"Cultivating Earth-Shaped Leaders: Ecological Imagination in Organizations"
an article by Ben Yosua-Davis, Director of Applied Research at The BTS Center
published in the Humanistic Management Journal, December 2024

The BTS Center is delighted to announce the publication of "Cultivating Earth-Shaped Leaders: Ecological Imagination in Organizations," an article authored by our own Ben Yosua-Davis, Director of Applied Research. This work, available to read now in the Humanistic Management Journal, offers in-depth analysis and learnings from the year-long Research Collaborative which Ben spearheaded from November 2021 to November 2022.

The BTS Center’s Research Collaborative gathered eight cross-sector organizations, all planted within Northern New England (plus one organization across the border in Montreal) — organizations representing many different sectors, including education, prison reform, the arts, community gardening and food justice, and social action — to explore the question “How would organizations act differently today if they embodied an ecological imagination?” The Research Collaborative took the form of a co-learning community which was nested within an in-depth qualitative research process. Together we spent a year in mutual exploration: reading together, asking big questions, sharing our experiences, wondering aloud, and engaging in personal and organizational experiments. 

The findings from the Research Collaborative are rich, at times surprising, and have implications for organizations in all sectors, not just those that are explicitly spiritual or religious. As Ben writes in this article:

"If we understand climate as the symptom of a deeper set of systemic cultural crises, then anything we do to transform the industrial-capitalist, mechanistic, imperialist systems that are at the roots of this crisis is inherently climate work. This means that an organization’s responsibility in this moment goes far beyond simply installing solar panels to investigating how the ways in which we lead can either reinforce or transform the systems that have brought us to this place."

We hope you'll take the time to read and explore, to wonder with us how this research might inform your own organizations and communities, and to be in touch with responses and questions. We congratulate Ben on his fantastic work!