Addressing Structural Incentives and Denial

Two ILA Lifetime Achievement Award winners, Henry Mintzberg and Jonathan Gosling, offer a sobering critique of societal structures that incentivize short-termism, denial and imbalance. Whether climate denial, corporate lobbying or inequitable wealth distribution, our systems often reward those who can exploit the system without regard for their impact on long-term system health. This creates a perverse feedback loop where responsibilities are outsourced or shifted and our capacity and sense of responsibility for adapting diminishes.

I firmly believe that leadership must include the moral responsibility and courage to interrupt denial and exploitation in systems, teams and ourselves. This means surfacing inconvenient truths, holding space for discomfort and building long-term thinking into short-term decisions. As leaders, we must be willing to confront these challenges head-on and foster a culture of accountability and transparency. This also means that our success measures must expand to include optimizing system health in addition to the health of the individual organization.

What systems does your organization participate in? What outputs do you generate that create liabilities for others? Do you pay your employees enough, or do they rely on public assistance? Does your organization generate pollution that reduces community health and strains health systems?

Disrupting Sameness to Foster Innovation

Theo Edmonds warns of the “monoculture problem” in innovation, where institutions reward sameness, safe thinking and predictable performance. This stifles creativity and leads to “innovation grief,” where bold ideas die on arrival. To revive innovation, we must reclaim wonder—the balance between awe and curiosity. Wonder fuels creativity, and creativity is the raw material of progress.

Leading innovation requires cultivating psychological space for emergence, enabling new collaboration across art, science and business, and designing systems that reward novelty, not just efficiency. This approach aligns with my view that innovation can solve some of our current challenges, from curing diseases to technology allowing us to accomplish mundane tasks many humans don’t want to do.

How do you create environments encouraging cognitive diversity, emotional safety and cultural remixing to foster innovation? What problems are you trying to solve using innovation? Do you have other opportunities to innovate to help your organization reach its potential?

Democratizing Leadership Tools

A recurring theme at the conference was the need to broaden access to leadership development. Too often, the most impactful tools—vertical development frameworks, emotional intelligence training and systems thinking—are confined to executive offsites and elite programs. This must change.

Leadership in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world cannot be the exclusive domain of a privileged few. The challenges we face—climate change, polarization, technological disruption—require distributed leadership at all levels of society. This means open-source learning, accessible media (like podcasts) and scalable tools that support transformation across hierarchies.

How are you leveraging the latest tools to make leadership education accessible across your organization? Do you have a leadership philosophy and framework that everyone in the company should understand, from those leading themselves to those leading the organization? These tools will be tailored to the audience and build skills across the enterprise.

Final Thoughts

As leaders, we must be willing to rethink what leadership means and redistribute the tools that make it possible. How can you become more aware, model these mindsets and behaviors and create developmental opportunities for others? The future of leadership is broader, inclusive and developmental. Embracing this new paradigm allows us to lead the way in transforming our organizations and communities to create a healthier and more stable future.

This article originally appeared on Forbes as a Forbes Coaches Council post. It is reprinted with permission of the author.