Interview: Alexandrina Agloro on futures thinking and how to apologize
Many conservation professionals spend years in the field before a promotion moves them into leadership, a role their science training never covered. The Future of Conservation Leadership course is built for them.
Agloro is an assistant professor of science, technology and innovation in the borderlands in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University, and a trained futurist. She teaches the one required course for the Conservation Futures Academy's Global Conservation Leadership Professional certificate, which consists of that core course and two electives.
The Future of Conservation Leadership course runs eight weeks as a cohort, blending self-paced learning with live online sessions, developed with ASU Learning Enterprise and taught by faculty from the Rob Walton School of Conservation Futures. We talked with her about futures thinking, the exercise her learners remember most and why it is important for the academy to meet working professionals where they are.
Futurist can sound like a buzzword. You treat it as a field of study. What does that work involve?
I was interviewed once for an award and I said, I'm a futurist. That's an actual professional field. When the article came out, it said "futuristic." I thought that was so funny, because it's not an adjective, it's a noun. I don't mind, I think it's funny, but it doesn't lend us toward seriousness.
When we say futures, I really mean it. We are studying futures. I am teaching you scenario building, how to think about things in the future. It's not just a cool word, we are planning the future. I'm more on the speculative side, because we can't imagine our future without an imagination.
I live in that world of, we do things that don't exist. We have to imagine the impossible, we have to be kind of weird and out there, because weird and out there is how we end up with solutions.
Alexandrina Agloro
Community organizing is a futures practice. It's like science fiction, speculative fiction. When you're doing community organizing, you're already trying to imagine a world that doesn't yet exist. That's futures thinking.
Futures language is everywhere now, from technology to climate. Does it feel like the field arrived, or like everyone else showed up late?
People care about this now. I was trained in futures because I anticipated it's the thing we're going to care about. And now we care about it.
Lots of things seem to be talking about futures now, technological futures, or where are we going with the climate. So that's the sort of thing where we futures practitioners are like, we told you so, now you care, so let's talk about it.
The environmental justice unit opens with an apology exercise, an unusual place to begin a conservation course. Why put it first?
The first thing we do in that unit is learn how to apologize. How do you apologize? I talk about environmental justice as not just the environment out there, the air and the soil. Environmental justice is also you and your organization.
If we're training leaders in the field, let's build a generation of leaders who understand how to apologize, who understand when they've done something.
Alexandrina Agloro
How do you repair? Because we're always going to make mistakes.
That's one of the specific activities we do in our live session. We actually practice apologizing in pairs. It's one of the most positive feedback things that they remember.
The way I talk about it is that you're always bad at something the first time you do it. That isn't terrible in leadership, that's just knowing that new things are clunky. And this is why we have these live sessions. The point is for you to do it badly in private with each other, as you're learning together. The next time is never going to be as bad as the first time.
Does the exercise hold up once people leave the cohort and go back to the field?
I was telling one of my graduate students, who's currently in the field in Brazil working with fishing communities on the Amazon, about this apology thing. And she said, oh my goodness. I was a witness to a funding organization who had to apologize to the community, and it was a disaster. They didn't know what to do, they were fumbling, they were not taking accountability. She said, I saw the train wreck coming.
This is the best thing, because it's not about the topic at hand, the conservation of the Arapaima. It's about how you're treating each other, treating the community, dealing with resources.
The course is built for working professionals, many of them years out of a classroom. Who is actually showing up, and what are they carrying in?
Most of the people I'm working with aren't academics. They haven't been in school for a long time. Most have maybe a bachelor's, maybe a master's, but it's not a requirement in a lot of their fields. It's aimed at working professionals, which means it's probably been about 20 years since they were in school.
Everybody in these certificate programs is a working professional who's leveling up. Not everybody can leave their job, take leave, go to school full time. It's not always possible. So this is meeting people where they're at, and giving them the skills to move up.
Not everybody can leave their job, take leave, go to school full time. It's not always possible. So this is meeting people where they're at, and giving them the skills to move up.
Alexandrina Agloro
In the first session, a lot of people came in saying, I'm trying to get my bearings and think about my next move. I'm taking this course to think about what skills I already have, what skills I can bolster, and where in this field I want to go next.
You teach inside an R1 research university, but the academy leads with short courses and a stackable certificate instead of a degree. What does that format do that a degree can't?
Degrees still matter. I can say this from the inside. But building a new degree can take years. In the meantime, we're teaching the knowledge.
That's what's cool about these courses, they're agile. We built this course in July to run its first session in October. The first version ran in October of 2025. We saw the need on the ground. There was market research on what kinds of upskilling people in the conservation field were interested in, and it came back saying leadership was really important, that people wanted to understand how to move up in these fields that are being built on the fly.
That's what's cool about these courses, they're agile.
Alexandrina Agloro
You have described spending your career at the edges of a lot of fields. What makes this group different?
I've mostly been floating around my whole career, doing this weird thing at these intersections here and there. And these are my people who are like, we see it, we hear you. So I'm very invested in this group. It feels very special to be the instructor of the flagship course that everyone has to take. It's really fun to see so many people come through it.
And the change is much faster than with undergraduates. With undergrads, you know that maybe someday they're doing something. But all of the learners I'm engaging with now are saying, I'm going to take this to work next week, I'm going to bring this up, I'm going to do this next week. To see that, the change is much faster.
Ready to lead the next era of conservation?
Explore the Future of Conservation Leadership course and the full Professional Certificate in Global Conservation Leadership at the Conservation Futures Academy.
Jen Woods leads content for ASU Learning Enterprise. She came to conservation from the ground up, through more than a decade building community food systems in Arizona, from Crooked Sky Farms to the Uptown Farmers Market she co-founded. Her community-based conservation work earned the ASU President's Award for Sustainability.