Discover how you can embed sustainability across a Higher Education organisation.
Dr Alex Ryan, Director and Founder of Learning Energy, returns to her old Lancaster University haunts to tell us about her work inside and outside universities on the ‘great big gobbling monster’ of sustainability. Alex helps people and organisations address sustainability challenges: work is not always easy.
We discuss the evolution of understanding and action in universities over the last 20 years; the importance of changes to culture and strategy; how to place the common good ahead of self-interest when making changes; and how the university sector mirrors other areas of society and the economy when it comes to attitudes and behaviours around sustainability.
We discover how a positive mindset change across an organisation can help overcome ‘change humps’; the essential role of universities in brokering systems change; and how to think differently around reporting and numbers.
Plus, Jan questions her own knowledge and skills, we discover Paul and Alex’s differing experiences of Lancaster University Library and its fines system, the Great Vowel Shift gets belated publicity, and we consider becoming the Pentland Centre for Love and Justice in Business.
Read the Advance HE Measuring What Matters report here: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/measuring-what-matters
Transforming Tomorrow
Sustainability is key for any business that wants to build a lasting legacy. From carbon footprints to biodiversity to modern slavery, seabeds to factory floors, everything matters.
On Transforming Tomorrow, we make the complex understandable, the theory practical, as we guide you through the ever-changing and often exciting world of sustainability in business.
Speaking to internationally renowned experts and business leaders, we uncover how to mainstream environmental, social and economic sustainability into purposeful business strategy and performance.
Whether you are leading transition in your business, want to build a corporation with a green heart or change your individual actions, or just want to know more about how space weather might affect your operations, Transforming Tomorrow is the show for you.
Hosts Jan and Paul bring insight, perspective, and not a little amount of disagreement, to all the subjects, helping you find the message among the madness.
Join us every Monday to uncover new insights and become a little more inspired that you can make a difference.
You can find transcripts for most episodes at: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/pentland/resources-for-education-and-practice/transforming-tomorrow-podcast/transcripts/
Send your questions on any of the issues we discuss in Transforming Tomorrow to [email protected] or fill in our feedback form here: https://forms.office.com/e/7Bw4rDiRDt
Find out more about the Pentland Centre and its work here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/pentland/
Meet the Hosts
Professor Jan Bebbington is the Director of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business at Lancaster University. Jan is an expert on accounting, benchmarking (to her co-host’s annoyance), and how business and sustainability intersect.
Jan loves nature and wants to protect it – and hopes she can change the world (ideally for the better). She is also motivated to address inequality wherever it is found and especially to eliminate forced, bonded or child labour. Transforming Tomorrow is one small step on that quest.
Paul Turner is a former sports journalist who now works promoting the research activities in Lancaster University Management School – a poacher turned gamekeeper as his former colleagues would have it.
Paul has always been interested in nature and the natural environment – it comes from growing up in Cumbria – and has been a vocal proponent of the work of the Pentland Centre since joining Lancaster University. He does not like rankings and benchmarking, and is not afraid to say so.