Deep Sustainability Academy

Yes if:

✅ You're in a position and have the drive to actively participate in making changes.

✅ You want to deepen your individual and collaborative problem solving skills .

✅ You recognize there are deeper changes we as individuals, organizations and societies need to make.

Is this for you?

How our "usual" ways of thinking are failing us: example

When we hear that the percentage of renewable energy in our energy mix is growing, you might think "Great! We're making progress to curb climate change." But look at the consumption chart - purely adding more renewable capacity does nothing to reduce the highly-emitting sources. We just have more total energy. These kinds of fallacies are ubiquitous and point to our lack of depth in the way we approach problem-solving.

• We treat symptoms while ignoring the deeper causes.

• We love narrow, easy-to-measure metrics while ignoring the wider context.

• We're very attached to our beliefs and what we call "thinking" is often just rationalization of our existing positions.

• We like to think in linear cause-effect logic, while most problems have deeper dynamics.

Programme

There will be 5 weekly live online sessions, each lasting 4 hours (scroll down to see the dates for the next cohort). Throughout the programme, you will be invited to apply the insights you get to the case of your choice - that way, you will finish the academy with tangible ideas about how to leverage your agency and align your organization with the direction of collective wellbeing.

Week 1: Opening the space for deep learning

• Introduction

• Perception vs reality: limited nature of our thinking and perception - and why this is actually at the core of our problems.

• The iceberg model: how to explore the deeper problem layers

• Multiple hypotheses: ditch opinions and become friends with uncertainty

• Homework: apply the insights to the case of your choice

Week 2: Dynamics that make our systems unsustainable

• Multipolar traps: how is acting in our best interest leading to collapse and why trying to manage footprints is less useful than you might think?

• Quick fixes and addictions: when easy and effective solutions turn out to be making the problem worse

• Perverse incentives: what drives the destructive behavior of our systems?

• Case studies: why are renewables and circular economy failing to reduce GHG emissions and material throughput and what makes AI a very risky bet.

• Homework: applying the insights to the case of your choice

Week 3: Unpacking the toolbox

• Interconnections: finding causes in unlikely places and why there is no such thing as "side effects"

• Feedback loops: the hidden drivers of change, stability and resistance

• Delays: recognize physical, perception and information delays as key factors of systemic behavior to be taken into account.

• Data: How it's useful and how it can be misleading

• Homework: applying the insights to the case of your choice

Week 4: Changing paradigms

• Hidden assumptions: how to bring them into conscious awareness to facilitate understanding and cooperation

• Conditioning: how worldviews generate our social and technological systems, which in turn condition our worldviews

• Emotions: dealing with emotional heaviness of questioning our deep beliefs and dealing with overwhelming issues

• Homework: applying the insights to the case of your choice

Week 5: Future trajectories

• Efficiency vs resilience: striving for balance

• The changes needed: how to build systems that will drive the evolution towards a better state?

• Visioning: an open discussion about what a sustainable, just and wise global civilization would look like and how we will apply the insights from the academy into our work

• Closing of the academy

Benefits

For individuals

• Better sense of agency in solving the most important challenges

• More clarity in decision making and critical thinking

• Greater capacity to understand perspectives of others and deepen your own understanding

For organizations

• Improved collaborative problem solving abilities

• Alignment of strategy with what the world really needs

• Improved capacity for mutual understanding within teams and with external stakeholders

For the world

• Approaching global challenges holistically is our only shot at building a society that thrives within planetary boundaries and doesn't destroy itself

• Building systems that serve all life instead of exploiting it

Programme facilitator

My name is Ram Dušić Hren. I developed the Deep Sustainability Academy because I just couldn't find a programme elsewhere that would comprehensively dive into the most important questions we as humanity must urgently ask.

Originally, I'm a physicist - which just means I never stopped annoying people with "Why" questions. My career started in academic research and then continued into tech entrepreneurship and later in a global technological corporation.

All the while I was in science & technology, some basic questions kept nagging me. "What is progress, really?" "How do technology and humanity interplay?" "How come that in spite of all this progress, we're still making many of the most important problems worse?" "What are the dynamics that drive our development?"

No single discipline has answers to that, but each can provide valuable perspectives. That's why I also studied literature in various other disciplines, especially economics. Public speaking, soft skills and workshop facilitation were also things I have always enjoyed doing. So, all of that prompted me to start Bright3r in 2020. From then on, I've been working on sustainability projects and launched the Holistic Thinking Academy in 2024.

Read more and follow me on Linkedin.