Tag Archives: servant leadership

Promoting Servant Leadership in a World of Hurt, Dr. Robert Zuber

19 Nov

“The Closer you are to the Ground, the more Inescapable are the Inter-Linkages.”

Editor’s Note: Apologies for yet another post so soon, but we’re just starting to catch up with a fall season full of presentations. This is an edited version of a talk I was to have made to a class of Dr. Robert Thomas at the Scheller School of Business in Atlanta on Servant Leadership. If this was the talk that was given it would have been a much better experience for the students. But, alas, they didn’t get my best effort. Perhaps some of them will see this post and gain some benefit from it.

The assignment for today is some variation on the theme: How do we talk about matters like Servant Leadership in a world like this one?  How do we think about competent, attentive service to others in societies seemingly committed in these uncertain times to killing, starving, and marginalizing? How do we respond as a species given that we have not only failed to expunge the four horses of the apocalypse — war, famine, pestilence and death – but as Michael Offutt claims we have now added a fifth – misinformation – one made exceedingly more sophisticated in its potential for deception with the recent explosion in Artificial Intelligence.  

For me these questions are largely about synergy and self-scrutiny and have linkages to a longer personal history than it might otherwise appear.

When I was in graduate school, I participated in a Ways of Knowing project – based on a premise that what the disciplines do is different regarding how they gather knowledge and what constitutes knowledge from that perspective.  In conducting our investigations, we found that these differences are largely matter of priority and focus, not of kind.  There is enough overlap between what financiers know and what astronomers know that they can communicate with each other, beyond their unique expertise.  And it is better for the world, and certainly for the academy, that they do so.  People should be able to explain their methods and explore synergies with each other and should be encouraged to do so.  If Einstein could explain himself to the world, the rest of us have few excuses for note doing so.

This way of understanding the world in its inter-disciplinarity has had implications for what we have done for a generation at the UN which is to pay close attention to what diplomats are doing and saying and then remind them of the related conversations going on in other conference rooms which should be encouraged to enrich their own.  It isn’t “brain surgery” to recognize that poverty reduction, economies free of corruption and communities free of gender and racial discrimination are better prepared to pursue and keep the peace.  There are times at the UN, literally, when we seem to be among the few people who recognize – or cop to recognizing — that while we are talking about the Middle East in the Security Council, complementary conversations are taking place in General Assembly committees, in UNICEF, in the UN office of drugs and crime.  How do we explain away that apparent inefficiency? Why is it so difficult to have one comprehensive conversation, to put all our cards on the table in one conference room, to craft resolutions we can genuinely be proud of and which honor to full effect our promises to a world often in desperate need? Our perspective on these matters don’t make us particularly popular, but few would deny that the abstractions of policy we perpetuate at international level don’t always speak to concrete and interlinked needs and aspirations at local level.   

This third phase of the journey draws much from Dr. Robert Thomas of the Scheller School of Business and his “servant leadership” colleagues and is based on the belief that there is much to commend leadership that is directed fundamentally towards the well-being of colleagues and communities, that leadership succeeds best when the people tethered to such leadership are encouraged to thrive. Of course, the movement also recognizes that, in a variety of business and other contexts, we human beings don’t yet seem to be up to the challenges of these times, including the challenges related to servant leadership.  Too many of us shield our eyes from complexity.  Too many distract themselves from hard truths.  Too few sufficiently prioritize the well-being of others.  Too many accept the “logic” of current institutions and the judgements of peers too much at face value. Too many are suspicious of pretty much everything and everyone – except themselves.  Too many project on to others the faults which they fail (or refuse) to resolve in themselves.

And these aren’t just the folks hanging out at the Chick FilA in Decatur.  These are the people who are running our world, the people asking us for money and votes, the people who want us to believe that its just too much trouble for them to share and grow, to fix the inefficiencies and barriers that keep the world on pins and needles, that allow the headlines to be stolen, day after day, by media who believe that we consumers just can’t get enough of the shootings and invasions, not enough of the betrayals and corruption, not enough of the pictures of bodies piled up in morgues in part because people like me in the policy world simply haven’t kept our promises.

Of course, we can keep those promises, just like we can organize our businesses and other institutions to better care for colleagues and communities.  We can.  And there is no magic here.  We simply have to commit to being better people.  Me.  People like me.  People not like me. Better.

Well, saying it is one thing, but the proof is in the doing.  Again with full reference to the demands of servant leadership, we’ve embarked in support of a fresh initiative called by its founder Dr. Lisa Berkeley, “Inner Economy.”  Inner Economy: Recognizing our different intelligences, some which we greatly indulge in such as the conceptual and their abstractions which largely govern elite learning in a place like Scheller, but also the other iterations of intelligence in which we are largely left to fend for ourselves.  Cultural intelligence.  Ethical intelligence.  Even spiritual intelligence. We don’t often identify these as “intelligence” let alone pursue their distinctive forms of wisdom, their contributions to a life well-lived.  But they are essential to the relationship-building and skillful, pragmatic commitments to which servant leadership invariably points.

I want to focus on perhaps the most obvious and in some ways among the most neglected of intelligences, emotional intelligence.  In the world of our making, we don’t see the education of the emotions as part of the curriculum either of school or, increasingly, of life. 

Think about how we in education and policy approach the emotional realm.  Mostly we do with emotions what we do with most everything these days – we learn to brand and indulge and even weaponize.  People practice the “skill” of emotionally manipulating others, of “yanking their chains” as we used to say, so they will buy what is being sold, whatever that is.  Even to purchase things and ideas which may actually be against their own best interests, like folks who buy a car from Toyota because they think that Jan has a nice voice or purchase  a phone plan from AT & T because people think Lily is like the girl next door even though she is actually the girl from another continent.

There are a number of intelligences which have been identified and which fit snugly into a servant leadership framework. But none with quite the potential impact of emotional intelligence.

The fact is that, like our cognitive capacities, we can educate the emotions by which I mean helping to ensure that our feelings are understood by us and are relevant to circumstances we encounter in the world; that they are reality-based rather than based on habits of the heart that we metaphorically “drag” through our lives while trying – often with some sense of desperation — to both rationalize their existence and minimize their negative impacts.

What are some of the manifestations of under-educated emotions? This is a short and woefully incomplete list, but it does point to some of our emotional habits that impact our capacity for servant leadership, that we are reluctant to change, and that in some instances we don’t even recognize ourselves as having potential to change.  

  1. Jumping to conclusions based on limited and/or self-serving evidence.
  2. Positing and reacting to threats where none exist.
  3. Projecting on to others bad intentions which we are equally guilty of, or which we might in some instances be more guilty of.
  4. Creating enemies where they don’t and shouldn’t exist including by turning disagreement into disunity.
  5. Being overly sensitive to the moods of others and assuming that somehow, some way, those moods have something to do with us, even when they don’t.
  6. Using language primarily as a tool to create distance or establish hierarchies rather than to disclose or share.
  7. Assuming that people have more power over us than they do and that we have less power over ourselves than we have.
  8. Being overly suspicious of the motivations of others but not also of our own.
  9. Demanding more respect from others than we show to others.
  10. Talking yourself into making only the changes you are willing to make, not the changes you need to make.

I could go on. This list could easily be thirty items long or more. This is about you the reader, about me the writer, about those who run key aspects of your life and seek to run it going forward.

Here’s the rub.  We’re not going to have better policy until we have better policymakers.  We’re not going to have better communities and education systems until we insist on being better teachers, better mentors, better at empathy and discernment, better at putting the needs of young people and office colleagues in our front mirror rather than our rear one.   We are not going to have more supportive working environments until we master the skills of service and synergy based on a broader and deeper knowledge of ourselves and others, based as well on skills related to recasting more horizontal structures from our overly habituated verticals.  

This is good news and bad.  Good in that the changes we need to make are still within our power.  Bad in that we are running out of time to make them.  And every day that we fail to put the education of our emotions on our priority list is another day we threaten to drift further into emotional chaos, another day when the promise of servant leadership is undermined by a failure to reflect hard and practice harder. And in case you haven’t been paying attention to our increasingly frustrated, wary and traumatized communities, chaos is clearly hovering on our collective horizon.

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Servant Leadership, Systems Thinking and Sustainable Development: A Hopeful Trio, Dr. Robert Zuber

12 Mar

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.

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Where the UN & Business Should Intersect, by Madelyne Hamblett.

8 Sep

Editor’s Note: Madelyne is the latest intern from the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology to lend us her skills and insights during the summer months. As many readers of this space know, we value the opportunity to familiarize people beyond our “peace and security” bubble with the important issues and processes which are likely to greatly impact future prospects, livelihoods and much more. We need more “champions” of multilateral cooperation and we need them in all those still-underserved spaces, not only where people are denied a place at the policy table, but where people don’t see the value of having such a place. Madelyn sees the value and we are grateful for it.

As a business student from Georgia Tech, I really had no clue about the world I was coming into when signing up to do a summer internship with Global Action to Prevent War. Sometimes I felt out of my depth, and I knew I was lacking context to truly understand much of what I was seeing. But that is exactly why my boss, Dr. Zuber, hired me. He didn’t want me here to provide the same perspective as everyone else. He wanted to me to view things through a business lens, so that is exactly what I did. And when I did, I noticed something. I noticed that the world of business, and the world of the UN do not seem to intersect much. I learned a bit about the UN Global Compact and, of course, NGO’s and the role they should play are discussed a good bit. But during these summer months I heard few discussions of what role for-profit businesses should be playing to help the UN realize the Sustainable Development Goals. This is truly disappointing because, from my view, both have a lot to offer the other.

In the world of business, it has become trendy to “care”. To show they care, corporations will create value statements or claim support for a certain social movement, but too often these are just words, not actionable commitments. As I learned in my Servant Leadership course taught by Dr. Robert Thomas at Georgia Tech, this can actually hurt a business. “Empty values statements create cynical and dispirited employees, alienate customers, and undermine managerial credibility,” (“Make Your Values Mean Something” by Patrick M. Lencioni). Rather than making empty statements that can actually hurt your business, businesses need to start creating shared value. Shared Value, as I learned in my Business Decisions and Creating Shared Value course taught by Dr. Ravi Subramanian at Georgia Tech, is “policies and operating practices that enhance the competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing economic and social conditions in the communities in which it operates. Shared value creation focuses on identifying and expanding the connections between societal and economic progress” (“Creating Shared Value” by Michael E. Porter & Mark R. Kramer). So, shared value is about creating a win-win for your business and the world. Just as “caring” is meant to create goodwill among your customers, shared value takes it a step further by giving a business incentive to “care,” taking action that creates a more sustainable business model and creates goodwill among your customers. But how does a business create shared value? That is where the UN could come in.

The UN has a global public network, an understanding of the most pressing issues of the world, and opportunities to get involved, all of which businesses lack. So, the UN could use their global network to help businesses expand their connections beyond the private sector and to the public sector which would be a great first step towards creating shared value. Then, the UN could help businesses identify the issues going on in the world that are most detrimental to their supply chain and provide them with ideas on how to get involved to tackle those issues. This would be the next step toward helping businesses create shared value because it provides a direct way for companies to get involved and improve their communities while also giving them an incentive to stay involved because it is improving their supply chain and business operations. For example, COVID-19 has been a major disruptor to businesses’ supply chains, and it has also been a very important matter at the UN. For-profit businesses could have done more to help the UN to raise funds for and distribute vaccines across the world which would help the global community while also limiting variability and stabilizing demand for these businesses around the world.

Just as many businesses utilize too many words and not enough action, this same issue can be seen at the UN. A lot is discussed, but not enough is done. From my time here at the UN, I have come to believe this is because many people holding positions inside the UN are figureheads with insufficient authority given to them by their country. I am not saying they do not want to do more. They may even hold the same ideals as I do when it comes to what the UN could truly be if the countries of the world just bought in, but, unfortunately, some member countries have not bought in sufficiently. So, the UN remains a symbol more than a tool because it does not always have the power needed to take action. This is where businesses could come in.

Corporations have large private networks, deep pockets of funds, and relatively unrestrained authority over their actions. The UN currently relies on sometimes finicky governments for resources which then may choose to withhold these resources at any time. Businesses could become a new supplier of these resources to the UN, and they would be willing to be that supplier for the aforementioned reasons regarding how the UN would also benefit them. In addition to being a new resource for the UN, their work with businesses could also instigate governments to work closer with and provide more authority to the UN due to public criticism. If for-profit businesses did begin to provide these resources to the UN, the UN would have considerably more power and ability to implement their assistance around the world. For example, COVID-19 has been a major crisis that the UN has been trying to address for over a year now, and, as previously mentioned, it has been a major problem for businesses’ as well. Had the UN approached for-profit businesses and incentivized them to fund and distribute vaccines around the world, then the UN could have possibly finished responding to this pandemic by now and even made headway on creating preventative procedures for future global pandemics.

I believe the UN and the business world have much to offer each other. Businesses could enable the UN to take more initiative and bring about legitimate change in the world while the UN could enable businesses to create shared value and thus a more sustainable business model. “Capitalism is an unparalleled vehicle for meeting human needs, improving efficiency, creating jobs, and building wealth. But a narrow conception of capitalism has prevented business from harnessing its full potential to meet society’s broader challenges,” (“Creating Shared Value” by Michael E. Porter & Mark R. Kramer). Avoiding this narrow conception is why businesses and the UN should intersect in even greater measure to help spur the change we all want to see in the world.

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Kid Rock: Youth and the Struggle for a More Harmonious Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

15 Aug
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One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.  C.S. Lewis

For society to attempt to solve its desperate problems without the full participation of even very young people is imbecile.  Alvin Toffler

The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.  H.L. Mencken

I can tell you that you will awake someday to find that your life has rushed by at a speed at once impossible and cruel. Meg Rosoff

“Sure, everything is ending,” Jules said, “but not yet.” Jennifer Egan

That’s the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.  Philip Pullman

When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.  George Burns

This was a week when many members of the UN family took a bit of rest from the grind of multilateral diplomacy, a time to restore at least a bit of the energy to the “batteries” which seem perpetually in need of a charge.

The world, however, doesn’t privilege holidays.  Indeed, our community was peppered this week by news both urgent and discouraging:   a massive earthquake in “snake-bitten” Haiti, the discovery of new Ebola cases in Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire, the rapid fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban and their enablers, an enhanced potential for civil war in Myanmar, even an increase in piracy and other crimes against maritime trade and the very health of the oceans themselves as acknowledged during a High-Level Security Council debate on Monday hosted by India’s Prime Minister Modi. 

Added to that, surely the most discouraging news of all; the release this week of the “Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis” by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The report is difficult to wade through (despite its inclusion of an interactive Atlas) and the main conclusions of the report are even more difficult to process: that even if we are able to somehow meet our climate targets, the patterns we now experience are sure to endure: storms of increasing violence and frequency, fires raging on multiple continents depleting even more of the forests we need to absorb excess carbon, water scarcity becoming increasingly the norm in a number of global regions, biodiversity threatened at multiple points on the chain of life endangering both agriculture and human health.  

There is more of course, more to be concerned about even than these. The SG’s response to the IPCC report, a “Code Red” for the planet, was widely disseminated throughout the global media.  The response of the young people around our office as well as those who gathered online this week to acknowledge UN “International Youth Day” was equally firm in the insistence that more can and must be done to “reverse the trend” (as our office colleagues would say), that the speed of our lives, the speed of global changes, must be matched more than has been done to date by the speed of our own responses, our own adaptations, our own resolve and, where appropriate, our own leadership – all of which beckons the skills and energies of young people at its core.

If this indeed is “code red” for the planet, it is surely “code red” for the future of young people, a future already compromised by high levels of economic uncertainty and even higher levels of social inequality and armed violence.   There is much to love about the world, beauty within people and in the wider planet which our short-term and self-referential decisionmaking has not yet managed to eradicate.  But the vantage points of too many elders suggest trouble; the lack of wisdom and discernment that such folks too-often bring to policy, the “advice” we are happy to dispense (often unrequested) without a similar acknowledgement of the crises made more dangerous on our watches, the fires we have not extinguished and which will continue to consume after we have passed on from this life, the frustrations that will keep spinning out of control as more and more people see through the half-hearted, overly-politicized efforts of many of the powerful and affluent to attend to the needs and aspirations of the desperate.

The times may seem a tad distressing, but the social and technological options which govern life in our times remain in healthy motion. We face problems which are unprecedented, but we also have access to avenues of response which are unprecedented as well, technologies which can remove plastics from our oceans and carbon from our atmosphere, communication tools that can help broaden the stake and integrate hopeful responses from youth and others geographically isolated from the global centers of policy.  While people like me press the buttons on our smart phones and just hope for the best, while others attempt to sentimentalize a past that was never as good as we claim it was, many young people are staking out a fresh, hopeful reality which, remarkably, does not reject the ideas, anxieties and suggestions of their elders as much as they might.  As a rule, they know better how to adapt the problem-solving and communications-rich technologies at their disposal to make issue linkages and identify new stakeholders.  They are often more comfortable in multi-cultural settings than their elders were and they are assuredly more comfortable in front of cameras than people like me who can barely stand to have their own picture taken.

 Many young people are also, and thankfully, fairly well attuned to the need to mirror changes in technology with changes in persons. Many seem to understand at some level that neglect of character in pursuit of social change is likely to lead to the same ends as the generations which proceeded them, a world with too many weapons, too little water, and health and other quality-of-life indices which strain existing resources and provide yet another rationale for armed violence. It was reassuring that the interns of Reverse the Trend (RTT) who met with the Kiribati Ambassador to the UN this past Friday on our “patio” seemed inspired by the kindness and hopefulness of his words, but also energized by his resolute stance that young people from every continent and every culture must come prepared to participate meaningfully in the affairs that characterize these times, prepared not only with their skills and ideas, but with their compassion, discernment and creativity. 

Such RTT and other youth may not be quite ready to once again take up fairytales, but they well understand and convey the importance of cultural expression to peacemaking; they recognize that poetry, dance and painting are not auxiliary aspects of an intentional life but are rather fuel for that life. 

During a typical week, we hear from (and respond to) a good number of young people from various cultures and on diverse life paths.  Some of these youth are discouraged; some are angry; some are thoughtful and determined; some are anxious that the current uncertainties will ultimately consume their potential contributions, that the wildly unequal access to resources which defined current generations will characterize yet another one.  And yet, despite their anxieties, we are heartened by how some young people have chosen a path not always taken, a path that calls them to invest in persons even younger than themselves, persons even more uncertain about their identities and threats from a world in turmoil.  Together they plant trees, they clean riverbeds, they grow healthier crops, they resolve conflict, they support victims and they presume to call on current leadership, including those rightly skeptical of the wisdom of age, to use their positions to better enable that transition to youthful energies which most UN diplomats now advocate.

We too, support this transition in every aspect. And just maybe, we’ve influenced some transition recipients more than we think.  One of our more active twitter followers is a young man (known only as “Sam”) from Côte d’Ivoire who recently wrote: “The values of a servant leader are the same as the values of a mentor: integrity, humility, respect and truth.”  Servant leadership, a concept and practice core to our own mandate. On those rock-solid values espoused by Sam, on those promises he strives to honor, we can surely build a movement for health and harmony that can truly sustain itself, that can blend inspiration and technology in new and life-enhancing ways, that can serve and be served beyond the boundaries of status and hierarchy, and that does not wait for official permission to share and to act.

And maybe, just maybe, Sam and his young colleagues can sneak in a bit of time for fairytales, or at least for the wise stories and accumulated imagination that remind us all why human life and human community remain so precious.

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