Growing Older, Scaling Impact

Starting Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative

Photo by Guido Coppa on Unsplash

Tomorrow, I’m going back to school for the first time in almost 40 years. It’s a mixture of excitement, anticipation and… trepidation. The 48 classmates (of which five are partners, including mine) on Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative were only revealed this past weekend, a handful of days before we connect officially on Monday. They are an impressive, gender-balanced bunch, with almost half being from outside the US (which was a very important criteria of the programme for me).

Glancing through the cohort’s biographies is like taking a stroll through a highly charged playground of global over-achievers. There are ambassadors and foreign affair ministers, business executives and bankers, social entrepreneurs and philanthropists. The variety of styles and accents and objectives is mind-spinning. The resolute homogeneity of passion and dedication to contributing to the world is inspiring.

For me, writing this on my flight to Boston, I feel like a kid wandering into candy store. All my favourite ingredients are being served up on a rose-tinted platter: fabulous, engaged people from cultures and countries across the globe. A historic, intellectually-ramped-up context in which to meet, facilitated by faculty from across Harvard’s massive maze of schools and disciplines.

The purpose of the program is to gather experienced leaders and help them turbo-charge their impact in service of the world’s challenges. The first week’s readings offer a dozen case studies of the later life careers and contributions of a range of famous leaders and their political, social or business innovations (e.g. Michael Bloomberg, General Claudia Kennedy, Lee Iaccoca, Sherry Lansing). Heady stuff, although it feels a bit over my pay grade. But I think that’s part of the program’s goals. To make you think bigger and more ambitiously about what you can make happen.

The first week’s agenda introduces Harvard’s 3-P model of social impact – Problem, People and Pathway.

What’s the Problem?

Start by clearly defining the problem. Explore the causes. Who benefits from the status quo? Why hasn’t it been dealt with? What’s the cultural context? This helps explore and map out possible solutions.

Who Can Help?

Identify change agents. What are their motivations? What are their sources of power? And for other stakeholders?

Where’s the Path?

Different problems present very different routes to change. They vary in risk and potential impact, time frames, and the extent of coordination and collaboration required to address them.

“Rather than providing a one-size-fits-all blueprint,” writes Julie Battilana and her team at the Harvard Kennedy School, “at its core the 3P framework offers sets of questions for social innovators to unpack and update iteratively. This approach encourages individuals and groups to find the “fit” between different elements.

---

A very happy New Year to you all. I look forward to sharing this experience with you over the coming year. I started 2022 by speaking with some of the Founding Supporters of this elderberries newsletter. It was an amazing conversation, full of insights, passion and again, a shared commitment to engage with issues large and deep. I was curious to hear what they wanted me to share from my journey and how that would support them in theirs.

I feel very privileged and grateful to have a small army of committed readers supporting me as I venture back into the classroom. You make me braver. Let me know how I can return the support. Please feel free to send ideas, reactions, requests for more or less of this or that.

My wish for you? To start this crazy year, in the midst of mayhem and the grinding of history’s big wheels, magically, mindfully - and purposefully.