which involves patterns of openness and closure, of inclusion and exclusion. We develop a succinct theory of interpretation to extend our understanding of stories and their roles in governance and community, with special emphasis on the concepts of genre, audience and medium, the structuring of time through stories and the position of stories that select other stories and keep them in place: master narratives.