LASPA Center Presents Evolutionary Leadership Webinar

By Sophie Fahey '17
Staff Writer

On Thurs., Nov. 12, the LASPA Center for Leadership invited students to an Evolutionary Leadership webinar. This webinar was put on by the Institute for Evolutionary Leadership whose goals include “developing and supporting leaders who redesign the world to make it more just, sustainable, and flourishing” (webinar).

“Lisa Watson [Director of the LASPA Center for Leadership] receives newsletters [and] emails from Leadership Learning Community that advertises various webinars people can participate in and other advertisements from other agencies,” said Lindsey Martinovich, Assistant Director of the LASPA Center for Leadership, explaining how LASPA learned of the webinar.

“Webinars are an extremely effective way for myself, Lisa, and all of the Scholars in Action [LASPA’s student staff] working for the LASPA Center to hear from experts in this field and learn different leadership theories and techniques so that we can bring these lessons to the larger Scripps community in our everyday work,” said Martinovich.

 This webinar, titled “Evolutionary Leadership: How to Redesign our Communities, Institutions, and Societies to Make Them More,” was presented remotely by Manuel Manga and Fyodor Ovchinnikov.

 The talk was divided into two parts. The first part, presented by Fyodor Ovchinnikov, was titled “Why Evolutionary Leadership?” Ovchinnikov began the talk with a quote from Mange, stating: “Most leadership programs are designed to run our modern world more effectively—the same world that is not working for all humanity and its ecological systems.” This means that most leadership programs only teach for the world as it is, instead of thinking about how to improve it. Ovchinnikov emphasized that “there is no lack of tools; what we need is navigation [of the tools available to leaders].”

 The second part of the talk was delivered by Manuel Manga and was titled “Competencies of Evolutionary Leaders.” Manga began his presentation by describing the difference between leadership and evolutionary leadership: “Leadership is the capacity to mobilize oneself and others to take effective action towards a vision or goal ... Evolutionary leadership is the capacity to mobilize oneself and others to consciously and effectively redesign our worldviews, cultures and institutions for a more just, sustainable, and flourishing world.” Manga also believes that society today is designed by the industrial age, and that ours needs to become an ecological and sustainable world.   

 Some examples Manga gave of evolutionary leadership and sustainable practice were the shift to wind and solar energy in Germany, Brazil’s new transportation system and the high speed train California is building to reduce reliance on cars.

 To find out more about the Institute for Evolutionary Leadership, visit www.evoleadinstitute.com. Look out for more events like this from the LASPA Center for Leadership in the future.