So we develop ideas aimed at improving the quality of leadership in blog posts (below) and in books like, Humane Leadership.
To put ideas into action, we develop thinking tools called Wisdom Jigs, advise clients, offer training, and lead community projects.
I look forward to hearing your ideas,
What in the U.S system has allowed narcissistic malevolent actors (especially those surrounding Jeffrey Epstein) into leadership positions and what allowed them to dodge accountability?
A concerned law student reached out the other day with this question and here are my initial thoughts.
We’ve been tracking a growing crisis in US leadership culture since January of 2017. We decided to look at possible refinements to leadership culture and development since then as initiatives of The Humane Leadership Institute. In the book, we propose that humane leaders
“… hold responsibility for helping people and organizations better pursue shared goals while ensuring the journey consists of the compassionate refinement of talents, habits, character and skills.”
Humane leaders will improve our performance and help us become better humans in the process. We believe leaders should actively live out three nuanced values:
Unfortunately, a number of powerful leaders today exercise strength without the fairness of elegance or justice. They seem to pursue their own interests without seeking to generate commonwealth or the greatest good for the greatest number. They apparently find wisdom and balance hindrances to their personal interests and whims.
We believe that living one’s values is the essence of virtue.
In this post, I’ll seek to explain our approach as it stands within our current opportunities and constraints. I make no claim that this is the only, correct, or even best path forward, but at least it’s a path that leaves the keys to the future in our own hands.
Clearly, many people in power are not living in an alignment with our values. How can we correct this in the short and long terms?
Society has a number of behavior control methods. Ranked by scale of application they are likely:
Of course, lawyers will think about legal remedies, public servants and advocates will think about regulation and so on. If we’re looking at systems to define problems and solutions, we should think about ways to understand the nature of systems.
Based on my career in technology and organizational change, I think of systems in terms of nodes (humans, organizations, tools) and connections (processes, rules, communications).
I also find Stewart Brand’s pace layer model of change helpful. In his theory, the layers at top change rapidly while the base layers move quite slowly.
We must consider the scale at which change happens as well. If we try to change the laws of the United States, that will likely be difficult and slow. Changing an organization is possible, but challenging and usually takes a long time.
Changing an individual’s mind may be faster, but much less impactful at first.
Our theory of change is individual, not systemic.
Organizational change is the product of a series of individual changes across a group of people – change one connected node and other nodes may begin to change as well. This theory of change is enabled by the vast speed and scale of online communities.
Organizations by nature seek stability, while individual humans occasionally seek change for a variety of personal and professional reasons.
If we think of organizations or society systemically, where does the change start, in the rule and norm connections or in the content of the human nodes? Organizations change only after the humans in them begin to think and act differently.
We could say, we just need to enforce the rules more forcefully. But, individual culpability is a double-edged sword. Practically, we must protect our leaders from frivolous lawsuits or lawfare, while also holding them accountable. The US is seeking a new balance between protection and accountability.
We seem to be living in a legal season of rights without responsibilities. Corporate leaders enjoy broad liability shields by incorporation and rights granted by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. They also enjoy broad philosophical cover for single-minded pursuit of profits given by Milton Friedman’s editorial in the New York Times magazine on September 13, 1970. In that crucial piece, he wrote that any CEO thinking of any issue beyond optimizing shareholder value should be fired.
The results of these rights without responsibilties are massive moral hazard and public assumptions of risk. See the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008 for complete socialization of costs, while nearly zero criminal or even civil consequences for those involved in setting up that disaster. Section 230 exemptions from liability for content on internet platforms allows massive monetization by social media companies with zero accountability for the billionaires who have benefited from stealing our consciousness. Banking and artificial intelligence reveal how a few brilliant minds driven by greed can invent unregulated sources of risk and reward far ahead of our legal and regulatory capacities.
AI turbocharges the formula for exceeding our legislative and regulatory capacities to manage the social costs of these risks. The machines are now generating risk reward vectors at superhuman speed at scale, where our society’s control systems are years, if not decades, behind.
Yes, it’s a bleak picture for systemic accountability.
In our analysis part of the path to this dark moment was paved by allowing leaders to define the scope of their own responsibility: shareholder value, my party’s control of the Senate, my donors’ and family’s best interests, etc.
It’s likely that systemic change is beyond our control until we create a group of humans who have reclaimed their own agency in allocating their attention, time, and money.
This leads me to the conclusion that we must appeal to the next generation of leaders and seed the habitual furniture of their minds with what we call a self-refining intelligence.
This is a fully rounded human intelligence that includes, of course, science, technology, math, law, and the rules of business, but also the more humanistic skills of compassion, communication, and yes, morality.
A simple, utilitarian morality, the greatest good for the greatest number, may suffice as a start for our experiments.
The most immediate and strict moral thinking may be simply to remind every leader, every worker, every customer that the moral implications of their private and professional actions cannot be avoided.
Even if no one knows what we’ve done, we will know that we’ve crossed the binary line between being a virtuous person and a person who says one thing and does another.
Our goal is always to live in closer alignment with our values. For us, that means fair strength, generative care, and wise balance.
If we don’t, there’s usually a price to pay.
Leaders can hide for a time in their protected towers, but then, often quite suddenly, they’re reminded that no, there actually are consequences to their misaligned actions and inaction: Hank Greenberg of AIG after 2008, Jeffrey Epstein, and Brian Thompson of United Healthcare are all examples that come to mind.
“Tell me what company you work for, and I’ll tell you what kind of human being you are.” – Emmanuel Duez
Implication happens, whether we see it coming or not.
So, what now?
For the foreseeable future, we don’t see connective regulations or legislation catching up with the financial, technical and communications innovation in amoral nodes, but there is hope.
George Orwell lived during the rise of fascism in Europe, and he wrote,
“If you hate violence and don’t believe in politics [or don’t have to have time to wait for it] the only major remedy remaining is education. Perhaps Society is past praying for but there is always hope for the individual human beings if you can catch him young enough. This belief partially accounts for Dicken’s preoccupation with childhood.” – George Orwell, All Art Is Propaganda. Critical essays
Therefore, we must work on the individual human nodes to empower them to influence the corporate nodes.
Corporate nodes are actually very sensitive behemoths who watch and react to revenue and sentiment changes on a daily basis. We can use some of their online tools for our own empowerment.
First, we must take the moral implications of our daily actions seriously. Start by listing all of our investments.
Any dollar we spend is an investment in continuing that part of the system. Every dollar is a vote for either the status quo or something better, so use your votes for maximum impact.
Look at your biggest expense categories: housing, transport, food.
Which world would you like to live in tomorrow? Your spending today creates what’s next in a market system.
Use the power you’ve got and amplify the vendors you support (and those you don’t) with their hashtags on social media.
So, maybe individual humans are the most numerous and influenceable nodes in the system. Maybe they are the point of greatest leverage for changes in our culture of leadership.
Some of the humans have formal roles as leaders in our organizations or communities, but every human being to varying degrees of consciousness and agency is the leader of their own life.
Each life, by definition, is connected to many other lives and the radiating nodes they each touch on a daily basis.
So our work has centered on empowering individual humans to greater consciousness and agency. We describe these efforts as self, team, and project leadership. If we start from the place of humble curiosity, pursuing clarity and creativity in identifying problems, opportunities, and solutions, maybe then we can feel there’s hope for transforming our culture of leadership and thereby our society.
As we become more conscious agents in our own lives, we will begin to sense the power of our daily choices of how we invest our thoughts, time, energy, and money.
Maybe, then we’ll see the power of sharing our questions and the hypotheses we’re testing in the experiments we call our daily lives.
What experiments are you running today?
What are you learning that might inspire us or save us from wasting our powers?
To lead yourself towards active agency, track how you deploy your core personal assets. This matrix can support your weekly reflection:
Use the Self Empowerment Wisdom Jig PDF file.
If we begin thinking about these sources of power each day, being clear and creative about experimenting with them, then we will generate our own empowerment and hope.
Sharing our efforts with others will allow the good to ripple out from our attempts.
Thank you for caring,
Read the book: Humane Leadership: Tools to Engage, Empower, and Improve Performance
The following is a vision for the transformation of Southern Oregon University (SOU) in response to the Deloitte plan of April 2026.
While institutional planning often focuses on managing decline through specialization and fiscal constraint, the true opportunity for SOU lies in a radical reframe: becoming a place-rooted hub for humane community leadership and lifelong collaborative inquiry.
The White Rabbit proposal is compelling and fairly complete. My thoughts on the entire proposal would be too much for this post, so I will suggest some modifications to their Lines for the Room on their page 18, later in this post.
But first, I believe there are more foundational questions to be asked in the board’s conversation.
Continue reading Southern Oregon University: From Institutional Decline to a Vibrant Learning Community
If disaster may come your way, get out early.
Not everyone can do that, but the more people who get out early, the better for everyone, both people who really need help and first responders trying to keep people safe.
If you have somewhere safe to go, to family or friends, go there before an official evacuation is ordered.
That seems like a good idea.
Unfortunately, it’s not simple, but it’s important to think about the option if you can.
Waiting for an official evacuation notice may be too late for you and your people.
Continue reading Prevacuation: Using Information and Time to Make Evacuation Easier
Thank you for your support for our work to create a people-centered post-disaster registry. Good data will make efficient and equitable recovery easier for our neighbors in any future disasters.
Luckily, we avoided any major disasters over the summer of 2023 in Southern Oregon, so our Vanguard Group didn’t have to swing into action.
It’s been a few months since our last update, so there’s a lot of good news to share.
Continue reading DLAD Update February 2024
Humane Leadership is on the move again.
The core ideas of Humane Leadership – continuous performance innovation in the self leadership lab, internalizing and applying new mental models with Wisdom Jigs, and professional self and project leadership skills – have found there way into some fascinating places over the past few years.
One of the most exciting places is in the Local Innovation Lab, a highly impactful internship experience meeting important community needs in partnership with Southern Oregon University. To support the interns, we created a 10-week online course including live online workshops that uses project-based learning to develop student project and self leadership skills. Empowering young people with professional level skills creates the next generation of leaders who know how maximize effectiveness and humanity at once.
The program has helped city governments, local community groups, and businesses recover from the 2020 Labor Day fires in Southern Oregon while giving students valuable experiences that bridged into full time work for nearly 40% of the first cohort.
Continue reading Humane Leadership Ideas Build Young Leaders