Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen

Dr. Jonathan Gosling - It’s Overwhelming

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 205

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Dr. Jonathan Gosling is an Emeritus Professor of Leadership at Exeter University in the UK and a visiting scholar at other universities, including Bled, McGill, Monash, Renmin, and UWE. He has taught and researched leadership for over 30 years and is now an independent academic and consultant at Pelumbra.com.

Current projects include with the Forward Institute promoting responsible leadership in government, NGOs, and business; supporting the front-line leadership of HIV and malaria control programs in southern Africa; running a series of ‘One Planet Leadership’ RoundTables for experienced managers  - and a new initiative to do the same for full-time students. He hosts writing retreats and this year published the 2nd Edition of Exploring Leadership: Individual, Organisational and Societal Perspectives’ (co-authored with Richard Bolden and Beverley Hawkins).

He represented UK Universities at the Rio+20 UN Sustainability Summit. He contributed to the ‘greening’ of management education, e.g., as co-author of the textbook Sustainable Business: A One Planet Approach and co-founder of One Planet Education Networks (OPEN). He worked as a community mediator for many years, co-founded Coachingourselves.com, and received the ILA’s ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ in 2021. He is a keen sailor of fast catamarans and slow cruisers.


Quotes From This Episode

  • "We're coming to a point where the drivers of change are probably going to be stronger than the drivers for continuity."


Resources Mentioned in This Episode


About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

  • The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for ILA's 25th Global Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, October 12-15, 2023.


About The Boler College of Business at John Carroll University

  • Boler offers four MBA programs – 1 Year Flexible, Hybrid, Online, and Professional. Each MBA track offers flexible timelines and various class structure options (online, in-person, hybrid, asynchronous). Boler’s tech core and international study tour opportunities set these MBA programs apart. Rankings highlighted in the intro are taken from CEO Magazine.


About  Scott J. Allen


My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your re

Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00  

Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you for checking in wherever you are in the world. Today, I have Dr. Jonathan Gosling, an Emeritus Professor of Leadership at Exeter University in the UK and a visiting scholar at other universities in Slovenia at Bled, McGill in Canada, Monash in Australia, Renmin in China, and University West of England in the UK. He has taught and researched leadership for over 30 years and is now an independent academic and consultant at pelumbra.com. Current projects include the Forward Institute promoting responsible leadership in government, NGOs, and business, supporting the frontline leadership of HIV and malaria control programs in southern Africa. Running a series of one-planet leadership roundtables for experienced managers, and a new initiative to do the same for full-time students. He hosts writing retreats, and this year published the second edition of ‘Exploring Leadership: Individual, organizational and Societal Perspectives,’ co-authored with Richard Bolden and Beverly Hawkins. He represented the UK universities at the Rio+20 UN sustainability summit and contributed to the greening of management education, for instance, as a co-author of the textbook, ‘Sustainable Business: A One Planet Approach.’ He is also the co-founder of One Planet Education Networks. He worked for many years as a community mediator and co-founded coachingourselves.com. And received the ILA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. He is a keen sailor of fast catamarans and slow cruisers. Sir, thank you so much for being… I'm reading the list of universities, and I saw McGill, and I know, of course, you've written with Dr. Mintzberg. The biggest mistake I've made while publishing this podcast is misspelling his name. I published it to the world, and Mintzberg was spelled incorrectly in two spots. (Laughs) Henry, I'm so sorry. I sent him a note, I said, “I hope you didn't notice it.” No one noticed it. I was just looking about two weeks later and I said, “Huh, that doesn't look correct.” So, I will try and spell your name correctly when I publish it to the world. It's so good to meet you. I really, really appreciate your time today. 30 years of exploring this topic of leadership. Before we jump into kind of what you're thinking about recently, though, what else do listeners need to know about you? That's just such a wonderful bio, sir.

 

Jonathan Gosling  2:34  

Well, thank you very much, Scott. It's such a pleasure to meet you, as it were face to face across the biosphere somehow bouncing around. I think I've sort of bounced around across the biosphere into my career actually, as well through relationships and connections with people. I spent quite a while as a conflict researcher and mediator in the East end of London. A part of the city, which was prone to a lot of neighborhood disputes and conflicts between groups of young people with the police and different ethnically defined groups in the 1980s, at a time of financial recession and a lot of change in the community. And working hypothesis formulated by a group of mainly religious leaders in the area was that this conflict is expressing a degree of pressure that people are feeling, but is misdirected at their neighbors, and could, more fruitfully, be made sense of in ways that would find a resolution to the real issues people are having with living conditions, but also address the political issues that are afoot of it. So, I found myself in my early working life involved with trying to understand what it is that's driving people, energizing them to such extraordinary efforts, often to rather fruitless ends. And in doing that, I learned a lot about where initiative comes from, where leadership comes from, and how kind of reframing the narratives that people are telling themselves and are living by and organizing in ways that can be more fruitful is a really powerful contribution to make. So, it was really seven or eight years of work intensely in the inner city, in the midst of very difficult economic circumstances. And a lot of change in the community, who lived there, and who was doing well, and who was on the up, who was on the down. A lot of change in infrastructure, and planning, but local people are not really involved much in that. So, it was always a struggle to find, purchase power and influence, to organize a coalition of people to see things, more or less, the same way so they could cooperate enough to get something done and their decision changed or improved. And that's really where I came to be interested in, “Ha, leadership has something to do with this.”

 

Scott Allen  5:24  

I just envision you seeing this all happening, and then wondering, “Okay, what is behind all of this? What is behind and what is driving these human behaviors to, in some cases, act in ways that aren't in our best interest, in some cases, act in ways that are increasing conflict or increasing strife?” Fascinating. Just absolutely fascinating. I came to the topic in a completely different context, but in a similar way. I had a supervisor who, on Thursday mornings, read ‘The Leadership Challenge’ by Kouzes and Posner. And it was the first time I learned “Oh, my gosh, there's a whole way of thinking about this that's underneath all of what I've been witnessing for four years.” I was in a leadership role, and I was just captivated. I was captivated. In a very different way, your story resonates.

 

Jonathan Gosling  6:14  

Yeah. That's interesting. I heard your podcast with Jim Kouzes and very much enjoyed it. And it took me to go back to his website and look at some of the research he cited again. And I think where that comes from is a real interest in and a concern for the predicaments individuals find themselves in when they're trying to make things better, taking an issue, taking a lead. And I think my perspective is not so much on the individuals as on the shared circumstances and the political opportunities. And the people were so diverse in their backgrounds, their languages. We had people who'd been living for generations in pretty much the same street, together with people who were refugees and had arrived with nothing from [Inaudible 7:06] qualifications. History meant nothing in this new environment, and they had to reinvent themselves and everything in between. I was a young man in my 20s, and I had very sketchy ideas, really, about how to make sense of all these differences. I certainly didn't feel that I knew how to typify the style or thought patterns of all these different people. I was really amazed, intrigued, and excited by not knowing what was happening, in a sense, more than having any confidence that I did or could sort it out.

 

Scott Allen  7:48  

You were intrigued, and you are curious, right? 

 

Jonathan Gosling  7:51

Yeah.

 

Scott Allen  7:53

I am really excited. I did an episode, probably maybe the third or fourth episode I did with Ron Regio. And you know Ron. And I just looked at him, and I said, “Okay, so what do we know about leadership?” And that's not the question I'm going to ask you today to get us going, but I want to know what you're thinking about. 30 years, really, really not only having those kinds of initial experiences in very complex situations in your community but then also having now not only engaged in the work but also done all of the research and all of the writing. What's top of mind for you these days? What are you thinking about? What are you reflecting on? They might not connect beautifully, but I think listeners will be very interested in what's caught your attention.

 

Jonathan Gosling  8:41  

Well, I think there are probably two sets of ideas that I'm tumbling around in my mind and in conversations with people at the moment. One is about the question of changing systems. It does seem that we're going to have to go through an awful lot of change in the coming years because of the pressure that's on the biosphere and on ecosystems, biodiversity, and climate change. And the apparent collapse of the established geo-political order, or, at least, the change of that. And we really don't know whether we're going to be able to steer away through this, preserve current orders of inequality around the world, or these are going to be fundamentally reversed or changed in some ways. I guess, most likely, it’s going to be fundamentally changed. And it means that a lot of the ‘us,’ people who are engaged in podcasts like this, perhaps for the first time, are going to experience turmoil, and that's the loss of the things that we treasure. And this throws up a lot of really interesting questions about leadership. I think, when I look around and try to make sense of the leadership that we've experienced in our industrial systems, and big companies, governments, and so on, in spite of all the talk about leadership being about change, primarily, it has been about continuity. How do we keep this system going? How do we keep the current structures of inequality pretty much as they are to preserve those of us who are now privileged in those positions? And when we look for real leadership of change, we're generally looking at rebellions, revolts, or disassociations. But we're coming to a point where the drivers of change are probably going to be stronger than the drivers for continuity. In that context, we don't have so much experience in the privileged world, but there is, of course, a lot of experience around because many, many other societies have been destroyed, and collapsed for all sorts of reasons. And we can look to them, and people who've been through that or are going through these sort of disruptions for learning on how things have gone. So, I'm very interested in how we can think about what will become of the things that leadership depends on trust in institutions and individuals. A shared idea about what counts as good behavior, or good values, or aims. Leadership is very muchassociated with ideas about greatness. We like to look to some individual leaders and to movements that represent cultural notions of greatness. And the tragedy of it is, really, that these qualities of greatness are often those that bring about that destruction of that system and all of that structure. So, there are all these questions, really, about the ending of an established order that I've grown up in and what will come of that.

 

Scott Allen  12:13  

Well, you are making me think of a few things. So, I've been reading, I don't know if you're familiar with Ray Dalio's work, ‘Principles for Dealing with a Changing World Order.’ Ray was the founder of the world's largest hedge fund and spent decades working in China, but is just an incredible thinker. He loves economics, he loves history, and he's fascinated by kind of what he calls the big cycle. He calls it the big cycle. We have the Dutch, and everything's backed up by the guilder. And then we have the British, and everything's backed up by the pound. And then we have the US, and everything's backed up by the dollar. And what are these big cycles that, it's not just… Its countries, kingdoms, dynasties, and he goes back to like 500 BC in China. He has studied this, and it is a fascinating lesson. But he, in his cycle, has six stages, and he thinks the US is in a late stage five of the kind of this cycle. So, you have that. And then, a listener, Gary Lloyd, shared a book with me called ‘The Coming Wave.’ And this was written by one of the co-founders of DeepMind, and have you seen the film ‘AlphaGo' by chance? So AlphaGo was the story of DeepMind, which was founded in the UK and was acquired by Google. And they were the folks who developed the AI that beat the human being in the game Go. And, of course, as you think about the game Go, allegedly, there are more potential moves in the game Go than atoms in the known universe. And they built the artificial intelligence. There's a wonderful film for listeners called ‘AlphaGo.’ You can go on the internet, it used to be on Amazon Prime, but it's the story of these individuals. He just developed a book called ‘The Coming Wave.’ And he's talking about this digital disruption, artificial intelligence, but then also bio attack. And how these technologies are being democratized in a way that is going to produce a great deal of change. And then, of course, you have Harari, ‘21 Lessons for the 21st Century.’ Sapiens, his book’s about these kinds of macro just seismic shifts that we at least have to have our eye on. And, of course, you're bringing into perspective the sustainability, the environment, those shifts that we're already seeing in a number of our weather patterns. So, it's a very, very interesting context that we are in right now. Very interesting context. It's worrisome, it's exciting, it's scary. It's the emotion of everything, what's that word?

 

Jonathan Gosling  15:07  

Might be overwhelmed. 

 

Scott Allen  15:09

Overwhelming, yes. Right? 

 

Jonathan Gosling  15:12

Yeah. Well, I've been thinking in that context about systems change, and what are our assumptions about how systems change. As involved in the leadership development world as I am, I come across many leadership development programs, of course, dealing with this context and generally saying it is complex. There's a difference between problems that are simple or problems that are totally chaotic and those that are complicated. And then there is the complex that has uncountable origins and uncountable consequences, and there is no linear cause-and-effect chain to influence. And the general conclusion of that is that, because of that, we might as well start somewhere, start doing something. And follow the thread as we pull it, and do what we can. I hope that we meet up with other people who are pulling similar threads and making threads and com some changes to the system. This is a perfectly reasonable and understandable kind of theory to hold, but it does mean that it reduces action to the things that an individual can do that's practical because if you're running a leadership development program and you've got three months, or six months, or 18 months, you say, “Well, here's a project, make a start and see how far you get.” And if people come across difficulties, or political obstacles, or something, they can stop or go around them. And that's relatively safe because they haven't actually committed themselves to change anything in particular; they're just pursuing problems of some sort. But not all systems, I think, are all that complex. So, for example, a transport system involves some complexity, but it's also pretty clear that with a little bit of regulation and some investment in infrastructure, we can make the transport system much better. And similar with food systems. There's a lot of complexity around weather, and politics, and all sorts of things, but also we know that if we reduce the sugar, and we improve the fiber, and reduce the amount of ultra-processed food, people are healthier, and they can spend less of their money on feeding themselves, and so on. And those choices and options can be made more cost-effective, accessible, and reliable than other things by some good policy, coordination, and regulation. That's not complex. It's politically difficult, but it's not complex. But there are these other things that can be done by a kind of heroic leader or individual pursuing their own interests. This requires organization and more of a sort of campaigning and even bureaucratic forms of organizing and influence. I think that difference exposes a set of assumptions about leadership that's built into a lot of leadership development programs, that it's all about the entrepreneurial individual, which, if you want to define it that way, fine, but that's not about actually changing our systems or not the systems that matter. If what you want to do is change the systems that matter, you've got a lot of other things to do and different kinds of leadership. Actually, management is probably at least as important. And then there's another way of framing this, which is that in any [Inaudible 18:45] systems, there's a lot of initiatives taking place. Many people are campaigning for organic agriculture, increasing biodiversity, rewilding, better terms of trade, changes in diets, taxes on sugar-rich drinks, and so on. Big progress is being made in a lot of those, and, quite possibly, with a bit of coordination across all of those changes and by pinpointing two or three key campaigns, we might really be able to tip the food system into something much healthier for people and for the planet. And that's the kind of perspective that campaigns us. There is a leadership involved in that, of course, and a community organizing kind of role in that. And a lot of role for academics, like you and I, to analyze what's going on here, and, at least, identify really what might make an impression. But that's not really the kind of action that most leadership development programs foresee. They, in fact, are very careful to not be political. Whereas, if we are saying we're going to change our systems, that's going to be political. I think that leadership development industries are boxing themselves into a small and kind of irrelevant corner, really, by their focus on the entrepreneurial individual.

 

Scott Allen  20:12  

And so, it's interesting because to go back to the Kouzes and Posner, you have their thinking about this in kind of like an organizational context. Not always, but a community context, and an individual, and kind of, quote-unquote, ‘normal’ circumstances. Challenge me if you disagree with that. And some of the… I've been thinking a lot about this lately: Greta Thunberg, or Malcolm X, or Larry Kramer in the LGBTQ+ community in the early 80s when HIV wasn't even being acknowledged by in the United States, Ronald Reagan, or Anthony Fauci, you have this activist mindset of, “We're going to get the attention, and we have to get the attention.” And it's a totally kind of different approach. It's a much more assertive and aggressive form to get on the radar and to make others aware. It's interesting. And I don't know how to put this in words, Jonathan, they're all approaches, they're all tools, but it's going to be very, very ‘are you intentional.’ it's almost like, to your point, this simple, complicated, complex, chaotic kind of framework. Snowden and Boone require a different approach. It requires some different intentionality around how I'm entering this space, depending on the type of problem. And I think our leader development probably doesn't equip people for these different types of contexts. Does that make sense?

 

Jonathan Gosling  21:46  

Yes. I think that's exactly really what I'm trying to get at. And, in so doing, I don't want to downplay or sort of belittle the importance of great leadership.

 

Scott Allen  21:58  

Sure. Day to day, I'm working in Intel. I'm a middle manager, and I need to be successful in building my team. That's the context. For some of the types of things that you're working on where there's a lot of complexity, you may take a different approach or a different way of thinking about how we develop leaders or skills. I think about that sometimes because if you look at just even the simple Snowden and Boone way of looking at things, it requires a different approach to the work, given the context that we're in. And to your original comment, I believe the context is that there are some seismic shifts, whether it's the technology, whether it's some of the environmental dynamics, whether it's some of the digital dynamics. But even as I'm listening to ‘The Coming Wave’ book, which, again, was written by one of the individuals who developed DeepMind, who is now somewhat concerned about where this could go, the second-order and third-order effects of what some of these technologies might bring, it's becoming a little more chaotic, and no one can control it. No one can. It's just spiraling and barreling forward. So, not only do I see the context as being somewhat complex, but a little bit chaotic. And he calls it the containment problem. For some of these innovations, they become very, very, very difficult. You're not going to contain the printing press. It wasn't containable; it just went. And about the only innovation that we've somewhat contained is nuclear weapons, but that even, and he goes through a series of examples of near misses and close calls of that technology going south very, very quickly. And obviously, there's a larger existential threat of that technology. But the context feels like it's shifting, for sure.

 

Jonathan Gosling  23:59  

Opening up to the yawning possibilities of catastrophe, as well as some kind of slightly bizarre opportunities for dematerialization, or planetary escape, or something like that. 

 

Scott Allen  24:13  

Yes, for sure. As some of these technologies are democratized, there's great good in that. The problem is every tool that humans have invented, we've weaponized somewhere along the way from the stick on. Fire to the wheel to… And so, that's the shadow side of this innovation and some of the good that can be created. It's overwhelming to think about, for sure.

 

Jonathan Gosling  24:43  

What do you think, Scott, should be our stance in relation to leadership, what we're studying, developing, teaching?

 

Scott Allen  24:52  

Well, Kellerman, in a really nice way, calls it her leadership system: the leader, the followers in the contexts. And I don't know, my sense -- pushback if you disagree -- my sense is that we as scholars have not spent enough time in that context space. What does that mean? And you use the word complexity earlier; that is an area where I am very, very limited in my understanding of that domain of the literature. I've had a couple of guests; I've had Mary Uhl-Bien and Willy Donaldson talk about his book ‘Simple Complexity,’ but I believe we're going to have to have a much stronger understanding of that domain of scholarship. And I don't necessarily experience it that way. I think, back to Snowden and Boone’s framework, if you look at Kouzes and Posner's work, and again, push back if you disagree, and Jim call me if you disagree, but it seems like leadership in some of those, like a middle manager, you're in more of like a complicated context. It's more complicated. That's kind of where your work is situated, in that space, which is important, and it's real. And for some of these global leaders who are now facing complex and chaotic, in some ways, especially as we have the increase in numbers of catastrophic events from a natural standpoint, that is going to disrupt and up some of the norms. And then, again, you had in the digitization some of the geopolitical forces that are shifting, like with BRICS. It's a very, very fascinating space. And so, what do you think? Do you think we know enough about leading? 

 

Jonathan Gosling  26:35  

I think that we know enough about our own experience to define what might be some of the challenges we have to deal with in finding within us our own authority to take decisions, to make alliances, to choose what we think is right or wrong in any circumstance, and to make the trade-offs where we'd have to. Some of those aspects of self-awareness have to do with a sense of idealism. One of those ideals is a sense of good, truthfulness, and beauty that we want to fall dear to, and we know the costs of compromising too much on those by reflecting on our own lives. And, quite often, I think those reflections on the compromises in life and times that we've been successful, and times where we've been unsuccessful in life, reveal a kind of tragic humility that is likely to put off what we know to be the priority for the sake of more immediate benefits or necessities. And those are perfectly justifiable. I can think of my own life when I knew I wanted to bring peace to the world, but in order to bring peace to the world, I'll take this job and the company car and the mortgage because I've got a family and all those things to do, but I was kind of still on my way. And then, all of a sudden, it's 40 years later, and the world is still in conflict, and I still haven’t paid my mortgage off. 

 

(Laughter)

 

Jonathan Gosling  28:22  

So, I think this very sort of human-enboarded frailty is a really important place to come back to in thinking about how we are really going to cope with the difficulties ahead. And one of the areas I've been starting to look at in my current research is questions around leadership in contexts of defeats and collapse. I think there has been a bit of a tendency to associate leadership with triumph. We're really interested in the people who won the war. But those who lead the communities that were defeated pay less attention. Perhaps, the US South is an exception to that, where leaders of the defeated South are still revered and studied by many. But I don't think that's true in many cases. And even that phenomenon is quite interesting to think about it, where resisting admitting defeat is a good thing or a bad thing. Probably good or bad is the wrong way to think of it; people will do as they do. But if you think about South Africa, and we, understandably, rightly laud Nelson Mandela for his leadership, he showed the transition in South Africa; it's also the case that FW De Klerk led, in a way, the defeat of his own constituency He and others, particularly him, in a manner that enabled continuity from one order of things to another. And I think it's quite a remarkable feat, really, and there's much to be learned from that. If we look at other kinds of transitions through defeat, there were much more complicated; of course, it can be summarized in a few words now. But, at the end of World War II, it was Admiral Dönitz, who inherited from Hitler, the commander of the [Inaudible 30:31] the German forces and signed the surrender, which legitimized defeat, created the political context for [Inaudible 30:40] to take up civilian leadership. Of course, it’s much more complicated than that, and not everybody admitted then or have they now, but it's enough; it was enough to start again with something, even, of course, a great loss. So I think that many of us in our communities and countries are going to face the equivalent of that, not necessarily military defeat, but it could be defeat by the forces of nature, or by, you say, technological changes that will simply make many of us irrelevant. 

 

Scott Allen  31:18  

Well, yes. I think of communities in the United States, a couple of communities come to mind. So, my grandparents were in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and all infrastructure has gone. Not all. That was an overstatement. A lot of the plants that were open in the '60s and '70s, the Hormel plant, for instance, is gone. Or communities in Ohio, like Lordstown, Ohio, where we used to produce cars, and now 15,000 people, that community has lost kind of a large chunk of its purpose, its reason for being, its livelihood. And those are dramatic. That is digitization and globalization in many ways. That's what's going on. That plant moved to Mexico, or that plant is now completely irrelevant, and the product is being produced in China. And I think that's a shift, and that's a contextual shift. And I think the US has gone through that seismic shift in the last few decades. I know it's happened elsewhere in the world, too. It's amazing. It's really, really fascinating to watch. And then what does that do to those communities, and for the individuals in those communities: purpose, hope, and stability? It creates this just ripe opportunity for destructive forces.

 

Jonathan Gosling  32:43  

Yeah. You mentioned hope, that's often cited as, “Well, we must have hope,” as if it's a kind of moral injunction that we must be hopeful. But in those kinds of circumstances, what part does hope play?

 

Scott Allen  32:57  

Mm-hmm. Well, we got really deep. (Laughs)

 

Jonathan Gosling  33:01  

Well, I think these are questions that, as you're saying, they've been around for decades in many communities in the US and all around the world. And more and more, they are. And my colleague, Sasha Maher, in New Zealand, has been working on the Oxford Managed retreat, which is the policies that governments and local governments will have to address when communities become sustainable. But the kind of reasons she was saying, because of industrial reorganization, or because of climate change, and rising water levels, or weather patterns, simply can't be kept going. And she’s an anthropologist, and she's done some fascinating work on how different sub-communities, subgroups within a community, make sense of the sustainability of what's coming. And there's a huge range from those who say, “Oh, well, okay, I'll go somewhere else,” to those who simply don't believe that this can end because it's been like this for generations and we've always been here. And whoever is saying it must have some ulterior motives, so it can't be believed. And it's just because they want to save money on the water drains, or infrastructure and the transport or whatever. And everything in between. She looks at all these attitudesense about the future, and around trust, s time around nature. Because, at that level of concept, people become fixed to that position. And it's at those levels of concepts that things have to change if they're going to retreat, manage, and allow it to be managed so that it's not totally chaotic.

 

Scott Allen  34:50  

Yeah. That word trust is so… He talks about this in the coming wave. He says that so much of our society is built on this inherent trust that we have. And absent that trust, it gets to some pretty interesting places.

 

Jonathan Gosling  35:07  

And one of the things I'm trying to do in the face of all of this thinking is to launch a series of programs and courses around what I'm calling One Planet Leadership, which I'm thinking of as, firstly, an awareness of what it looks like to be taking responsibility as a citizen or as a manager in very different circumstances because it's kind of hard to know what it's like for other people, especially as travel becomes more expensive and harder to do, and carbon footprint makes us more reticent to do that. But, of course, we have other technologies that allow us to meet and connect with other people. But the question is really the framework and the processes for really hearing what it's like and not just assuming. Because I think climate change is the most important thing, does it mean that even somebody doing the same job as me in Sri Lanka, for example, sees it the same way? So, this One Planet Leadership program, I’m setting up, some for experienced managers, people in mid-career or later in their career who have a lot of experience to look back on, and current responsibilities, dilemmas that they’re holding and dealing with, which will be informed and enriched by sharing those and comparing them with their peers in other parts of the world. And I also want to set up a program for full-time students who are at a stage in their life where they're thinking, “Well, what am I going to do? Where am I going to put my energies in life? Where will I make a living and make a contribution?” Which will do the same thing. Plug them into interactions with people from around the world and their peers in other parts. So, if any listeners to this podcast find themselves moved by that same impulse, I'd really like them to get in touch and see if we might collaborate. And, Scott, I hope you can put in the show notes links to some of those initiatives.

 

Scott Allen  37:16  

I will. I will, for sure. I just have great respect for your curiosity, and for your goal to connect and for people to get together and have dialogue. And I had Margaret Wheatley on recently. And another gentleman named Mike Mascolo, who is at Merrimack, and both of them are working pretty intently on how do we create opportunities for dialogue across different perspectives to build that shared sense of understanding. And I will put that in the show notes for sure. So, we are close on time, so that just means we need to talk again because we went really, really, really deep very quickly. But I'm so excited to potentially meet you a little bit later this fall in Copenhagen. I hope you will be there.

 

Jonathan Gosling  38:05  

I will definitely be there talking about some of these things. 

 

Scott Allen  38:10  

I'm very, very excited. And so, we will do this again, please. But I want to make sure that… I'm always asking guests before we kind of wind down… Well, first of all, do you have anything else you want to mention before we wind down?

 

Jonathan Gosling  38:25  

Well, I just like to say that in all these difficult times, those people who are thinking about it, I'm not always thinking about it in the sort of grandiose terms I've been using here. Quite often, one's mind turns to thinking about your own family or background, just like you told the story of your family somewhere in… Where was it? Idaho?

 

Scott Allen  38:49  

Iowa.

 

Jonathan Gosling  38:50 

And you think, “Oh, there's that.” And it opens up a space in your heart for them. I could see you reaching out to them with your heart and most empathy for them. And I think this is so important, but it's also beautiful. It's a beautiful part of humanity that we do that when touched by these difficult times. And I've found that there are some people taking time out to write about that. It's really fruitful, and creative, and great fun. I've been hosting writing retreats for many years now, and I think there's a term happening in these writing retreats now where people are doing exactly that. I'd love to hear from you more at some point and from others, maybe listeners who resonate, to see if we might extend some of those possibilities.

 

Scott Allen  39:47  

Well, and I will put… Because I know that you have some of those retreats on the docket, right? There are some retreats that are planned, so I will make sure that we place those into the show notes as well. Another outlet, right? Another outlet in a community for people to connect, engage, and then produce and make sense of where their passion lies. And it could be in a number of different streams of what we've discussed and others. But what has caught your attention recently? What have you been listening to, or reading, or streaming? It could have something to do with what we've just discussed; it might have nothing to do with what we've just discussed. But is there something that you think might interest listeners?

 

Jonathan Gosling  40:29  

Well, I read, in my reading group, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira ‘Hospicing Modernity,’ and its mind-expanding, soul-expanding book. The first half of it consists of a number of thought experiments and exercises where the reader is encouraged to go for a walk and think about this and then come back and read the next bit. The second half is some very stimulating, challenging, and intriguing arguments about the effects of modernity and what kinds of roles one might be talking about play, which she frames as the death, the ending of what we've come to know as modernity. I didn't really know… I recommended it to the book club because I'd heard of it from other people and found it to be a really, really interesting and stimulating read, but I didn't know what my fellow members would say. And as we started the meeting, people sat very stony-faced, and I thought, “Oh my goodness, I recommended the book that nobody likes,” but one after another, they all said pretty much the same as I've just said. So, I strongly recommend it to people as a read that will take you somewhere different.

 

Scott Allen  41:52  

Awesome. Okay, ‘Hospicing Modernity.’ I will put that link in the show notes as well. Well, sir, thank you so much. The first of future conversations. Can't thank you enough for your time today. Thank you very, very much. And thanks for the good work that you do all around the world. Very, very much appreciated. And I just am very, very thankful.

 

Jonathan Gosling  42:14  

Well, thank you, Scott, for the opportunity and for the good work that you do with this podcast and many other things. Your lovely children who introduce each episode!

 

Scott Allen  42:23

(Laughs) Okay. Be well, sir. 

 

Jonathan Gosling  42:25

Thank you. See you later.

 

 

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