Unlocking Sustainability
Jason Jay is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative. He teaches executive and masters-level courses on strategy, innovation, and leadership for sustainable business. He has helped secure MIT Sloan’s position as a leader in the field of sustainability through teaching, research, and industry engagement. Jason’s publications have appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Greenbiz, and World Economic Forum. With Gabriel Grant, he is the author of the international bestseller Breaking Through Gridlock: The Power of Conversation in a Polarized World. Jason also works as a facilitator for companies, organizations, and business families, supporting high quality conversation and shared commitment to ambitious sustainability goals. His clients have included EFG Asset Management, Novartis, Bose, Environmental Defense Fund, BP and the World Bank.
In this session, which took place in December 2024, Jason described how this journey has involved looking for “leverage” – the elusive idea from systems science that we might find key pressure points and timing for intervention that help us change the course of events in a better direction. He used the En-ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator to illustrate the idea of leverage and shared how the emerging theory and practice of systemic investing might provide a promising pathway forward on climate and the other big challenges of our time.
