Welcome to Cohort 2040
For decades, they’d been warning the world that it wasn’t a matter of if, but of when.
Whether from experts in universities and government departments or those on the frontline in communities most at risk, the warnings were the same: the current path was unsustainable and a world-changing threat was looming.
But the warnings went unheeded. They’d occasionally surface in news or on a TED talk, soon to be buried under more pressing matters. Crisis preparation was seen as the preserve of a niche few, far from the priorities of prime ministers and presidents.
And anyway, technology and incremental policy changes would deal with the root causes of the problem. Stability breeds complacency.
Then the crisis came, and fast. Exponential change crashed up against a limited capacity to respond.
What seemed to be a crisis related to one issue soon became a crisis of food supply, financial markets, mental health, politics, even social cohesion. Leaders became overwhelmed by competing demands, of protecting populations, maintaining political support, stabilising economies, navigating geopolitical tensions, and keeping up their personal resilience and that of their immediate teams.
“What could I have done to be better prepared for this pandemic?” they’d often ask themselves.
As this website explores, emerging leaders of the Millennial generation (currently in and around their late twenties and thirties) face a future of potentially unprecedented and overwhelming leadership challenges.
Like the Covid-19 pandemic, a future of worsening environmental destabilisation could create crises that arrest economic systems and entire societies.
Emerging leaders could be leading in a world in which 4 billion people suffer persistent heatwaves, a third of cropland is affected by severe drought and there is around a 50 per cent chance of a synchronous crop failure in breadbasket regions.
The resultant cascading effects would drive higher mortality rates, political instability and regional and international conflict.
The leaders of tomorrow will have to overcome the inherited burden imposed on them by the leaders of today who are failing to adequately mitigate and adapt to the environmental crisis as well as to undertake the vast changes to societies needed to prevent a worsening future.
How can we accelerate the transition to more sustainable and fair societies in a chaotic world of 2C warming? If we could come back in time to today, what would we do differently to be better prepared? How can a community of emerging leaders better anticipate such a future and work together to improve their capabilities to lead through worsening conditions?
This blog will provide a regular commentary as we seek answers to these questions. Specifically, it will be used for three main types of reflection:
Exploring insights on the challenges future leaders face in between events, reports, and the other outputs we are producing
Sharing the lessons we’re learning about how to build a community of practice that helps future leaders, including what didn’t work, as well as what’s gone well
Commentary on the project processes we’re using to answer those questions, including research methods, ways of defining future leaders and bringing them together, and building partnerships.
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