Our work with AACSB
We are honoured to collaborate with the largest accreditor to business schools globally, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, to design and facilitate their Societal Impact Leadership Accelerators.
The Challenge
Design and facilitate a process that would create a new body of societal impact leadership knowledge to affect the global standards for business school education.
OUR APPROACH
A series of Societal Impact Leadership Accelerators with cross-sectoral cohorts of senior leaders that would stretch their ways of seeing, knowing, and being.
“I believe that the impact of this initiative will reach far beyond us, just as the stone dropped in the water ripples to the shore.”
— Accelerator One participant
The not-for-profit AACSB was focusing increasing attention on the importance of societal impact and sought to expand their work and influence in shifting the value proposition of business schools. In summer 2021, AACSB Chief Product Officer, Nick Igneri, approached Solvable with his vision to build a cross-sector collective that could identify the future leadership competencies needed for positive societal impact in the private and public sectors. Given our background in building networked peer-learning spaces, he asked if Solvable could design and facilitate spaces that would galvanize a collective while harvesting the wisdom of these leaders.
We began a discovery process with senior impact leaders in our network to ascertain what it would take to say yes to joining such a collective. While it was clear that many saw the immense value in shifting the value of business school education towards societal impact, there was a clear challenge in the scarcity of time these leaders had to contribute to a collective. Through conversations with the AACSB leadership team, we co-created a more personal invitation—an intensive leadership learning journey while also contributing to an important body of knowledge. The concept of a three-month innovation journey emerged called the Societal Impact Leadership Accelerator.
Underlying this work was the assumption that in order to emerge a set of competencies both different from our present and distinguished from business-as-usual, the learning spaces had to be carefully prepared to imagine other possibilities outside of our current dominant paradigm.
Together with thirteen senior impact leaders from Google, Interface, the Government of Wales, Doctors Without Borders, Enactus, Heineken, Computer Warehouse Group, Ashoka, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Wiley, and ETS, we launched Accelerator One in spring 2022 consisting of five synchronous virtual workshops, nine working group sessions (divided into three groups), and thirty-nine one-on-one coaching sessions. We created an Advisory Circle of illustrious impact leadership thinkers to inspire and provoke the cohort: Andri Magnason, Arturo Escobar, Cathy-Mae Karelse, Denise DeLuca, Peter Block, & Renee Lertzman. Three Horizons was our framework for this journey accompanied by readings, dialogues with experts, and inner work practices to open consciousness of multiple presents, possible futures, and transitions that could accelerate alternative paradigms.
The Accelerator sought to bridge the connections between the inner conditions of the leader and their capacity to make an external positive impact in the world. Societal impact leadership competencies were considered as intervention points to manifest change within teams, organizations, and systems. The three leadership competencies Accelerator One chose to dive deeply into—paradox, compassion, depolarization—were recognized as sitting uncomfortably with the private, public, and educational sectors. We see this as validation that the design of Accelerator One was transcendent of the dominant paradigm and enabled the cohort to step across iterative change and into a truly different set of societal impact leadership competencies than can be found on most corporate HR lists.
“Being part of this Accelerator was enlightening for me both personally and professionally. The process allowed me to really look deep at who I am as a leader, and what I want to do moving forward to maximize the impact I have on people and the planet. The group and the discussions were incredibly motivating, and really got to the heart of what is needed to be a societal impact leader. In a career spent helping people achieve educational and workplace success, this is some of the most rewarding work I have done.”
— Accelerator One participant
A NEW VISUAL LANGUAGE
When a new field is emerging—as we believe is currently happening within societal impact leadership—it can often feel abstract and untethered from our day-to-day realities. We felt it was important to create a visual language that reflected the emergent and entangled nature of this social field and complemented the written descriptions. Our team created a new design language that incorporated AACSB brand colours while creating ways to understand the competencies and see new possibilities and connections in their interrelationships. Each competency was visualized to reflect the nuanced definitions created by the working groups, while also stitching them together within a broader societal impact topography that can expand as the work continues.
RESULTS
At the conclusion of Accelerator One, we created a survey for the cohort to measure the value of the experience. The scores were highly favourable with reflections of the following:
The Net Promoter score was 50 which is considered “excellent.”
88.5% of the responses said they gained new insights on leading change with others.
All respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the work AACSB is doing with societal impact leadership is vital.
Based on the impact of the work and the results, AACSB renewed our contract for a second Accelerator which began in September 2022. The Accelerator Two cohort expanded in participants and also in its ambitions. Through all that we learned in the Accelerator One prototype, we redesigned a number of elements to deepen the leadership and competency work. We also recruited a new group of stellar Advisory Council members for the journey: Marty Linksy, Vanessa Andreotti, Henry Mintzberg, Jemilah Mahmood, Bill Reed, & Terry Irwin.
You can follow the progress of Societal Impact Accelerators on AACSB’s website here.