Transforming leadership for complex times

Yannick Beaudoin

By GRID-Arendal

March 3^rd, 2017

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The world is a complex place and solving its problems is not a straightforward task. Old ways of thinking have produced results that lead away from a sustainable future. From political upheavals and armed conflicts, to unprecedented migrations and resource insecurities, our societies increasingly have to adapt to ever changing social and ecological conditions.

This is especially true in the Central Asian countries of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan which face their own climate and environmental realities.

These countries stand at the crossroads of Asia and Europe and and are closely linked with the history of the Silk Road trade route that linked the continents throughout history. In addition to seeking support to help devise solutions for adaptation to uncertainty, the three countries have much knowledge and experience to offer. How to recognize and use that knowledge is the purpose of a new effort GRID-Arendal is supporting in the region.

From mid-March, people from government, business and civil society in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan will gather to start a year-long transformational “Leadership Journey”. Over the next 12 months, they will examine different concepts of leadership and will work to develop new approaches that could best serve their countries.

The initial meeting will take place in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan with future gatherings planned outside Central Asia. GRID-Arendal has extensive experience with climate, environment and development themes along with knowledge in how to apply innovative approaches to social and participatory processes. We have therefore been engaged to help co-design and co-facilitate this leadership development programme.

Over the course of the year, I will use this forum to do my best to share the story of this journey. It will be a story that will have its highs and lows, but one that will undoubtedly involve unanticipated and unpredictable moments of creativity.

Embracing new ways of thinking and looking at the world can be unsettling. People do not like change. We develop our habits and discover our comfort zones, and we are prepared to dedicate a lot of energy to maintain the status quo.

However, change can be evolutionary rather than forced only by crisis. We can learn to embed change and innovation within our leadership processes and approaches. In our connected world, our collective creative potential remains vastly untapped and often overlooked.

And yet we need new and often unpredicted ways of thinking when facing the climate and environmental challenges of our times, as well as those that will confront the next generation.

“Meeting the challenges of this century requires updating our […] operating system from an obsolete ‘ego-system’ focused entirely on the well-being of oneself to an eco-system awareness that emphasizes the well-being of the whole,”says Otto Scharmer, a Senior Lecturer at MIT