1. Love, lead, launch #EquityMoonshot: why do we have a global leadership crisis?

At the onset of the Covid crisis, I was laid off of work as a family doctor and used my unemployment sabbatical to re-invent myself and coin the phrase:?#EquityMuses as a new category of change agents who work with leaders in mobilizing people to act in their mutual self-interests for the greater good of all..

The Covid crisis has triggered an economic crisis that has made the gaps between the haves and have nots so much worse, especially for women, children and minorities. This crisis has also exposed our leadership fragilities in addressing our 21st century mega-problems. This is our global wake-up call.

This blog series invites slow thinking and self-reflection. It is for executive coaches, leaders, muses, truth-seeking free-thinkers, human-centered designers, co-creative people, catalytic innovators and heart-centered social entrepreneurs who seek to connect the dots and exponentiate network power for scaling up transformational change.

You are invited to embark on a learning journey about how to launch?the #EquityMoonshot project: open and align mindsets to co-design an Equitable, Regenerative and Sustainable Future?(#ERSF).

Consider joining?the Clubhouse group, #UniteEquityMuses to discover what it means to become equity muses together and ask Big Hairy Audacious Questions that challenge our leaders to explore what it means to cultivate the governance, stewardship and leadership for #ERSF.

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What is the biggest leadership mistake of all?

We have to admit that we have a global leadership crisis of incompetence across the private, public and political sectors. We are failing to co-design an equitable, regenerative and sustainable future (#ERSF). Our educational systems have yet to transform the vision of an #ERSF into a core curriculum and lifelong learning platform, from cradle-to-grave.

• What is more important than building a thriving #ERSF?

Leaders within and across these three sectors fail to collaborate together in addressing the complex web of wicked mega-problems in the 21st century, such as the impacts of pandemics and global warming on increasing inequities.They lack the big picture perspective in creating the overall governance and stewardship processes needed to lead large-scale transformations. all governance and stewardship processes needed to lead large-scale transformations.

Narrow-minded leaders undervalue and even disparage others working in the different sectors. Such narrow-mindedness is insufficient for addressing our 21st century mega-problems. The heroic journeys of individualistic saviors and their follower-ship are insufficient for solving our inter-connected mega-problems.

Saviors cannot save us. We can only save ourselves.

We need to co-create inter-sectorial and intra-sectoral networks of collaborative leadership, and not rely on individual saviors within the different sectors. We need a new narrative of heroic distributive leadership guided by the virtuous trifecta: to lead with Love, truth-seeking and the pursuit of equity.

With this trifecta, we can all become part of the solution in co-creating a thriving future for the greater good of all, and not regress to fear and despair: feeling futile about preventing a dystopian world, riddled with inequities, political strife and uncivil disruptions.

Leadership paradigms across the private-public-political sectors are broken, fragmented and disconnected in addressing the "why, how and what" leadership questions about co-designing an #ERSF. These leadership paradigms lack the holistic and interdependent perspectives needed to manage our 21st century mega-problems.

Furthermore, executive coaching programs are not set up to challenge the limitations of leadership mindsets about how to build an #ERSF.?In short, our leadership and coaching paradigms across the three sectors (private-public-political) are failing us, because our visions are based on the short-sightedness of short-termism. Overall, these paradigms are uncoordinated and predominantly reductionist in function.

Reductionism is the original sin.

Reductionism is either/or and both/and linear thinking that only focuses on separate parts of the system without considering the dynamics of whole systems. The sin of reductionism is the failure to zoom out and zoom in to observe how our priorities in virtues and values affect the dynamic emerging non-linear patterns of interacting systems.

Furthermore, we have an "i" leadership abundance of sages-on-these-stage delivering their ego-centric content. These content creators provide illuminating theories, constructs, models, toolboxes and solutions. Furthermore, they often speak eloquently in their own esoteric languages, but this limits their impact and scalability. Above all, their self-centered content (the what) is disconnected from the collaborative process (the how) and from the meta-view of purpose (the why). These leadership disconnections between the “what, how and why” perpetuate the "we" tribalisms?of dysfunctional polarizations that prevent our evolution toward "We” the common good of aligned actions to benefit all.

In effect, we have a scarcity of (the how) networkers: the process creators who connect the dots to scale up the network power needed to exponentiate positive impacts to benefit all. What matters most is not the dots themselves, but the relational processes between the dots for developing collaborative and synergistic partnerships. The spaces in-between these dots provide the opportunities to co-create the dynamic generative dialogues and open innovation cultures needed to address the deep root causes of our mega-problems.

Reductionistic approaches within the public and private (corporate) sectors are insufficient for addressing the 21st century mega-problems. For example, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Environmental Social Governance leadership initiatives are fundamentally flawed in redressing inequities. These initiatives lack the virtuous trifecta, To Love, truth-seeking and equity, as their lead co-attractors for inspiring large-scale transformational change.?Paradoxically, a focus on regeneration and sustainability without focusing on these virtues will make inequities worse and thereby increase the risks of political and civil chaos.

As a consequence of reductionist thinking, our leaders lack the bold vision and humility to collaborate in solving the world’s mega-problems. We need leadership collaborators and not saviors. Our shortcomings in governance, stewardship and leadership arise from our failures to develop the lifelong learning platforms needed to scale up our collective human consciousness and civilizations to higher levels.?

Address the dilemma of virtues and the polarities of values

An explanation for our global leadership crisis lies in understanding how our the virtues and values, and the lack thereof, shape the positive and negative attributes of our private, public and political systems. The USA, for instance, has been the beacon for the value of liberty-freedom. This individual value is a double-edge sword.?

On the upside, this monocular vision on liberty-freedom has created the most prosperous country in the world. It has unleashed an abundance of innovation, entrepreneurial and capitalistic opportunities.

On the downside, this narrow-minded vision has rigged systems to design the land of inequities. This reductionist outcome is a direct function of failing to manage and move beyond the polarities between individual values (such as the ego-hubris of liberty and freedom) and social virtues (such as the transcendent-humility of equity and equality). Paradoxically, this individual value has unleashed the dark side in ways that has corrupted democracy to serve the elites. The political system is rigged against serving we, the people.

The practice of working toward equity is a social virtue. This calls on our leaders to develop tri-polarity stewardship. This stewardship requires the equanimity of the virtuous trifecta to navigate between the polarities between individual values and social virtues.

• How can leaders, leadership development and coaching programs and executive coaches maximize the upside of individual values and social virtues while minimize their downsides in co-designing an #ERSF?

The question then becomes: What will it take to inspire us all to open, expand and align our mindsets to adopt the virtuous trifecta as the co-attractors for large-scale transformational change?

Equity dialectic: a semantic oxymoron

Many people do not understand about the differences between equity and equality. Equality is about individual rights, such as the right to vote for all. Equity is about redressing personal and societal disadvantages, such as assuring disability rights and addressing educational, gender, social and economic inequities.

Equity has a double meaning related to financial investments and fairness. On the one hand, investors compete over finite resources in the win-lose, zero-sum games that create wealth inequalities. On the other hand, social entrepreneurs collaborate in the win/win e-games: exponentiating human and social capital development to solve the complex web of wicked problems in the 21st century.??

We spend too little time discussing what we mean by unfairness, inequities and inequitism as a means for creating regenerative and sustainable future for the greater good of all.?

Inequitism?amplifies inequities.

Inequitism is the foul play of implicit bias and prejudice that creates an uneven playing field of unfair advantages for the few against the many.?

Equitism?enhances equity.

Equitism is about the fairness, fair play and the fair rules of?impartial equanimity needed to create an even playing field for all.?Equitism is the process for cultivating equity and co-designing systems that give everyone the freedom and fair opportunities to achieve their highest potential of healthy well-being and the virtues needed to amplify human flourishing for all.

Courageous leaders make lifelong commitments to the meta-view of purpose (the why): redressing inequitism and promoting equitism in order to build an?#ERSF. This bold vision calls for overcoming the divisive dysfunctional polarizations that arise from the political and religious fundamentalisms that enable inequitism.

Equitism calls for developing and uniting a particular kind of change agent, equity muses, to work with courageous leaders. Together, equity muses and leaders connect the glocal (global-local) dots to build social networks. However, this is insufficient for building the network power to co-design an #ERSF. What matters most are the qualities of relational processes between the dots and the alignment of mindsets needed to mobilize the network power for large-scale transformation.

How can equity muses ask Big Hairy Audacious Questions to facilitate the complex process of:

• Addressing the deep root causes for the global leadership crisis?
• Failing to solve the complex web of wicked problems in the 21st century?
• Expanding, opening, and aligning our mindsets to inspire, co-design and build an #ERSF?

Manage complexity

This monumental leadership challenge calls for learning how to use complexity, systems and design thinking in managing interacting systems within and across the political, public and private sectors. Systems evolve and devolve, for better and for worse. The dynamics of these interacting systems concurrently create upward spirals of positive influences toward virtuous actions and downward spirals of negative influences into the amoral abyss.

How can we, as leadership collaborators, muses, change agents, innovators, social entrepreneurs and truth-seeking free thinkers:

• Co-create cultures, mobilize artificial intelligence and co-design systems for building an #ERSF on our one-shared commons and on our one-shared planet?
• Develop a new framework of work that empowers and gives people the slow thinking time to reflect, learn, co-create and innovate on how to respond the the above question?
• Manage system dynamics to maximize the upward spirals of positive influences and minimize the downward spirals of negative influences?

Effective leaders learn how to maximize the upsides of evolution and devolution while minimizing their downsides. Furthermore, they maximize the upsides of centralization and de-centralizations and minimize their downsides in building high-functioning hubs and innovative ecosystems for an #ERSF. This mission call for understanding how virtues and values affect the functioning of systems.

What we need are courageous leaders who have the humility to recognize their incompetencies and the limitations of their visions in building anti-fragile systems that prevent or minimize inequities while solving our mega-problems.

How can we launch the #EquityMoonshot project to:

• Move beyond the individualist models of heroic leadership and follower-ship to co-create a global distributive leadership collaborative and equity muse learning platform for developing truth-seeking free thinkers?
• Use this learning platform to develop the resilience capabilities and anti-fragile capacities to address the complex web of wicked problems in the 21st century needed to co-design an ERSF?
• Cultivate the intra-personal, inter-personal and systemic awareness to re-design our transactional burnout work machines into thriving transformational systems of caring and joy?

The next blog will address why leaders need equity muses.