We know it's coming. The signs are everywhere. Excitement. Stress. Anxiety. Exhaustion. The clock is ticking down the last six weeks and we Forum scholars are left wishing we could squeeze just a few more hours into the day, a few more days into the week.

I knew it was coming when talk of the 'j' word (job) crept into seminars, discussions and to-do lists. Preparations for life after Forum and our Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development began with a fantastic career session: a professional life coach helped us identify the necessary ingredients for personal success and how to plot the journey ahead of us. CV sessions and job advice have since followed, and now it's down to us.

I knew it was coming when, despite having only just settled into a manic and creative month on The Guardian Environment Desk, I was already walking away from the final placement of the year.  But what a year of placement experiences:  from food self-sufficiency in Middlesbrough Borough Council, to sustainable planning in the Environment Agency, to the plight of hill sheep farmers' at Friends of the Earth, and sustainable food chains behind Sainsbury's, I have learned an incredible amount. When you add my five placements to those of the other eleven scholars, we have generated 60 months of shared experience, invaluable knowledge and lifelong learning.

I knew it was coming when the evenings and weekends started to disappear. It is June, which is crunch time for delivering our completed sustainable business plans.  Combined with a personal leadership analysis and reflection on our year's learning, these form the equivalent of a masters dissertation and, I would argue, are more valuable. Each business plan aims to tackle society’s sustainability woes (or improve a few of them at least!)  And, to top it all off, just a few days before we graduate we'll present these business plans before a 'dragon's den'!

I knew it was coming as we waved goodbye to our tutors at the end of our second and final teaching module at the Leadership Trust. Six of the most enlightening and enjoyable days of the course were spent at this centre for leadership excellence in Ross on Wye; practising, studying, and reflecting upon our personal leadership development.  And the experience helped us scholars bond as a team.

I knew it was coming this side of Easter when one big test could be ticked off. It was my turn, with fellow scholar Sol, to plan the post-placement event after a month working within in the business sector.  Drawing together sustainability professionals from Unilever, BP, Bupa, BT, Sainsbury's and others, the event focused on how sustainable goods and services could be consumed by the mainstream citizen, and in particular, how reusable water bottles and car club memberships could move from a niche to a mainstream market.

I knew it was coming when the final schedule arrived, and time no longer seemed indefinite. Core seminars in science and technology, ethics and values, people and community, and economics, are tailing off. Our ever impressive list of speakers, from social entrepreneurs to political experts, continues, but not for long. A new addition to the timetable has arrived; graduation.

I knew it was coming when it felt like I'd been here before; next year’s applicants have been welcomed, the interviews conducted and our successors announced. 

So, we know it's coming. We're very aware. But it's not quite over yet. Ahead lie hours of business planning, big discussions on sustainability, even bigger debates on leadership, one or two essays, a few thousand words, plenty of reflections, an inevitable panic and certainly one large celebration.

We can see the end but the journey is far from over. In fact, come July, the real journey we have been preparing for will finally begin.

As the negotiations continue to form our next government, what are we to make of an election process where nothing was what it seemed – except that the exit polls were pretty accurate and correctly forecast the first Green Party seat in Westminster?

 The message the electorate sent to the body politic, and to the mindlessly partisan media, was ‘we deserve better’.   Better system, better choice of candidates, better commentariat to help us think through the choices that really matter – e.g. defending the (still) defenceless economy from the barbarian hoards of currency speculators, and working out how to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions in a way that increases rather than slashes and burns the resilience and conviviality of our communities. 

In a pre-election debate on the relative merits of the party manifestos, the students on the Forum’s Leadership for Sustainable Development Masters came to the same conclusion.  They were asked to fillet the party promises from a sustainability perspective and to discuss the political process in general.  Here is a flavour of an energetic and thoughtful discussion.

How many people would read the manifestos with the care the students were asked to do?   Of the 30 million voters probably only a handful, so why are they so long and detailed?  How many policies would be put into action?  Some, but wasn’t the point of the manifestos to give a flavour of the partiess’ approach to policy, rather than write out a full prescription for government?   A lot of the policy detail was similar, while the ideologies behind them were different and not always explicit. Students found the manifestos to be defensively and cleverly written to cloak potentially controversial ideas from detailed scrutiny by voters, other parties and the media.   Wasn’t this a bad habit, brought forward from the days when manifestos appeared in print only and were discontinued and biodegraded long before the government ran its term? In these digital days every word is a couple of clicks away for anyone wanting to check it out, making a virtue of blandness and necessity of using all the key words. 

Were the leader debates a good thing?  Well, yes and no, the students concluded.  Yes, because the campaign was galvanised, and made it more interesting.  No because it became an electoral reality show with an edge of cruelty.  Who would slip up and show their vulnerability to the sword of another? Where were the women?  What is it about the process that is so unappealing to them?  Or, indeed, to many men?  Was the rise and stall of Cleggomania a fabrication of the media – desperate for a different story to fill multiple pages for several days?  When the students in turn ‘defended’ each manifesto for its sustainability content, they found that, once in role, it was easy to regress into cheap debating points rather than argue content and logic, to be theatrical and to lie when in a corner.   Does that mean a certain type of person is attracted to politics, perpetuating the truism widely shared but never overcome, that what you have to say to be elected is different from what you have to do once in power?

With such a tight focus on the party leaders, what does that mean for our form of representative democracy?  Wouldn’t many voters be confused to find the names Clegg, Brown and Cameron absent from their ballot papers, with many largely unknown people competing to represent the voters’ interests in each constituency?   How clear are we about the difference between a representative democracy and a participatory one?  Have the boundaries been fudged by the perpetual recourse of all parties to opinion polls, focus groups and other means of feeling the national pulse between elections? Doesn’t this interfere with the relationship between the elected member of parliament and their constituents?   What is stopping politicians exercising their wise judgement on behalf of constituents they know well?  

There were many views on this last point, ranging from the debate-strangling use of the party whip on parliamentary votes to the undue influence of the media, corporate interests, and the money markets on the democratic process.  We contemplated the fact that we seem to have the worst of all worlds – our democracy is neither representative nor participatory, but rather monitory, in that everyone is monitoring everyone else, by poll, by social media, by targets, by their behaviour. Monitoring for a slip up, a missed target, a failure, a weakness, a scandal.  Gordon Brown’s gaffe with Mrs Duffy was an exemplar of a monitory black hole, when everyone was monitoring what everyone was saying and doing as a result.  Our attention is atomised and drawn to storms in teacups while financial barbarians gather at the gate and global warming is ignored. 

The session ended optimistically, imagining that, this time, there would be a real chance to reform our democratic system.  In early June we regroup to consider the implications for sustainability – and our democracy – of the election outcome.

I am a leftie, and more than that, I am an extreme leftie. So far left I am nearly off the spectrum. So what does that mean? Do I have pictures of Lenin hanging on my bedroom walls? NO! Do I want the state to control everything? NO! Do I carry a little red book with me at all times? NO! Because my declaration of leftism has nothing to do with my political persuasion, and it is in no way an indicator of how I voted at the general election, rather, my penchant for the left is indicative of the type of leader I am - at least that’s what I was told at the Leadership Trust last week.

As a Forum for the Future scholar I have been on a journey for the last nine months to discover, analyse, and decipher what type of leader I am and, more importantly, what type of leader I can become within the sustainable development movement. So what does it mean to be a leftie leader? Well, to give you a very brief overview, there are two types of leader at either end of the spectrum: those on the right who lead with their heads over their hearts, and those, like me, on the left, who lead with their hearts over their heads. Where one places oneself on the scale, by answering a series of revealing questions, reflects how likely one is to be a controlling, maybe even sadistic leader (far right) or to be a self-destructive and non-committal leader (far left). These, of course, are the extremes and most people find themselves hovering somewhere around the mid-point.

I was not surprised to find myself on the left. I know in my heart of hearts (proof in itself) that I am a leftie with a tendency to lead with my gut and to do what feels right.

When asked to rate me as a leader, however, nearly all of my fellow Scholars placed me on the right of the spectrum. I was perceived as someone who leads with their head rather than their heart. The conclusion of my peers can be interpreted in two ways: either, I am suitably convincing in making heart-felt decisions seem the logical and rational thing to do or, I flip-flop between the two styles of leadership, confusing those around me. To be honest, the latter is the far more likely explanation!

Understanding how you lead others, and how others perceive you to lead, is vital to becoming a good leader - irrelevant of your style. Taking part in the leadership exercise analysis at the Leadership Trust has also made me think about how I want to be led. A particularly relevant question given the recent general election. I must confess, however, that after diligently watching all three of the televised debates, I am still uncertain as to the type of leader Messrs Brown, Cameron and Clegg want to be.

I have studied the manifestos of each of the main parties as a part of the Masters course but I fear they could all turn out to be nothing more than Trojan horses with which to crash open the doors of No. 10. I have witnessed how vulnerable all leaders are in the monetary and media-saturated democracy in which we live. And I have watched as they have shown their true colours as followers, not leaders.

I now find myself asking what do I really want from the future leader of this country? As a wannabe leader in sustainable development, I have begun to realise that any leader whose aim is to create a more sustainable and fair future for the UK, and indeed the world, is going to have to use their heart and their head in equal measures. I hope that whoever ends up in Number 10 realises this too: good leadership, at every level, requires both heart and head.

Coco Chanel once said, “Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”
So how can an industry become sustainable when the ‘we loved it, but now we shun it’ cycle is embedded so deeply? Do we have to change everything we love about fashion to make it a sustainable, fair industry? Not necessarily.

Last night, amid the glamour and excitement of London Fashion Week, we held a drinks party with Levi Strauss & Co., to launch our joint report Fashion Futures which explores the world of 2025 and the role of the fashion industry within it. More than a hundred fashion industry folk turned up to hear about our four vivid scenarios and view the animations, which bring them to life.

Follow this link to find out what kind of worlds might see cities inundated by second-hand department stores; high-street brands competing on sustainability credentials; people partying in biodegradable, spray-on outfits; and regions where grow-your-own clothing is popular.

We created the scenarios to help companies around the globe navigate the ever-changing challenge of developing sustainable businesses. They compel us to mull over big questions we wouldn’t usually consider when thinking short-term. Like how the industry will react to shortages of cotton and other raw materials – or how people will care for their clothes in a future of water shortages and high energy prices – which raises deeper questions like whether current business models will survive in a retail market that’s very different from today.

We have deliberately avoided making Fashion Futures a read-it-then-shelve-it report. We want companies of all shapes and sizes, from all corners of the globe, to use the four scenarios. We want them to be inspired, perhaps even a little scared by some of them, but hopefully motivated to think differently about the future and excited by the idea that a sustainable fashion industry is achievable.

To this end, we’ve published some workshop materials on our website with advice on how to use the scenarios to shape strategy, push for sustainable design and innovation and generate the skills needed for a sustainable industry.

And we’ve brought the scenarios to life with four powerful two-minute animations, which show just how different they are, and how much a sustainable future depends on us taking bold action today.

Fashion Futures has already been put to practical use. Our project partner, Levi Strauss & Co. is using the scenarios internally, to inform strategy and innovation. As Michael Kobori (pictured), LS&Co’s Vice President of Social and Environmental Sustainability said at the launch party yesterday, "These scenarios are so stimulating, we will be sharing them with senior management to inform our broad strategies, with designers to spur them to create more sustainable products, and with all employees to unleash the power of our entire company to think about sustainability."

And we’ve used them to help fashion students understand how to design for the future, working with the great team at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the London College of Fashion. Four groups of students from the 2009-10 MA Fashion and the Environment – a diverse and enthusiastic bunch from all over the world - spent their autumn term living and breathing one of the Fashion Futures scenarios, creating new ideas and businesses that would thrive in such a world. They not only produced some great, thought-provoking concepts, which are illustrated in our report, but they also helped us shape the scenarios at one of the critical stages of development.

So this is the beginning of an exciting journey. We’re looking forward to helping our partners and others use the scenarios and we’re excited to hear how other organisations will use them in innovative ways.