Regenerative tourism: the challenge of transformational leadership

Introduction

… there is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is not much better. The sailors are quarrelling with one another about the steering -- everyone is of opinion that they themselves have a right to steer, though they have never learned the art of navigation

(Plato translated by Jowett, 2001).

For the last two years, many tourism professionals have been feeling as if they have been set adrift in a pandemic storm, and now a bounce-back blitz. Government responses have swung from “take shelter and ride it out in place”, to “hoist the mainsail because hope is on the horizon”. Poor or conflicting advice, uneven policy supports and power manoeuvres that influence who gets a place on the recovery deck have meant large swathes of the tourism and hospitality workforce have been unevenly affected. Many have left the ship opting to stay on safer shores or take their chances navigating in their own boat.

For many tourism professionals – consultants, destination managers, policymakers and researchers – these have been tumultuous times. Their professional roles expanded from traditional tourism management to include counsellor, business coach, grants writer, advocate, teams coach, virtual working technologist and foresight enabler. In the process, old ways of navigating tourism management steered by our heads (i.e. the maps and charts produced by scientific thinking) began to sit uncomfortably with knowledge bubbling up from heart and instinct. Responding to what many called “unprecedented times”, tourism professionals began to reach out for new ways of thinking and working in tourism. These new ways needed to respond to uncomfortable knowledge produced when heads, hearts and instinct work together. In this context, the Tourism CoLab began to offer a range of professional development courses in 2020 in support of those wishing to explore alternative tourism futures.

This viewpoint paper is a joint collaboration, generated by participants in one of the Tourism CoLab’s Regenerative Tourism by Design (RTxD) courses in 2021. The course sits within a suite of innovative online or in-person cohort courses that include Design Thinking, Hosting Community Conversations, Designing a CoLab, and more, where the aim is to upskill and shift how we navigate the future of tourism.

Aims

The aims of this paper are to share how one cohort of tourism practitioners viewed the transformative change needed within the tourism industry and to explore the implications for leadership in the future. Our starting point was to recognise that we are currently in a highly disruptive transition period between the old scientific mindset towards a new collective consciousness (Dredge, 2022). The evolution that is taking place in our thinking requires that we see the world has an evolving living system and that we must learn to live within the limits of that system, to regenerate and to act as co-creators of our future alongside (and not dominant over) nature. The viewpoint paper is written in the voice of diverse participants working with or towards regenerative tourism, how they perceive the challenges, the barriers, the blind spots and the opportunities for regenerative tourism (RT). In doing so, we unpack the leadership implications and opportunities for tourism education, professional development.

In addressing these aims, the paper first outlines the Tourism CoLab's regenerative tourism by design approach as a unique education opportunity for tourism professionals. The course engages participants in new and innovative thinking with the aim of cultivating transformational leaders. Following this introduction, we briefly explore the characteristics of transformational leadership before reporting the findings from a curated conversation about the challenges and opportunities for introducing regenerative tourism with course participants. The conversation took place over two weeks and was facilitated using the virtual whiteboard, Mural. The conversation provides important insights into the way that tourism professionals think about the transformation ahead, and is useful in informing education and professional development, and provides insights into relevant conference themes in the future.

Learning as a key strategy for transformation

One of the fundamental platforms on which the Tourism CoLab has been built is that by creating opportunities for deep shared learning, we can help to evolve our thinking and leadership as we transition towards a very different future. Our mission is to create learning opportunities that assist the leaders of tomorrow to work within an increasingly Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear and Incomprehensive (BANI) world (Cascio, 2020). We are also cognizant that among the skills required for the future the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs report identifies analytical thinking and innovation; active learning and learning strategies; complex problem solving; critical thinking and analysis; creativity, originality and initiative; and leadership and social influence (World Economic Forum, 2020). As advocates of these new skills, we also believe that disorienting dilemmas, flipped thinking and breaking down taken-for-granted assumptions can lead to shifts in mindset, values and beliefs (Sheldon, 2020: Dredge, 2022).

The Tourism CoLab is a social enterprise that seeks to disrupt traditional education offerings by addressing the need for safe, shared, inspiring, learning spaces. It creates a course that nurtures participants' development on three levels:

1. Self-work, including understanding how and why we think the way we do, barriers to thinking differently and how to unleash new thinking.

2. Relational work that enhances empathy, conversational skills, collaboration and inclusivity, and

3. Systems change – identifying the levers for change in the tourism system.

The courses are designed for change-makers, curious thinkers and the leaders of tomorrow who wish to take an active part in rewiring tourism's economic–environmental–social relationships. Tourism CoLab courses are marketed to policy writers, planners, entrepreneurs, practitioners, scholars and researchers. They enrol without prerequisites because we believe that it is the diversity of life experience, informal and formal education, and personal characteristics that lead to learning and reflection opportunities that are not provided within formal education offerings.

As a social enterprise, our mission is to help build both the individual learning opportunities, and the capacity to collaborate and unleash systems change through collective action. The style of pedagogy, instruction and the range of courses fills a gap between the industrial higher education model and practical and technical skills-based courses in, say, social media marketing, instruction in Google analytics, and e-commerce. The pedagogy does not fit the normative mould of higher education, but researchers and higher education teachers have enrolled in the programs to upskill and learn from practitioners in the group. The global cohort classes differ from traditional higher education in a number of ways.

First, the global cohort classes are delivered in five learning sessions and supplemented by five in-depth interactive, intercultural workshops wherein participants develop deep bonds of friendship and curiosity for others' experiences. Discussions often reveal deep questioning, tensions and ambiguities between the public position on the regeneration/sustainability work of their tourism organisations and their privately held views about what is really going on.

Second, the suite of courses creates a community who support each other over time, although, admittedly, a key challenge is to keep the community actively engaged across different time zones and life commitments. Co-learning, honest conversation and shared reflection are essential in the collective journey.

Third, we seek to uncover stuck ways of thinking and to explore tourism as a complex system which cannot be addressed using traditional strategic management and its rational, linear thinking approaches (Dredge and Jenkins, 2010). Instead, participants are encouraged to understand and feel comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity. In the process, they are encouraged to turn their attention to how they might adapt, build flexibility and resilience, to let go of old thinking styles, sit in the mess, engage in sense-making and to lean into emergent practice. Put simply, tourism is a complex system, and so requires complex evolutionary actions instead of linear strategic solutions.

Fourth, we relate best to things that concern ourselves, and make sense in the ecosystems that surround us. Thus, we need to work on ourselves, on our relations and at a systems level. The tools developed by the Tourism CoLab help to make sense of participants' complex experiences. They provoke systems thinking and provide organising heuristics within a complex systems approach. These tools provide a prelude to transformation in tourism.

Fifth, the courses help people find their purpose and their place in the world. Active change makers come in many forms such as gardeners, acupuncturists, questioners and brokers (Narberhaus and Sheppard, 2015). Our ambition is to demonstrate that there are alternative, feasible ways to live, relate to others, and create value within place, people, and with the natural world beyond the traditional values of profit, growth and economic value within the context of tourism.

In sum, courses are designed to help and encourage participants to think differently and explore new perspectives. They are supported by instructors and class cohorts who support creative design experiments, create new values and cultures, challenge past ways of thinking and test new ideas.

Regenerative tourism by design cohort class

As we opened this paper, our course begins with Plato's allegory “Ship of the State” (trans. Jowett, 2001), which started an animated and engaging discussion wherein diverse and very real experiences of participants were shared. Using the allegory as a metaphor for participants' work challenges, people could feel comfortable engaging in conversation without talking directly about their own organisations. Channelling our insights from research in neuroscience and change-making, we sought to create a positive, welcoming tone for the course wherein collective reflection and learning had begun.

It was a wide-ranging discussion of rampaging self-interests, frustration, difficulty in reading the future, curiosity about the currents and what direction they were flowing. There was recognition that many voices simultaneously demand access to the helm, yet self-interest runs deep. The fight is highly individualistic, and resistance to change was a concern voiced by most participants on the course. Participants observed that few sailors/stakeholders, if any, have their sights set on where the wind, the currents and waves are taking them and what a future, which is not a projection of the past, might look like.

In the allegory, the wind, the currents and the waves, together and in unison, create something bigger and more complex than each individual driver of change. The system is far more complex than most of the sailors/stakeholders might imagine, and powerful influences as yet unseen lie beyond the horizon. A few of the sailors/stakeholders have the skills to zoom in and zoom out to see the task of navigation as a complex challenge. Some have the ability to imagine what lies beyond the horizon. A handful have the ability to blend different kinds of disciplinary knowledge, wisdom, understanding and practical action. Collectively the required skills, knowledge and wisdom may exist but working together is difficult. Resistance to change is much easier (Dredge, 2022).

In many ways, this is the story of humankind. It is the story of tourism, the free market economy, politics, a not-so-civil society and a complex system resistant to change. Using Plato's story as the point from which we set sail, the Regenerative Tourism by Design course delivered a 12-week learning journey and a hands-on experimental approach to co-creating the future of tourism.

The course brought together 20 people with vastly different skill sets, professional experience, geographical distributions and worldviews. The task was to navigate towards a deeper co-created understanding of regenerative tourism, one that could be applied and actioned within individual contexts but benefitting from collective support. The course required developing new skills sets, including inner development, meta-cognition, the neuroscience of change and mindfulness. It also required development of new technology skills such as the use of virtual whiteboards.

Reflecting the participants' interests, the focus is mostly on destinations and places, but some participants were also in the process of launching their own businesses with a regenerative edge, and were keen to learn about what they had intuitively felt was the “right” direction. The course tapped into the emotional and cultural intelligence of individuals and built common understandings. New tools and skills in intentional design were also introduced, which are crucial to translating ideas into practice. Participants become close, sharing deeply held frustrations, fears, achievements and insights. Working collectively, and intensively for 12 weeks, they followed each other, checking in and forging new friendships and professional alliances.

Approach and method

The remainder of this paper outlines the collective insights generated from one of the course's multi-week activities. The aim of this activity was to brainstorm individually then build a collective, shared understanding about the complexity of the challenges ahead. Participants were then asked to identify priorities. The process used an adapted design thinking pedagogy. It is “adapted” because instead of placing the user or customer at the centre as per the typical UX consumer orientation of service design, we adopted a multi-facing approach where the perspectives of both humans and nature were considered. This approach builds empathy and nurtures a more holistic approach to understanding the dynamics of what is really going on. The process was as follows:

• Step 1 – Introduce the virtual whiteboard Mural as the brainstorming canvas and its tools. Participants were upskilled on its use, underlying pedagogy and strengths and weaknesses.

• Step 2 – Using Plato's allegory “ship of the state” as a starting point, the cohort was presented with a virtual canvas that incorporated the following graphic (Figure 1). This graphic is an organising device based on a 2 × 2 matrix that helps to illustrate the complexity of navigation. Along the horizontal axis we explore past, present and future. We encourage participants to avoid linear thinking and instead contemplate layers of influence that swirl around and influence the complex problems we face. The vertical axis extends from operational detail at the bottom to higher-order thinking including visions, aspirations and blue-sky thinking at the upper end. We noted that research suggests that most strategic managers spend at least 80–85% of their time on operational details and only 15–20% on blue-sky higher order thinking (Porter and Nohir, 2018).

• Step 3 – Participants were asked to individually brainstorm their issues and concerns in each of the four quadrants. Participants were provided with an explanation of the science and process underpinning ideation and its most effective use.

• Step 4 – Participants then, through a process of silent work, reflection, conversation and sense making, identified key themes using questions to deepen understanding of comments that others had written, and built a shared understanding around common themes. In the process, participants were provided with explanations of techniques for deep listening, the framing of good questions and conversational intelligence. Each group generated a mural that looked similar to Figure 2.

The findings described below represent the collective thinking of the three working groups.

For the purpose of the discussion below, the cohort started with their hopes and dreams. Inputs into the upper left quadrant captured the positive energy, optimism and participants' vision. The lower left quadrant (Quadrant 2) captured their frustrations, fears and what they felt was missing in their journey towards a regenerative future. Quadrant 3 asked participants to identify who they could ask for assistance and where they could find support. Quadrant 4 sought to identify any tangible and intangible assets, resources and assistance available to help them on the journey.

Their words, produced verbatim below, illustrate their shared frustration with the current tourism system and its structure as well as a passionate drive to pivot away from business-as-usual tourism as a COVID recovery strategy. In order to understand and make sense of participants' responses, the following explanation draws aspects of transformational leadership and the neuroscience of change. Why have we chosen these lines of literature to unpack and explore the themes?

The answer lies in the emergent nature of the discussion that took place, the way that discussions often shifted between cognitive knowledge and felt experience, and that participants were generally mid-management with a high degree of independence and autonomy in their jobs. As a result, making sense of their capacity to lead and their opportunities to exercise agency made perfect sense.

Transformational leadership and change

Research into how our brains work is revealing important insights in the relationship between how we think and feel. Woods (2020) has argued that how we feel (i.e. our somatic and psychic energy) kicks in before our cognitive awareness and that these feelings shape how we learn and behave. In other words, the conscious narrative about our work, values and experience does not completely capture what is going on at a subconscious level, but it is this deep layer of consciousness that shapes our decision-making and action.

Fogel (2013) further explores the nature of felt experience arguing that the human brain has a task positive network (TPN) associated with rationality and science, and a default mode network (DMN), which is active when we are not focused on a task. When people are in DMN they are more relaxed, they think about past and future, and they have access and can connect different ways of knowing. They are attuned to others and can access a deeper form of wisdom. Fogel observes that these networks are not active at the same time but we toggle between them. Embodied self-awareness is when we have access to both the felt experiences of our DMN and the conceptual knowledge from our TPN, and that we can be non-judgemental and give the gift of presence to others who find themselves in a disregulated state. A disregulated state is characterised by anxiousness, stress, judgemental behaviour, anger, and feelings of low self-worth and lack of confidence, for example.

Kegan (1982) would argue that this state of embodied self-awareness is a key feature defining our capacity to lead into the future. He argues that in order to navigate the disruption and uncertainty ahead, we need to reach for a higher level of consciousness, to transcend our own biases and self-interest, and to act for a common collective good. In tourism, Ateljevic (2020) has also suggested that a mindset shift is needed in tourism where we can act for the collective benefit and not individual self-interest. However, as Dredge (2022) observes, in tourism there is resistance to change. Sometimes people are not even aware of their own resistance because its origin is subconscious.

Here, transformational leadership is relevant. Originally proposed by Burns (1978), transformational leaders are those who possess both a moral character and a set of behaviours that trigger those around them to be the best they can be (i.e. to self-actualise in Mazlow's hierarchy of needs). The effectiveness of transformational leaders is based upon their capacity to establish collaboration, exercise self-awareness, communicate shared values and mobilise collective action (Bass and Riggio, 2005). Further, their approach improves resilience in not-for-profit and social enterprises (Valero et al., 2015). Regenerative leadership actively seeks to create organisations that are integrated and holistic, reconnecting left (rational, external) and right (intuitive, relational) hemispheres, inner connections to self and outer worlds, balancing masculine and feminine traits within humans and natural systems (Hutchins and Storm, 2019). But as suggested above, even transformational leadership is challenging when resistance is subconscious.

Findings

Conclusion

The aims of this paper were to share how tourism practitioners viewed the change needed within the tourism industry and to explore implications for leadership in the future. Participants in the Regenerative Tourism by Design course were generally experienced professionals in middle management positions. They work with destination management organisations, with communities and with businesses, and directly experience the challenges they are describing in the course. The conversations reported in the findings of this paper provide important insights into the challenges and opportunities faced by tourism professionals as enablers of regenerative tourism.

Participants in this course were actively pursuing change within the tourism system and, through the conversations from the Canvas activity, it is evident that many are already demonstrating transformational leadership in terms of their moral positioning, embodied self-awareness, collaborations and collective action. They were not sitting back but were adopting positions as change agents who want to implement and inspire action in others, despite their frustrations.

The professionals in this cohort can see that the tourism system identified specific points of inertia embedded within culture, power and organisational structures. They recognise that part of the challenge of regenerative tourism is because its foundations are not well known and change is long term. They identified the need for practical tools, new frames of reference and examples. Indeed, these industry professionals embody the transformations in values, thought, word and deed that are needed to shift the course of tourism in the future (Bellato et al., 2022).

The findings speak to the frustrations and opportunities for individuals in stimulating transformational change. The findings threw up many issues: governance, organisational, destination management strategies, planning and policy framework individual and well as contradictions within the tourism system. But it also shed light on the inner worlds and workings of people working in the sector for whom the need for transformative change is evident.

Finally, the art of navigating tourism in an uncertain future requires transformational leadership. Transformational leadership is characterised by both moral character and a set of behaviours that trigger those around them to be the best they can be. The effectiveness of transformational leaders is based upon their capacity to exercise self-awareness, establish collaboration, communicate shared values and mobilise collective action. But transformational leadership is challenging when resistance is subconscious. This paper highlights that there are many challenges to enabling regenerative tourism, and many of these challenges are deep systemic challenges that are resistant to change. That said, the participants demonstrated a high level of embodied self-awareness and emotional intelligence in the way they expressed their views, and an appreciation of the complex requirements of collaboration and activation.