An exploration of contingency, repetition and creativity in craft work. How the wayward and surprising emerge from a disciplined attentiveness to technique, materials and form that is nurtured through cycles of recursivity (see Yuk Hui). An extended discussion of rule following, of what Tim Ingold calls the ‘task scape’ and Alva Noe ‘entanglement’ and of the nature of expertise and skill. The textile workshop of Märta Måås-Fjetterström is used as a case to think through these arguments.

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 is pattern and ornament? Is the decorative superficial, a crime even? A riposte to the idea that form and material are the base and pattern the afterthought, the additional. Pattern is a basic force of life. Through a discussion of A. N. Whitehead and process philosophy, the chapter challenges ‘substance metaphysics’ and via a prolonged study of William Morris’ work on pattern and the craft venture to which he (and Jane and May Morris) belonged, suggests that where work fails to generate redundancy and plenitude, the progress will only ever be a disappointment.

Why Gothic sensibility and aesthetics matters for Ruskin as he prevails against the broken world warranted by laissez-faire economics. Ruskin, in his concept of ‘plague clouds’, is one of the first to locate what has become known as the Anthropocene. The chapter details the characteristics of Gothic, which will then frame the inquiry into craft work.

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.

The naturalism of Alvar Aalto is set against the philosophy of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. There is a discussion of what a ‘thing’ is, prolonged by a foray into the concept of Mingei and its refinement and transformation in the hands of Theaster Gates. The chapter goes on to to discuss aesthetics, form and the philosophy of Amercian pragmatism, coupled to the ongoing debate between digital and analogue in media philosophy.

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.

What is it to belong to, and yet be in distinction from, a broader environment? Recurring to earlier discussion of Mingei, this chapter discusses the aesthetics of form in relation to individuals and organizations, using examples of Gestalt theory (Kurt Goldstein), architecture (Peter Zumthor) and poetry (Rilke (via Rodin)), as well as craft workers Mary Watts, Gary Fabian MIller and Gertude Jeykll. It culminates in a study of Ethel Mairet’s weaving workshop The Gospels, and her sustained and arguably utterly original attempt to blend the biotechnic thinking of urban planners like Geddes and Mumford, the aesthetic sensitivity and skill of weaving and an enduring and vibrant small business venture.

Continuing the foray into the work of Mairet, Morris and then circuiting back to Ruskin, the discussion centres in the nature of a broken world (a world being compromised because of the way work relations are broken up) and how craft work might reveal and offer correctives to such. Is this thinking utopian? Is it simply re-heating old Arts and Crafts arguments? Is it just too late to do anything?

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.