“We are going through a profound change of age”

“We are experiencing a profound change of age, not age of change, which offers many new possibilities, but on the other hand we have no idea how to get there and are struggling to see what the next world view is going to be,” says Josephine Green, a renowned promoter of new thinking and new knowledge in the field of social foresight, innovation and change. She held an exclusive creative workshop for leaders at IBM event Key to Solutions, which took place on 24^th of October in Portorož, Slovenia.

From the left: Ladeja Godina Košir, Josephine Green 
and Tanja Subotič Levanič (Photo: Teater d.o.o.)

About twenty Slovenian leaders, ambassadors of change for a more sustainable future in their organisations, which were invited to the workshop titled Balanced Leadership for a Balanced Society: Being a leader here and now – how to co-creatively energise change for the better discussed with Josephine Green how the role of a leader has changed in the chaotic world we live in and how should they lead when the control is no longer in their hands.

“We live in a world of complexity we cannot control. We have to embrace complexity on its own terms. Nothing is predictable any more, there are so many touch points and we are in a constant state of chaos,” stressed Mrs. Green. We are experiencing shift from industrial-market era, driven by technology and (over)production, to socio-ecological era, where
social innovation is going to replace product innovation. “The best thing for society would be
to find solutions for social issues and intelligence would prevail.”

In her words, the problem of being a leader is that more and more people do not want to be led: “Digital natives and generation Y do not want to take commands, they do not want to be told what to do.” Her advice to the leaders is that they should try to embrace complexity, letting go of control, raise creative and innovative capacity of every person within the organisation and learn through experimentation. A leader of the future should un-boss himself/herself and transform from winning, exclusive, secret, controlling into caring, inclusive, open, honest and authentic person. The leaders should nurture and embrace diversity in difference, and embrace change agents – women, cultural creatives, generation Y and digital natives, because it is the only way to find a balance in our quest to balanced society.

This unique workshop, where the leaders discussed openly about the problems they are facing within the system, their visions of the future and their own contribution to better society, was a project co-created by IBM, Teater and Giacomelli media, who is representing Josephine Green in the region.