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Editor’s Note: This past week, at the end of 2 months away from New York, I was honored once again to address students at the Scheller School of Business at Georgia Tech University. Courses offered by our close colleague, Dr. Robert Thomas, cover issues related to Servant Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship and have attracted a large following of students who seem to be seeking ways to utilize skills and privilege to expand their options in the service of a planet and its people under considerable strain. This is a lightly edited version of my Servant Leadership presentation. The Social Entrepreneurship piece will soon follow.

Today, this weary road-warrior will attempt to blend three objectives together.   First the beneficial implications of Servant Leadership which I value highly.

Second the objective of this week’s lessons which is the benefit of Systems Thinking which I also value highly, though not without caveats.

And the third to discern implications of all of this for fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals which, at least some of you may recognize, is a focal point for this week of activities here at Georgia Tech. It is certainly a focal point for much of our work in New York as well.

First up, why servant leadership?  I and a small group of colleagues are in the process of writing a book grounded in large measure on inights from the Inner Economy model lovingly developed by Dr. Lisa Berkley in California, a model which among other benefits assists us to explore the feelings, values, connections and inspirations that many of us in this world overlook but which make us who we are, help define who we might become and influence how we can better use our skills and talents to make a better future for the world.  At the UN, our phase for this is “better policy requires better people” people who see more deeply, hold the mirror up to themselves as well as others, and invest in the wellbeing of colleagues across the political spectrum as well as their own.  It’s about leadership which is committed to raising all the boats in the harbor not simply the largest and most expensive. It is also about the realization that none of the problems – some grave – that we now face are ultimately unsolvable without a commitment to deeper connection and a more comprehensive and supportive engagement with the skills and aspirations of others. As a general rule, we need to risk more closeness while committing to vigorous shaking of the asset tree in our diverse communities and then making better use of what falls from it.

What we seek here is not only about a more honest relationship with ourselves, but also about a more robust and open claim on connection with others, with those we know and those we don’t know yet.  One of the motivations for my own involvement in the aforementioned book project is the recognition by psychologists and neuro-biologists, and certainly but by folks in other walks of life, that we have collectively done grave damage to what is in fact our hard wiring for connection.  Despite a bevy of social media tools, we have become, on the whole, more cynical and suspicious than is either empirically-justified or generally good for us.  We have swapped out broad circles of connection and replaced it with performative and materially focused gestures.  People who wouldn’t dream of making eye ontact in a café willingly pose in front of camera possibly to be seen by thousands.  People increasingly would, to quote the great Wendell Berry, rather own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor.  The movements represented by Inner Economy and Servant Leadership remind us in part of the fundamental value of human connection, of not only having neighbors on farms and in offices but doing more to help their various contributions and labors have the impact that our stressed-out world needs them to have.

So now, what does “systems thinking” contribute to these ends?

Systems thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into constituent and independent parts.  Systems thinking also involves a sensitivity to the circular nature of the world we live in; an awareness of the role of both local cultures and global structures in creating the conditions we experience; a recognition that there are powerful laws of nature and economy operating on us that we are largely unaware of; a realization that there are consequences to our actions that we are oblivious to. Systems thinking helps strike a better balance between how the various elements of life fit together and the small acts and insights that help define our contexts and ensure an improvement of the fit. 

Systems thinking is also an aid to increasing our sensitivity to how patterns shift over time, patterns that operate within us and outside us, most beyond the events of the moment.  I am trained a bit in counseling and there is a tendency here for the one being counseled to focus on the life events which both provoked their narrative and allegedly proved that narrative as well.  But any such narrative is inevitably more complex, more inter-connected than articulated.  And despite our desire at time to hold it in place, our narratives continue to evolve as we also continue to evolve.  As I reminded a successful friend of mine, “we were not always this way.”  You will not always be the way you are now.  Regardless of how hard you try not to change, how much you might want to maintain your habits, preferences and “explanations” for both, the constant drip of life ensures that our outer and inner economies will at least in some key ways be transformed, not only in wrinkles but in disappointments and loss, in satisfaction and success.  And all of that is integrated into a human system which in our cases has already experienced much and which is connected to far more than we generally recognize.  

Finally, systems thinking enhances our ability to examine skillfully what at the UN we call the “root causes” of events and issues, causes which are often considerably more complex than what we are able or willing to acknowledge.  Again with reference to counseling, we hear a lot of the “someone done me wrong narrative” that ostensibly forms the basis for the pain and drama that motivated the person to seek counseling in the first place.  But of course the story is always more complex.  Yes, we have been done wrong, sometimes gravely  But we have likely also done wrong.  We have enabled bad behavior.  We have held our tongue when speaking out was warranted.  We have stood by when intervention would have been the more virtuous path.  And we have accepted systems of education, business, politics and even religion that could be so much more than they are, so much more engaging and hopeful if only we would commit to make them so.

The problems we face in policy are most often chronic and systemic, rather than a one-off.  This is true as well in our personal lives.  But our problems also have a context that is evolving, one that is constantly incorporating new experiences and new reactions, one that includes habits forming but also habits dissolving, one which urges us to ask different questions, better questions, including of yourself, than you might have been willing to ask before.

Perhaps I am making too much of this, but this last point seems particularly important.  Most of us are terrible at asking questions.   When we ask, it is only rarely without agendas, rarely drawing people out, rarely open-ended.  Many of our questions take the form of accusations.  Someone is suspicious of something or other.  Someone is trying to “catch” us in something.  Back in the days of transactional analysis, there was this game which so many of us play and which was defined as “now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch.”  This is how we roll now.  Catching people in one half-truth or another is the goal rather than helping them to explore or grow.   

Given this, we collectively tend to recoil at being asked questions, seeing questions as a threat or an intrusion or a source of judgment – justified or not — rather than an opportunity to connect, to broaden our thoughts and other engagements with the world. Indeed, one could make the case (and I would make it here) is that the way we ask and respond to questions is a strong indicator of the state of our social world and, more specifically, the state of ourselves.

Finally we come to the Sustainable Development Goals which is more or less systems-thinking-on-steroids for sustainability.  This is SDG week here at Tech and the SDGs offer some important insights into how servant leadership and systems thinking interconnect.  On the plus side, we are reminded that Sustainable Development Goals and targets are interrelated, that progress on racial justice or women’s rights or green energy access has direct implications for food security, smarter cities, ocean health or the creation of more peaceful societies.  When we discriminate, when we fail to acknowledge the degree to which our prejudices keep too many on the sidelines as we attempt to solve the problems which will directly impact your future, problems which are related, which affect all and which must be solved by all. Our prejudices and other limitations jeopardize fulfillment of the SDG promises we have made and, more importantly, the promises that you who will soon come to full fruition in this crazy world will require.   We owe you this, we owe you all of it, including a strong and impactful role for each of you who desire it in helping the rest of us ensure that promises made are promises kept.

But as important as this is, it leaves out an important dimension, that of context and localization.  Yes, we want people in general to be guaranteed access to education, to fresh water, to cities that are healthy and functional, to governance and justice systems that at the very least attempts to be fair.  But like other people we also want to ensure water access for our own families and neighbors, we also want better transportation which serves our own neighborhoods, we also want education for our own children which prepares them to live in the world to come and not only the world that was.

All of these desires and aspirations have specific contexts and all of this requires energies and strategies which are tailored to meet the needs and aspirations of real people in real places. Rethinking transportation options takes a different form in Bangkok than in Atlanta.   Water access means something different in Miami than in the Sahel.   And contexts can shift, sometimes dramatically.   Los Angeles this winter had torrential rain and sleet storms with feet of snow on mountains visible from local beaches after years of drought.  Little stays the same except, unfortunately, the way in which we address changes, the levels of determination and fairness that we apply in the struggle to ensure more equitable access to sustainable resources. 

There is a lesson here for Servant Leadership as well.   Yes, we want leaders who are concerned about our well-being beyond our workplace functions.  And yes we appreciate policies that help make our labors more effective and humane.  But we need service provision that to some degree responds to context.  Persons with disabilities often need different forms and levels of service than so-called “normal” people.  Immigrants often need different forms of support than residents.  Children and the elderly often require sustained care beyond what those of us in this lecture room generally require.   It is the job of sustainable development policy to as we say “leave no-one behind.”  But the needs of aspirations of people are not a function of some computer-generated abstractions.   They all reside somewhere specific.  They all have a metaphorical address and we must do better at delivering to those addresses.

So this to me is the great challenge of servant leadership which embraces systems thinking and contributes to sustainable development.   We must better train ourselves to see the connections between projects and people, between issues and outcomes.  And we need to get better at being honest about the things that can go wrong when we attempt to lead or make policy based on sometimes-willfully incomplete assessments, such as when we release new technology to market before we have properly interrogated its potential for harm.   But we also need leadership which moves beyond algorithms and other abstractions to the system which exists around us and within us, a system which we both create and carry with us, a system which needs to remain humane and reassuring, a system which has inflicted pain and had pain inflicted on it, a system currently characterized by too many disconnects and half-fulfilled, decontextualized promises.

Because you are who are you and because you are in a place such as Georgia Tech, you will likely always have options in life.  But you will also face your cross-roads, some of your own making, where even the most provileged and self-directed of you will need a hand to help you out of some metaphorical ditch.  One key to the fulfillment of the SDGs is to integrate more of those hands into our institutions and policy chambers, to reflect over and over on the responsibilities of leadership to enable a world of sustainable connection and shared development. It is often said at the UN that we are running out of time to fix the world.  Servant leadership reminds us that we are also running out of time to fix ourselves.

Tags: SDGs, servant leadership, Systems Thinking