Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Steve’s Institute for Economics and Peace has more information online at https://www.visionofhumanity.org and their main website, https://www.economicsandpeace.org.

Mike’s 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:

• Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work by Ancestry CEO Deb Liu, on how to overcome the obstacles women still face in the workplace – especially in tech. It’s in hardback at https://amzn.to/47OUO9E, and audio at https://amzn.to/3Y6EmOQ.
• 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)

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

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

• From Ego to Impact: Managing with Clarity with Subhanu Saxena
• How Your Personal Practices Make You an Exceptional Leader with Kathryn Goldman Schuyler
• When Leadership Puts Life on the Line with former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Steve Killelea A.M is a global philanthropist focused on peace and sustainable development, with a long, successful career in high technology and international business development.  Over the last two decades, Steve has applied his business skills to his many global philanthropic activities, established an internationally renowned global think tank — the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) — and a private family charity, The Charitable Foundation, which now has over three million direct beneficiaries.

Mike Hardy is the founding director of the Centre for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations at Coventry University. The Centre is a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and experts whose work draws together issues such as conflict resolution and reconciliation, social identity, inequality and mobility, wealth and poverty, integration and pluralism, prejudice and discrimination, intergroup conflict and cooperation, the problem of civil rights and the politics of equality. Mike has been twice honoured, 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 Queen’s Birthday Honours, June 2010, for his work internationally in Intercultural Dialogue. Mike is a trustee of 3FF, the leading interfaith charity in the UK, and board chair of the US-based International Leadership Association.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] Welcome to Innovating Leadership Co-Creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute where we help leaders become future ready. I am delighted that we are recording today from the International Leadership Association Conference, and we have the ILA Board Chair Mike Hardy, as one of our guests today.

Also delighted to have with us today. Steve Kle has applied his business skills to his many global philanthropic activities, establishing the internationally renowned global think tank, the Institute for Economics and Peace. Steve, how did you get involved in. Peace and you have a business background.

Tell us a little bit more about that.

Steve: Actually, it was all by accident, really. I’m just an accidental man of peace, to be quite frank. So my background’s in business set up two international IT companies. One ended up publicly listed on NASDAQ and the other on the Australian Stock Exchange. They were global [00:01:00] businesses, so I did well out of that.

So I created a family foundation to work with the poorest to the poor. What I didn’t realize at the time, the poorest to the poor mainly live in war zones or near post war zones. So I spent a lot of time in these war zones or near post war zones, and I was in northeast Kao in the Congo. One time walking through there, I suddenly start to wonder what are the most peaceful nations in the world?

And so anything I could learn from him to bring into the projects, which I was doing, it was really just a fantasy question. When I got back to Sydney, searched the internet and couldn’t find a list, the nations of the world by their peacefulness. And I thought, wow, that’s a good idea. And so that’s how the Global Peace Index was born.

But that creates a really profound question because if a simple businessman like myself can be walking through Africa and wonder what are the most peaceful nations in the world and hasn’t been done, then how much do we actually know about [00:02:00] peace? If you can’t measure something, can you truly understand it?

If you can’t measure it, how do you even know whether your actions are helping you or hindering you achieving your goals? You just simply don’t.

Maureen: Let’s take that to then the next logical question. You started measuring it and you’ve talked about positive peace indicators. Can you share with our listeners what the idea of positive peace indicators are and then what are the actual indicators?

Steve: I have a little bit more background and I’ll come straight back to that, Maureen. What I realized is most of the time when we are actually talking about peace and studying peace, we’re not. Was studying conflict. And what I realized that what was needed was to understand the qualities that societies needed so that they didn’t actually fall into violence.

And that’s what we could call positive peace. So just to think about it for a while. And so this analogy’s really important because a lot of the time we’d say we’re studying peace, but we’re actually studying violence. And the two are different. So [00:03:00] analogy with, let’s say. Health, for example. So great breakthroughs in pathology as we’ve really started to understand how to cure cancers.

None of us are gonna die of a heart attack young, but it wasn’t. We started to study healthy people. We understand what we needed to be resilient and not get sick. Could exercise, right? Mental disposition, correct diet. You’re not gonna understand any of them through studying someone on their deathbed. So what happens is you come back, you start with the Global Peace Index, which is measure the absence of violence.

That’s how we understand the most peaceful countries. And then what we do is we run statistical analysis, a whole lot of mathematical modeling against about 50 different data sets to understand what are the factors most closely associated with peace. What we do then is use further statistical necks to clump them together.

Then this comes out in clumps. There are eight different [00:04:00] clumps, which we then give a name to. Each of them now become a pillar of positive peace, and then we turn that round into an index. Again, not unlike, this is all quite technical, but turn around into index where even the weighings are determined by the strength of the correlations.

Now, what’s profound about this, really profound, it’s not my ideas of peace. It’s not the researcher’s ideas of peace. It’s purely empirically derived. That’s what separates this body of work from most all other work on peace, and that’s why it’s becoming so popular.

Maureen: Can you share those eight pillars?

Steve: Sure.

Maureen: Are there any that are a surprise to you?

Steve: No. This is the beauty of it. It’s all pretty, uh, logical. Nothing is counterintuitive, but it all works as a system, which I’m sure we’ll come back to a little bit more further on. So if we’re looking at, its well-functioning government. Strong business environment, equitable distribution of resources, free flow of information, good relationship with [00:05:00] neighbors, acceptance of the rights of others, high levels of human capital, and low levels of corruption.

And what we find is at different stages of peace, different pillars become more important, but they operate as a system. They operate as a system and a lot of time we talk about systems, but we don’t truly understand systems.

Maureen: So now that you understand them, can you intervene either in a post-war community where things like, if I don’t have a solid justice system.

Then if I start a business, someone can take my stuff and there are no consequences. Therefore, I’m not gonna keep starting businesses and have people steal my stuff. Are you working both in post-war economies to build these systems and also with, say, middle of the road economies that are falling in and out of peacefulness?

Steve: Well, this is. The fascinating thing is when we are [00:06:00] looking at the positive piece, we can use it in all sorts of different settings. You can use it as the framework for doing developmental work, for example, as well as being able to, how to restructure a government at the very top levels of federal government to make it the more peacemaker society, which is a lot more resilience.

So, just to give you an idea, so we take positive peace, we find it’s also associated with higher per capita income. So for example, countries which are improving in positive peace compared to countries deteriorating. If we go back over the last decade had on average 2% per annum, higher GDP growth rates.

That’s a lot. Measures of wellbeing and happiness highly correlated with positive peace. You’ll also find better performance on ecological outcomes and better performance on developmental aid as well. What this says is that positive peace in many ways describes an optimal environment under which human potential can [00:07:00] flourish.

What happens is through implementing this, you can use the same principles and do it down into a project. I’ve seen it done successfully in things like education institutions, just to be able to come back and better understand in a school how you can improve literacy. I. So, I’ll give you an example down in Kenya.

So there was a gentleman down in Kenya who did now courses on positive piece, and then he was with a rotary club and they were working on a literacy program in the school. So they’d been at it 18 months, but had an improved literacy. So they went down and used the eight pillars to be able to now analyze how they would go about improving the education in the school and in the end.

All of the pillars were important, but there were three which were really, really important. The first one was acceptance of the rights of others, and so a lot of the girls weren’t coming to school four days a month. So what they did then is they implemented the separate toilets for ’em and [00:08:00] sanitary pads.

Pretty simple. This is something we all know about. The next one, which was really important, dealt with good relationships with neighbors, which normally, if you’re thinking about a literacy program, it wouldn’t come into it, would it just, it’s not there. But this was in a particularly poor part of Uganda and it was in a rural setting.

So the kids at lunchtime are going out and raiding all the fruit trees in the neighbor’s yards. And this was just. Obviously causing real connation with the the neighbors as well. So the solution is they plant some fruit trees in the yard and then provide some porridge at lunchtime for the kids. The porridge was about 2 cents a kid, and the final one was free flow of information.

So they went out and spoke about what they’re doing on the local radio station, but like we’re talking now. Now the outcome of this was that they actually double the attendance at the school and moved the number of kids who were in the top two [00:09:00] grades from 30% to 60%. For some very, very simple reasons.

Very simple. First, as the kids’ brains couldn’t concentrate in the afternoon, they didn’t have the nutrition, get the nutrition at lunchtime, concentrate in the afternoon, the grades go up. You go on the television station and you talk about the free food at lunchtime, and now there’s an incentive to send the kids to school because in these really poor environments, from about seven, maybe even younger, five, these kids have got a pretty much.

Fend for themselves, find their own food, make their own living. So you can see many different things come together to cause success.

Maureen: What I hear from this is beyond the national or global peace initiatives, I. I could use this in my local community.

Steve: Exactly. For example, uh, we’ve just recently signed a MAU with World Vision.

World Vision are now going to start to look at using this framework in framing [00:10:00] all the developmental projects they do. It’ll be part of the framing exercise to make sure that what they’ve got is it’s a holistic or a systemic approach to being able to tackle development, but built right into the guts of it, what we find is peace.

So this now becomes transformational peace now starts to become a transformational concept. It sits the very basis from which we can develop our societies, our government structures, and such.

Maureen: So in business we don’t necessarily talk about peace. I wonder how much the eight pillars translate to operating an effective, productive, flourishing business.

Steve: They would say quick shortcut way of being able to look at a system, a business also as a system. So it gives you the ability to become in and look at it from these different angles to see where you are at. Now. A lot of the time, these various pillars, they act with tension. I. So well-functioning government, strong [00:11:00] business environment can have a lot of tension with acceptance of the rights of others or equitable distribution and resources.

So it’s the system intention in many ways is what creates an optimal outcome. I.

Maureen: I love that, that often we think that somebody out there has figured out the formula and the idea that even the polarities stretch us to become better than we were.

Steve: So a lot of time with democracies, we think, well, democracies should be flowing smoothly and they shouldn’t have these bumps and hiccups.

We shouldn’t have leaders elected, we don’t want, et cetera, et cetera. And democracies are highly inefficient. But in many ways that’s why they’re so successful because we don’t get the leaders we want. We get the leaders, which are popularly elected, and if we look at it, there’s awful lot of indecision, making a lot of duplication, a lot of waste, and we just look at the way politicians fight.

But. On the other hand, [00:12:00] that’s because you’ve got power spread and the spreading of the power creates the competition. And that’s again, the system intention. But in many ways, we look at it the richest countries in the world on a per capita basis and all well-functioning democracies.

Maureen: Mike, do you wanna jump in because your work is around peace.

Mike: I mean, it seems so clear and articulate about what is a clear and very straightforward but absolutely transformational idea. And you can see, I think from this very short introduction, the excitement that the academy has when Steve and his ideas comes along. I came back from diplomacy back into the academy, set up a center that was trying to focus on exactly the same thing.

Why is it we have such a conflicted world? But I confronted then. The experience that Steve’s alluded to, King’s College London, one of our strongest research centers in this area, department of War Studies, it’s called. So we tried to create a center which was more outta the box [00:13:00] than had been tradition, so you’ll know the center we created looked at trust, it looked at social relations as well as the potential outcome of peace.

It was really very frustrating that most analysis, even that which looked at the essence of peace and how to build it and how to create peaceful conditions, still didn’t operate out of the box in the way that Steve’s described. We didn’t have metrics. We didn’t have the ability to measure what worked and what didn’t work and what might work.

But above all, it wasn’t just metrics, it was this systemic approach. You know, from our previous experience, I’d been involved in peace building missions for the United Nations in actually in the caucuses in the Middle East, and we’d gone in with an empty toolkit essentially, because we’d gone in to say, well, let’s sit down and resolve the differences.

Now, how many of the pillars are reflected in that conversation? Certainly not enough. The simple description of that condition in Kenya and [00:14:00] Ugandan schools, I think amplifies that very clearly. You cannot get a sustainable, resilient outcome, which is what you need as a peace builder if you haven’t got the full toolkit.

If you haven’t got the ability to see outside of the peace box, into the drivers of change, the transformations that are needed. So there’s great excitement and hence the continuing dialogue and the work of, uh, Steve’s Institute is seminal and it’s no wonder that it’s popular. The final point I make it is not just academics who get interested because we can strengthen our overall understanding of these things.

It’s other stakeholders that really are concerned about levels of violence, are concerned about low growth and poverty and inequality, but really can’t get a handle on how they can get close to the issues. It’s much easier to get close through the language that Steve’s work has encouraged to do. Oh, thanks for that, mark.

It’s easy to get close. I mean, you can mobilize people with talent and with capability. I couldn’t do that as an academic because you get [00:15:00] lost in the faults. There’s great strengths in the academy, as you know, but in the faults of the academy is that doesn’t always

Maureen: think outside the box. Even our issues with immigration now, if we could create greater conditions of peace in the countries that people are exiting, they’re exiting often for lack of peace.

A

Steve: lot of the time they. Exiting for multiple different reasons. And yes, Maureen did right a lot of time for loss of peace. And you can see that with just the number of the refugees globally, they’re about 120 million now and 120 millions. A lot of people, and at this stage, it’s very, very hard to actually feed and look after them and some of the more.

Innovative approaches to refugees are actually happening in Africa.

Mike: There’s also a sort of circularity in your question, which I liked, was that it’s not just stopping migration by stopping the force, the conflict, but it’s also the conflict, the results from migration when people arrive. I mean, it’s that whole thing.

I think you’re right. The African experience is very strong. The [00:16:00] corridors between parts of Africa, ’cause of the 120 million. More than nearly 70% of them are in the global south. More than that, yeah. Yeah. So the great majority of refugees in the world don’t, don’t hit us in the sort of more affluent world, the more developed world.

They reside in pretty vulnerable places. Anyway.

Maureen: One of the things I remember from a prior conversation was, what one thing do people take when they leave their home?

Mike: Yes. This is from our research on the shores of Greek islands. The Syrian refugees and the Afghans particularly. So our research, as I described to you, we asked a set of questions of people as they stepped outta their boats.

The traffickers had brought them across as they got out. We had local people asking questions in Arabic, in in their own language. And one of the questions, Steve, was, what’s the last thing you did in the last hour before you left your home? Oh, okay. Or in Hans, can you imagine? And it was quite revealing ’cause I said, well, you must have got round and said, said [00:17:00] Goodbye, hugged everyone.

Keep safe, charged your mobile phone, which is a major asset. But no, the last thing people did on average was to bury their treasure. This wasn’t gold, it wasn’t money. It was my favorite chair. This picture that I can’t carry with me. When we went to Brussels, I said, what does this tell you? Politicians? And I was quite passionate about this.

It tells me

Steve: that these people want to go home. Yep. They didn’t want to leave in the first place. Exactly. But the sad thing is when they do become a a refugee, a lot of the time they don’t go back. No. Because they can’t go back. Because they actually won’t have the assets back there anymore. They have God.

But the other thing too is in a lot of these environments, they’re economic refugees as well, and the economic impoverishment and the conflict go hand in hand, and that’s why the poorest people in the world, you’ll find are in conflict zone or near post conflict zones. One of the other things out of it as well, from the research we’ve done, is a [00:18:00] very strong relationship between ecological degradation and conflict as well.

The countries with the worst ecological degradation are generally countries in conflict. Ecological degradation probably goes back centuries. This is just a vicious cycle, which goes on. If you get the conflict, it’s generally over resources. I. That degrades the resources further. Now the conflict might settle down.

There may be a peace agreement, but the system’s now more fragile. And then at some point in the future you get another shock, which could come with a drought or a flood or another conflict breaking out and the system degrades even further.

Maureen: Is your organization helping the communities as well as countries rebuild their.

Ecosystems.

Steve: There’s many different hats, which I can wear. Two of them in. This one is sort of obviously the peace hat, but the other’s also the developmental hats. So I’ve got a family foundation we set up and [00:19:00] I’ve some mention that works with the poorest of the poor. So through that we do a lot of work around ecological restoration and also a lot of work around water capture to produce food, particularly with an emphasis on food production.

So if you went to Africa at the moment, two out of every three Africans is what you. Classified as food insecure. Amazing, amazing stuff.

Maureen: Out of every three,

Steve: two, out of every three on

Maureen: the entire

Steve: continent. Give you an idea. If you went and bought a ton of barley in Australia, you’d buy it for about half the price of what it’s imported into Africa for this, Africa doesn’t produce enough food to feed its people.

For example, this comes back to the relationships between development and peace. So Africa captures about 1.8% of its natural rainfall. That’s all that gets caught. Now, when we look at that, we look at the world somewhere between, on average, the other continents, somewhere [00:20:00] between six and 44%, 44% in the Middle East.

And so you’ve got. All this water, which is not used. You’ve also got 34 million hectares of land, which could be cultivated, which isn’t. And then when you look at the actual amount of land, which is irrigated of the land, which is farmed now, it’s only about 6%. It’s the combination now of moving into developmental aid and peace, and now we’re starting to see how things intimately linked.

And they get even more linked because really we’re living in an age now, which is being characterized by complexity, which we can’t get our mind around. But much of this complexity lies inside the concept of systems. We don’t think that way. We think in cause and effect

Mike: very linear. Two dimension. I mean, as you, as you listen, what Steve is simply describing so powerfully is the interconnectedness.

Historically, we’ve dealt with a particular problem [00:21:00] in a particular way. We think we have a solution. So the UN peacekeeping forces are visually, usually men with blue hats. And that doesn’t relate to anything that’s been described within the broader system. So it’s not an agronomist, it’s not a water specialist.

It’s not somebody who’s carrying bags of vaccines or whatever. It tends to be that we keep people apart on the pretense that that brings a resilience and a peacefulness of communities. But of course, it stops violence at a point in time. But it doesn’t address the system that a systemic approach would deal with other things to build resilience in that way.

Maureen: Mike, you and I were talking on our way to get coffee about. Peace and exactly that. The tribalism and who do I define as my ingroup versus other with the idea that other creates risk for me? Hmm. How do we now redefine especially using the pillars to start helping people expand their [00:22:00] sense of who’s my tribe?

Mike: Yeah, so one of the senses that I have from my experience in the study I do is that we are very uncomfortable with difference with different groups, different tribes. That’s one factor that has led to unstable relationships that can lead to violence, that can lead to self-protection, and it’s driven by anxiety and fear and a lack of knowledge, and in seeking several years back in how we can break down some of this intercultural problematic.

I hadn’t got insights of the kind that we now have through the pillars, through the positive piece, it’s very clear that it’s not just about the relationship between people. That’s hard enough. It’s also about the conditions in which the peoples and their relationships happen. I. We were talking broadly about the chaos and crisis and tragedies of the Middle East at the moment.

It is not simply a clash of ideas here. It’s a very complex issue about fear, about [00:23:00] anxiety, about helplessness, about a humility about humiliation. All these things are very, very complex, but we have to find a way of wrapping them into a system, which gives us just a tiny little chance of getting on top of them and saying that we can, if we foster a few simple things.

There was a classic case in India several years ago when I was in the foreign service where there was an anxiety about how we could raise the numbers of vaccines that were taken up by people. And the standard response of the Indian government was to make them compulsory to send little letters or policemen to tell people to go.

And the beginnings of applications of systems says, no, you need to do other things. You need to incentivize. So when a mum brings their children to the clinic for a vaccine. Give them some food so that they know they associate it is exactly the same as the principal said. And also make sure that if you ask someone to walk for 16 hours to a vaccine center, that there are enough [00:24:00] vaccines there when they get there.

Because also there was a problem that people didn’t trust the. The system would be providing, and I learned from that that I needed to know much more about systems in order to get my head around how you could actually make a difference.

Steve: One of the approaches we’ve adopted a lot of the time, I think Mark’s right on there, like what we do is we create concepts of identity, which create us and them.

Now we’ve worked with the various different groups and a good one, as an example from Libya, at the height of the Libyan war, we ran some positive peace projects and we brought in young leaders from a number of different cities in Libya. Each of ’em, uh, were to go back and do a, a project based around the, uh, positive piece in each of their different cities afterwards.

Now the end of it, they said, well, we never thought we’d be sitting in the same room with people from these other cities, let alone agreeing on what to do. So it all comes down to how do you structure the interactions. And so what we do is [00:25:00] we work off something practical. I. So the practical thing was not how to bring peace in Libya, because then that would’ve created fighting was how do you create peace within your city?

And the amazing thing was obviously now they’re working on a common problem. What they found was pretty much they wanted the same thing in all the cities. They wanted rule of law, so you actually had basic policing functions. They wanted the garbage. Cleaned up. Okay, so the void ill health, they wanted running water again back in the cities.

And so again, as it came back, peace can be different in different environment. In the west, we’d say it’s peace could be something like, oh, I don’t want to be bullied. I don’t want to be troubled by this. I to see better inclusion, and so on and so forth. For many people, let’s say in many parts of the world, it’s simply peace is having somewhere to sleep, which is safe, or peace [00:26:00] is having enough adequate food.

Maureen: So starting with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Steve: Yes. You could put it into that terminology if you wished. Yeah. I.

Maureen: Self-actualization isn’t relevant if I don’t think I’m

Steve: gonna make it through the night. Exactly, exactly. So what we do in our projects is like we’ve got the eight pillars and people view what would be interventions through the lenses of those eight pillars, but it’s up to the group you working with to decide what they are.

We don’t bring in external values, and so on that basis then it pretty much works in all cultures.

Maureen: I love that idea. ’cause I know of situations where we think we have an answer for you, whoever the U is often poor people in other countries whose culture is entirely different and so we take interventions that are not culturally appropriate and of course they fail.

Mike: Yes. You know, this became transformational for me and the way we thought about relations generally. So my center was called somebody something social relations. Because [00:27:00] actually I was at that time very focused on how people related one to another. But what I was missing was why were you relating what for?

What was the purpose of the relationship? And when you focus at a local level in a community saying that, why don’t you just think about getting your neighborhood peaceful? What does that mean? Then the relationships between potentially protagonist or becomes focused on that particular social action to get this community safe again.

We saw a little bit of that in the north of Ireland when the piece finally came from the troubles. We haven’t resolved everything. In the north of Ireland, but people became more purposed in the reason for

Maureen: relating. So shared mutual purpose. Yeah. So now we’ve got the biggest companies in the world saying they wanna be carbon neutral, and part of that is buying carbon credits.

Is there a linkage between large corporations who want to invest helping communities? Who have had negative environmental impacts. Can those linkages [00:28:00] happen through your work?

Steve: Well, you could if you wished in your company and you are working in a particular area. And generally when we’re looking at these are extractive companies.

Extractive companies, a lot of the time by necessity end up in a lot of troubled countries. And the laws in many of those places, they, they just aren’t there, let alone being enforced. So they’re very, very difficult environments for ’em to work in. But they can certainly take the positive piece and look at the programs they’re gonna put into the communities in which I.

They’re doing the extractions so that the communities get a sense that they’re getting benefit from what’s happening rather than they’re seeing their land getting destroyed or what they’d see as their assets being taken away from and not seeing anything come back. In that sense, they, uh, could use the eight lenses, a positive piece to structure your project, which would be quite a valid way of operating.

Mike: So you just visualize m in a, a mining company that arrives in your [00:29:00] community. The first thing that they would do is build a huge high electric fence around. And exclude the community. So the positive peace approach would be exactly the opposite. You’d sit down and find out how you would in integrate the need to extract, which clearly is an economic thing, and we could go into that separately.

And the relationships that you’d have with the local community. There are better and better examples that crop up, but it’s not systematic, is it? And part of it is about how much regulation there is, how much transparency there is, how much people are watching. And it’s, it’s mixed, isn’t it?

Steve: Yeah, Mike, that’s exactly right.

So a lot of the time when people are talking about systems, they don’t really understand systems. What they’re generally saying is, okay, I’m gonna bring a bunch of things I think are important to try and solve this. Issue I’m dealing with. But systems are much more than that. Uh, a system to understand it must have a boundary.

First thing is to describe the boundary is system. It seeks [00:30:00] hemostasis, but at the same time wishes to grow. Hemostasis is just another word for steady state, and it maintains a steady state through a whole series of encoded norms. What it does also is it goes back and tries to change the inputs into the system when they’re out of the bounds of the encoded norms.

You’ve got concepts of stocks and flows that gives you the ability then to be able to see emerging properties within a system, and also those properties which are sunset as well. You’ve got path dependency. So systems dependent on its path. That can be, it’s a political history, it’s cultural history, it’s economic system, and so changing systems generally you want to change slowly.

You don’t want to smash them overnight. It a lot of the time we can see that creates a whole lot of other issues and backlashes, which happen further down. So think of American Indians, and you think a rival of the [00:31:00] European settlers smashed the culture, and we can see the outcome of that. Same as with the Aborigines in Australia.

So whatever change we’re making has to be based on following the path to dependency and working from the system to change the aspects which need to be changed. But in final, what I’d really like to say that the concept of positive peace is transformational is what it does. It puts peace, the center of the development of the economy, the development of the political systems, the legal systems, and the cultural content of the society.

And now. When we’re looking at that, what we can see is the positive peace framework gives us better economic outcomes, more peaceful outcomes, more resilient society, better performance on the oncology, better performance on development. Therefore, positive peace describes an optimal environment under which human potential can flourish, and this is a [00:32:00] transformative concept.

It’s different than anything we’ve had in any other epoch. This is why it’s

Mike: so important for leadership. You can see if leadership is unaware or unable to mobilize this sort of toolkit, it won’t succeed. And we look to leadership to be inspirational, to take people with it, but to have the tools that can actually deliver this transformation.

I.

Maureen: Where would people learn more about how to leverage your ideas, learn more about the research, bring it into their communities?

Steve: So there’s a number of ways people can engage with the Institute for Economics and Peace. So the first is we’ve got two websites, vision of Humanity. Second one is Institute for Economics and Peace.

So just searching on a vision of humanity. Any of those kind of ones, you’ll get it. Global Peace Index will get you there. We have online courses. Uh, some of them are quite simple, take four hours. We also have an ambassador program, IEP Ambassador program, if you’re really interested in [00:33:00]the work. That’s a part-time six week course.

Currently have about 7,000 ambassadors globally and growing all the time.

Maureen: So hopefully this is the first of many conversations and thank you so much for the work you’re doing. Oh, thanks for having us on the program. All. Mike, I realize that your work is transitioning. How would they learn more about this center?

Mike: The Center for Peace and Security has, its URL. You can look on Coventry University, but also much of my work is has transit to the leadership field and the International Leadership Association houses most of my little mini projects. The Center for Peace and Security is, is working in many of the areas that can benefit from the new approach that Steve’s encouraging.

So a lot of our work on migration, that data is new ideas, new understandings can relate to systems.

Maureen: Thank you. And I also wanna thank the International Leadership Association where we are recording live for [00:34:00] organizing this opportunity.

Steve: Great. Look, I think it’s our pleasure being here. It is indeed. Yeah.

Well done. Thank you.