As someone who believes deeply in peace, collaboration, and servant leadership, the past year has been a hard go.
Whether you lead a music band, a team in government, a volunteer group, or you simply want to set a positive example, you’ve likely felt it too: polarization is growing, and power-over, competitive approaches dominate.
Common courtesy and cooperation seem to be evaporating and being replaced by incivility. Fear, frustration, and disempowerment can shift how any of us think, speak, and act in a nanosecond. Emotions are contagious and it’s feeling disheartening.
Yet, as a new year gets underway, I want to stop seeing our world as hopeless. I want to shift my focus instead to what leaders can do, even in small ways.
Here is a collection of some thinkers who have inspired me, followed by a leadership inspiration after each one.
Take the Long View – Alvin Finkel
There’s a new book out by historian Alvin Finkel. In Humans: The 300,000-Year Struggle for Equality, Finkel shows that for most of human history, us Homo sapiens have lived in egalitarian, cooperative communities.
I’ve heard that before (many times) and Finkel’s work has added more. He also found that when inequality did emerge (through agriculture, states, empires, capitalism, colonialism), it’s never been passively accepted. Across eras and cultures, ordinary people:
- Rebel
- Organize
- Create alternative social arrangements
- Push back against exploitation.
Long View Inspiration: Sometimes it seems like our influence doesn’t matters. From the long view however – it does. The actions you model, the collaborations you nurture, the fairness you practice are part of an age-old dance between cooperation and inequality. Speak up. Model the way. Be the change. Take the long view. Believe it matters because it does.
Model a Partnership Way – Riane Eisler
Decades ago, I was highly impacted by reading Riane Eisler’s book The Chalice and the Blade. Eisler is a cultural historian and systems thinker who has spent years studying human societies. She offered two frameworks to understand the kind of societies that have existed time immemorial:
Partnership models
- more egalitarian
- gender balanced
- cooperative
- less violent
- power understood as power with
Dominator models
- rigid hierarchies
- male dominance
- normalized violence
- power as power over
She is structurally making the same kind of claim that Finkel makes historically:
- Finkel: humans repeatedly organize egalitarian systems and resist domination.
- Eisler: humans repeatedly oscillate between partnership and domination models.
Partnership Model Inspiration: Every choice you make to practice partnership values like listening and asking people’s opinions, including them in decision-making, and collaborating, reinforces partnership and the choice for a more egalitarian system.
Hold Conflict as a Third Sider – Bill Ury
Bill Ury is one of my all-time favourite authors. His influence on the field of conflict resolution is profound. One of his earlier books left an indelible mark on my consciousness. In The Third Side, Ury shows us, through his research into peaceful communities, that conflict is not just between two sides or two people; it is held – and can be transformed – by the surrounding community.
He tells us that communities can interrupt domination before it hardens into violence. The community is the third side and the third side is us: friends, colleagues, institutions, and cultural norms.
Third Side Inspiration: Conflict is never just “their issue.” Every time you acknowledge tension rather than avoid it, slow things down rather than inflame them, or bring curiosity instead of blame, you are acting as the third side. These moments may seem small, even invisible – but across time, they are how our communities stay humane. Hold conflict with care. Interrupt harm early. Be part of the field that makes resolution possible.
Lessons From Old Europe – Marija Gimbutas
Marija Gimbutas was an archaeologist and anthropologist, a Professor at UCLA, and a specialist in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe. Gimbutas argued that Old Europe (my people!), during the eras of roughly 6500–3500 BCE, had these characteristics:
- Egalitarian social structures
- Low levels of warfare
- Central roles for women in religion and social life
- Symbolic systems focused on life, regeneration, and the sacred feminine
- Settlements without fortifications or clear evidence of elite domination.
Does this sound familiar? Perhaps like me, you can see a trend or thread emerging. I found these references reassuring.
Cooperation Inspiration: Cooperation and equity are deeply human. Domination is not inevitable. Trust that your efforts to lead fairly and inclusively are part of a long, resilient human tradition.
Band Together – Margaret Mead
Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who researched 20th-century Samoa, New Guinea, and Bali. She was chasing the question of how much was human behaviour biologically determined vs culturally shaped. She believed anthropology could expand the human imagination about what kinds of societies are possible. Her studies showed:
- Aggression is not biologically fixed, masculinity does not mean automatically dominance, femininity does not automatically mean nurturance.
- Cultural and group norms are maintained by only a handful of folks – small groups of committed individuals
- Cultural change often begins with just a few people. Once certain norms are socially legitimized, those practices spread
Be the Change Inspiration: Mead is known for the quote “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” She gives us a vision of being committed in a small group, an island of coherence. And, even if it’s a minority voice that sets the tone.
Your Leadership Call
All these insights add up to inspiration for me. They help me take the long view and converge on these simple themes:
- Our actions do matter so take heart in modelling the way.
- Small groups can shift culture so ensure you are working with others.
- Conflict can be held and transformed so believe in that and practice peace.
- Equality and cooperation are resilient human patterns.
I want to remember and really feel that small, consistent steps add up. I want to remember that we are part of a much larger, long-term arc toward cooperation and equality.
Perhaps we live in a Star Wars movie. We are all part of the epic struggle between good and evil.
The Force is still with us – we just have to call on it.
