Fundamentals of sustainability transformation in organisations: HNEE employee receives research fellowship at IASS Potsdam

Dr Anke Strauß, head of the Strategic Sustainability Management Master's programme at the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE), has been awarded a research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS Potsdam).

Despite the urgent need for change towards a sustainable way of life in our world, production, consumption, living and working processes hardly change. One of the reasons for this immutability is the way we shape organisational processes and the relationship between organisations and their environments. The prevailing paradigm is based on the principles of autonomy and abstraction. Both are forms of decoupling that also determine our current understanding of and approach to sustainable development issues.

Until December 2022, the scientist and HNEE employee Dr Anke Strauß is now researching the foundations of sustainability transformation in organisations in the IASS's transdisciplinary research group "Perception, Values, Orientation". As part of the research fellowship, she is investigating the role of aesthetics in organisational sustainability transformation. Aesthetic practices - such as experimental future narratives or artistic approaches - are examined to determine the extent to which they can change the current mental infrastructure and open up new ways of thinking about organisational methods.

"Transformation requires skills to deal with what is not yet known. We access new things through our senses. As sustainability requires new forms of organisational processes, structures and also relationships between organisations and their environments, aesthetics play a central role in the urgently needed transformation towards sustainability. I am therefore delighted to be a Fellow at the IASS and to be able to pursue these questions in an interdisciplinary and international team," says Anke Strauß.

The topics of sustainability, transformation and aesthetics overlap in terms of content with the HNEE continuing education programme "Strategic Sustainability Management" programme. Here, sustainability transformation in organisations is seen as a strategic task that operates with open futures. The training of change agents required for this includes, in addition to content qualifications, above all the teaching of systematic design skills that enable visions and strategies to be developed, coalitions to be formed and organisational transformation processes to be accompanied.

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