Time to hit the leadership reset button_1

As you reflect on 2020, do
you think global leadership
has to hit the reset button?
Here’s a practical way to do
that. (part 1 of 3)
Published on December 27, 2019
It is timely, dreadful and inspiring that the 2019
Dictionary.com Word of the Year has been declared to be
‘existential’, that is:
Existential [ eg-zi-sten-shuhl, ek-si-]

adjective
1. of or relating to existence: eg: Does climate change
pose an existential threat to humanity?
2. of, relating to, or characteristic of philosophical
existentialism; concerned with the nature of human
existence as determined by the individual's freely made
choices.
Something snapped in 2019. Maybe it was the warning of
11,000 climate scientists of “untold suffering” if humanity
does not immediately address what is now known as the
climate emergency. Or maybe it was the Yellow Vest and
pro-democracy protests in France and Hong Kong
respectively, the odd and awkward creep of Brexit, the Nazi
‘emergency’ declared in Dresden or the 5,427 ‘false or
misleading’ claims made by the US commander-in-chief in
the first 282 days of this year alone. Of course, in truth it
was all of those and much, much, much more - the deluge
of news we each process each day.
More so than has been true for a very long time,
thoughtful observers of the human future across many
fields and geographies have begun to earnestly wonder
– is there a future - or more helpfully, a future for the
civil society of liberal democracies? It seems that more
and more issues are being recognized as existential in
nature, that is clearly ‘of or relating to existence’- making

the management of all of them all together mindnumbingly
daunting.
Little wonder then that the words that were amongst those
most searched on Dictionary.com in 2019 ranged from polar
vortex to stochastic terrorism to exonerate – and that
word, existential.
It was in this context that Peter Biro and Howard Aster
convened 25 subject matter experts from around the world
to consider the topic Constitutional Democracy Under
Stress: The Need for Heroic Citizenship, over the course of
a powerful two-day conference at Ryerson University’s Ted
Rogers School of Management in Toronto Canada in
October of this year.
The somber, very serious tone of the proceedings - and of
the paper-givers generally - was well caught by conference
Co-Host Peter Biro;
“It is not catastrophizing too much to declare that a dark
age is upon us. Notwithstanding the recent optimistic
outlook of some observers of the human condition and,
indeed, of the state of liberal democracy in the world, I
submit that we are witnessing, on a grand scale, an
unmistakable retreat from the allegiance to the liberal
democratic principles throughout the west.”[1]

Indeed, on subjects ranging from populism, freedom of
speech, climate change, youth mobilization, electoral
reform, the role of big data, human rights, diversity to art
and art education to name just some, the paper givers each
described a complex reality that each demanded at
minimum a complex and uncertain response. It was not just
the immensity of addressing their subject at hand, but more
so the increasingly evident challenge of doing so each at
the same time simultaneously, and with in fact, shockingly
little time to do it.
But there was also too the inspiration of those “concerned
with the nature of human existence as determined by the
individual's freely made choices”. These were the hundreds
of participants – presenters and audience alike – giving so
generously of their time and expertise to address these
vital, pressing issues. And there was the inspiration of the
stories that were told and shared, that showed the power of
purposeful individual and in the aggregate collective action
– of the capacity of free choice to change the world. Such
exemplars were the heroic citizens sought by the
conference organizers to ‘redeem’ liberal democracy.
However, it was a fact too that like so many existential
conversations every day, every where, the question left
hanging at the end of each session was ‘what can I as an
individual do to make a difference, and how do I go about

doing so?” To contemplate action in the face of so much
magnitude and ambiguity is almost overwhelming.
As it happens, at the periphery of the conference – as a
sponsor – was a purpose-built potential answer to that
question, perhaps even the scaffolding for the apparatus
that has the potential to redeem liberal democracy and
successfully address the existential issues that need
addressing in our lifetime. It is called Leaders Expedition
(LEx), and I am its founder and Executive Director.
In the spring of 2016, a diverse group of 25 people came
together from across North America to ratify the tenets of
an organization that would come to be known as Leaders
Expedition. We were also there to consider two defining
challenges:
i) what was the greatest inhibitor to humanity being
able to address the existential issues that needed
addressing, while assuring its full potential in an age of
abundance? And,
ii)
what was the solution?
Since then, over 650+ members from 35+ countries, have
invested over 15,000 hours in designing and prototyping the
solution to these two challenges. With respect to the first,
we believe that there is an existential

leadership insufficiency that is systemic and global, and that
a new cohort of existing and aspiring leaders need to
be connected, empowered, mobilized and elevated to
positions of influence, power and impact, from classrooms
to board rooms to legislatures – to thus then author the
solutions that will transform the world.
With respect to the second challenge, we believe that
the gordian knot-like complexity of the noted systemic
and global leadership insufficiency demands nothing
less than a Manhattan Project-like response that must
be materially underway by 2030 to assure the survival of
civil society. Moreover, only a nuanced eco-system of
solutions has any prospect at all of being able to impact
leadership narratives, cultures and practices in just ten
years – that is what we have invested our time
designing, prototyping and deploying.
The Context for LEx
We live in an Age of Abundance. Since the Industrial
Revolution there have been exponential advances in science
and technology that are now accelerating at a pace that is
all but incomprehensible.
These gains mean that in the last 10-20 years we have
crossed from one historic period to another – from the Age
of Scarcity that defined the human experience since the

dawn of time, to this new Age of Abundance.
Where it was the case that there was too little food, not
enough doctors or teachers, not enough resource or
infrastructure, not enough money – that is simply no longer
true. Where all of the economic orders – Mercantilism,
Communism, Capitalism – existed to ration scarce resources
in a world too large – today we can feed everyone, house
everyone, educate everyone and provide healthcare to
everyone.
In fact, thought leaders such as Steven Pinker tell us that
there has never been a better time to be a human – to be
alive. By any measure – diet, education, mortality, income –
more humans are leading materially better lives than even
was the case 20 years ago.
For the first time in human history we have the means to
assure that we can all live a full life lived with dignity, and to
the extent that we cannot today, we know that within the
very, very near future those exponential advances in science
and technology will assure that we can.
And this is just the dawn of this new age.
But, there is a but. Those same exponential advances in
science and technology are also driving – directly and
consequentially – the advent of profound environmental,

socio-political, cultural and economic stresses, from the
climate emergency, to nuclear proliferation, to healthcare,
education, law and social justice issues and income
Inequality to name just a few.
Humanity is approaching a pivot point – a convergence
of many existential issues – where failure to successfully
address any one of them is simply inconceivable. The
societal turbulence resulting from these advances are, or
will soon be, amplified by profound disruptions to the labour
markets caused by AI/robotics and in health care – both in
their own way challenging sooner than we can comprehend
what it means to be a human. Our own eyes, and the
warnings of many organizations – most notably the United
Nations tells us that we don’t have much time.
It is increasingly clear that the world we live in today is being
defined by a desperate competition between those that
believe in the infinite possibilities of our future and the glory
of human potential, versus those who instead seek comfort
and security in the things they believe to be true from their
perceived past. For all of their contempt for each other, the
radicalized ISIS recruit and the radicalized white nationalist
have a great deal in common – the future as an unknown is
to be feared and avoided, whereas the seduction of a highly
curated but known past is to be embraced.
Though the latter is the smaller cohort in numbers in almost

every democracy (however defined), we are seeing these
numbers grow as we collectively perceive that we are just
on the knee curve of increasing societal volatility. The postmodernist
questioning of the truth that emanated from leftwing
intellectuals in the 60’s has been adopted instead by
those cynically manipulating social discourse to exacerbate
division in a way that is anything but intellectual. At all
levels, the technologies that seek to enrich and simplify our
lives, paradoxically and bewilderingly make them vastly
more complex. The consequence of 280-character mass
communication shows this to be so.
While it is tempting to point to iconic individuals in the
moment as causal agents of the cancer of populism, we
have to (more helpfully) admit that they are in fact ‘just’
metastasized examples of the same disease. And, just as a
life-threatening illness can cause depression in an
individual, it seems clear that way-of-life societal challenges
– real and perceived – are doing the same. As this malaise
deepens to a generalized ennui amongst too many, we see
the question raised ‘what can I as an individual do?’ not as a
question, but rather a declaration that they intend to do
nothing at all.
But it is the social credit experiment of the People’s
Republic of China that perhaps best illustrates the potential
to retard or reverse the development of civil society – to not

inconceivably ‘dead-end’ humanity.
First announced in 2014, the objective of the program is to
cement the belief that “keeping trust is glorious and
breaking trust is disgraceful”, where ‘good’ behaviour (as
defined by the state) is rewarded and ‘bad’ behaviour
punished, by a co-opted and corrupted society. In just a
few days, that is 2020, the compulsory program will require
that each new cell phone purchase will require the
mandatory registration of the owners face, and the
subsequent gathering and processing of state and nonstate
data sources on them - from their primary school
marks to their real-time social media activity - to establish
that individual’s unique social credit score.
This is not some theoretical Orwellian future. This system
exists today, rendering the Uighur people as the first
digitally imprisoned population in history. It is increasingly
the exemplar for many around the world that see it as the
foundation for not only autocratic governance, but of
‘illiberal’ democracies as defined by Hungary’s Viktor
Orban. Moreover, in the techno-driven disruption of the
near future, it is possible to imagine liberal democracies
accepting similar controls if stressed by extreme economic
distress or civil unrest.
For the first time in human history – in our near future - we
can contemplate a state where organized opposition is

simply no longer feasible (witness the Uighurs). In such a
‘dead-end’ state it is impossible to imagine that the pressing
existential issues of our day can and will be addressed in a
manner that secures the best possible future for humanity.
Is the prospect of a dystopian future certain? Certainly
not. There is far more evidence in the wonder that is
humanity to suggest that we will together find that best
possible future. But still, the odds that our newly
connected species will take a tragically errant step are
uncomfortably high and getting higher. The possibility
that that dystopian future might be possible means that
all exertions must be made to guarantee that it is not.
We assume that the human species has 10 to 20 years to
organize the conduct of its nations, cultures, economies,
religions, ideologies and people in such a way so as to be
able to shape a positive future - all the while avoiding the
daily catastrophes that have always dogged our path.
In a very short period of time we need
to connect, empower and mobilize a global community of
people who accept the possibility of both futures - and are
united in their determination to transform community and
sectoral leadership so that we create the one marked by the
pursuit of wonder as opposed to one of squalid
mediocrity. That is why Leaders Expedition (LEx) was
founded with the moonshot objective of “elevating one

million members to positions of influence, power and impact
by 2030: from the classroom to the boardroom to the
legislature”.
In a world that is ever more tribal, we are creating a new
tribe, one that is inescapably and unapologetically global
– one that is defined by our Tenets. However, unlike
other tribes that by definition seek first to insulate and
distinguish themselves from those around them, we seek
to engage with the people within those tribes who share
our commitment to the future. From villages, towns,
cities and nations; from cultures, classes, religions and
ideologies; to the grand sectors that are impacting us all,
we must prevail in our pursuit of a positive future.
This challenge would be audacious enough if we had a
century to achieve our objective. But clearly, we don’t.
Which begs the question, are we going to trust ONLY the
Darwinian marketplace of ideas to assure that enlightened
humanity prevails by 2030? That is, that the millions of
charities, nonprofit organizations, NGO’s, social enterprises,
governments and other good actors all acting in good
faith will somehow independently and in concert, avoid the
dead-ending of humanity and our consequent ability to
appropriately address all of the noted existential issues by
2030?
Or do we bias for success humanity’s efforts by launching a

purposeful, systemic global effort by connecting,
empowering and mobilizing the community that is powerful
enough to transform the world – to change the way leaders
lead by 2030. A Manhattan Project scale initiative
targeting the root cause of all existential issues – leadership
– just as Bill Gates targeted the eradication of malaria and
polio, and likewise predicated on the assumption that failure
is not an option.
That is Leaders Expedition (LEx).
Look in the coming days for the second of three
instalments, detailing the LEx value proposition, where we
discuss the value system on which LEx is founded - our
Vision, Mission, Charter and Core Values.
Resources:
LEx Website & Community
[1] Peter Biro, “The Retreat of Liberal Constitutional
Democracy and the Urgent Need for Heroic Citizenship”
in Constitutional Democracy Under Stress: A Time for
Heroic Citizenship, Mosaic Press, To be published Spring
2020