Author: Julian

Lessons from the Future: What Leadership Means in the 2020s

Lessons from the Future: What Leadership Means in the 2020s

Melanie Jamieson

The 2020s have emerged as a decade of profound challenges. Leaders face complex, multifaceted issues as they respond to disruption and work to transform their companies and industries for future readiness. Navigating these dilemmas requires wisdom, agility, and the courage to look for opportunities and ask: “What if the best is yet to come?” And, most importantly: “How can we create that future?”

During our Future Quest in Copenhagen during June, I had the privilege of learning from exceptional business leaders committed to transforming their companies and industries for a sustainable and more just future.

What emerged from the programme was the idea of a new model of leadership: the ‘Visionary Deliverer’. This is a leader who can hold sight of a purposeful vision in the face of competing demands, while executing with excellence, and delivering commercial growth along the way.

Here are the leadership qualities we observed in those ‘Visionary Deliverers’:

1. Conviction to unlock new growth opportunities by solving big problems

The most compelling business leaders we met are dedicated to solving humanity’s big problems by creating new markets with sustainable and ethical sources of supply at the right price point. Often, this process begins with a return to first principles: What is the need? Where are the gaps, and what opportunities do they present? What are the solutions, and how do we create demand for these?

For example, Carl-Erik Lagercrantz, CEO of Vargas Holdings and a long-term, active investor in green energy technology, described how Vargas has raised $6 billion to bring green steel to market through H2 Green Steel. Starting with a ‘blank piece of paper’, they created customer appetite for greener steel and secured the finance for an entirely new industry.

2. Humility to build unorthodox partnership models and collaborate to compete

A frequently voiced idea was, “We can’t do this alone.” In a landscape of rapid disruption, the leaders we met are forming unconventional partnership models to stay ahead, build resilience, and share the risks of new ventures.

Urban Partners, for instance, is collaborating with C40 (a network of the world’s 100 biggest cities) on the Green and Thriving Neighbourhoods programme, aimed at supporting 22 pilot projects to turn the 15-minute city concept into reality in locations from Austin, Texas, to Guadalajara, Mexico. Their Copenhagen project Jernbanebyen exemplifies this by bringing together investors, architects, and community actors to create an inclusive, vibrant neighbourhood (the ‘social infrastructure’) before they even begin building the ‘physical infrastructure’. 

3. Flexibility to lead across time horizons and inspire followership on a long journey

Ensuring sustained success requires the ability to maintain focus on the big vision while delivering with excellence at every step. This strategic approach harmonises quick wins with long-term investments, ensuring an organisation remains agile and adaptable in the face of change.

At Copenhagen Atomics, the CEO, Thomas Jam Pedersen, shared his vision of harnessing the power of thorium to generate cleaner, safer, and cheaper nuclear energy. The company’s incremental development, driven by extensive and iterative testing, continues to give rise to new innovations. A decade in, they are onto the second prototype with a goal of launching to market in 2030. Their high-performing team of engineers stays motivated by a flat hierarchy that allows the best and most creative ideas to surface through robust debate and challenge.

The Visionary Deliverer: a new archetype for leadership

As we ended our Future Quest, our group reflected on a new archetype for leadership: ‘Visionary Deliverers’ who can hold true to an ambitious vision for a better future, while executing with courage through global disruptions. I’m excited to see how this idea, coined by Jamie Page, will evolve with thinking from David Astorino and others.

I left Copenhagen buoyed by a sense of ‘rigorous optimism’, grounded in data and experiences that illustrate the best may yet be ahead. It’s another reminder of the power of Questing to understand the forces shaping the future and learn how to transform our organisations to survive and thrive.

We’re already planning the next Future Quest. Please get in touch if you’re a CEO or C-suite leader looking to expand your perspective and build new leadership skills for the future.

Written by Melanie Jameson

Co-CEO Leaders’ Quest

Leadership mindsets to tackle climate change and future-proof your business strategy

Leadership mindsets to tackle climate change and future-proof your business strategy

During London Climate Action Week last month, we hosted an energising workshop at The Conduit to explore how companies are addressing climate change while future-proofing their business strategies. 

The sessions were facilitated by Leaders’ Quest’s Melanie Jamieson and Yasu Mali, alongside notable speakers including UN Climate Change High-Level Champion for COP29, Nigar Arpadarai; Cedric Demeeus, Vice President at Holcim; Ian Simm, Founder & CEO at Impax; Charmian Love, Global Director of Advocacy at Natura&Co; Vaishali Nigam Sinha, Co-Founder of ReNew; Prof. Mateus Simões, Vice Governor of Minas Gerais, Brazil; and Dr. Kirsten Dunlop, CEO of EIT Climate-KIC.

You can watch the whole session online here.

Here’s what we learned… 

1.   Collaborate to compete.  One of our panelists highlighted the need to shift from a mindset focused on self-interest to one of collaboration. Leaders must expand their boundaries and engage with new partners to drive large-scale solutions. 

2.   Translate your message for diverse stakeholders. Embrace a broader perspective to engage a diverse range of audiences. Tailor your messages to create meaningful dialogue with different stakeholder groups.

3.   Think about risk differently. Separate the concepts of economics and risk. Accurately measure each risk, ensuring you’re focusing on the right ones and weighting them correctly.

4.   A new value chain and ecosystem.  Developing holistic, long-term solutions requires reimagining the value chain and ecosystem. Collaborate with suppliers and industry partners to enhance climate resilience and open up new opportunities. 

5.   Spot the devil in the detail. Although climate resilience as a whole is an overwhelmingly large topic, zooming in on the detail can reveal new innovations and solutions. By honing in on hyper-local solutions that are relevant for a specific context, parts of the jigsaw can fall into place.

6.   A stretch-mindset. Maintaining the status quo is the most destructive risk. Leaders must push beyond their comfort zones to foster innovation and challenge conventional thinking.

7.   Support the growth of others. Leaders should look for solutions through a climate-aware economic development lens, mobilizing entrepreneurs, especially in the global south.

8.   Show, don’t tell.  Use real examples to demonstrate successful changes in products, business models, or supply chains to overcome skepticism.

9.   Commit to the roadmap. Clear commitment to a roadmap – including from the top – must be maintained along the journey. Even when the path is unclear, it’s important to keep moving towards the big vision one step at a time.

10.   Celebrate success. Companies need to make many tiny steps into a more climate-resilient future. Celebrating these small steps along the way is fundamental to embedding an innovation mindset.  

Want to learn more?

For more guidance on working across your company’s ecosystem, download the Guidebook to Radical Collaboration which was produced by Leaders’ Quest in partnership with Reos Partners, TED and the Climate Champions

Interested in the opportunities for your business in building climate resilience?

As we look forward to COP29 where climate finance – and specifically access to it – will be on the agenda, we invite you to consider how your business is thinking about climate resilience.

If you’re interested in expanding your perspective on this topic, take a look at how Leaders’ Quest uses the Three Horizons Framework to encourage leaders to think further into the future.

Change Happens – it isn’t Pushed

Change Happens – it isn’t Pushed

By Carolina Moeller

When we really want something, we push for it. We invest energy into driving that change forward with grit and determination. However, when the change that we seek needs other people on board, sometimes pushing hard will gets us nowhere. In fact, holding lightly what we most cherish could deliver better results. 

How is that possible? 

In a previous role as Head of Business Education at WWF International, I had the opportunity to join a Leaders’ Quest program. It took place in China at a time  when global environmental and social disruption was already rampant; geological disasters, flash flooding, environmental protests, a debate on shale gas drilling, and even a proposal to ban shark fin from menus had made the Chinese news that year.

I was excited to spend a week with an awesome mix of people (business, investors, activists, artists, and conservationists) and most of all to explore what was playing out in China and the parallels with our own contexts. 

But quickly I grew frustrated. 

I felt we were in the right place but having the wrong conversations. 

I voiced my concerns to the LQ team and they suggested I speak up after dinner to try and shift the narrative. My legs were shaking as I stood up to make my points in front of the group. Afterwards, the activists and artists thanked me (‘’finally someone said it!’’) but the business people still turned their backs on me, and nothing changed. 

Fast-forward to the end of the week when we  shared our final reflections. A wealthy investor spoke. He said that he had screened the group at the start of the week, spotted the ‘tree huggers’ and the business people, and made a conscious decision to spend his week with those most like him. But then he said: 

“As I sit here at the end of the week, I realise that the most inspiring heart and mind opening conversations I’ve had have been with the tree huggers. I’ve come to know the tree hugger in me.”

My jaw dropped. I realised my whole approach to change was flawed, filled with resentment and judgment.

Pushing data, statistics and arguing doesn’t inspire deep change. 

What makes change possible is the experience of seeing the world from different perspectives.

The magic of a Quest

This was my starting point for loving the approach we practice at Leaders’ Quest. Change happens through experience, not telling others what to think by providing information, but providing the conditions for change. It happens by suspending judgment, by allowing people to change their mind with grace. This is the magic of a Quest and it allows ourselves and others the freedom to evolve.. 

When it was my turn to speak in the circle, I said:

“I’ve come to see that I’ll strangle the ideas that I most care about if I hold them so hard, push on them so relentlessly.” 

Like the investor on that Quest, I’m still learning to hold lightly that which I most cherish. Another way I’ve heard it put is “strong opinions, loosely held”, a concept attributed to Jeff Bezos of Amazon. This refers to the importance of being able to think openly and flexibly about a problem instead of being stuck intellectually on any one particular path. 

Letting go of strongly held beliefs is a real struggle when we care so deeply about the change we want to see in the world, but I experienced the radical change it can bring about first hand, and I encourage you to try it with an idea that you really care about. Is there a time you can reflect on where you pushed so hard for something it stopped you from realizing what you most longed for? Hold that idea loosely and you may see a new way forward.

To learn more about Quests from Leaders’ Quest, visit our Quests page

Example Quest: An Offsite for a new CEO and their Leadership Team 

Example Quest: An Offsite for a new CEO and their Leadership Team 

Strengthening Leadership Cohesion: A Leaders’ Quest Offsite

Leaders’ Quest recently ran an offsite event for a global manufacturing company, bringing together its executive team and new CEO for the first time. Over three days in the company’s home city, we helped 17 leaders strengthen cohesion, connectivity, and trust. The work focused on aligning the team around the new CEO’s strategy, exploring untapped commercial opportunities, and mapping a fresh path to industry leadership in sustainability.

Highlights

  1. Generative Conversations

We led sessions to enhance empathy, practice deep listening, and transform conflict into productive momentum. A major goal was to improve team communication, with exercises centered on confronting biases and assumptions. Participants examined live cases from their own experience, and practiced shifting these challenges into courageous conversations.

  1. Quests

Immersive experiences with changemakers, tailored to the client’s ambitions, enabling the group to gain insights and inspiration.

Highlights included:

  • Purposeful Vision: Visiting a mission-driven organization disrupting the food packaging industry with fully compostable solutions, we explored how zeal and motivation can bring a vision to life. We discussed how to similarly inspire the company’s sustainability goals.
  • Leading Through Times of Conflict: At a Presidential Library, we talked about how political leaders evolved organizations, tackled global conflict, and advanced democracy, while staying true to founding values. We brought this back to the role of the company’s own founding values.
  • Resilience and Courage: At a nonprofit supporting those who have been sexually exploited, leaders met with the CEO and residents to discuss resilience, courage, and trust during adversity.
  • Radical Collaboration: Meeting with a local organization’s leadership team, we learned about the power of steadfast commitment and collaboration across diverse communities to improve equity and health outcomes.
  1. Active Workshops
  • Photography: An exercise in sharing personal stories and getting to know colleagues better. Participants captured team members’ essence through a new lens.
  • Energy assessment: The group learned to be more aware of their personal energy, manage wellbeing, achieve peak performance, and support their teams in doing the same.
  • New York Ballet: A discussion with a professional ballet dancer highlighted the parallels between peak performance in dance and in leadership, exploring the importance of physical and mental endurance, strength, and flexibility.

Outcomes

  • Building alignment around the new CEO’s strategic vision.
  • Fostering trust within the executive leadership team.
  • Helping leaders discover their edge, sharpen skills, and embed new behaviors.
  • Creating a high-performing team in tune with organizational values and ambitions.

Discover More About Quests

At Leaders’ Quest, we believe in the power of experiential learning to build skills, shift perspectives, and create the conditions for change. For over 20 years, we’ve delivered Quests around the world to some of the world’s most successful and purposeful companies.

Talk to us about how a Quest could help your leadership team.

Celebrating female leadership on International Women’s Day

Celebrating female leadership on International Women’s Day

Meet members of the LQ community who are inspiring inclusion

To mark International Women’s Day and embrace its theme of ‘Inspiring Inclusion’ we’re sharing the stories of five amazing women from the Leaders’ Quest community.

Renewable energy systems and community empowerment

Dr. Arwen Colell is an energy policy specialist, and Co-Founder and CPO at decarbon1ze GmbH

Arwen discusses the importance of educating and empowering individuals to make informed decisions about their energy consumption and to encourage community participation in building a resilient energy system.

Empowering marginalized leaders

Shivani Mehta is, Executive Director at CORO INDIA

Shivani talks about CORO’s mission to create a world free from discrimination and marginalization, emphasizing their efforts towards inclusivity and promoting leadership from within marginalized communities.

Artivism and immigration

Rosalia Torres Weiner is an artivist at Red Calaca Studio

Rosalia explains her work which combines art and activism to document the stories of underrepresented communities. She emphasizes the importance of her work in telling the stories of others in order to broaden people’s perspectives.

Transformational thinking in prisons

Jessica Taylor is Executive Director at Chance for Life

Jessica discusses her work at Chance for Life, where she and her team teaches transformational thinking inside prisons with the aim of effecting systemic change in communities and systems.

Women’s rights and the untapped potential of seaweed

Gudrun Hallgrímsdóttir had a long career in Icelandic politics, and worked at the United Nations UNIDO in Vienna.

Gudrun talks about her research into Icelandic seaweed and its potential to revolutionize nutrition and medicine, alongside how her activism has helped to shape national policy for the benefit of women.

Reducing carbon footprint and promoting inclusion

Natalie Kind is  founder of Dunamis Clean Energy Partners

Natalie shares the company’s mission and its commitment to inclusion by training and hiring from the local communities, with a focus on underprivileged and underrepresented groups.

Working with the global LQ community

We are grateful to work with such an incredible community of hosts who help to open up new perspectives for leaders in all walks of life. 

To read more about how we work with our hosts, take a look at what we do…

The renewable energy of inclusion – and how it can power business

The renewable energy of inclusion – and how it can power business

Darya Shaikh

I’ve noticed that when things in the world feel particularly fragile, we tend to look for ways of avoiding conflict. There are so many painful and complicated issues that seem to be demanding we take a stance or form an opinion. Yet, there is more evidence that the risk of getting it wrong far outweighs any benefits of engaging at all.  

One thing that feels clear, however, is that the pressure on leaders across sectors to respond to these societal tensions and geo-political conflicts is only going to grow. So, as I’ve learned over my years facilitating across contested spaces, conflict is unavoidable.

I’ve been working with companies following the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7 and subsequent War in Gaza to help leaders navigate the intense emotions and deep challenges showing up across the workplace.

More often than that, I’m partnering with DEI teams to deliver this delicate, nuanced work. But leading through conflicts and crises is the responsibility of all leaders. Not because of any moral imperative – that’s not what this article is about. Rather, the quality of inclusion and generative conflict across organizations ties directly to the health and resilience of your business.

Conflict avoidance vs generative discomfort 

My biggest takeaway in doing this work is that the default corporate culture of niceness and acting like a ‘workplace family,’ where conflict avoidance is a stronger skill than working through generative discomfort, is inhibiting the true power of inclusion and is one of the biggest risks to business success. 

Of course being nice is a prerequisite for inclusion, but true inclusion requires much more from us. It requires us to go through difficult things together. Instead of looking for safe spaces as the hallmark of inclusion, we should be creating challenging spaces, where there is psychological safety for real conversations about the things that matter in the world and in business.   

I’d like to share some learnings from our work at Leaders’ Quest, and some of the ways we help people acquire the tools and language to better foster inclusion.

Why now?

The intensity of the current geo-political situation has brought our attention to which voices get heard when there are multiple powerful, and seemingly conflicting, perspectives. The same principles apply within businesses, and skills which used to be considered ‘soft’ such as deep listening, empathy, and seeking out different perspectives, are now top leadership competencies.

Inclusion is about making sure people feel like they belong in a system; providing access to the tools and information they need to act from a place of belonging and shared value. I think of it as a design principle for resilient systems. When the force of inclusion is released, it’s powerful: catalyzing radical collaboration, and transformative innovation.  

Meaningful inclusion (as opposed to performative inclusion) enables organizations to be more efficient, decisive, courageous and healthy. Organizations are more connected and in flow – and inclusion becomes a renewable resource inside the organization, rather than something that takes energy from it. 

But while inclusion is a non-negotiable in terms of future-fitting culture and weathering disruption, there is sometimes an aversion to conflict within organizations that erodes the potency of what it could really foster. 

To move beyond this, we need to build our collective capacity and courage. Our work is focused on equipping people with the language and tools to engage and the space to build a deliberate leadership practice fit for the future.

Releasing the power of inclusion

I’d like to share my three takeaways from this work:

  • Engagement is crucial and shouldn’t be taken for granted. Even if you don’t get it right, have the difficult conversations. There is a transformative power in listening to someone without judgment and there are simple, effective tools like Marshall Rosenberg’s structure for nonviolent communication that help people to create these important spaces. We’ve been working with teams and companies to facilitate sessions that allow people to connect, question and engage with deeply challenging issues ranging from Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia to the future of Democracy.
  • We need to go to the edges of our comfort zone and create generative conflict to move towards inclusion. This is an individual and organizational muscle that must be exercised consistently. We’ve partnered with incredible leaders from across our global community whose lived experiences grant them wisdom about how we go through contested space. They include CORO based in India and Chance for Life based in Detroit (at the end of the article I’ve included a link to learn more about their work). 
  • Ownership across teams and leaders is fueled by inclusive cultures, where people have permission to lead and where empowerment is woven into the incentives and processes, not just the lexicon. Organizations have an opportunity to accelerate inclusion by looking at where there are structural and procedural barriers. It shifts the ‘burden’ of inclusion away from the individual and signals to your workforce that an inclusive culture, where people have access to what they need, is a business priority.  

The head, heart and hands of inclusive leadership

Inclusive leadership requires a mix of awareness, skill and courage. Sometimes I describe the capacity building work we do as falling across head, heart, and hands. We give people access to information so that they can build their knowledge in spaces that are non-judgmental and allow for curiosity to match convictions. We connect people to their shared humanity and activate their compassion, even when facing issues or perspectives that they deeply disagree with. And we have a duty of care to provide leaders with the tools to show up skilfully in situations of heightened tension and conflict. 

At Leaders’ Quest, the experiences and wisdom of our community play a huge role in the journey towards inclusion. If you’re interested in hearing from some of them, visit Celebrating Female Leadership on International Women’s Day.

It can sometimes be hard to describe what we do at Leaders’ Quest. One of the things that we do with deep skill and care is help leaders have better conflicts about the things that deeply matter – as individuals who want to be good ancestors for our children to business leaders looking to do good and do well. The skill of inclusive leadership and value of generative conflict will only appreciate in our challenging, yet beautiful world. 

More about what we do

At Leaders’ Quest, our community plays a huge role in the journey towards inclusion. If you’re interested in hearing from some of the incredible people in our global network, and how their work fosters inclusion…

The seven practices for radical collaboration

The seven practices for radical collaboration

Leaders’ Quest, Reos Partners, TED Countdown, and the Climate Champions Team joined forces to create “Radical Collaboration to Accelerate Climate Action: A Guidebook for Working Together with Speed, Scale, and Justice.

The book defines ‘how’ to implement radical collaboration in seven inter-connected do’s and don’ts that are intended to produce movement and learning, and therefore the potential for fast, big, and fair results. It achieves this by bringing together 100 experienced climate practitioners from around the world, who summarize their guidance around bringing people together to tackle systemic challenges.

Take a look at these high-level points to see how you can intentionally engage in radical collaboration:

Play your role

Scan the landscape. Many types of actors are taking many types of actions—political, economic, social, cultural, technological— to address the climate crisis. You can’t and don’t need to do everything. Look at what others are doing to see the most useful role your collaboration can play as part of or in connection with existing efforts. Consider your ambitions and capacities to discern how your collaboration can enrich and strengthen this complex ecosystem. Being clear about your role will help your collaboration and the larger climate movement advance with greater speed, scale, and justice.

Decide how your collaboration will play its specific role—and how you will play your individual role within this collaboration— using your head (your strategic and systemic assessment), your heart (your passion and commitment), and your hands (your learning, from your own experiences and those of others, about what works in practice). Don’t start a new collaboration just because you prefer to do things your way or under your brand. Egotism, duplication, fragmentation, and competition limit quality and impact.

Don’t ignore your inter-dependencies with what others are doing. Unite when you can and differentiate when you must. Don’t get distracted by what you think others ought to be doing. Focus on playing your role well.

Find necessary allies

To be able to overcome the many inevitable obstacles along the way, you’ll need to collaborate with people who share the same goal and have diverse and complementary capacities. Include people who are living with and understand the problem you’re trying to solve, and who have the will, energy, and capacity to deliver solutions.

Working only with the people you are comfortable with—whom you know and like—won’t get you far. To be able to act with speed, scale, and justice, you need to work with different and disruptive others (often including people you might see as opponents or even enemies) and to centre marginalized and impacted people.

You can’t and don’t need to work with everyone: choose the allies you need to be able to play your collective role. As you gain momentum, you will be able to enrol a broader group of allies. And as your collaboration grows, you’ll need to recognize and manage the permanent tensions among speed, scale, and justice.

Collaborating requires you to agree on some things but not on everything. You need to agree on the direction you are heading and the minimum standards for travelling together, but not necessarily on the path you will take. Don’t waste time trying to collaborate with people who don’t want to advance or who want to head in a different direction.

Negotiate pragmatically with your allies about the value of allying. Discuss explicitly and openly what you are aiming to accomplish together; what each of you, given your particular resources and constraints, can contribute to the collaboration, and what each of you needs from the collaboration to be able to make this contribution. Don’t expect selflessness or purity.

Build collective power

Your collaboration needs collective power to play its role in effecting systemic transformation. This requires recognizing and bringing together the different types of assets that each of you can contribute—authority, money, technologies, ideas, followers—to grow your individual and collective capacities. Exercising power together, fairly, is required for speed and scale.

Expertise and hierarchy can help you decide what to do and to get it done. But when some powerful allies use their power over others — forcing things to be the way they want them to be, whether through imposition, exclusion, co-option, or divide and rule— they undermine the collaboration. If you push people around, they will be resentful and angry and will push back, and you will get slowed down or stuck.

For your collaboration to build power and to hold itself accountable, you must make decisions fairly, involving not only the allies with more power but also those with less.

Invest in building a transparent and equitable governance process and a strong and resilient team.

Work your differences

The primary reason collaborators get stuck and do not achieve speed, scale, or justice is that they aren’t able to work productively with their differences and disagreements. Your collaborators face different realities, opportunities, and constraints, and so have different positions, perspectives, and powers. This diversity can help you see more clearly and navigate better through complex and confusing terrain.

These differences also produce disagreements and discomfort. Often people enter a collaboration convinced that they are right and others are wrong. You can’t erase these differences and you don’t have to: usually it is possible and necessary to advance together in spite of, even because of, such continued differences.

If you insist on complete agreement and alignment, you will not be able to advance. Acknowledge your differences openly, keep the role your collaboration is playing in sight, and continue to look for better ways to move forward. Agree on what you can and must, and keep moving. Work together deliberately and patiently to build your relationships, understanding, trust, agreement, and impact.

Discover ways forward

In playing your role within the complex climate ecosystem, the way forward will rarely be clear or straightforward. It is not a highway: you can’t clear away the obstacles and make a straight road before you start.

The only way to advance with speed, scale, and justice is through rapid, disciplined, iterative experimentation. The climate crisis creates pressure for decisive and definitive action, but advances will not always be linear or predictable. Take small steps quickly to learn through trial and error what works, and to build your confidence, capacity, and momentum.

Transformations are usually messy and unclear, especially when we are in the middle of them. Be prepared for confusion, crisis, failure, frustration, setbacks, and disappointment. When these occur, pause, sense, and try something new.

Be open to changing course. Share what you are learning to help others advance more quickly. The weather affects your journey and you can’t control it. Your context will keep changing and presenting new obstacles and opportunities. Seize the moment when you can.

You won’t be able to know or agree on a perfect solution before you start. You can only advance through acting and building momentum, and so pragmatic progress matters more than perfect promises.

Share hopeful stories

People won’t move forward together without shared stories of realistic hope. They need narratives and maps about where they are, where they are trying to get to, and why it is important that they move.

People usually don’t like being told what they must do, so share stories that your allies understand and want to be part of. Recognize the diversity among the people you are collaborating with and those you want to engage: scientific and economic explanations will resonate with some people, and empathetic human narratives with others.

Certain storytellers will be more credible with some people than with others. Don’t expect one language to work for everyone.

Demonstrate possibilities through examples and evidence of success and progress. Acknowledge risk and admit mistakes. Construct plausible scenarios of the future, bad as well as good, to enable people to see more clearly where they need to go and to act more confidently to get there. Adjust your narratives and maps as you advance.

Care for yourselves

A healthy movement towards a healthy future requires healthy people. The way you show up affects what you can do. You won’t be able to move with speed, scale, and justice if you don’t take care of yourself and your companions. We all need support. This seventh practice enables the other six. Acknowledge the uphill.

The climate journey is long and hard. Many of your fellow travellers—especially those with less power and privilege—are suffering, traumatized, and frightened, torn between resignation and rage. Many face immediate threats to their livelihoods and lives. Collaborate empathetically and fairly, recognizing that different collaborators face different realities and have different resources and constraints.

Progress requires purposefulness and persistence, but if you just keep pushing on and pushing others, you will produce burnout and breakdown. Build a network of mutual professional and personal support. Help one another through the rough patches. Inattention to yourself—forgetting about yourself, or identifying yourself only with your work—creates defensiveness and rigidity. Self-awareness, humility, and generosity are required for openness and creativity and therefore for impact.

Take time to stop for refreshment, reconnection, relaxation, reflection, recovery, and renewal.

Celebrate your victories and honor your losses. Cultivate dignity and courage. Be kind to yourself and others.

View the full radical collaborations guidebook

Download the complete book.

TED Countdown announces membership of its Vision Council and new corporate members of the TED Future Forum

TED Countdown announces membership of its Vision Council and new corporate members of the TED Future Forum

TED Countdown, a global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis co-founded by Leaders’ Quest and TED, has welcomed Joshua Amponsem, Olivia Lazard, Omnia el Omrani, Rayne Sullivan and Riddhima Yadav to its Vision Council. They join Jim Hagemann Snabe, Gonzalo Munoz, Habiba Ahut Daggash, Manish Bhardwaj and LQ Ambassador Nigel Topping as advisors to Countdown. 

Since the launch of TED Countdown in 2020, the initiative has:

  • Generated more than 270 million views across 230 original pieces of content focused on climate solutions.
  • Raised $1.3bn in philanthropic giving for climate solutions in collaboration with TED’s Audacious Project.
  • Convened more than 3,000 attendees in person at major global summits and smaller focused events
  • Hosted more than 1,000 TEDx events across the globe.
  • Produced multiple original films, including one airing on PBS stations around the U.S. 


In 2024, TED Countdown will continue this work with new events and media projects focused on topics like the future of food and the role of AI in solutions for climate and nature. It will continue to focus on advancing business-led climate solutions through the TED Future Forum, a community of companies committed to sector-leading action to transform the global economy.

LQ and TED are thrilled to welcome new member companies to this year’s cohort. The full group for 2024 includes: CEMEX, Circ, COFRA, Danone, Ford, W.L.Gore, Interface, Maersk, Mars, Northvolt, Ørsted, RHR
and Siemens.

These companies come from diverse industries and are all committed to the green transition for the long haul. In 2024, Forum members will come together for peer-to-peer learning and curated events focused on the role of business in driving sustainable transformation. 

“TED Countdown is founded on a spirit of radical collaboration,” said Lindsay Levin, the Head of TED Countdown and the Founder and Chair of Leaders’ Quest. “We will only crack climate change by working together — across business, social activism, policy and science.

“We are thrilled to have accomplished new advisors join our Council and, through the TED Future Forum, to partner with companies who are committed to the difficult journey of transitioning their companies to a cleaner, fairer future.”

Tapping into active hope and deep realism

Tapping into active hope and deep realism

As each new year rolls in, Jayma is known to choose a word to serve as her North Star for the journey ahead. This year, we are both also drawn to a phrase that our colleague and mentor, Bill Sharpe, has shared with us: deep realism and active hope.

Looking out at the start of 2024, it can be easy to slip into the despair of our daily news feeds. Yet beyond the disheartening headlines, there is also evidence of incredible progress — both globally, and within the communities and organizations around us.

At the global level, we’ve seen significant reductions in the past year in child mortality and the number of those living in extreme poverty. We’ve made big leaps towards eradicating diseases like polio, and we’re seeing exponential change in renewables and electric vehicles at rates faster than predicted.

At the regional and local levels, we see inspiring leaders who are innovating courageously to make progress, often under the radar and in the face of great odds. This includes people in the Leaders’ Quest community with whom we are privileged to spend time, learn from and call our friends:

  • In the face of unimaginable loss and trauma, the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP) is a coalition of over 160 organizations — including tens of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians — that is working to build cooperation and mutual understanding. ALLMEP’s community of leaders is meeting this moment with deep empathy and the conviction that peace is possible. Experience some of their stories from the field.

  • Akshaya Patra is an organization based in Bangalore that prepares and delivers two million meals to children in 20,000 schools across India every day. The team applies a sense of mission to build the world’s largest school lunch program, showcasing purposeful ambition and innovation at scale to combat food insecurity and malnutrition.

  • Sweden-based Northvolt is a global leader in battery technology that is using its capacity for innovation to transform supply chains and transportation. Emma Nehrenheim, Northvolt’s Chief Environmental Officer, is working on delivering the world’s greenest battery. Her TED Countdown Talk in Detroit last July is an inspiring summary of what’s possible through clean energy, and how we can vastly reduce environmental impact while powering the future.


These stories demonstrate how facing the truth of our circumstances does not negate hope, but fuels it. We highlight these not to detract from the conflict and crises we face collectively, but to remind ourselves that human beings can accomplish extraordinary things when we choose agency over despair. Drawing from the insights of author Joanna Macy, Bill Sharpe defines hope as ‘the belief that in acting from our own sense of human integrity we are creating the possibility of a wider pattern of human renewal around us’.

Our intention for 2024 is to use deep realism and active hope to guide our choices at LQ. We see it as a leadership muscle to build daily – to stay awake to the challenges in the world, while seeking out examples that demonstrate extraordinary change is possible and is happening around us every day.

Using Three Horizons for climate resilience

Using Three Horizons for climate resilience

Carolina Moeller

Solutions to long-term threats, such as climate change, require business leaders to think beyond the typical two or three-year planning time horizon. But, how is it possible to look further into the future when there is so much uncertainty about what the world will look like in 10 — or even 20 — years’ time? 

The Three Horizons framework is one of the tools we use at Leaders’ Quest to help business leaders have better conversations about the future and move from short-term to long-term decision-making. In this article, we share the example of how Leaders’ Quest worked with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) to facilitate a Three Horizons conversation with its member companies to explore adaptation, climate resilience and new mindsets.  

What is the Three Horizons Framework?

Three Horizons is a framework that helps leaders to extend the standard two-to-three-year decision-making horizon to 10, 20, or even 30 years into the future by using three perspectives (or simply say three horizons) which are:

  • The first horizon is the dominant system at present, or, ‘business as usual’.  We rely on these systems being stable and reliable. But as our world changes, aspects of business as usual begin to feel no longer fit for purpose. 
  • The second horizon is a pattern of transition activities and innovations; people trying things out in response to the ways in which the landscape is changing. 
  • The third horizon is the long-term successor to business as usual.  It grows from activity in the present that introduces completely new ways of doing things which turn out to be much better fitted to the world that is emerging.


At Leaders’ Quest we work with the second and third horizon. In the ‘messy middle’ of the second horizon, we help leaders figure out the gap between what’s not working today and how to win in the future. In the third horizon, we unlock inspiration, mindsets and culture shifts required to create a bold ambition for the future. 

How does it work?

Leaders’ Quest recently hosted a hybrid Three Horizons workshop for WBCSD and its member organisations. The topic was climate resilience, and the purpose of the workshop was to help leaders expand their thinking from mitigating against climate change (H1) towards adapting to climate change (H3). 

What’s the difference between mitigation against, and adaptation to, climate change? 

We need to recognize that we’re in a climate emergency — and that business needs to act urgently in providing solutions and accelerating a clean transition. 

Climate mitigation can be viewed as removing harm. For instance, mitigation involves reducing emissions or enhancing sinks of greenhouse gases (GHGs), so as to limit future climate change. 

Adaptation is how businesses can survive the impacts of climate change. For example, a manufacturing business may see an emerging risk of not being able to use as much water in its manufacturing process in the future and so it needs to change. 

Mitigation and adaptation are not binary choices. We know that climate change is happening now–we see the effects all around us. It is crucial for businesses to set and achieve their net-zero targets and also take the leap to adapt their business models as needed.

Applying Three Horizons to climate resilience for businesses

In our workshop, it was widely accepted that businesses need a climate change mitigation strategy, however, many find it difficult to prioritise adaptation due to the uncertainty of climate risks and a lack of understanding about the likely return on investment.  

We used Three Horizons to work through emerging threats to the participants’ businesses and to create pathways towards adaptation. A pathways approach allows for flexible progress towards a visionary goal and a shift in thinking that empowers leaders to create strategies that unlock long-term value creation – not just mitigation. 

For example, food companies might think about shifting to seeds that require less water or acquiring climate-resistant land. Companies reliant on large amounts of data storage could consider climate-ready data centres, and companies with physical offices in coastal areas might consider partnerships with cities to build resilient infrastructure.  

The impact that adaptation could have on climate resilience is sizeable: A study from the Economics of Climate Adaptation estimates that 40-70% of losses expected by 2030 as a result of climate change could be avoided through adaptation. 

Helping leaders prepare for the future

Three Horizons helps teams and multi-stakeholder groups to move beyond incremental action to systemic change that supports long-term value creation. 

Any leadership team can apply Three Horizons to any challenge or emerging risk.

Leaders’ Quest regularly hosts Three Horizons Facilitator Trainings. Join a growing global network of change-makers, including policymakers, researchers, business leaders, consultants, conservationists, philanthropists, activists, and community leaders who are using this transformative framework to drive positive change. Register for the trainings.