Exploring Leadership:
Creative Leadership to Transform the World
As news about the spread of the novel coronavirus began to flood in during early March of 2020, I received invitations to share my perspectives through websites and online special issues of publications. Just weeks earlier, I had spent time with an emergency room doctor who described the value she was experiencing from meditation. From that conversation I knew that what I was feeling was limited compared to what others, like her, were facing in their lives. I wanted to speak out but did not really see what to add that might make a difference.
As chair of the ILA 2020 global conference this November, I observed with interest the resources that were being made available by ILA and the launch of their new blog: Leadership for the Greater Good: Reflections on the 2020 Pandemic. I also joined in an exciting opportunity to involve oneself in a global change process through Otto Scharmer’s Presencing Institute’s GAIA Project (Global Activation of Intention and Action).
After much contemplation, I suddenly envisioned a series of video interviews on leading during this tumultuous time as part of my ILA Interface newsletter column, “Exploring Leadership.” I pictured gathering people whose work could contribute to taking us all through to the other side of this crisis — people who could make a difference for what many of us will be able to do and imagine doing as the immediate crisis passes.
This series of interviews on Creative Leadership to Transform the World came together within a few weeks and is intended to be timely. So far, we have four leaders who work creatively in varied areas and who can make a difference for the future. Each of these leaders brings their own unique background and vision for how to contribute to the world:
- Riane Eisler developed the notion of partnership systems and has been evolving it for about 30 years. This paradigm helps us develop more robust economic policies that include all of the working population, such as caregivers at home, in measurements of productivity.
- Max Klau has developed a program to encourage servant leaders (e.g., people who have served in the military or peace corps) of both parties to become candidates for political office in the U.S. Experience in such public service could have a significant positive influence on political discourse.
- Subhanu Saxena is Director of Innovation at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, focusing on implementing healthcare solutions that scale across Africa and the developing world. In the face of a global health crisis, the development of global solutions is critical to creating a healthy world.
- Matt Lee, Director of Empirical Research at Harvard’s Program on Flourishing, works on the importance of defining and measuring wellbeing at the organizational and community levels. Shifting from an individual understanding of wellbeing to a societal one and being able to measure it could be a critical element in creating the future we wish to live in. All of these were recorded from our homes, as we sheltered in place.
Right now, keeping ourselves and our society healthy requires staying physically distanced from other people, but it asks much more of us than this. What are you currently doing and what do you dream of doing that can help create the world you want to see for yourself, for your family, and for everyone’s children and their children, around the globe?
Exploring Leadership is a series of conversations hosted by Kathryn Goldman Schuyler in which she introduces viewers to leaders who dance with possibility and whose creativity, depth, and vision bring leadership to life - people from many arenas whose lives add vitality and meaning to our planet.
Kathryn Goldman Schuyler has many years of experience in leadership development, organizational consulting, research, and somatic learning. She has helped hundreds of executives to cultivate healthy organizations and is Professor Emeritus of Organization Development at Alliant International University. Kathryn has published widely on leadership and change and is the author of Inner Peace – Global Impact (IAP, 2012) and the lead editor of Leading With Spirit, Presence, and Authenticity (Jossey Bass/Wiley, 2014), and Creative Social Change: Leadership for a Healthy World (Emerald, 2016). Her recent research focuses on awareness and mindfulness at work: her published work in this area highlights how being fully present enhanced participants’ connectedness with others and with the natural environment and renewed their sense of purpose in their work. She has studied mindfulness and awareness with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Mingyur Rinpoche, Lama Tharchin Rinpoche, and other masterful teachers of meditation. Kathryn and her husband, a composer, live overlooking San Francisco, a view that encourages them to pause and appreciate gleaming sunsets and foggy mornings, the calls of ravens and the circling of hawks, and the sparkling city lights.