Workshop: The Sustainable Priorities Game

Objectives Educational: improve awareness of sustainable priorities. Research: how do personality profiles impact sustainable values, and sustainable actions?

1. Understand the impact of sustainability issues.  Which sustainability issues are most important? Are sustainability issues related to each other? In order to solve sustainable problems, which actions should be prioritized? Compare and discuss your ideas and assumptions with others. 
    
2. Translate strategy into action. What does it take to operationalize a major sustainable problem into day-to-day actions in your neighbourhood?  Invent new innovative ideas and give a start to implementation.

Case

The World’s leaders meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos in order to discuss policies in the coming years regarding sustainability issues. You are the future generation. Therefore, they ask your advice. Which of the following 10 issues are most important according to you? First, rank individually the issues and report your ranking via your smart phone. Then, discuss in teams of 4 people the optimal team ranking. Your arguments count. Therefore, try to convince your fellow team members rather than calculating average scores.   

Educational form

Case, learning by doing, interactive lecture.

Activities

Before the game:

• students fill in a questionnaire concerning personal and sustainable values (15 min.).

During the game:

• Workshop instruction. 
• Determine individual sustainable priorities
• Via smart phone, report the listing of the individual priorities – 5 min. 
• Per team of 4 students, discuss in order to achieve consensus concerning the follow order of priorities. 
• Discuss the follow order of priorities between various teams – what is similar, what is different. Why? Implications? Connection between the issues? 
• Conclusions and lessons learned.

Optional steps 7-9:

• Translate per team the highest priority into an action plan that is feasible within the university. Make the plan visible and present it to the other teams.
• Students select the best plan.
• In case of parallel workshops: winning teams present their ideas at a plenary end session. An expert jury will choose the winner. This idea will be published and possibly executed within the university. The winning plan will be awarded. 

Duration:
45 – 90 min (variable)

Language:
English

Number of students:
Max. 28x per workshop (=7 teams of 4 people). Larger groups we will split into subgroups.

Research partners

The workshop is part of the research project “Sustainable Values” in which we examine the impact of personal values on sustainability. In the project several academic partners cooperate: Avans University of Applied science, Groningen University, Twente University, International Universities and Business Schools.