Bargmann is an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture where her research through Project D.I.R.T., Design Investigations Reclaiming Terrain, aims to “excavate the creative potential of degraded landscapes.” She is also a principal at D.I.R.T. (Dump it Right Here) Studio in New York. In both of these pursuits, Bargmann’s work is interdisciplinary and driven by an “obsession with urban regeneration”.

Bargmann has worked on such high profile projects as the green roof on the Ford River Rouge plant, working with William McDonough & Associates among others, and New York’s High Line Park, working with Michael VanValkenberg & Associates among others.

Her hero is Robert Smithson, the American artist who is one of the founders of the earthworks or land art movement. She described him as thinking with “a greater clock” – having deeper and more expansive concepts of time that were revealed through his sculpture. His art and essays have inspired her to think differently about land and landscapes. She said that she finds beauty in industrial landscapes and sees industrial uses of land simply as one point on a continuum of usage that stretch through time. “It’s not as if we are taking a landscape from what it is back to what it once was; I want to help the landscape become what it is meant to be next.”

Bargmann described the challenges of her work as beginning with the general lack of familiarity with brownfields issues. “You have to understand the minds you are dealing with,” she said. “My job is not to make the issues less complex, but to make the outcomes seem more attainable.” Bargmann said that this is her greatest leadership challenge. She has to be facile with economic as well as design issues.

On the Rouge River project, Ford executives were initially not interested in a green roof. However she and the team were able to convince the head of Ford’s environment group of the value of the project. He, in turn, became a champion who swayed the balance of the Ford executives.

“Every designer needs a champion on the client side,” she said. “You have to plant the seed, be catalytic, and get them thinking beyond business as usual. It means being both pragmatic and poetic.”

She worked on the Vintondale Reclamation Park project in Pennsylvania. In this case, a historian was the champion for the project: he had the vision that the site of a former coal mine could be reclaimed as park land. The historian saw the park, which would also include art installations, as continuation of the work of the land. “He saw this as the next logical step for the land,” she said. Bargmann worked as part of pro-bono team for five years and describes this as a “seminal project” as it brought severely damaged land back as a productive, vital landscape. It was awarded the Phoenix Award, “the brownfields equivalent of Hollywood’s Oscars.”

Bargmann described the Vintondale project as a typical example of leading from the bottom up. This is where she often sees projects taking shape and so now concentrates her work on pilot and demonstration projects. She noted that major projects are difficult to find given the current economic climate. She has purposefully kept her firm small so that she can pick-and-choose those projects that are most interesting.

Not every project comes to fruition. The architect on a large project for a university that was expanding into a brownfield site brought Bargmann onto the project team. The original plan called for excavating tons of potentially contaminated soil and trucking it across several states for disposal. Bargmann and her team developed a plan for a “soil farm” process through which the “dirty” soil could have been reclaimed on site. “It made an enormous amount of sense but the team from the university just couldn’t get their arms around the idea,” she said.

Another leadership challenge for Bargmann is navigating the political aspects of a project. She noted that major projects typically involve a “dysfunctional network” of agencies, developers, designers, and other players. She said that she often had to play “match maker” between agencies that don’t often speak with each other, yet that must come together for a successful brownfield redevelopment. She counseled that knowing the players and their interests. Then you can “make room for the landscape’s best interests,” she said.

Bargmann said that it is important to “level the ground” and find a common desired outcome. She works to do this by focusing on what is “best for the landscape.” This gets the discussion out of the functional silos and up to a more strategic level. “I try to be the voice of the landscape,” she said.

No matter how skillful one is, however, permitting is still an enormous logistical challenge, she said. “No matter how many agencies give you the green light, there is always one more out there that can stop you in your tracks,” she said. To mitigate this she tries to work with architects (who are usually the design lead on a project) who are politically astute and who know how to navigate in the city where the project is situated. “Someone on the team has to know the bureaucracy,” she said.

Looking to the future Bargmann said that she is intrigued by smaller industrial cities such as Trenton and Baltimore where the challenges are great but resources scarce. She is particularly energized about the possibilities in Detroit, a city that is trying to “shrink in a purposeful way.” She sees the potential to create “an urban wilderness” out of abandoned industrial and commercial sites, a prospect she sees as an enormous, exciting challenge.

Bargmann’s work is instructive and an inspiration to see the discards of our past in a new light.

In doing the research for the proposal, I spoke with a number of local people and the idea took on a life of its own. It has been embraced by a number of local organizations as well as the Green Restaurant Association (GRA) which has agreed to certify Washington Square as the nation’s first green restaurant district if 25% of its restaurants meet the GRA’s certification standards. The Green Restaurant District project will be a feature of Brookline’s Climate Week in January 2012.

Why pursue a Green Restaurant District?

-          Restaurants are the dominant business in Wasington Square (20 of 62 storefront businesses are restaurants).

-          Restaurants have a greater impact on the environment than other businesses: on average, they use 2.5x the energy of other businesses, generate approximately 50,000 lbs of waste (95% of which could be recycled or composted), and use up to 300,000 gals of water;

-          The Square already has Boston’s first certified green restaurant here: The Fireplace. Owner Jim Solomon is enthusiastic and says that he saves significantly on his operating costs as a result of adopting environmentally friendly practices;

-          The Green Restaurant Association (GRA) gathered more than 2,000 signatures in Brookline from people who said that they wanted Brookline restaurants to “go green.”

Thus it seems logical: if  Washington Square restaurants  “go green,” they benefit from lower costs while the town benefits from a smaller environmental footprint. And, with the publicity likely to result from becoming the first green restaurant district in the country, more diners will be attracted to the Square giving business a boost. It’s a win, win, win!

Another personal benefit of the project is that it is a chance to move beyond the academic exploration of leadership to the front lines. While the initial enthusiasm from the neighborhood is great, it will take a lot of meeting, educating, and cajoling to make the green restaurant district a reality. And did I mention that I am looking forward to getting to know the restauranteurs better?

I’ll keep you posted. If you are interested in helping, please be in touch.

I am a climate change believer. I see it as one of the Pillar Trends that has the power to reshape our world and the way we live. However, I must ask: is the war for truth one that can be won?

In my latest paper, I explore the epistemology of climate change science. My conclusion is that more physical science is likely not the answer.  One must turn to the social sciences to better understand how we learn and come to hold the beliefs that we consider to be the “truth.”

I invite you to download the PDF: ClimateChangeSciencecc and leave your comments here.

Library of Congress Photo courtesy of KansasPhoto (Flickr Creative Commons)

I have been thinking for some time about the gradual disappearance of what I call the “rich-poor” life. This is the life once lived by my grade school teachers who didn’t have a lot of money but who managed to be culturally rich. They traveled and brought their slides to school. They read books and saw films. They visited museums.  They were educated, sophisticated, and adventurous without being slaves to a job or worrying about health care. This was a life I always felt that I could live as a fall-back should I find myself in hard times. Now, I’m not so sure.

The rich-poor life depends upon public libraries, free nights at museums, public lectures, open rehearsals at the symphony, theater in the park, the parks themselves, and so much more. It needs quality public spaces and those “third places” where one can find a reasonably priced cup of coffee or glass of wine and spend an hour conversing. At a more fundamental level, it requires quality public schools so that people cultivate a taste for cultural exploration, an appreciation of nature, and a thirst to learn. Each of these is under threat by our current economic downturn with funds dwindling and, more significant, a turning away from viewing social spending as necessary.

I may have a romantic view of the rich-poor life, thinking that I could survive happily in a small garret with my books, tea (OK, wine), and a subway pass. For many, however, these resources are critical for social mobility. It was for my parents and many other people of their generation. The library, the arboretum, the museum opened a view on the world that inspired them to study. They saw a better life and a way to get there. They saved and worked and strove.

Instead we have been sold, and to be fair have happily bought, a poor-rich life full of easy credit and the mountains of stuff it makes possible: a new car leased every two years, acres of granite counter tops, and useless gee-gaws that give us a momentary purchase high.  We can’t live without 200 cable channels so that we can track every movement of the Kardashians (who are they and what do they actually do?).  We have failed to address the decline in public education in a meaningful way for more than a generation.  Household debt is up; social mobility is down. Unemployment is up and so is income inequality. Our public infrastructure is a shambles. We’ve quite willingly sold our collective soul to the company store.

This is not about the “nanny state.” This is about how much of our common wealth should be hidden behind a pay wall. Is there a certain amount of life that should be free or is it all going to be pay-to-play? I believe that making it possible to have an intellectually and culturally rich life at low or no cost is critical to the fabric of a healthy democracy and vibrant economy.

Is it that important, this rich-poor life? We have reached a point where it seems we cannot afford to be us. Or at least us as we’ve defined it over the past 20 years. We’ve just witnessed widespread rioting in London. When people at every economic strata cannot live satisfying lives, pressure builds and eventually bursts. When we hollow out life so that it is defined only in economic terms, it becomes expensive at best and impossible at worst for many people to find that satisfaction. That is a tragedy for  individuals and society as a whole if we wish them both to be sustainable and resilient.

Leaders, however, must acknowledge that while simplicity has its place, the world is non-linear, disorderly, and in many ways unpredictable. Leaders need to embrace and understand complexity.

In a literature survey that I conducted this past spring I found that complexity was a topic not covered in depth in most traditional leadership scholarship (I will cover the other “missing” topics in future columns). A relatively small group of thinkers including Meg Wheatley, Peter Senge, and Donella Meadows have rooted their work in a systems-based world view that brings complexity to the fore and offers important leadership insights.

One approach to complexity that I have found particularly useful was developed in the 1950s by Dr. Warren Weaver to help explain the evolution of scientific thought. In Weaver’s framework, Simplicity refers to challenges with 1 – 4 variables. Disorganized complexity refers to challenges with many, many independent variables such that sophisticated statistical analysis is necessary to understand it. As organizations and cities become more sophisticated with analytics, they become more comfortable with disorganized complexity. In between the two, and often overlooked, is organized complexity. These situations have more variables than found in simplicity yet fewer than disorganized complexity and, more important, there are interdependencies between the variables. Jane Jacobs, in her classic Death and Life of Great American Cities, felt that neighborhoods were examples of organized complexity.

Senge, in his book The Fifth Discipline, made a similar distinction between detail complexity (arising from a large number of variables) and dynamic complexity (arising from the relationships between the components where cause and effect may not be clear and may vary over time).

Much direct mail fundraising activity is an exercise in disorganized complexity. Offers are sent to thousand or perhaps millions of people. Each responds or not independent of any of the others who have received the offer. The complexity is mastered through averages (response rate, gift size, etc.) derived through statistical analysis. Success is achieved when those autonomous responses conform to or exceed the predicted average response.

Large organizations, by contrast, represent organized complexity. Key to success is understanding the interdependencies and relationships between the components.  Marketing may generate thousands of gifts but if Member Services does not follow up with a “thank you,” if Purchasing does not procure the promised premium, if Fulfillment does not send the premium, and if Accounting does process the donations success will not be achieved.

It is not uncommon for people in organizations – or their external constituencies – to complain that “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” In my experience, things are often arrayed so that they make sense on paper – a simplicity-based view – but are derailed by sour personal relationships, misaligned or conflicting incentives, or a failure to discern hard-to-see interdependencies. For example, Marketing may have had an opportunity to get into the mail early and failed to notify Purchasing that premiums would be needed sooner than planned. Or Purchasing, incented to save money, may have switched suppliers resulting in a delivery delay. At one level, this is management: getting people to do things right. At a higher level, however, it is about leading through complexity.

Leaders must continually work to ensure that each component of their extended enterprises – within and outside of their formal organizations – has clarity on three things: purpose, values, and the business model.  Purpose is understanding the job that the customer is hiring you to do – if they are donating to your environmental organization they want to know that their money has been received and is being put to work. If they opted to receive the premium product, they may also value the chance to promote their efforts on behalf the natural world. Values are the bedrock principles by which you operate – among which may be providing the highest level of service to members. The business model is how the organization remains financially viable – and understanding that saving a nickel on each tote bag may cost more than it saves if they arrive a month late.

The dynamic nature of complex systems means that clarity is always threatened. People come and go, assume new roles, and acquire new experiences. Market conditions shift. Competitors act. Leaders must always try to see the whole and help those they lead see it as well. Embrace complexity and give others clarity. Then people will begin to act as parts of the system and more accurately perceive their impact on the rest of the system.

Action Plan

-          Read more about leadership and complex systems. Donella Meadows’ article, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” or the book A Simpler Way by Meg Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers are great places to start.

-          Pursue clarity around Purpose and Values as well as the Business Model. Many meetings begin with a review of “the numbers.” Try starting one with a conversation about purpose or values to signal that these are high on your agenda and to find fuzziness around why and how you operate.

-          Exercise a framework for understanding complexity. Whether you adopt Weaver’s, Senge’s, or another approach, practice using complexity as a diagnostic for addressing situations you face. Keep notes on where relationships between elements rather than the elements themselves are the critical issue to resolve.

A version of this post appeared on BecomeaLeader.org.

Your thoughts and comments are encouraged!

Late in 2009 world leaders met for COP15 in Copenhagen and came away empty-handed. Hopes were incredibly high — too high to ever have been fully fulfilled — and the hangover from that disappointment bled into 2010. Carbon legislation stalled in the U.S. and will not be helped by the more conservative Congress that will convene in January. A Conservative government was elected in the U.K. and will likely scale back investment in alternative energy and other green measures as part of its overall austerity plan. Europe is teetering on the brink of a major Euro crisis that will distract from its leadership in sustainability. China continues to invest in green technologies but any discussion of the social justice aspects of sustainability would likely be met with a blank stare if not outright hostility. It also continues to build massively using old technologies and old standards in parallel to its efforts to be clean.

2011 may well be the year of full-blown backlash against climate change: the choir will continue to sing but increasingly to itself. The challenge will be to turn a time of retrenchment into an opportunity for recharging our batteries, refocusing our arguments, and frankly better understanding the concerns of those who are not on the bandwagon.

This is a challenge of leadership. As I have long maintained, technical knowledge is not what is holding us back: it is a lack of broadly persuasive, transformational meta-leadership that brings together disparate parties and engages both individuals and organizations in a cause bigger than their own self interests.

The financial crisis of the past two years has done much to pull us apart and cause people to focus on their own situations. This is natural given that many found themselves without a job, lacking health care, and losing their homes. Even those doing relatively well see themselves at risk. It is definitely a time of “there but for the grace of God go I.” Forecasts are that unemployment will not get better for some time and efforts to repeal the Health Care Reform act in the U.S. will make health care even more precarious for many.

I also think that the analytics of sustainability will become increasingly refined and more broadly accepted. It will become harder to argue against evidence with half-truths and ideological statements. If we who believe in the threat of climate change are smart, we will concentrate on making those analytics easily understandable by the lay public and relevant to their lives.

In all of this I find hope. My enthusiasm is undiminished. I’ll be starting a self-designed Master’s program at Lesley University focused on leadership of meta-system scale challenges (like climate change) and co-authoring a book on meta-leadership. I also am increasingly convinced that the leadership we need on climate change and sustainability (and health care for that matter) will come from the bottom and the middle rather than the top. There are hundred, thousands of grass roots efforts to address these issues. From these will emerge meta-leaders who can unite those working toward similar goals into an energized army of change. I plan to march among them and hope to see you in our ranks.

2011 may be the year of backlash but I think that it can lead to a year of resurgence in 2012.

What are your thoughts for 2011?

What are your favorite quotes about sustainability? How do they shape how you think about leadership?

Compelling arguments can be made for each option. Read the case and weigh in with your thoughts.

The case will appear in the December 2010 issue of the print publication. It was co-authored with Rupert Davis, head of the sustainability practice at MontaRosa — a innovative leadership company.