Report: Leadership in the Polycrisis
This report explores how leadership development in a defence context might have increasing relevance for civilian leaders wanting to enhance their capacity to respond to an era of instability, itself driven by the escalating climate and nature crisis. We were interested in learning any transferable lessons from a leadership context - defence - that is constantly facing chaotic conditions.
The report was published with the Centre for Climate and Security. You can read it on their website.
As a crucial aside, we found that engaging with the defence and security community is imperative to enable us to face down the potential militarisation of the effects of the climate and nature crisis. Those effects are already becoming national security concerns, a trend that will only deepen. This cannot and does not have to evolve into militarisation. But that requires an active and loud policy and political agenda.
Here’s an excerpt, taken from the report introduction:
The global scale, systemic interconnection, and severity of today’s climate and ecological crises has led researchers to conclude that the world has entered a new era—or overall state—of complex, cascading, and compounding risk. Some have labelled this the ‘polycrisis.’ Approaches to leadership development in a defense context—which commonly focus on the ability to operate effectively under intense conditions—might have increasing relevance for civilian leaders wanting to enhance their capacity to respond to this emergent polycrisis era.
We undertook research exploring these approaches, utilizing structured workshops and interviews with around thirty senior officers and personnel across the United Kingdom (UK) Defense enterprise. We found that the strong emphasis placed on physical and mental resilience, situational rehearsal, and an initiative mindset grounded in organizational structure and team ethos will increasingly have a broader leadership applicability as the destabilizing consequences of the climate and ecological crisis grow. This briefer explores our findings.
