CSO at University of Calgary - Joanne Perdue

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Have you ever wondered why some teams rise to excellence or some organizations excel at innovation? Understanding what drives organizational learning and innovation, and the foundations of highly successful teams has been a personal pursuit for Joanne Perdue for almost three decades. Joanne considers this knowledge essential to accelerating the sustainability transformation.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As CSO for UCalgary she is responsible for leadership and organizational strategy to enable the university to reach its goal of being a leader in sustainability. This work takes her deep into the disciplines of organizational learning, leadership and change management – alongside both the diverse technical skills and business operations knowledge required of sustainability professionals.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Joanne believes there is no</span> <em><span style="font-weight: 400;">more</span></em> <span style="font-weight: 400;">important work. The higher education sector has the greatest reach in preparing future leaders, undertakes critical interdisciplinary research to enable the transition to a sustainable future, and has unique opportunities to model the way forward.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Prior to joining UCalgary, as a practicing architect she combined her aptitude for design thinking, her reverence for the natural environment, and her desire to create remarkable places. This triad shaped a twenty-year career specializing in healthy, high performance green buildings.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">She is a LEED Fellow but her work in this area began long before LEED. The C.K. Choi Building at the University of British Columbia, completed in the mid 90’s, was perhaps her most seminal project. It set an exceptional North American precedent for sustainable design, and it demonstrated the power of the integrative design process (then an undefined concept) in enabling interdisciplinary teams to innovat