Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

The Center for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations, now called the Centre for Peace & Security, is online at https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/peace-and-security.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson; it’s available in hardback at https://amzn.to/460LnmQ, on Kindle at https://amzn.to/3RVXhZs, and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/3xPjBgn.
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Paperback = https://amzn.to/3VEl7cU, Kindle = https://amzn.to/45JGm1L, and audiobook = https://amzn.to/3RPhC2y
• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5)

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Mike Hardy was the founding Director of the Centre for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations (now the Centre for Peace & Security) at Coventry University. He is adjunct professor of leadership at the LSPR Institute of Communications and Business in Jakarta, Indonesia. Mike has been twice honoured in the UK, awarded the OBE in 2001 for his peace-building work in the Middle East, and appointed a Companion of Honour of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the HM Queen’s Birthday Honours June 2010 for his work internationally in Intercultural Dialogue.

Mike is a Board Director and Chair of the International Leadership Association, Chair of Trustees of The Faith and Belief Forum the leading interfaith charity in the UK, and life-fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

Transcript
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Key Takeaways: 

• – Leaders must actively address division  
• – Empathy strengthens decision quality  
• – Inclusion reduces performance friction  
• – Shared values enable alignment  
• – Peaceful systems outperform fractured ones 

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Unknown Speaker 0:09
I’m your host, Moria Metcalf, today our guest is Mike Hardy. Mike is the founding and Executive Director for the Center for trust peace and social relations at Coventry University. I’m excited just with you the listeners, and with Mike here to explore what this means, this idea of peacefulness as business leaders. How does peacefulness relate to running a business organization, a government role, a nonprofit role in traditional organizations? So Mike, welcome. Thank you. I couldn’t have articulated and I probably won’t do it well, my passions about peacefulness and the real moment, in terms of my thinking about peacefulness, came only this year. Okay, it’s a revelation from others, and I’m hugely plagiaristic of other people’s good ideas. And why not, and if we can take them forward, so much the better. But I was invited in April of this year to the spirit of humanity conference in Iceland. I got this invitation reason me out of the blue from people that knew my interest and knew the work that we were doing, both at the center and in some of the fora that we referred to, the peace forums and so forth, and they asked me to come and talk about and contribute to a panel on the spirit of humanity. And I thought, Oh, this doesn’t sound like Mike the spirit of humanity. It sounds far too focused on spirituality. And maybe it’s maybe I have to wear a white robe or something like that. But no, I accepted, because they were good people and I knew them, and I’m intrigued by the focus once I’d read, read up, and the wonder of social media. You can go online and find out everything. Of course, the thing, yeah, I went to Reykjavik, lovely people, just wonderful people. And I really enjoyed the first day of the forum, and my panel was on the second day. And beforehand, David Cadman, who is my host, Greg guy, who I only met in Reykjavik, even though he’s another Brit, he came to me and he said, Mike, we know what you do, referring, I think, to my leadership at Coventry of this center for trust peace and social relations, which is like a non traditional Peace Studies forum. We know what you do, we know what you’ve done, but we’re interested in your panel contribution to tell us why you do it. Okay, I can talk forever, as my colleagues know about what we’re doing and where we’ve been and our route to success and where we’re going to go. But actually no one, strangely enough, had ever asked me why I did it, and what had provoked David to ask this question? This is a bit of a long winded way, but actually it comes to this convergence that you referred to in your opening comments. David had looked back and seen that. Here’s this funny guy. He was an economist, my first period as an academic, I was a specialist in mergers and acquisitions, which doesn’t seem like peace studies, and which is quite an aggressive and confrontational context in the financial markets, but And now 3040, years later, you’re a peace studies director. So that’s what he’d seen. So he was interested in the notion of why you did what you did. And I went back to my hotel a bit of a trauma, and think I would scrap that presentation. What am I? How can I say this? This is all quite personal, and that’s the first thing I think that’s important, that I’ve moved from knowing a lot about things to knowing a lot about things in relation to me

Unknown Speaker 3:44
more explicitly than I did before. Sorry. So there’s a bit much more of self analysis in my analysis of things out there. So when we talk about developmental maturity, which I do often on the show or maybe too often, oh, this idea of this inner awareness and how it relates to our changing context, and that as the world changes, I need to change not only my outer skills to cope, but my inner view of who I am in this new world. Yeah, evolving world. Yeah. So this exactly, and of course, I’d read quite a lot about Ubuntu in Africa and similar ones in China and so forth, and the famous Abba movie song about Knowing me, knowing you and we. I’m not sure that quite gets as deep, but in many ways, we’d looked at these in terms of my real interest in social relations, in the relationships between people and people of difference. And we spoke, we’ve spoken about this in the past. Worry so if the drivers, psychological drivers in our existence are that we need to belong somewhere, but we also need to be different. That creates all sorts of challenges for the.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Relationships between people, because, yes, I want to be in your tribe or that tribe, and that tribe is better than your tribe, and I need to be different as well as I get up in the morning and make sure I have an image that’s very different from everyone else, so I’m attractive and so forth. These were the things in looking at social relations, I used to analyze how the transactions and the sort of the journey through difference and living the difference. But after Iceland, I began to reflect much more on the notion of Ubuntu, and it is about this contextualization. So share with our listeners, because not everyone knows the word Ubuntu. So this is that you are defined by who you are with and by the relationship between your awareness of self Okay, and how that self has been adapted by the acceptance and recognition of others. So it really is that no man is an island like but and that, as you said, your inner self has to adapt to the changes going on. If it doesn’t, you become redundant. You become actually dysfunctional. And that’s why, in some of the debates at the ILA over the last couple of days, which have been focused on the populist movement, which concerns us in contemporary society, and its passion, the populist passion for looking back at nostalgic context and saying it was always better, then Mike is about the inability that people have to focus on on self on self awareness, self change, self leadership and so forth. Thank you for summarizing the hundreds of hours things I didn’t go to because it that’s a brilliant and I want to restate that because so many of us struggle with this populist movement and what it means. And so I love the insight that it’s really about if we’re not adapting our worldview that we want to keep moving backwards rather than forwards. And so I think it’s really important to look at more carefully that it’s been populism has been the sort of pariah in discussions. It’s a bad thing, but it’s not a bad thing or good thing. It is, and sometimes it’s a really important reflection on where we are in our society’s communication, one with another. Why wouldn’t you expect some poor family stuck in the Rust Belt who’s been left behind by globalization, left behind by the emergence of technologies which just replaced him or her. Why would you expect them not to look back to a time when things were different? Of course. So the context in which it’s we relate to political awareness and of the consequences of leaving people behind. It’s really important we have to take and I really believe that public leaders have got to step up and not attack populist feelings and not submerged them, but underlying causes. Exactly. Look at drivers for these and because the problem with populist feelings and tendencies is that malefactors, some public leaders will come and exploit them, and will come and take control. And I think we’ve seen a lot of that in the last couple of years. People who take advantage of this feeling, these feelings and anxieties, most populism come from anxieties. Why not work on the anxieties than on where we do it? But coming back to this notion of peacefulness by analyzing why we work in the way we do

Unknown Speaker 8:32
it, led me on to think much more about my understanding of peace and why and how the peace studies in my center was being applied, and all of a sudden I saw that most of our work around peace was trying to build it where it didn’t exist. So that took you to places of conflict and war and of violence and pestilence, and there’s plenty of that. So it was easy to find

Unknown Speaker 8:54
actually in the center, we had developed a lot of work around places which were already peaceful, because I’d had this view which I hadn’t been able to explain fully, that actually going somewhere that’s peaceful, and analyzing why it’s peaceful, and then working with that place to keep the peace would be actually quite important.

Unknown Speaker 9:18
And that, writ large, you can talk about whole sort of regional movements like the European Union, at the moment, is going through a challenging transformation, because of Brexit, because of Catalonia, because of Scottish independence, all these, these constant strains that popper used to write about in modern society. But writ large, the European Union is having to reflect, I think it itself has to adapt in the modern world. Itself has to change or post modern, really. But it doesn’t mean that the European Union hasn’t been fabulously successful in maintaining peace in Europe since 50 terrible years of World Wars and.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
And recession. So the European Union has been hugely successful at promoting peacefulness, strangely enough. And so it would seem, and to continue your line of thinking, and this is probably what you were going to say, is, of course, it would adjust just like any of us adjust as our context change. Yeah, it probably hasn’t been adjusting quickly enough, and people get impatient, and particularly where there’s inequalities and social change resulting from post industrial traumas, in the levels of inequality that globalization has brought with it, and the association, we don’t have to go into the arguments around that, but has led to people being requiring at this adaptation to be quicker. So we see bureaucrats in Brussels. We see the inability to reform, the failure of nation states to really embrace a more federal with a very small f way of working. So the place is under strain. But that mustn’t remove from us the notion that we have actually organized our affairs in Europe for the last 40 or 50 years quite successfully, because we’re not kicking each other, we’re not killing each other. It’s not perfect, and we’re not there yet. It needs your progress, I think so, and huge changes that we take for granted now and when the United Kingdom, my country, and I’m embarrassed. I’m really very much a Remainer when we seek to remove ourselves from this European project, we’re finding now how difficult that is, and I reflect on how that difficulty of extracting, of dismantling is actually because Europe’s been so successful, it’s divorcing someone who’s been fabulously successful. Yeah, very personal. To boil it down. I was really taken anyway, after my Icelandic sorts of experience, the sinking and the hot springs, they came together about this notion of peacefulness. And in looking at peacefulness, what research do we need to do? And then, of course, my associated interest in leadership and the international leadership Association brought this all together. How could leaders be purposeful? How could they be invisible but powerful, all these themes that are currently at the top of our agenda in a world that’s really complicated, and how could we put that? Put the agenda around restoring the basic peacefulness in relations between people.

Unknown Speaker 12:29
A couple of years ago, as you Maureen, I’ve joined the international leadership Association, partly because it was a new territory, but also because nearly all my career and work and certainly my current research looked at either the goods and bads of leadership, the contribution or dysfunction or whatever. And I was intrigued. And of course, I met many academics who were working in areas such as mine. And one of them, Mansoor Java dam from Arizona, just pushed me in this direction. And it was a new territory, rather than a territory that was obviously going to be complementary, yeah. And I’ve always been a person that has a little taste for new Jerry, you know. So I’ll put my Wellington boot into the puddle. It might be quite deep, or it might be quite shallow, but it’s worth putting it in. And, yeah, isn’t it? But I keep the other one out, just in case, though, that causes you to not drown, yeah. So then I got very quickly involved in some of the development of the ILA issues. And I suppose in life, I’m quite a good builder. And I think it became easy to just say we could influence in this way and that way. So a couple of things really important. The ILA is an international organization that is aspiring to be global. So that’s interesting for a starter. So they, when they first, when I first met them, they talked about this international organization, 51 countries, but their passion and their real, genuine commitment to be global. And from where I sat, I don’t really have a home because of my career has taken me everywhere. I didn’t think they were global at all. I thought that they were locked into their own culture. They’re very North American and so forth. But this what I really loved and really took to very quickly, was this passion, this openness, this commitment, this agility, this desire to do things differently. That’s great. If you find a group of people, and they’re amazing people. Yeah, they are everyone I’ve met, Justin mate, who do it in that way, and that energy and that commitment, and starting with the CEO, and this notion that you could successfully combine, as the academy, with practitioners, with policymakers, and mean that not just do it in a tokenistic way. So that was good. So it was very quickly I saw, and of course, it does relate to my parallel interests, which was converging rapidly on peacefulness and social relations and some of the terror.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Violence in the turbulent world in which we work, in which leaders have an influence. So this convergence became very quick and very obvious. And then when we looked at how the ILA was creating a platform for good discussion about leadership, there were two or three strands in that became very attractive, very powerful to need to know more. So one one is this notion is this year we’ve probably got two or three strands of very important work going on. The power of purpose is one of them. You may have heard this notion that purposeful leadership, which builds on common purpose, makes better leaders, gives more value to organizations, gives more impact. And my books, that’s the first exercise chapters, yeah, in each one is what’s your purpose and values? It’s not always the case that leaders develop and nurture and farm purpose, and certainly not common purpose. They have their private purpose. But when you see good organizations that say, these are our sacred values. This is what we’re about. It’s maybe a combination of the bottom line and ethical ways of working, or in the not for profit. So it’s not getting too hung up on on the vulnerable that you’re trying to support and becoming totally inefficient in the way you organize. So all that the power of purpose, that’s an ongoing thing, which is really attractive. The second is the work of George’s sorrows and Gil on invisible leadership, which I really took to don’t look for the obvious leader, to look for the leadership in the world. Look for the powers of leadership which are happening. And sometimes they’re not the most obvious. I think Margaret Heffernan talked about that as well. Yeah, absolutely. And I’m just a visitor here. This is an area of literature I’m exploring and getting into. I’m really I’m the guy on the top deck of the bus that eventually will be in the dry big sea, but it’ll be a long time off. Those were two things. And then the third, I think, was about how leadership is either the source of the problem in our modern world or part of the solution, and that’s a newer issue. And I really think leadership can be both, which makes it such an interesting and important area. And if you mix all that up with the fact that leadership scholarship is so much more developed in North America than it is in other places, then I could suddenly see in my sort of missionary zealot feeling or persona that we could mobilize a global international leadership associated it could actually change the way things work. And we shouldn’t ever be understating our ambitions. We’re going to change the world. And why don’t you get up in the morning and say that’s what it’s about? So you’ve just connected the purpose of ILA, which you said is so important, the idea of having a purpose, of course, you would gravitate to an organization that has a big purpose. Because even if you don’t accomplish all of it, you’ve accomplished a lot more than you would if you had a little purpose. So in my professional life, you said in the introduction, I work with the three faiths forum in London, in the UK. It’s a very large interfaith organization does amazing things. It’s the faith and belief forum. Now it’s changed its name because it started only looking at three faiths, and actually, beliefs are much more significant, so we’ve had a little bit of influence there. So the faith and belief Forum has a very clear purpose, and it’s about saying that the relationships between organized religions and non organized beliefs, the source of much tension in the turbulent world, actually

Unknown Speaker 18:39
isn’t a real problem at all, if you confront it, if you have co attached and so forth, yeah, we say it’s a problem. We say that Jews and Muslims have a real difficulty. I don’t see it. I think sometimes the context in which they coexist have difficulties, but rarely is it about a fundamental divide between beliefs. Yeah, there’s a purposeful organization that I work with and learn a lot from. I also work, as you said, within the United Nations system, heavily criticized for being out of date, being post war, and not adapting itself and so forth. But would you get rid of it, or would you work within it to improve it? So the purposeful leadership work that we can do and support within the United Nations system is about that is saying, Look, we need you guys. We need you to be better. We need you to be more powerful, more focused on the real world, and not in your little ivory towers of in New York and so forth. And the same could be applied, of course, to my university and my little center, especially as we think of this idea of global, truly global. So there are some things that are global, whether we like it or not. If I pollute the air in my country, that air goes around the globe. If there is a nuclear meltdown in Japan, and that nuclear material goes into the water, it pollutes the food.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Kills the fish, or, even worse, poisons the fish that we eat. There are many things that are foundationally global on a planet, and as our technology has become more sophisticated, our ability to impact each other is happening, whether we want to be populist or not, so having some mechanism to communicate globally, internationally about the things that are truly influencing or impacting my actions impact what happened to you in London, maybe not day to day immediately, but as countries, they do and not having a forum that continually updates. So you’ve talked about forum, the EU and now the UN. And then back down to our individual institutions, this whole idea that we need to from individual to small group to national to global need to be continuously dissolving. Yeah, there’s a bit bit of interest here as well, because the organizations that I’ve been mostly associated in my career have been in the public sector or the policy sector, not in the private sector. I started as an economist working the private sector,

Unknown Speaker 21:18
if we allow the global conversation to be driven by global capital and the economics of globalization. We’re not going to get the sort of world that I think we both need and deserve, as in humankind. And that’s you don’t have to get into a heavy criticism of Global Capitalism, as opposed to any other system. But the reality is that the pursuit of unbridled and unregulated capitalism brings about pretty bad things for some people. So the growth of inequality, the growth of exploitative relationships and transactional relationships, the rainforests being destroyed, global you can list them all there. We haven’t found a better way of mobilizing and provoking economic growth. I probably think there are, but we haven’t found them yet. But I do know that we need a regulated world. We need a world of collaboration and a world of mitigation of some of the consequences of our pursuit of growth. It’s not just because I love orangutan that I’m worried about the rainforests in Indonesia. It’s because ultimately they will cause Bangladesh to go underwater, or they’ll cause the sort of hurricanes that battered Florida. There is a relationship in science. So I think leadership in the public sector and leadership in the not for profit sector, leadership in the education sectors has got to step up, because the leadership in the corporate private sector is off and running, and they have their purposes, and there’s very clearly driven sometimes we have anxieties, as was my own personal ideas about neoliberalism was a way in which sometimes the public policy process was supportive of the global capitalist process, but generally speaking, we have these multiple sectors, and we need leadership to step up so that there’s a Bit more sanity. And so if you drive through an agenda of creating peacefulness, you have to look at throw the best birthday party ever that your child will always talk about, big air trampoline park inside Field House USA at the Polaris Mall. Can do just that. Award winning birthday party Packages start at just $300 and all birthday parties include pizza, drinks, a party room with a party host, grip socks, printed invitations and all 40 attractions at Big Air trampoline park. It’s a birthday party. You and your kids will never forget. Book your party today. Big Air Columbus, where the fun never ends. Visit big air, usa.com/columbus,

Unknown Speaker 23:56
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Unknown Speaker 24:01
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Unknown Speaker 24:41
they held that very precious, because that was their livelihood, for their families for potentially generations, and they don’t want to let that go without having something else to provide livelihood. Yeah, there’s a huge agenda here, isn’t it, which makes it exciting, and I think we’re not going to.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
Make the world a fair place, even though we know we need to argue that it should be fairer, fairer. Yeah, we’re not going to remove all the humiliation and anxiety that exists in the real world just because we know it’s a good thing, but we can remove some of it. We can push along. But I think what we have to do then, is take responsibility as a in the ILA, in my academic work, in other activities, to help leadership step up. And what are this you can do this by defining what is a good leader. What is a better leader in terms of this purpose that we’re pushing for, and it’s probably a leader who’s a little bit more reflective of the context in which she or he operate. That is part of the work that I’ve done as the leader actually published in the leader 2050 book I did with partnership with Mike morfox and Susan cannon, but really looking at what does this future of leadership look like, and it’s things like being a 360 degree thinker. So I understand the systems in which I operate, and when I pull one lever, I understand that a whole bunch of other things are impacted. And if I don’t adjust the balance on the other levers, I’ve created, in some cases, harm, even though. And so if we used capitalism as financial capital being the only capital that matters, versus financial or human capital or whatever, if we bring all of those in into the definition of the system. So if we expand our definition of the system, that kind of leader and then add in humility and collaboration and inspiring followership rather than dictating followership and innately reflective, adding all those to the equation and not saying that we got it right, but I think it’s directionally, yeah, and it’s these are huge issues philosophically. They’re big issues around ideology and the way we understand the world are quite pragmatic. Let’s take bite sizes. Let’s do when we can. So I give you a very clear example that I think makes a difference to me. We set up our Center for scholarship in this area around the concerns about human security. And there are all sorts of dimensions of that, and it reflected, I think, when the UN set up its own focus on human security as a defining way of thinking about the problems of modern society and human security, we can’t do everything that makes people insecure, but we started to look in the center, what sort of building blocks could we add value to the general journey towards a more secure humanity. And one of them was interesting enough, because we had a Greek sea captain on my staff who came to me one day and said, Look, Mike, we should grow a notion of maritime security. This is understated. Let’s look at the nexus between land and sea, and you’ll see already where this can go for an academic saying maritime security. This is a university that is landlocked, by the way, it’s not coastal. But it took us straight away to the sorts of things which we’d observed in the context of 2017

Unknown Speaker 28:21
slave ships in illegal fishing trafficking, the

Unknown Speaker 28:26
mass migration of people over water from Africa to potentially promised lands of jobs in Europe in little, tiny boats. And from a focus on human security and saying the ideal purpose is we want a more secure world for humanity. What sort of evidence do we need to develop to help policymakers and grow our understanding maritime security is a good idea. That’s a little box you can frame things around and look at the things you start to look at it. We were, weren’t previously, weren’t emphasized in this, in the academy, and so we’re working now in Indonesia, which is a country I know, the amazing archipelago. They have more shoreline than you believe, because there’s 17,000 islands. This is a country which loses trillions of dollars a year by other countries stealing his fish because the maritime security issue, because they’ve only got six submarines and they’ve got miles and miles and miles of coastline, all of a sudden we can do scholarly work, which can change the lives of ordinary people, fishermen that no longer have fish because large boats, factory ships with slave workers come and spend three or four years At Sea farming.

Unknown Speaker 29:40
Oh, yeah. And who’s regulating that? Who’s policing it? It’s the natural pursuit of enterprise to do that. And getting back to our notion that public leaders have to step up this natural pursuit of successful enterprise, of fishing industry, filling your tins of tuna or whatever else they’re doing.

Unknown Speaker 30:00
Is causing dramatic changes in the quality of life of villages in Sulawesi, and we can make a difference, but and not by going and being angry about the fishermen, but balancing the good of multiple being articulate with evidence of what’s happening and what’s possible and developing with policy makers ethical approaches to this and what led in Africa to the development of labels for the food stuffs that was actually brought through ethical processes or so we now eat chocolate with little labels on it saying these cocoa burns weren’t raised in exploitative ways. They were raised in Africa in ways that community benefited, so forth, free trade, fair trade is called the movement, and just that simple movement creates a level of equity and transparency in the system that now, as a consumer in the US or wherever I happen to be, I can make a conscious decision and the same model, the same approach that gives you truth in lending or gives you very clear statement on the label about what’s in you to protect your health can be used to protect the well being of someone in a developing country, we each have the ability to protect the well being of others in a way that’s relatively easy. I just look at a label, yeah, and I can make a conscious decision about someone. On the other side, we were reflecting on some of the bite sized chunks that you can look at. So our reference to maritime security, and we could look at others. We’re also looking at migration, the movement of people that’s a consequence of the way the world is has shaped. We don’t even have to get into why it’s happened, just let’s look at the issues related to that. And then when you look at peacefulness in my reflection, I refer back to the sort of time in Iceland when I was provoked to think about this more, I look at the levels of anxiety in people, in individuals, at individual level, I believe that relationships between people are the single most important thing for us to consider in this notion of pursuit of peacefulness or the or peace itself is actually the interrelationship of people that breaks down for whatever reason. And so I think what I’m really passionate about now is trying to look at how we can remove the anxiety of contemporary of the contemporary world in ordinary people, not just I haven’t got a job and I’m poor and I can’t look after my family. Gosh, that’s important. But there’s many other sources as well, and the ones that really provoke my concern and my passion and brings the sort of work I do to the front.

Unknown Speaker 32:46
Are the sort of fundamental things that I think are important, and I think these should be at the forefront of leaders who have influence and have the ability to make a difference in whom and whatever they lead, there’s a really important difference between leadership leaders. So I’m talking now about leaders stepping up. If they’re in a position of power and influence, they should take responsibility. We have a world now in which humiliation

Unknown Speaker 33:16
of people by other people seems to be more prevalent than mutual respect. So what’s going on there? Why do we have a world in which I thrive by humiliating you? Now, if you look around for examples, that’s happening all the time, we need leaders who can help us develop respect for one another, and the way they lead is a critical way they help in that God. Secondly, why is it we have a world with long term injustices where there’s just basic unfairness that’s almost written into the way we organize ourselves. What’s all that about? Why can’t we have fairness as our sort of default? And when people exist and experience long term injustices. They react in different ways. They get demoralized, they get depressed. Some get angry and get violent, and some say this just isn’t good enough. What we’re referring to here is some work of a very good friend of mine, John Alder, does in the House of Lords in UK, who’s a psychiatrist and who’s who taught me a huge amount about this notion of anxiety. Why do young Brits who have everything live in London? They go to the cinema, they have a fun time. Why do they drop all that and go and fight in the deserts of Syria and deserts of Iraq knowing that they’ll die, knowing that they’ll die. Why do young women of 15 spend six months planning and then escape with their friends to go and become brides of terrorists in why does that happen? So John’s work has helped me to look more and a lot of it’s about this notion of perceived being humiliated, perceived unfair.

Unknown Speaker 35:00
Ness, discrimination, that seems to be more commonplace, and we’re seeing it now. The populist movement has brought it to exactly this is exaggerating. It is. It’s self fulfilling, whatever, and it’s the third issue is that our societies find it increasingly difficult for whatever reason we could come to if we had time to accommodate difference in peaceful ways, so this tribalism that is being encouraged. So those three things, the humiliation, the unfairness and our basic inability to make a difference by accommodating difference and by being mutually respectful.

Unknown Speaker 35:45
It’s behind a lot of the human insecurity about which we’re interested in, because we’re coming to a close, I’d love to wrap up with a couple of suggestions on what to do about this. I realize you have not single handedly solved the entire world’s problems. Although with your intro, you should have

Unknown Speaker 36:05
there’s two big things for me, and you’re right. We haven’t solved the problem, but I do think we live in a world where compassion has seemingly been pushed aside. I would inject big doses of compassion, and this is just about feelings about if you see something that’s unfair, don’t ignore it. Don’t be one of the huge majority of those who are silent. So that’s the first let’s bring compassion to the front. When a refugee is fleeing appalling conditions in their home country, don’t build a wall and close them out. First thing we should do is empathize and say, if this were me and my family, what would I do?

Unknown Speaker 36:49
Chancellor Merkel took a stand on compassion, I think, when she let in 850,000

Unknown Speaker 36:55
refugees into Germany. And the second is inclusion. These are big ideas. All right, let’s have a world in which our basic approach to relationships are inclusive and not exclusive, so that let’s not continue to exclude people. Shut the door. Where’s your past? How do you get in here? Let’s have a world in which conceptually we’re much more inclusive. I’m always led to

Unknown Speaker 37:21
Lucas’s Star Wars movie. The first Star Wars movie, you’re probably two young ones. No, actually, Star Wars was out our high school theme. The first movie has a wonderful sequence in it that I often refer to because I remember it well. And it’s the sequence in the bar when they’re negotiating for Han Solo to take them to some planet. And this is a bar full of the most bizarre, monster looking space people and aliens, and they’re only talking about business, not about each other’s different. It’s fascinating that I never thought about it from that lens. Just to wrap up very quickly, the two things I heard you say is compassion, and each of us has that within our own power to be compassionate and bring it out circles, live it. Yeah, I do compassion. I am compassionate, and the other is inclusion, and again, for our business leaders, for our nonprofit leaders, who are listening, each of us can be more inclusive, more attending to fairness, more putting ourselves. Don’t just do it because the law tells you to that diversity is important because it brings richness, it brings actually an asset base, which you wouldn’t otherwise have. So don’t just do it because we have equalities legislation. Don’t just put down people because they’re too young, they’re unqualified, they’re the wrong ethnicity, inclusiveness is a way of thinking, just as compassion is a world for AV, thank you, and I can’t wait to do this again next year, if not before. But I’m delighted to hear your new work. And how would hopefully, this has sparked curiosity for 1000s of people, and they will want to find your information. How would they find? A couple of ways. Some some of these ideas we’ve included in we released a book in January, Muslim identity, published by Jessica Kingsley, which you can find online. It’s a very focused book on a particular issue, but some of the issues we raise that we’ve been talking about are in there. And secondly, go to my Center’s website, the Center for trust, peace and social relations, it has a Facebook page as well, and you’ll see some of the work that we’re doing. Just bear in mind that the reason we’re doing this is fundamentally about some of the issues we’ve spoken today. So it may be very specific, it may be very contextualized, but actually it’s driven by this sort of philosophy, this sort of worldview. Thank you. This worldview is so beautiful and relevant to me, I leave hopeful that there are opportunities through this chaos and turbulence to create something much better. Thank you for being a person that brings and inspires hope. Thank you for asking you.

Unknown Speaker 40:00
You.

Unknown Speaker 40:10
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