Leading social entrepreneur and Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, Caroline Watson, is currently seeking an executive assistant as well as some other part-time roles in marketing and sales, finance and administration, teaching and workshop leadership, to support her in the development of 4 new entrepreneurial initiatives.

1. The Centre for Arts and Leadership – a cultural ‘tiers lieux’ on the outskirts of Paris, providing unique creative learning opportunities, corporate training, artistic and performance residencies, weekend workshops for public and residential accommodation for extraordinary weekends away
2. Schools of the Future – a network of innovative schools to support the development of global leadership skills for the next generation of school children
3. Act for Impact – senior leadership corporate consulting for global companies, using ground-breaking participatory arts methodologies
4. Hua Dan/Scheherazade Initiatives – a global organisation that uses participation in theatre as a tool to empower migrant and refugee populations

 
We are looking for energetic, creative and self-motivated individuals, fluent in written and spoken French and English, who are keen to be part of a growing and flexible workforce.  A background in international living and business is a huge plus.  We are particularly keen to create opportunities for expatriate mothers and female entrepreneurs, given our founders strong focus on women’s empowerment, with a view to offering flexible work opportunities that can grow as both the position and the organisation grows. Interested candidates should possess:

• Strong research and execution skills
• Pro-active self-starter, able to work independently
• Excellent writing and presentation skills
• Good with numbers
• Book-keeping skills
• Passion for the arts, education and social change

 
No one day is the same working with Caroline!  You could be assisting her in the search for a location for one of her schools; working with her on the implementation of a creative training programme for migrants and refugees; writing and/or translating a visionary proposal document for a social project or implementing a marketing campaign for our Global Explorers programme.  Caroline’s retention rate for employees is exceptionally high and she is keen to identify individuals with a passion for her causes to cultivate their leadership development over the long term.
 
Independent and auto-entrepreneur candidates are also welcome to apply.
 
Interested applicants should send a CV and motivational letter or video to Caroline at caroline@carolinewatson.org.  More information about Caroline and her initiatives can be found at www.carolinewatson.org
​

It's been a crazy few weeks here as France has gone into complete lockdown over the coronavirus.  A trip to Australia to explore the expansion of the Scheherazade Initiatives model has had to be cancelled but I've been taking this opportunity to really think through how our work can be of value to both individuals and companies in reducing fear at this difficult time.  I've therefore been inspired to bring to light a project I have been working on for a while but that I thought was important to share more broadly in this present climate of fear.

Love Not Fear is a video project and a learning portal that explores how harnessing the power of love can have profound impacts over a fearful worldview in both a personal but also a corporate leadership journey.  In the introductory video I share more of my journey starting Hua Dan and Scheherazade and how that power of love helped me to overcome the challenges of becoming an entrepreneur and navigating the challenges of running a business in China and what it means for each one of us to live with love not fear. 

I invite you to take a look at our introductory video and to like, comment, share and subscribe to the series and to consider what love not fear means in your own life. 

​I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

(Originally published on Medium)

I was in Beijing with my China team on that fateful day when the result of the June 2016 referendum on Britain’s proposed withdrawal from the European Union took place. I’ll never forget the reaction of my Chinese colleague when I sat there, shocked and devastated, “ Well that’s democracy for you!” she said.
I was born in Hong Kong and have lived and worked in China for over half my life. It is common to be asked the question by fellow Europeans as to whether China will ever become democratic. For anyone who has ever spent any serious amount of time in China, and observed the sweeping changes taking place in the country, and the extraordinary industriousness of her people, it often seems like a very naïve question. China has one of the most educated populations of any country in the world, and it has been extraordinary to both witness and experience the opportunities that have emerged for individuals to raise themselves up from extreme poverty to take their place in the burgeoning affluent middle class. If our systems of government should be designed to support the maximum well-being for the maximum good for its individuals, China might well be a contender for first prize. But China is far from politically democratic as we all know.
I now live in France and am, and always have been, a passionate Europhile. Having lived outside the UK for nearly 20 years, I was unable to vote in the referendum due to the 15-year rule that prevents British citizens having lived abroad for this length of time being able to vote. Disenfranchised for having lived abroad for most of my life, the situation has, on more than one occasion, caused me to question the dynamics of a democratic system that cannot adapt to suit the changing needs of ‘populations who move’. This is but one of the many reasons we need an overhaul in the system. But I digress. Had I been able to vote, I would most certainly have voted Remain but my reasons for doing so have little to do with a vested interest in keeping my freedom of movement (although that is important to me) but more to do with my experience of living and working in China and seeing the evolution of this new world power.
To my mind, we can debate the failings of the European Union for as long as we like (and I’m not talking about the accusation that Brussels exercises too much control over the shape of the carrots we purchase, an apparently life-threatening issue still unable to be proved by my Brexit-voting family members) but the forces at play in our world and the shifting power structures are so great that alliances such as the European Union are necessary to strengthen a balanced, multipolar world that would avoid the extremes that caused the conflicts that erupted in the 20th century. But, most importantly, my reasons for voting Remain would be that the principles of unity, of leadership, of co-operation, of strength in diversity are innately of ‘higher order’ than those of isolationism, racism and xenophobia, a faux individualism born of arrogance and a nostalgic, misplaced sense of one’s place in the world, a demand for efficiency at the expense of unity.
Indeed it is that ‘higher order’ thinking that, to me, underpins the democratic institutions and ideals that have taken such a bashing of late.
This week, I have observed the country where I was born, Hong Kong, as well as the country whose nationality I claim, Britain, wrestle with two very different but complementary aspects of democracy. In the first, the right to peaceful protest and the demand to be able to vote in democratic elections to choose one’s leader; in the other, tensions in the role of parliament and the people in maintaining peace and stability in the face of leaders who have been known to manipulate and connive in pursuit of ego-driven and less than noble goals.
I am one of the estimated 1.3 million British citizens living in Europe who, along with the 3.2 million European citizens living in the UK, every day during this Brexit nightmare, are living in extreme uncertainty about what our future holds, from everything to whether our right to freedom of movement will be upheld, whether we will have access to healthcare, pensions, education for our children, and whether our work and financial security can and will be maintained. But, crucially, whether the very foundations and principles on which our societies were built are crumbling before our very eyes.
But here’s the thing, democracy as a government framework is nothing if it is not backed up by the higher principles that govern it.
It is common for Brexiteers to claim that ‘the will of the people’, as evidenced by the result of the referendum, needs to be respected. It is a fair point — provided those same people have been fully armed with the facts, free of manipulation of the media to which they have access and, critically, have benefitted from a quality of education that enables them to adequately question all that they see around them. These other pillars of democracy — access to information, a free and unbiased media, and the citizen responsibility to ensure they are adequately informed — have all spectacularly broken down.
So, what then, is left?
To me, democracy demands of each one of us an adherence to a higher principle of how we support and uphold the true and innate freedom of man, as evidenced in how we vote and support our own responsibilities within a democratic system. Democracy has always been based on those higher set of ideals than simply the machinations of government. It requires of each one of us a passionate adherence to, and upholding of, the more spiritually elevated ideas of freedom of thought, individual accountability, unity in diversity and a commitment to empowering the equality of all men and women. This is no less an imperative for our leaders as it is for ourselves as citizens. We must be mindful of those who lay the blame for our current mess on forces outside of ourselves for the contract between the citizen and the government must always be one of mutual accountability and of holding both ourselves, as well as each other, to that very highest standard of behaviour.
Martin Luther King was one leader who dedicated his life to ensuring that human law was in line with higher principles.
“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”
— King 1963
And, as the British people negotiate what is ‘legal’ or not in their current situation, squaring what happens with that more elevated sense of justice is what both individuals and public officials should be charged with doing. To ensure that our voting systems, our governance and governmental structures, bear witness to enabling and empowering that highest conception of man to emerge — whether that is within individuals as political and business leaders, or within citizens and how they call to account those that have entrusted them to govern.
It used to be that the West was seen as the upholder of the values of democracy, freedom of thought and expression, accountability between the governors and the governed, a free press — but most of all, decency, a respect for human rights, and a sense of moral responsibility to those less fortunate than ourselves, all underpinned by the Judeo-Christian ethic of the individual’s right to determine their own salvation and equality for all in the eyes of God.
There’s another moment during my time in China that stands out clearly in my memory. The night after the Olympic closing ceremony in Beijing, when the city handed the Olympic flame to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, the same team member who had pronounced her perhaps fatalistic and disparaging comment on democracy post-referendum incredulously asked me, with a wry smile on her face, who was this individual who had bumbled his way through the ceremony, his hands in his pockets, his shirt unbuttoned, casual and disrespectful to his Chinese hosts. I shuddered with embarrassment, this apparently the best that Britain could do. A short time later, she shared with me how she had then been inspired to look up on a map of the world to take a closer look at the British Isles.
“It’s amazing to think that this tiny country could have once ruled over so much of the world”.
Indeed it is.
But the jury’s not out yet. There’s still time for the ship to turn around. For leaders all over the world to choose to exercise that servant leadership that has at its heart, a deep conviction in humanity’s extraordinary potential. The potential for goodness, for justice based on a higher law, of integrity, honesty in government and a desire to always do the right thing. For love — not fear — to reign supreme. There’s still time for the third way.

​I was fortunate to take part in a recent 6-month accelerator programme run by the Miller Center at Santa Clara University in California.  The accelerator programme offered a series of online learning modules that encouraged entrepreneurs to clarify their business and impact model, their financial models and marketing and customer segmentation strategy.  The online learning was accompanied by weekly calls with experienced mentors and culminated in a 5 day in-person residence programme in October.  During the residency, entrepreneurs were able to present their project to seasoned entrepreneurs, funders and development professionals and were rigorously ‘tested’ on their model.  Finally, each entrepreneur was able to ‘pitch’ their project to an audience of 150 investors at SOCAP, the Social Capital Markets conference held in San Francisco.
 
It was an exciting and exhilarating time for me, a rare opportunity to step out of the day to day running of the organisation to reflect on the most efficient way for us to grow our model.  We are committed to empowering the next generation of migrant and refugee leadership to grow our work into 5 new countries in the next 3 years and have an ambitious programme to also develop a handbook and online training tools to grow not just our own work but to enable others to benefit from our experience and the models we have developed too.  We are also looking to better understand our impact through the applications of ‘lean data’ collection and hope to recruit someone to manage this and improve our digital storytelling around our impact.
 
Our earned-income programmes have helped to support between 30 and 50% of our income in any given year and we are keen to continue this growth through the development of new and innovative corporate training programmes, educational programmes for children and online learning.  We are also keen to develop the technology around how to deliver our workshops at scale, following the successful pilot of a project using Skype to deliver our workshops to women and children trapped in besieged parts of Syria.
 
We have an ambitious goal to raise US$3 million for the expansion of our programmes and would love to hear from you if you are keen to be part of our journey!
 
For more information about our business plan, please see the link below for an excerpt of the pitch I did at SOCAP.
 
Will you help us be part of a movement in using theatre for social change, bringing a more inspired approach to the empowerment of humanity’s full potential?

​Following the success of our first pilot project in the UK, in partnership with Ealing Council, we were pleased to receive a second round of National Lottery funding to expand our work into not just one, but three boroughs across London.  The new phase of ‘Lina’s Story’ will now be running workshops in Ealing, Hammersmith and Ilford and we are also looking for partners interested in hosting our play of that same name within their community.
 
Lina’s Story focused on the challenges that Lina, a young Syrian woman, faces when she moves to London – negotiating the bureaucracy of refugee resettlement, challenges accessing social services such as healthcare, and the changes in the balance of power in her marriage with new gender expectations.  The play has, so far, been performed in Ealing and at the Migration Museum as part of their Refugee Week celebrations.  ‘Lina’s Story’ is an interactive Forum Theatre piece that invites audience members to step into the action of Lina’s life and look at different ways that she might address the challenges that she faces. 
 
We are excited to now be training new facilitators for the expansion of our work, recruiting refugee women themselves as facilitators and offering them training in workshop leadership and facilitation as well as earned-income to support their families.  This is how we intend to grow Scheherazade across the UK and, ultimately, globally, by creating a network of empowered peers to facilitate our workshops.
 

​As part of an ongoing project, Hua Dan was invited by the British Embassy in China to collaborate on a series of workshops exploring how businesses working along the Belt and Road Initiative can implement more ethical and sustainable measures in their business practices.
 
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China’s biggest infrastructure project to date, an attempt to replicate the old land and maritime ‘silk routes’ that traversed Asia and Europe, facilitating both trade and the spread of ideas between East and West.  Some estimates put the cost of implementing the project at US$8 trillion.
 
Not without controversy, there is an effort on the part of many countries to encourage China to take an ethical approach to its development and a desire to commit companies working along the ‘road’ to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals to their way of doing business.
 
As part of this, I developed a series of workshops to bring together key stakeholders in 3 regional cities in China – Beijing, Chengdu and Guangzhou – to explore what ethical business should look like in these contexts.
 
The first workshop in Beijing focused on environmental issues and we used the ‘Frozen Pictures’ technique to develop story and character around people affected by the environment.  These ranged from rural workers who developed illnesses due to polluted water and were unable to work due to desertification corrupting agricultural land, to a young couple expecting their first baby and concerned to leave Beijing to ensure a healthy upbringing for their child.
 
The workshop in Guangzhou focused on workplace discrimination and touched on age discrimination, the hardships migrant workers face in marrying in the city, pregnancy discrimination and the racism experienced by African migrants in their efforts to find work in China.
 
All workshop participants found theatre to be an extremely effective way of addressing these issues and there was a common feeling that current efforts to change behaviour were limited with an overemphasis on reports and statistics.  By contrast, they felt that the theatre-based approach allowed people to understand the issues at a much deeper, more realistic way, how they affected people at the grassroots and that this could, in turn, affect policies and the education needed around how we dealt with climate change or gender discrimination at work.  There was also a marked desire to continue the conversation about how to encourage businesses to commit to making their contribution and to build community around these discussions.
 
One participant saw a value in not only performing himself but also in watching others perform.  He felt that when he performed himself, it forced him to think about the issue and how to express it to others.  On the other hand, when you watch someone else do a performance around environmental issues, it has a more direct impact than someone just simply giving you the information.
 
Changes that participants had implemented in their work and personal lives as a result of their participation in the workshop included:

• A reduction in meat eating and a refocus on recycling as much as possible.
• Rethinking of how messages can be spread and a shift towards more creative means of communication issues around the environment
• Importance of education in combating environmental issues
• Implementing changes in how they trained men and women to deal with clients, respecting gender difference in communication styles.

 
As one participant said:
“In the past, when we do workshops we will be presented an issue, with instructions about the things that we can do to tackle the problems.   But in this workshop we got down to very detailed observations, looking at people that have disadvantages.  It enabled us to think in different levels rather than just the big theory.  It was more vivid, more tangible."
 
Hua Dan is committed to projects such as these as, given our extensive experience working with migrant workers in China, we have witnessed the extraordinary rise of China’s growth through the lens of the very people who have, quite literally, built China.  Our corporate consulting work is increasingly focused on helping corporates learn the lessons we have encountered on the ground and bringing those more human solutions to leadership decision-making.
 
We are always interested in partnering with corporations interested in instilling more ethical leadership in their supply chains and cross-cultural management to ensure globalisation is more equitable for all concerned.  Please contact caroline@carolinewatson.org if you or your company is interested in collaborating on a project such as this.

Afghanistan is the biggest recipient of aid in the world.  In 2015 – 2016, the country received US$3.4 billion of overseas development assistance (see link).  But in a country still grappling with democracy and the rule of law, keeping local officials accountable for how aid money is used is a challenge.  Integrity Watch Afghanistan works with communities to help them better understand the law and their rights to keep their officials accountable in how money is spent. IWA works in several specific fields, notably healthcare, education and infrastructure to support communities in ensuring these projects are delivered at the highest standard of integrity and accountability.
 
IWA had discovered that Forum Theatre was an extremely effective way of educating communities in how to keep officials accountable for how money is spent in their Community-based Monitoring (CBM) programmes.  Forum Theatre is an innovative tool that uses a team of actors to play out a challenge or ‘oppression’ that is faced by a community or group of people and then invites the audience to ‘step into’ the action to look at ways to solve these problems.  It is inherently empowering of the individuals and communities, enabling them to literally ‘rehearse for real life’ the conflict resolution skills necessary to take leadership in their communities.
 
In September, I delivered a 6-day training for senior team members of IWA in Dubai, focusing on the importance of team-building, prepping your audience for interaction and creativity, and developing story and character around the themes of IWA’s work to begin to shape Forum Theatre pieces for them to perform to their communities.  I also developed a handbook of tools to enable them to roll out the work back in Afghanistan.   During the training in Dubai, we developed three stories around health, education and infrastructure. 
 
The health story focused on Ahmad, 17 years old and the sole provider for his family’s income after his father died in a work accident.  Ahmed has developed breathing difficulties through a lack of adequate health and safety procedures implemented at the brick factory where he works.  In the education story, the focus was on the difficulties of girls receiving an education where the Taliban still prevails and the way in which more work could be done to educate communities on the importance of girl’s education.  In the infrastructure story, Fatima, a 45 year old widow and mother of 4 children, faces the threat of eviction from her home after corrupt officials sell off the land where she lives for an infrastructure project.
 
These are just some of the issues that IWA deals with in the community and the opportunity to empower community members to realise that they, too, can take action against such injustice is the principle goal of Forum Theatre.  The plan is to shape these pieces into more formal theatre shows that can then be toured to communities to educate them around the importance of keeping officials accountable to solving these issues.
 
The project was a humbling experience.  I knew little of Afghanistan before I started the project, other than what one reads in the papers.  The IWA team were invariably well-educated professionals who had the option to leave Afghanistan if they wished but had intentionally chosen to take part in the extremely risky work of community engagement, often working in areas still dominated by Taliban and Islamic State.  I marvelled at their courage and commitment to bring such techniques as Forum Theatre to a wider audience and to use the power of theatre to bring about real change in their country.  It’s not easy doing this kind of work and, indeed, when Forum Theatre was first developed in Brazil in the 1960s, it’s initiator, Augusto Boal, was exiled to France.  Such is the power of theatre!
 
I wish the Integrity Watch team all the best in implementing these techniques in Afghanistan and hope it will be the beginning of a real movement of thought in the country.  Bravo!
 

​Lina is a newly arrived Syrian refugee to London. Married with two children, she struggles with adapting to life in the UK, the difficulties with the language and making friends, day to day life an effort, made harder by her lack of English.  Her daughter is fast growing up and Lina feels the pressure of generational expectations, made sharper by the perceived difference in cultural values between those of Syria and the UK.  She struggles too in her marriage, with the pressures of a husband who travels and has little time to help her take care of her children, whilst Lina longs to join the working world.
 
Lina is not a real person but a fictional character created by a group of Syrian women currently taking part in the ‘Realising Hopes and Dreams’ project run by Scheherazade Initiatives.  The Scheherazade Initiatives use participatory theatre as a tool to empower the potential of migrant, refugee and displaced populations with the self-confidence, personal leadership and teamwork skills necessary to take advantage of the opportunities and overcome the challenges of enforced migration.  Through weekly theatre workshops and performances in the local community, Scheherazade uses theatre games and exercises, storytelling and character creation, role play and scene creation, to explore the issues Syrians and other refugee populations face in adapting to life here.  This particular project, supported by the National Lottery’s Awards for All scheme, also has a focus on helping the women to improve and practise their English-language skills, to enable them to better adapt to their life here.
 
Says Terez: This course is great and we are benefiting a lot from it. We get opportunities to speak, even if we make mistakes. And we can also learn from our friends’ mistakes as if we were one family. And we learn in a beautiful and beneficial way! Sometimes by singing and dancing, and by acting the new vocabulary is memorised and activated in a more powerful way. We hope to continue the courses to help us integrate quickly and to become active members in our second home.
 
By creating the character of Lina, participants are able to explore the range of different issues experienced by refugee women arriving in the UK and use her as a proxy for all that they themselves are experiencing.  Role play and a technique called Forum Theatre allows participants to experiment with ways to solve some of the challenges they face in their everyday lives and creates a space and context to come together with others to build friendships and supportive bonds in their new home.
 
The workshop has been especially helpful in enabling the women to practise their language skills and make sense of their new culture.
 
Rana: Thank you very much for this beneficial course. Indeed, this group is making us benefit in a fun and entertaining way, completely different from the college method. It is helping us to communicate our ideas through many ways to further enhance the learning and not to forget it, for example through repetition, acting, writing, and participating in games and dialogues, and memorizing. These methods are capable of supporting and focusing the main topics and help us remember it. Thank you very much for your efforts and we hope to continue with these courses in future!
 
We tend to find that by using theatre, we are able to bring alive how language is used in context and the feedback we get is that this is far more powerful than learning language in more formal settings.  Additionally, the opportunity to meaningfully bring together both refugees and local volunteers, aids in building cross-cultural relationships that have the added benefit of bridging the cultural gaps and decreasing the sense of isolation that many newcomers feel.
 
For Farah, “The style is very flexible and fun. And the most wonderful things is that in any sentence we say, even if it has a mistake, we don’t face objection and surprise.  On the contrary,  [the facilitator] tries to correct it in a polite way and without making us feel embarrassed. And this enhances our self-confidence which I feel it is getting weaker in this country because of the language barriers and not being able to communicate with others.”
 
Scheherazade’s work is part of not only the innovative theatre-for-social-change movement but also the growing work in creative education, fuelled by the necessity of creating new models for education that cope with our fast-changing society and the pressures faced by populations all over the world increasingly on the move.  By combining a ‘practical’ skill such as learning a language, with an arts-based or creative methodology, individuals are able to develop the creativity, the resilience, the personal leadership and capacity to overcome challenges and work with others that enables them to feel confident in their new surroundings and contribute to society.
 
As Kamar said, ‘I wish it was more than once per week’!

[This blog first appeared on the Huffington Post on 12th August 2016]

Welcome to the Spirituality and Transformative Leadership blog series!

There is no doubt that today’s global leadership is at a crisis point. Leaders of principle are in short supply, politics has become reactionary and isolationist and there is a crying need for leadership that can unite multiple interests into a coherent vision for the reality of today’s world. The model of ‘servant leadership’ that believed in service to a higher cause than oneself, embraced by such visionaries as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Churchill, Mandela, seems extinct in today’s world. As recent events have seen, we need a new vision of leadership that can steer the course of our globalised world, whilst having the humility to recognise the challenges that ordinary people face in their day to day lives.

What started as a discussion within the community of the Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum has now resulted in a series of blogs from both Young Global Leaders themselves and others, that touch on a wide range of themes within the idea of spiritually-based leadership.

Writers were asked the following questions:

What does spirituality mean to you? What’s your special story?
How has it helped you solve a world challenge?
How has it helped you to drive action?
How has it empowered and sustained you as a leader?
How does it relate to your everyday work?

Each writer brought an individual and distinct understanding of what spirituality meant to them. For some, the traditional view of a God-head was key; for others, a more fluid, contemporary understanding of spiritual identities inherent in each one of us. All were united in the importance of this belief in something bigger than themselves and the humility necessary for great leadership.

Some of the key themes that emerged were:
1. The need for a shift from mind to spirit to address the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the implications of spirituality on technological development.
2. The importance of feminine leadership to bring about greater harmony and rebalance our world.
3. ‘Service’ leadership and its perspective on the impact on philanthropy and the arts 
4. Values-based leadership - focusing in on qualities such as integrity for a more ethically-inspired leadership
5. The leadership lessons from our religious leaders.
6. The business case for spirituality and defining a vocabulary for this in the workplace
7. Our connection with the natural world as a source of spiritual growth and, thus, the importance of paying attention to climate change for a more holistic and sustainable growth model.

For Professor Jem Bendell, spirituality and leadership is something we all have access to, no matter whether we exhibit an external leadership role or exercise leadership in more personal ways. Carlota Mateos describes her ‘crucible moment’ that lead to a rebalancing of her yin and yang elements in her leadership, harmonizing and balancing opposites, encouraging ‘more soulware and less software’. Nicole Schwab calls for a refocusing on the values of feminine leadershipand how these qualities can be expressed in both men and women. Minoush Abdel-Meguid praises the leader of the Muslim faith, Mohammed, for being innately human in his leadership. For Dana Leong, there is an innate connection between music and the imperative to lead with love. Dr Sheetal Amte shares her experience of how spirituality has informed her and her family’s philanthropy. Maran Whiting Hanley questions whether the ‘well-worn path’ is really our own and urges us to discover the power of self-determination in our leadership journeys. Laura Storm recounts a project that brought together ‘pilgrim cities’ with initiatives on climate change and suggests that it’s time that we as leaders start living in sync with the planet, whilst Georgie Wingfield-Hayes talks about the way in which nature enables us to understand our role as part of the greater whole, bringing a much-needed humility to our leadership journey. Dave Hanley talks about how to bring one’s spiritual self into the workplace and Tan Chin Hwee shows how we need to apply spiritual principles to both business and finance for greater ‘returns’ to our lives and those whose lives our businesses affect. For Ajay Chaturvedi, the path to enlightenment came through a radical reassessment of the values that drove him and helped redefine what success should look like. Dr Yuhyun Park calls for a shift from mind to spirit if we are to be able to adequately adapt to the challenges of The Fourth Industrial Revolutionand So-Young Kang reminds us of the importance of integrity as a key aspect of spiritually-based living and leading.

Each blog highlights the role that spirituality has played in the leadership of the individual writer, drawing parallels with a leadership we might all aspire to both emulate and follow. We invite you to explore the series and to consider:

What role has spirituality played in your leadership?
And who are the spiritually-inspired leaders of today that you believe will leave a greater legacy for tomorrow?

This Spirituality and Transformative Leadership series was set up as a response to the need to bring ‘higher order’ principles into leadership today and to spark an ongoing discussion as to the role that spirituality, as distinct from religion, has in today’s world. It is a curated series that invites both Young Global Leaders and others with an interest in leadership to contribute to a discussion on the role that spirituality plays in leadership today. For more information, please see the following link for an overview of the origins of this project and for a link to all the blog posts in the series please click here.

Follow Caroline Watson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/c_j_watson

​Two days have passed since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.  Two days in which there has been the inevitable backlash, in social media, in families, and on the streets, towards a president-elect who ran his campaign on fear-mongering, falsification of facts and misogynist, racist and hate-driven speech.  Those who have rightly sought to understand the views of those who have brought this man into power, no matter how much at variance with their own views, have begun to see that there is another voice in America, far away from the ‘liberal elites’ who have held onto power for so long, that clamours to be heard. 
 
Last week, I went to see ‘I, Daniel Blake’, the shocking story of a middle-age carpenter in the north of England who has to go onto welfare benefits following a heart attack.  The film documents the extraordinary level of red tape that Blake has to go through to secure this support and, in the process, his befriending of a young single mother going through the same thing.  The film depicts the huge injustices facing someone who has spent his life paying into the system yet getting nothing in return when he needs it most.  The story has a tragic outcome that should be a call to arms for any thinking person, liberal elite or otherwise, to truly ensure our society delivers for all.  Yet, the thing that struck me most about this film was the integrity and dignity of this man in the fact of a hostile system that failed to act with a shred of humanity in his time of greatest need.  Yes, this was a man who had every reason to go out and get what was rightly his but there was so much evidence throughout the film of Blake’s desire to do what was right, despite the pressing financial needs he faced and to uplift others too and encourage them never to lower their standards in the pursuit of financial security. 
 
The events of this week, and the growing realisation of the injustices felt by many around the world towards the liberal elites, has lead me to question whether principled behaviour is only ever the ‘luxury’ of those whose basic needs are already met.  To my mind, the recognition of integrity, of honesty, of principle in both public and private life is never the preserve of the few.  They are uniquely spiritual qualities that everyone possesses and everyone has the ability to detect in others.  And, to me, they are the only standards by which we should judge and elect those in leadership positions.
 
In seeking to understand the results of the election, I have thought back to Daniel Blake’s story.  It would seem that he represents so many of the disenfranchised, disengaged and angry men and women who voted for Trump.  Their concerns and the harsh realities of their day to day lives make their choice and their trust in a leader who ‘says it like it is’ understandable.   Yet, Ken Loach’s film, as politically heightened as it is, does nothing to suggest that the pursuit of economic justice should come at the cost of one’s moral standards and the behaviour one would wish to see exhibited in public life.  I yearn for the day when principle ‘trumps’ politics in the standards we demand from our leaders and that no amount of promises to deliver our material needs would override the evidence staring us in the face of an individual lacking moral fibre.
 
An initiative I started earlier this year in collaboration with the Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum, the Spirituality and Transformative Leadership Initiative, seeks to create a generation of leaders lead by ‘higher order principles’.  Our leadership role models include Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela.  These leaders were quite clearly in the camp of the dispossessed, the poor and the marginalised.  Yet they truly stood in solidarity with them and sought to empower these communities to liberate themselves from the chains of oppression through eternal principles that elevated humanity.  What they achieved in the human sphere was unparalleled by any other leader but it was first and foremost fuelled by a higher view of man that wished to see the divine evidenced in our human world.  They left legacies far greater than themselves and believed that principle always triumphed over politics.
 
It is clear that both sides of the American political spectrum evidenced a lack of integrity, honesty and principle, to a greater or lesser degree.  And whilst it was thought preferable for many to choose the lesser of two evils in this election (whichever side you came down on), going forward it is imperative that our conversation AND action moves away from partisan politics towards creating the next generation of leaders who are led by a vision bigger than themselves, where higher-order thinking overrides human will and ego, and where grace and humility in servant leadership empowers practical solutions that truly unite our troubled world.
 
Then, and only then, will we ALL truly get to live in the world we deserve to live in.