Leadership Dynamics: The Missing Bit In The Paris Accord

One of leadership’s most challenging tasks is connecting perception to responses.

Example one

You are watching your favourite TV programme and a message comes through that a sudden tsunami is heading your way and will wash through your neighbourhood in a couple of hours. (please forgive technicalities and focus on the essence of the exercise) It is highly likely that there and then, watching TV becomes history.

Example two

A recent global warming report – this is now for real – warns that the consequences of not doing enough are far more calamitous and nearer in time than currently contemplated. It also includes a statement that reducing the world population and usage of livestock is a crucial part of the urgently needed action.

So, you must cease – or at least reduce – consuming meet and limit your family planning to one child.

How many people, do you reckon, will do just that upon reading the report? It’s just too downright inconvenient for all sorts of reasons. In some cultures, it is tantamount to downright impossible. And anyway, it may not really concern you so personally. It is a global issue. This makes it just too personal.

Or does it?

The mammoth in the room question

How to get people to translate clinical perceptions to constructive timely responses? How to get the world to reduce the estimated number of cows from a billion and a half to half a billion? How to get the world to understand that a big part of its many ills is sourced to out of control over-population?

How to persuade the world into radical behavioural change?

Because switching to all-electric cars will simply not do the trick. To what degree are people mindful of the pollution caused by mining, processing, manufacturing and recycling the technologies that depend on the necessary metals and rare earth elements? Next to the well-known issue of long-term nuclear contamination from nuclear waste from nuclear power stations?

The Way Forward Lives Elsewhere

The core of the problem is not the imminent calamity caused by global warming. It is not in the first place about reducing greenhouse gases, ceasing to consume meat or reducing the world population. It is about tackling head-on the subject of bringing about a fundamental attitudinal transformation towards life itself. We need a new value system to be put in place, that frees people en-mass to explore why the human is on earth in the first place. In the absence of a new value system, we are witnessing a mass hijacking of the human opportunity – and the spiritual opportunity of billions of people – mainly due to lack of education that properly addresses the subjects of self-awareness, values, accountability and responsibility already from a young age.

The greatest peril facing humanity is sheer ignorance about the purposes of living

The glaring need

Do you feel the glaring need for self-accountable, responsible grown-ups that are capable of impartial thinking and are able to rise above possessive self-interest and seek for new ways forward; to unify humanity in constructive missions and facilitate the creation of bright new futures for all? Sounds like a utopian vision, doesn’t it?

The good news, though, is that there are millions of individuals around the world that deeply share this sentiment. The problem is that they live in a deeply divided world and are not gathered in conversations at the right level.

The rise of social networks created the no-boarders blue-print of people from around the world sharing their story. Imagine the impact of people from around the world engaged in a discovery conversation of updating shared values about what really matters for the future of the world we live in.

David Gommé
World Copyright 2018© David Gommé

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