These aspirations for a reorientation of academia are reflected in our motivations for experimenting with a new leadership collective, the Careoperative, which brings together a group of individuals from multiple organisations and disciplines in collaborations beyond research projects. The name Careoperative conveys our common goal of providing a reflexive, inclusive and caring space for members as we pursue our mission to collectively explore, embody and lead transformational sustainability research and practice.
As a living experiment starting in October 2019, the Careoperative provides a space of support for sharing professional and personal experiences, connecting different perspectives and positions on sustainability transformation, and developing collective leadership skills through self-organisation, distributed responsibility and mutual respect. While growing out of relationships established through in-person meetings, we have used regular virtual meetings and shared online workspaces to expand and deepen our collaboration. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in the beginning of 2020, these regular virtual interactions provided a strong collegial support system that enabled us to maintain both our collaborative work and provide peer support to deal with the new challenges of, for instance, balancing work–life and care duties or conducting research in foreign contexts (The Care Operative 2020). In various ways, the Careoperative is distinguishable from other professional networks we take part in by its aim to achieve “more-than-outputs”. The Careoperative instead presents a seed of change from which we draw inspiration and support to explore transforming our research practices and work environments in the present and with eyes to our future careers within and beyond academia. We see three key ways through which the Careoperative is emerging as an invaluable foundation upon which to develop collective and transformative research leadership (see Fig. 1).
Taking root—nourishing conditions that enable collective leadership to flourish The Careoperative provides nourishing conditions—an ethic of care, based upon egalitarian ways of working and shared responsibility—that support us to develop roots and flourish. An ethic of care is often invoked with regard to earth stewardship (West et al. 2018). In the Careoperative, caring for ourselves and each other as colleagues working towards sustainability transformations forms part of our broader endeavour of caring for the planet and society (Corbera et al. 2020). We use non-hierarchical and non-competitive ways of working. Our choice of writing under a shared first-author pseudonym, O. Care, for example, reflects how this paper is the result of a collective effort, whilst challenging lead author status as indication of prestige. A first-author pseudonym with alphabetical contributor listing recognizes the varied but essential contributions of the entire collective to the processes of learning, reflection and writing that have resulted in this paper. Sharing responsibility provides opportunities to develop and practice transformational leadership skills, including facilitation and coordination, while accommodating diverse caring responsibilities. Sharing responsibility further allows us to maintain momentum with group activities while respecting the ebbs and flows of individual members’ time and creative resources. This nourishing context feeds both our leadership collective and our individual needs.
Pollinating—exchanging with others to enrich and diversify The Careoperative provides an inclusive and trusting space for open pollination of ideas, tools and experiences within and beyond the collective. Each of us brings diverse knowledge, life experiences and understanding from other contexts into the Careoperative. We have, for example, built on this diversity in a horizon-scanning exercise to identify research frontiers in relation to future food system transformations that feed into joint proposal writing. The experience within the Careoperative has in turn inspired a number of us to open discussions on how to embed and support values of leadership collectives and care in our working environments and transformative change processes elsewhere. These forms of “pollination”—through development and exchange of how to work collectively—play an important role in enabling sustainability transformations.
Seeding change—encouraging collective processes and actions to emerge The Careoperative is founded on active, critical and collaborative reflection that encourages new ideas and approaches to emerge. We interviewed each other about what transformational leadership means to us to develop a shared understanding of transformational leadership. With this as a starting point, we collectively created a document describing the Careoperative Fundamentals (see Supplementary Material 1) that details our core vision, mission and values. This reference document elaborates the processes we follow to integrate shared values, collective responsibility and self-reflection into the way we work together, and helps us continuously consider the challenges of inclusivity. We are also working on developing a code of collaboration, further detailing decision-making processes, conflict prevention and resolution, and authorship policies.
External facilitation with a professional facilitator trained in process work and other facilitation methods has been invaluable for supporting our collaborative work and deep reflection. Based on the belief that the means to reach the objectives are key elements in transformational work and for effective group work (Schwarz 2002), the facilitator’s role has been to accompany the group to formulate and reach its goals, while demonstrating care of people in the group, as well as the process. The facilitator guided our group whilst sharing insights to the innovative methodologies used, such as social technologies (open space, world cafe, pro-action cafe, etc.), future scenario planning, process work techniques, etc., thereby developing our own facilitation skills. Critical reflection is a further vital function that inspires us to do things differently, create alternatives to the dominant work culture of academia, and strive towards sustainable social change. Attention to processes and critical reflection has facilitated activities that lead to tangible outputs, including funding applications, workshops and writings.