Apology is a leadership skill. So is imagining the future.
Alexandrina Agloro teaches the required course in Conservation Futures Academy’s Professional Certificate in Global Conservation Leadership. Two of her arguments are worth the attention of anyone who leads mission-driven work.
Leadership training in conservation tends to cover strategy, budgets and people management. Alexandrina Agloro, a trained futurist and assistant professor in ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society, teaches two things it usually skips.
Repair belongs in the curriculum
Agloro frames environmental justice as a question about organizations, not only about air and soil. Mission-driven work runs on conviction, and conviction is hard on the people who carry it. Harm inside an organization is a leadership problem with the same standing as any external one.
Her position is that leaders will make mistakes, so the competency worth teaching is what happens next. “How do you repair? Because we’re always going to make mistakes.” The environmental justice unit of her course opens with that skill rather than closing with it.
For a field that works through partnerships with communities, funders and governments, an organization that cannot apologize well is carrying an operational risk, not a personality flaw.
Futures is a field of study
“It’s not just a cool word, we are planning the future,” Agloro says. Scenario building has methods, literature and practitioners. She teaches it as such.
Her framing of who already does this work is the more useful idea for institutions. Community organizing, she argues, is a futures practice: anyone organizing a community is working toward a world that does not yet exist. That places rigorous foresight closer to conservation practice than most organizations assume, and it widens who counts as qualified to do it.
The through line is that both skills are learnable. Neither belongs to temperament.
In the full interview, Agloro describes how learners practice apology in the live session, what a graduate student watched go wrong between a funder and a community on the Amazon, and why the Rob Walton School of Conservation Futures leads with people.
Read the full interview with Alexandrina Agloro in the Conservation Futures Academy newsroom.
Image: Alexandrina Agloro facilitating a carbon futures game she designed. Photo by Linsey Wilt.