Season 3 - Episode 4 | Special Edition - Systemic Change for Sustainability: Geert-Jan 'GJ' Van Der Zanden (Thailand)

In this episode dedicated to Sustainability, Dr. Ramesh and Mr. Geert-Jan 'GJ' Van Der Zanden confront the pressing need to overhaul traditional notions of success in business. GJ, Visiting Professor, Author and Expert on Sustainability, Transformational Leadership and Systemic Change, underscores how critical it's now become for all stakeholders to engage in this conversation.

With shallow solutions falling short in addressing the complex systemic challenges our world faces, there's an urgent need for a radical shift in mindset among business leaders to move beyond traditional profit-driven models, towards holistic approaches that prioritise socially inclusive and environmentally responsible models of growth:
- What are the challenges businesses face in navigating sustainability transitions?
- What is the transformative potential of adopting a regenerative leadership mindset?
- How can we redefine success in business leadership and forge a more sustainable future together?

5 Key Takeaways:

• Urgent Mindset Shift: Refocusing to Sustainability and societal impact.
• Systemic Transformation: Overhauling systems,  relationships and  paradigms for real change.
• Collaborative Engagement: Driving powerful collective action for systemic solutions.
• Purposeful Leadership: Aligning personal and organisational purpose for meaningful change.
• Educational Empowerment: Equipping future leaders with both tools and the mindset for systemic change

Host: Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra, Author, Podcast Host, Founder of Talent Leadership Crucible & Founder of Impact Velocity

Guest Speaker: Mr. Geert-Jan (GJ) Van Der Zanden, Visiting Professor and Senior Advisor for Sustainability & Transformational Leadership at Sasin School of Management, Thailand.

Check out GJ’s latest book (free online access): Transforming our Critical Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Tune in, and together we'll be Thriving in the Age of Disruption. 

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Transcript

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 

Welcome to the Thriving in the Age of Disruption podcast series, GJ. It's really exciting that we can have you here today. 

Geert Jan (GJ) van der Zanden

That's great. Thank you so much. I think it's always very nice to exchange thoughts with good thinkers. My name is Geert Jan van der Zanden, which is hard to pronounce name from the Netherlands.

I grew up there, but I spent most of my life outside of the Netherlands. I'm currently a senior advisor and visiting professor of Sustainability and Transformational Leadership at Sasin School of Management in Bangkok, Thailand. I focus on systems transformation. I just wrote a book about systems transformation calling Transforming Our Critical Systems published by Cambridge University Press.

I'm not an academic. As such, even though I work for the business school, my background is really as a practitioner. I've been a managing director for the last 10 years in a sustainability strategy and leadership development advisory firm back in Europe, where I worked with leadership teams in some of the world's progressive companies like Unilever, MasterCard, IKEA, and helping them navigate the sustainability transition and equip their leadership teams with the right skills.

I started in the Netherlands, but I've been away for 30 years. I lived in 10 different countries in those years. So as a result of that, I'm a big fan of diversity, human diversity, as well as biodiversity. So I also love to hike and dive and be part of nature. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 

Lovely. Thank you for the very comprehensive introduction from both your career perspective, as well as your personal interests.

I thought we'll just dive in and talk about Sustainability transitions because you mentioned that you'd worked with some of the leading companies in the world in supporting them to do that transition into sustainability. When you work on those projects, what are the key challenges usually to even get started?

Geert Jan (GJ) van der Zanden

Yeah, that's a really good question. Sustainability is something that cannot get around, right? There's no alternative. We have to reinvent the ways in which we produce and consume and transport things because we're going beyond what the earth can support us in. And also we increasingly we're eroding the social fabric. For some people getting very rich, other people staying poor. Income inequality is also becoming an issue. We need to reinvent our models, and that is really the whole thinking behind the sustainability movement. And as I said, it's not an option. It's something that we have to do. Climate change is coming, but it's not only climate change.

It's also resource scarcity. There's water scarcity in different parts of the planet, and that is getting worse. I work mostly with companies. They need to start thinking how they can contribute to making that transition, to helping the world move to these new models. There are certain pathways that you can take as a company.

Companies are looking at how they can move to net zero, for instance, when it comes to carbon emissions. The whole net zero concept also applies to other aspects. You could also look at how can I be net zero in water, for instance, or how can I be net zero in other types of resource use. But what many companies are not seeing yet is that the sustainability transition is also a strategic opportunity.

It's not only about complying with regulations or targets that have been set to reduce footprints, but it's an opportunity to reinvent your business model and to help your customers become successful in their efforts to reduce their impact, for instance, and that becomes a tremendous business opportunity.

Countries around the world. I think Europe is probably taking the lead in that are spending billions. Tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars trying to stimulate that transition and that money will go to the companies that decide to be at the forefront of the transition. It's so important for us to be successful in that transition.

And that's what I focus on a lot as well. When we talk about systemic transformation, there are different ways in which you can try to change a system, but systems are very complex. They're made up of many different actors. And all of these actors have their own agenda, their own dynamics and sometimes competing.

Sometimes we try to change the system by introducing a tax or a subsidy, but those are very shallow. What is the type of system we want to create and what would be objective that we're collectively trying to achieve here? 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 

GJ, you were giving us a definition of what it takes to do systemic transformation. And if you can just share with our listeners what it entails. 

Geert Jan (GJ) van der Zanden

Yeah. So systemic transformation, it's a very complex and very challenging topic. Let me start at the beginning. So we know that we need to change our systems of actors and dynamics that has organized itself around satisfying our human or societal needs.

So for instance, we need to eat. That's why we have a food system that produces our food, transports it, deals with the waste. So that's what I call The system, but today we see that many of our systems are very inefficient and they have many undesired side effects. They produce waste or they produce too much greenhouse gas or the value created in the value chain is not distributed in a fair way.

So we need to change many of our systems. The United Nations came up with its sustainable development goals, which reflect what are the dimensions that we need to change. The problem is that systems are very complex, as I said, made up of many different actors, different dynamics, different agendas, sometimes competing agendas, how do you change a system?

That is the big challenge here. And there's been a lot of studies, a lot of philosophizing around the topic also. What we see a lot is that at the moment, we're still trying to change systems by making shallow interventions. And when I say shallow interventions. You should think about introducing a tax or a subsidy or a standard.

And those are shallow interventions. They're not very powerful interventions because if the design of the system still pushes the system in one direction, a tax won't fix it. For instance, if you have an economic system, as today in many countries, where most of the wealth creation accumulates with a small group of people.

Let's call them stakeholders, you can introduce a tax, but it's not going to change the system. Deeper interventions are in the design of the system, for instance, or in the way more stakeholders can have a voice in designing the system, that is a more powerful way to reorganize the system. And the most powerful way to reorganize the system is intervening at the level of mindset and paradigms.

So if we can change the mindset. Through which a system was designed and if we can change the objectives for which the system was designed, you're going to end up with a much. Better system than when you're only tweaking some taxes or some subsidies. So systemic change is a really complex issue because changing mindsets is not easy.

It's easier to use a tax. It's very difficult to change mindsets, but we need to start looking at that. Clearly just changing taxes and subsidies as we are doing now, setting targets. It's not getting us there. We have the SDGs. We've been working on them since 2015. We set targets for 2030. We have 17 SDGs, 160 something targets under those 17 SDGs.

We're almost missing all of those targets. We're vastly off track for reaching most of those targets. I think only 15 percent of these targets are on track. Most of them are sold and something like 18, 19 percent of the targets are actually backtracking, actually going backwards. So clearly the objectives are noble and right, but we're not going about it in the right way.

The way we're trying to achieve the SDGs is not working optimal. We need to start thinking also about more radical system level reinvention. And that's what I'm focusing on, that's what the book that I wrote is all about. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 

What are some ideas that you have for this radical reinvention? 

Geert Jan (GJ) van der Zanden

There's no silver bullet here that I can explain to you in two minutes.

Each system is different. But one thing that we see happening in society now is that society is polarizing. Technology is not helping us at the moment. Depolarizing society, right? One way in which we can Get more people involved again in designing systems together and getting shared visions, how the system works and what we like it to be, is to bring the dialogue back.

Right now we're in a polarized society where people Only talk to people that agree with them. And it's saying that people that don't agree with them are really wrong. And that's a fault in the way we're dealing with each other right now. So building platforms, constructive dialogue is one of the starting points for us to start building shares, understanding, because the problems are common problems.

The problem in the food system or climate change. It's not a problem only for Democrats or, or only for Republicans. It's everyone's fault. So we need to start building shared understanding and shared vision. And then we can start identifying where in the system it makes sense to intervene. The moment we're going in a different direction, we're not listening to each other.

This is a very basic first step that we need to consider. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 

It's really great that you have shared something which is valuable for everyone. And it's also very close to my heart because I run a small boutique consultancy and We do corporate culture change work, and we work mainly with family owned businesses.

In some ways, when the family is visionary enough, you get that tipping point where they can move the entire system. And of course, most times, it is harder to work with them because They are very much adverse to change or rocking the boat. About three years ago, we started working with a family in Vietnam in the ceramic tiles manufacturing business.

And as a result of creating a 30 year vision for the family, when they started to look at different scenarios, they were imagining a world where man may Be a man anymore, but it might be a machine, right? Because we're living in this moment where technology is really overtaking a lot of our lives. And so if that's the future, then really making more money doesn't make any difference.

It's the quality of that future. And the quality of the future is not just about. Money for my family, generations, but it's really the society, how it's engaging and how it's going forward. And so it was really amazing. The three next generation successors took on just one commitment for 30 years. And that was that they would invest their time and effort to the three P's.

One was people's inner development, which is to your point that if people don't have awareness about themselves and how they are part of the larger system, then there's going to be a lot of unintended consequences. And how do we get that knowledge, that awareness out to a greater group of people? And they came up with the audacious goal that they'll have a million people take on a three day system awareness program.

So that they have that to drive their next step, whether it's an entrepreneurship or it's in public service. And then they looked at planet renewal. And the last part was actually looking at progress sharing or prosperity sharing, because a large number of their workforce are actually people who earn something like 2 or 3 a day.

And how do you take them in a sustainable way to earning a thousand dollars a month without putting them into a debt cycle? Fintech was going to be the greatest hope for all the unbanked and the unserved. But what it has done is that we give them such high interest rates. And we make it so onerous that they get back into the debt cycle rather than move upwards.

So when they created the 3P commitments, what they saw over the one, two years, as they worked in the company in transforming the company to be a match for that future, because they are in an industry which depletes natural resources, contribute to pollution. You can't go and reinvent the industry literally overnight, unless you build a new factory and like you said, there are these actors and you have to talk to the different stakeholders, whether it's the fellow manufacturers or your suppliers and your customers who are your distributors.

And each one has their own agenda to not want to change. So how do you actually get them on board? And mind you, all this is not being done at the government level because Even the taxes and subsidies have not trickled down to industries as such because governments have their priorities and they're focusing on different things.

We thought it was really brave of the family. And then they saw that, okay, maybe we need to create a parallel organization because when a system has been built in a particular way,  can't really make much of a change unless you have a parallel organization. So they created like a NGO kind of a structure where These three commitments could be actually furthered by the work of this new organization.

And then they started to cross link it back to their corporate organization to have a group of people who are now aware about systems thinking, systems awareness, and are doing 3P innovation in their organization. In the factory floor about different ideas, whether it is to go to the villages and talk about food wastage or dealing with responsible production and consumption.

In some ways, this was very organic, GJ, because you don't get case studies about what you're going to do. You're out there literally making up the rules and just checking out whether it works or not. And is that what the journey is all about for the early adopters? Because the early adopters would have to test and prototype.

Geert Jan (GJ) van der Zanden

Yes, we all need to go through that learning, but we can learn a lot from other. People or other companies experiences, what you said, that family companies are often hesitant to change, which might be the case in some cases, but there's also a very nice aspect of family companies is that they tend to have a long view into the future.

They don't need to report profits every three months so that they can take them up and they've been around for generations and so they can, I think in terms of generations rather than reporting cycles, that actually makes family owned companies very interesting to work with. I love the work that you do where you help companies to develop their vision.

I think doing that work as a company, engaging a large amount of people in your company to jointly, Develop a purpose and translate that into a vision of what type of world would you like to create, what role can you play as a company in creating that world? That is such a powerful guidance for companies through crises.

It is such a powerful way for companies to get the right people on board and to mobilize their supply chains for that higher purpose, right? Especially the Western world, I think has been, Very materialistic, very efficiency oriented, uh, because there was a capitalist system behind it that was demanding efficiency in return on investment.

And all of that is great, but we need to find ways of integrating more purpose into that activity that's being done. The discussion now is not only on. Financial profits and financial reporting, how it is, we also need to report on social and environmental impact. So we're moving in the right direction.

And that's why that type of work of developing purpose for your company, creating time for everyone in the company to think about this. What is my purpose? How does it connect to my company's purpose? That can unlock tremendous amounts of innovation and energy. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra

How can companies get access to case studies and methodology?

Your book probably shares some of it. And if they're not the Fortune 500 companies and they have limited resources, how can they get access? 

Geert Jan (GJ) van der Zanden

As you say, in my book, I try to give the high level idea of the journey that companies need to consider. It's really at two levels. One is what I call a compliance. 

So, regulations are changing because countries have made commitment, especially on greenhouse gases, but more and more also on biodiversity or other issues. So as a company, you need to be aware of what those commitments are. You need to do your materiality analysis so that you know what's important for you as a business, what is important to your stakeholders.

And that helps you prioritize where you're going to focus your societal impact efforts. So this is quite a big compliance. Workstream, it's fairly straightforward, you know, what is important to you and your stakeholders, how I'm performing at the moment on those dimensions. So you need to do some.

Accounting and reporting. And then you need to devise the strategy. If you say we need to improve our water footprint or we need to improve our waste footprint or our greenhouse gas emissions, then you devise a strategy around that the other pillar of sustainable transition is more complex, but also more powerful.

This is where companies start to reinvent themselves for that sustainable future. So you need to do much more. Visioning work to understand strategically why you want to change that the leaders in the company need to translate that into a change narrative. Because they need to get their internal stakeholders on board.

They also need to get their external stakeholders on board with the change. And they need to convince the people that provide capital that this change is going to make sense. Then you need to implement that change. So then you need to go through this building of awareness and building involvement, building a culture in your company where everyone automatically takes these considerations into account when they take decisions. So it's not only about money and efficiency anymore. It's also about your societal and environmentally. That is really a tweak to the model that we have right now. We had a very simplistic capitalist model where for too long, we'd said the only thing that matters is making money.

Even if it causes external damage, if it causes damage to nature or to society, we're entering a new era now. So it's still about how can we be as efficient as possible, but we need to be economically sustainable. Yeah. You won't be around for long if you don't make money. So you have to make sure that you are economically sustainable.

But you also have to make sure that you clean up any mess that you create environmentally. Nowadays, they call it regenerative leadership. So we have actually eroded nature and society so much that it's starting to cost us money and we have eroded nature's ability to provide us with clean air or clean water.

So nowadays actually we need to help nature recover its ability to give us natural services. They call it regenerative leadership, and that's how we can create a better world. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra

What comes to mind now is a possible pushback from the stakeholders, including employees, because in any change effort, you will have promoters.

And you will have opposers. How do you think we can deal with opposers effectively so that they don't derail that change? 

Geert Jan (GJ) van der Zanden

That's a really good question. Of course, the first thing is to really try to understand the unopposers, which doesn't always happen. Let's go back to my story before, whereas we're not always going about systemic change in the right way. Sometimes it is invented somewhere at the top and then we identify a number of KPIs or targets. We put a couple of incentives in there and then we hope it's going to happen. That's not enough. You will need your targets and your incentives, but you need to bring people on board.

That onboarding process, which is much more of a psychological and cultural process and it's about making sure that all the stakeholders are heard and that they can contribute to the design of that new. system that you're trying to achieve. Maybe you recognize, again, there are these three different levels of where you can intervene in a system.

You can either set targets and incentives and the tax or subsidy, or you can involve stakeholders in that dialogue to jointly figure out what is important, how the system should be designed, and even better is if you can help everyone develop The understanding and the mindset and buy into the new paradigms that underlie the creation of the new system.

So there are these three different levels of how you can go about creating a new system. So when you talk about opponents, don't impose things on stakeholders. Now we live in a world where, where people are too connected and too opinionated and often too well informed to get stuff imposed on them.

Engage them and ideally engage them in the design and listen to them. Try to reflect the input that you get into the design of your new system and engage them in building that joint vision and the mindset. What do we need is a shift in mindset where we don't only care about money anymore, where we recognize that it's fine to make money, but don't ask society or nature for help.

To clean up your mess, to deal with the expenses of your focus on money, also make sure you create, or you at least maintain value for nature and society. That is the chip in mindset. And I think most people agree with that, but they've just been trained for decades. To just be as efficient as possible in making money.

And that's just a story that they were told when they were in business school in the 1970s. That's what they were being told. We need to start telling people a different story. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra

That's true. And what is SASIN doing as a business school to change that paradigm of thinking so that you can have future leaders who can be more sustainable?

Geert Jan (GJ) van der Zanden

We try to work on that in a very deliberate way. First of all, we have all of our core curriculum, the finance courses, marketing courses, et cetera, where we're working with all the existing faculty to really try to optimize the sustainability impact oriented content in their courses.

We still have finance courses instead of marketing courses, but we make sure that we, we bring in the sustainability and impact discussion into those courses. And then also we deliberately work on developing the right mindset in the students. We have a nine credit course, which is the equivalent of three.

Normal university courses in a module that we call skills and values for mindful leaders in a very playful way. Also very practical way. All of our students need to go through that quarter before they can start their MBA or their MBA. And this is where we help students think about their purpose and we help them.

Students understand how they should think about systems, how they can engage stakeholders to understand stakeholders better and work with stakeholders. It's equipping them with the basic and the basic. way of thinking for them to start creating positive societal impact. You can't do that in just a few weeks.

This is a seven week module, but it puts people on the right track. So we asked to identify which societal or environmental aspect they care about most. And they would like to impact during their time in session and afterwards. So, and, and that often becomes like the red thread in the way they choose their courses and RME is very action oriented.

So we have lots of practical projects where students need to work with companies to do consulting projects, for instance. Then often they take that societal issue that they are passionate about as a guidance in choosing which company, which challenge they will work on. As they work on these practical projects, they build their, their Knowledge, they built their understanding and then they applied it in a very practical way.

We tried to develop that mindset. We tried to help people think about their purpose. Then we give them the practical tools and the practical opportunities. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra

I think it's so inspiring that someone can go and do an MBA and get. Exposed to this whole aspect of who am I, and then to be able to contribute from that discovery of who am I as a purpose and do meaningful work for the rest of our lives.

I'll have to tell my daughter about the program, so maybe she can go and do that. 

Geert Jan (GJ) van der Zanden

I've worked in business for most of my life, and it's really exciting to now be working with the future generation of leaders. I learned the hard way in a way, when I went to do an MBA, most of what I heard was the role of companies and society is to make as much money as possible.

That was just the way it was programmed. And most of us were programmed. And I think it's really exciting to be able to transfer my learning. When I got my MBA, I, I focused on being successfully banking and consulting and making money until you find out that life is really not about that. But it takes a couple of decades before you really realize that.

I'm really excited about the opportunity of passing some of that learning onto new generations early so that they can spend most of their professional life actually creating positive discipleship. What's the use of being rich on a planet that's falling apart? 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra

So true. You also do work in the area of transformational leadership.

Geert Jan (GJ) van der Zanden

Now, ultimately, once you've looked at the context of sustainability or systemic thinking / transformation, it comes down to the implementation and it comes down to that individual. So what is transformational leadership and how distinct is that from the regular business as usual kind of leadership?

We spoke about changing our system because we create a much better world than we have today. It will never be perfect. To start thinking about some. Quite radical reinvent systems. If you want to change a system, someone needs to start, right? You need at least one organization within that system to take the lead.

Then you need some leader or leaders within that organization to take the lead. These things don't happen on their own, right? So transformation, the system starts with. An organization or a company becoming transformational, creating a transformational culture. And that starts with individual leaders within that organization, transforming their organization, being transformational leaders.

And that implies much of what we spoke about before, understanding the bigger system, effectively engaging. Stakeholders so that they also co memorize and co shape that understanding to joint process. So in transformational leadership, we focus a lot on systems thinking, on futures thinking, which is imagining the future through different lenses, not only the lens of technology, but nowadays.

People think that technology is going to be the solution to everything. And when you ask people to imagine the future, they will come with a technological story. What about values in the future? What about the balance between nature and society in the future? And there are many different dimensions in which we can imagine the future.

And you can only start creating a future if you imagine it first, right? We also work on that, helping people imagine a future that is not only one dimension technology. The different scenarios. So different scenarios, different lenses. And then once you get into implementation, you need to start thinking, okay, if I want to eat this future that we imagined, you can't do that alone.

This is by definition, a collaborative process. If you want to become good at collaboration. You need to build those skills and part of that is deeply understanding the stakeholders that you're dealing with, building your change narratives in such a way that your stakeholders totally are with you. And these are very specific things that you can teach people.

There are tools that you can teach to do systems mapping, to do your stakeholder mapping, to build more tailored narratives for different stakeholders. There are tools to do scenario planning or futures ideation. Can we teach people radical agility, right? How can you target radical change in a way that you're agile, but the radical change objective is always there.

Our objective is when people walk out of the door here, that they are well versed with these tools that have toolboxes full of useful tools. they're comfortable with and they can start applying. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra

I think it's really powerful how you've described it. We think that we have to copy someone's style or look at that person's personality, or maybe they went to this particular university.

But what you have decoded for us is that transformational leadership is all about being almost like a metasystem leader, whereby you're able to bring your sense making of what's happening as an awareness. And then you are also clear about what's happening around you with your stakeholders. You're able to engage them, to include them, and then at some point to align so that people can get together and to move forward.

And at all points, you are providing that leadership. Not just for yourself, because you've got your own frames and you've got your own perspectives that you have to be willing to let go of in order to be able to engage with others. But what's powerful about all this is that these are really tool sets, like you said, that someone can equip themselves and can get really competent to use them and all they probably need is a deep commitment and maybe an awareness that we are all in this shared journey together. And if we have that level of empathy or compassion, then all we need to now do is to just learn these tools and we'll become this great meta system leader.

Geert Jan (GJ) van der Zanden

Probably the most important part that I would encourage everyone to stop and think about for some time is developing your personal purpose. That is so powerful. You spend time thinking about what is the type of world that you want to create as an individual or as a company, or what is the big issue that challenge that you want to positively contribute to that becomes such a strong driver of your own personal activity, but also that is where you can get other people to join forces with you.

There's nothing as powerful as a group of people that share the same purpose. Simon Sinek, he has this beautiful TED talk about the golden circles, right? How do you get people with you? How do you get them on board? Because we need to do this together, right? The why, the how, and the what, and you should start with.

Why many people start talking about what they want to do, but we should talk to people about why we're in this, why are we sitting around the table together? What is the big challenge that we agree on we need to face? Then everything else becomes easier. What we've found in our visioning work, when we create the company's vision, what's critical is that the individuals who are participating have to identify first and create their own personal purpose.

Because if they don't get what's in it for me, as in, what, who am I and what's my purpose. They can't align to that shared common vision that you are trying to create. And so it goes hand in hand and it becomes really powerful when people understand that. And like you said, why is a very important piece to fulfill.

At the end of the day, we're all in the same boat. We're all living on the same planet and we're responsible for that one planet. So if we mess up society or if we mess up the planet, we all lose. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra

That's true. I've enjoyed this insightful discussion with you today, GJ. I'm looking forward to meeting up with you when I make my next trip to Thailand, Bangkok. So, thank you. 

Geert Jan (GJ) van der Zanden

Thank you, too. I think these questions are really good. It's nice to get into these topics. Well, thank you for the invitation.