As an avid believer in the value of scenario planning as an exercise for promoting deep dialogue, improving decision-making, and identifying strategic assumptions held by leadership teams, I recently discovered a book that bills itself as a survival guide for humanity. Published by Earth4All (an international collective of economic thinkers, scientists, and environmental advocates convened by the Club of Rome, the BI Norwegian Business School, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and the Stockholm Resilience Centre), the book explores two paths forward for the planet up to the year 2100.

A key strategic assumption of Earth4All is that the current dominant economic model—characterized by a “singular focus” on gross domestic product growth—is destabilizing our societies and planet. The authors openly declare their intention “to accelerate the systems changes we need for an equitable future on a finite planet.” With classic Shark Tank terminology, Earth4All believes that “there must be a better way!”

The two scenarios they describe are “Too Little Too Late” and “Giant Leap.” The former depicts a world where societies continue at their current pace, setting and often failing to meet incremental goals, and neglecting to take strong collective action. And if we remain on this path, the authors conclude “humanity is ill-prepared to deal with approaching threats” such as dysfunctional economic, political, and social polarization, food and energy insecurity, climate change, and ecological collapse.

The Giant Leap scenario envisions a fundamental reconfiguration of global economic, energy, power, and food systems to benefit both people and the planet. But to take this path, the authors suggest the focus of all levels of government and society in general must be on making the following five turnarounds shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Five Turnarounds Required for the Giant Leap Scenario

Idealistic? Perhaps. But these goals appear desirable and, according to the authors, are achievable within a generation if we take the right steps to achieve them. Yet our current leaders seem to be ignoring the warning signs while continuing actions that lead us toward the systemic collapses predicted in the Too Little Too Late scenario. Assuming our leaders are intelligent and well-meaning, it seems illogical for them to keep leading us along this avoidable path. In other words, why does Too Little Too Late behaviour continue?

After asking this question, Earth4All offered an explanation in a deep dive paper entitled “The System Within: Addressing the Inner Dimensions of Sustainability and Systems Transformation.” Although the levers for systemic change in the material and quantifiable external system (our planet) have been clearly identified and explored, Earth4All concluded that the prerequisite internal (human) dimension of systemic change has been underestimated, left aside, or simply ignored.

What do they mean by “internal” dimension? Over the years, many professionals have attempted to capture the concept:

•  “What is most important is invisible to the eye.” — Jonathan Day, business advisor and former principal at McKinsey & Company
•  “The signals of a new reality simply could not penetrate the corporate (political) immune system.” — Arie de Geus, business theorist and former group planning coordinator at Royal Dutch Shell
• “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.” — William O’Brien, corporate transformation thinker and former Hanover Insurance CEO
• “Our blind spot is actually the inner place from where we operate.” — Otto Scharmer, systems change researcher, Founding Chair of the Presencing Institute, and senior lecturer at MIT
•  “We see the world as ‘we’ are, not as ‘it is’; it is the ‘I’ behind the ‘eye’ that does the seeing.” — Anais Nin, author of novels, short stories, and diaries

In summary, if the internal dimension of our leaders does not change, and what is invisible to them today cannot be made visible, then achieving the five required turnarounds is not just impossible or unlikely for them, it is inconceivable and unimaginable.

The inner dimension involves cognition, emotion, consciousness, and culture—an interplay between individual subjective experience and unconscious processes—and contrasts markedly with the material outer world. Yet, change in the latter cannot be achieved without first addressing the former.

The Earth4All deep dive into this issue proposes that leaders need to:

• Move away from a capitalistic, materialistic, human-focused, short-term way of dealing with challenges.
• Shift from viewing nature as an external resource to seeing humanity as part of nature and recognizing interconnectedness.
• Move from having a sense of entitlement to one of responsibility for the planet’s well-being.
• Recognize the need for the five turnarounds, with an urgency, energy, and commitment akin to that witnessed in the collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Embrace embodied, intuitive, collective, cognitive ways of knowing and moving forward.

For this transformation to occur, our leaders need to experience what the Apollo astronauts did as they looked back at the Earth and viewed it with a sense of awe as a small blue (fragile) dot in the enormous context of the star system. The paradigm shift that all astronauts experience when blessed with this view and experience is life-changing and irreversible. The glasses through which they view everything—that is, their “inner dimension” or inner operating system—are changed forever.

These conclusions align with the UN’s understanding that Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) cannot be attained without working on Inner Development Goals (IDGs) too (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: UN Inner Development Goals

Source: “Inner Development Goals,” United Nations, https://innerdevelopmentgoals.org.

Improving the internal dimension of our leaders will not be achieved by leaders intellectually “knowing” this must be done; they must be exposed to and open to experiencing a shift—which will probably entail them entering their zones of (possibly extreme) discomfort.

They will need to learn how to leverage their “extended minds,” hearts, guts, intuition, and bodily wisdom and the collective consciousness; reflect on past and future generations and the well-being of all the natural world; and sense whatever is ripe for emergence.

They will need to go into their respective communities and into nature to observe, listen, contemplate, and ultimately allow decisions to emerge through collaborative, generative conversations, physical movement, imagery, and words (in the form of poetry or prose rather than in the minutes of a meeting). The use of methodologies such as taking “empathy walks” in pairs and simply sharing stories and sentiments as opposed to conversing can have powerful effects. Writing short “seven-minute stories” describing experiences or visions or even capturing feelings or visions in “six-word stories” (e.g., “Children; grown and gone. Feeling lonely”) or visual sensing sketches or collages can serve to identify feelings, emerging changes, or new directions in ways that cannot be captured by more conventional methods.

This “inner dimension” in all of us—not just our leaders—is tapped into via our internal system composed of our bodies, brains, hearts, guts, senses, presence, awareness, and consciousness. It is accessed through our exteroceptive and interoceptive sensibilities (referring, respectively, to the five external senses and our inner bodily sensations) and our ability to experience and sense all this wisdom.

Such a learning experience will not be achieved in traditional in-person training, online, or sitting in a boardroom (with the doors closed). These are all capabilities and skills that are generally lacking from today’s university, corporate, and government leadership development training programs.

The deep dive report states, “Through experiential imagination, visioning, and group exercises, participants can shift worldviews and deeply held beliefs about what is possible…” The authors conclude that, “The simpler aim of this paper is… to urge a single overarching turnaround: a widespread turn towards the under-appreciated inner in all system thinking, discourse, policies, allocation of resources, and strategies for change.” If the planet is to avoid the horrors of the Too Little Too Late scenario, our leaders must undertake deep and profound inner work.

We need a new, better way—and there are only a few possible futures:

1. Continue the status quo and stay on the Too Little Too Late path.
2. Leaders do the necessary inner development work.
3. Current leaders are replaced by suitable fit-for-purpose individuals.
4. Citizens find a way to isolate and circumvent current leaders.

This leaves us with some key questions:

• Do you believe our current leaders want to upgrade their inner operating system? Are they capable of doing so?
• What role can we play in making this happen?
• Where might the next generation of leaders come from? When? How can we help them emerge?
• How might we work to circumvent current leadership and make the Giant Leap?
• Can each of us continue to do nothing—or will we wait until it is literally too late?

It is easy to sit back and blame our leaders. However, as the late Alexei Navalny said, “There is no shame in doing only a little. There is shame in doing nothing.”

So, what are you going to do? Does your own inner operating system need an upgrade to play your role in this endeavour?

If you are interested in exploring and developing your (or your team’s) “inner dimensions,” here are a few simple techniques to get you started.

For individuals:

• Begin to practice becoming aware of the “Three Levels of Consciousness.”
• Set yourself the target of consciously checking in with yourself 100 times per day to see how present you are at any given moment. Use a ring on your finger or a bracelet on your wrist as a highly visible mnemonic.
• Find some quiet “me” time: Use some embodied/mindfulness technique such as meditation, tai chi, extremely slow walking across a room, or Social Presencing Theatre for a few minutes each day.
• Give yourself permission to leave a gap before responding when someone is talking to you. Sense how your body feels or what images/emotions came to you as they spoke before continuing the conversation.
• Write two pages in a journal each day capturing how you felt or what you sensed or were (not) aware of during the day—and what small experiment in “being different” you might try the next day.

For groups/teams:

• Redesign meeting spaces to encourage people to move around, sit on the floor, paint, etc. Never meet in the boardroom unless it is a board meeting.
• Turn all phones/devices completely off during meetings (and take longer breaks so that people can answer messages).
• Do a 1–5-minute centring practice at the beginning of each meeting (and after each break) so that people can become fully present.
• Look at your team’s training programs. Do they all focus only on improving your employees’ technical skills or are they equally focused on their inner leadership development?
• Use the Inner Development Goals—customized to your team/organization—in 360 evaluations and in your reward and recognition initiatives.

Although it can be tempting to continue trying to improve (or save) the world using the familiar established, external tools and techniques that have failed us in the past, perhaps the time is right to follow the UN and the Earth4All practitioners and to recognize that we really do need to begin by working on ourselves. It is not an easy endeavour, but it is one over which we have full agency – and one that Ghandi proposed to us many years ago.

Whether you use the suggested techniques above or others, “being the change you want to see” starts with you deciding to upgrade your own inner operating system as of today.

References

• “Executive Summaries,” Earth4All, https://earth4all.life/publications. (Available in English, Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.)
• UN Inner Development Goals, https://innerdevelopmentgoals.org.
• Bristow, R. Bell, C. Wamsler, T. Björkman, P. Tickell, J. Kim, and O. Scharmer, The System Within: Addressing the Inner Dimensions of Sustainability and Systems Change (The Club of Rome, Earth4All: Deep-Dive Paper 17, 2024), https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/earth4all-bristow-bell.