Better Leaders. Better Futures.

The Time for Societal Leadership is Now!

For many, 2010 was a sobering and thought-provoking year, and the early months of 2011 have been little different. Never, perhaps, has humanity been so in need of profound, insightful leadership in all walks of life. And yet, we've fallen considerably short in meeting the need as individual and collective societies.

Reflecting on the significant challenges of the past year, and the growing buzz (or outright doomsaying) about the forthcoming challenges that humanity will face on many economic, social, and environmental fronts in 2011, we are struck by the fact that many of these issues come down to changing our attitudes toward what the Foundation terms "societal leadership".

Societal leadership is not yet another formulaic approach to learning leadership, but a call to change the way that we -- as individuals, communities, organizations, and nations -- think about the role of leadership in society. Equally important, societal leadership includes what responsibility we accept for changing the way our social fabric works. 

Leading The Way: Reflections

On Thursday November 11 and Friday November 12, I had the privilege of attending a conference in Calgary hosted by Peter Senge and Margaret Wheatley on the topic “Leading the Way: Building a Sustainable Future.”

As has been my experience with all of their published work, this conference was nothing short of inspirational and, in some cases, transformational. The conference was a beautiful and comfortable space of learning and dialogue, consequently unlocking the collective intelligence of the group through techniques employed by the Art of Hosting such as: check-in, Circle, WorldCafe and OpenSpace.

The depth, meaning and diversity of the discussions were indicative of the overall passion of the 450-odd participants. To reduce this conference into a short blog piece would not serve it justice, but I have chosen to reflect over a few posts on one area of each of Peter Senge and Margaret Wheatley’s presentations, pieces that really stuck out to me.

Imagining the Future

Conceptualizing the types of skills and education we might need to tackle the challenges of the future is not an easy task. But the visual thinking experts at XPLANE have taken a stab at doing so, and recently updated the original SHIFTHAPPENS video to include some new statistics.

Although some parts of the video are dated — such as the as-yet unrealized promise of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative — the central points remain highly valid. As in education, leadership has to be forward thinking and evolutionary: do we have the necessary answers to the video's concluding questions?

Tell us your thoughts on imagining the future by leaving a comment below, or by e-mailing us.

Technorati Tags: societal leadership,societal leaders,imagining the future,XPLANE

Rethinking the practice (and science) of motivation

Arguably, much of our future progress as a society will come from a new generation of leaders possessing skills and viewpoints that include an enhanced level of creativity and advanced problem-solving abilities. But are our current business and other organizational management paradigms matched to developing this type of motivated societal leader?

From the 2009 TED Oxford event comes this thought-provoking presentation by author and speaker Dan Pink, who challenges us to rethink the way we view extrinsic motivation -- such as monetary incentives -- in business and other parts of society.

To Pink, science tells us that these types of rewards simply don't work the way we largely assume they do, except in a very narrow range of mechanistic 20th Century-type tasks. For the largely conceptual challenges of today's world (and tomorrow's), he argues that a new set of intrinsic motivators based on principles of autonomy, mastery and purpose are a significantly better way to stimulate necessary levels of creativity, innovation, and problem solving.

Tell us what YOU think by using the comments feature below, or by e-mailing us your thoughts.

Creating a new leadership dialogue

Key to creating Better Futures is finding ways to develop Better Leaders. That, in turn, requires that we have a new form of broader societal dialogue about the nature and needs of true societal leadership.

A helpful step in this direction is the short (6 minute) video written by Nitin Nohria and Amanda Pepper of Harvard Business School's Leadership Initiative. They collaborated with the visual thinking experts at XPLANE to help people talk about the value and importance of leadership, and how it can (and must) be used to address some of society's most pressing problems. Watch the video here:

"It is my desire to inspire people of all ages and social demographics to think about leadership on a broad level, contemplate what it means to them and what individual impact they can have when it comes to leading," says Nohria.

Not surprisingly, many of the historical figures selected by Nohria and Pepper overlap with those societal leaders that the Foundation has previously highlighted in its own presentations. But they also highlight a fact often overlooked in the discussion: which leaders are most relevant to the next generation of leaders, who will bear an increasing burden to address the challenges and legacies that today's leaders will leave behind?

While figures like Martin Luther King, Ghandi, and others may resonate with members of the Baby Boomer, Gen-X, and other more recent generations, do they (or will they) resonate similarly with the young leaders of tomorrow? And, from where will the next generation(s) draw their leadership inspiration: from popular culture, politics, business, or broader civil society?

Viewpoints on what constitutes good or great leadership can be highly contextual, so it is important to continuously evaluate leadership attributes that have stood the test of time, and which continue to be relevant to each succeeding generation. Faces associated with the traits will come and go, but the traits themselves largely should be enduring and relatively consistent. From there, the next obvious challenge for all is to find ways to expand these attributes more broadly into society.

Although leading by example has the possibility of creating a new generation of inspired societal leaders, we also have to find ways to grow these attributes more systematically and consistently. The world of tomorrow will need more and better leaders than that of today.

How do you view leadership attributes? Watch the video and provide us with a comment using the submission form below, or e-mail us your thoughts!

Technorati Tags: societal leadership,societal leaders,next generation,visual thinking