New Paradigms in a Complex World
By Dr. Lance Newey
I was half-way through a 5-day training workshop teach-
ing entrepreneurship to parents and small business owners in
Colombia when I had a personal and professional watershed.
I wondered: Even if these people learn all this and set up busi-
nesses, what are we doing all of this for?
As a business school academic, I wrestle with this very
issue as waves of millennials come through my classroom
questioning all the assumptions on which my classical busi-
ness and economic training are based. They see the dark side
of obsessive economic development and vote no to continuing
this paradigm.
I felt the threat of irrelevance as I realized I was stuck in
an outmoded paradigm. I recalled one of the most powerful
statements from the 2013 World Economic Forum: “The
leaders of today are trained for a world that no longer exists.”
This was me.
Figure 1
The Eight Components of Wellbeing
Material
Physical
Economic Social
Cultural Environmental
Psychological
36 APR-JUN 2018
Spiritual
The Pilgrimage: Searching for Answers When Your Fa-
miliar Paradigm is Broken
I see it as a solemn responsibility to not just talk about
what’s wrong in the world, but to develop solutions. As an
educator, I’m in a prime position to help develop a new gener-
ation of leaders.
Below is part of a model we are developing at the Univer-
sity of Queensland Business (QB) School and testing on the
ground in Alaska, India, and Norway. The model is an answer
to the question that punched me in the face in 2013: What are
we doing all this for?
Wellbeing: A New Paradigm for the Next Generation of
Leaders
A credible answer is the concept of wellbeing. Our
research defines wellbeing as the capacity of an entity (an
individual, a community, an organization, a society, the globe)
to resiliently flourish. We are interested in how eight compo-
nents of wellbeing interact: economic, environmental, social,
cultural, psychological, spiritual, material, and physical.
We focus on these eight because each balance the other
to form an integrated whole, creating a powerful framework
to guide individuals, businesses, and nations. Problems arise
when we fail to see how these eight components work togeth-
er.
In the past, we’ve trained leaders to specialize in just one
or two components. If you faced a complex issue, you assem-
bled a multidisciplinary team and hoped some eclectic result
would emerge. But this approach, I argue, is at the heart of
why we aren’t moving forward. To prepare leaders, we need to
look at the interaction between these components. We need to
look at polarities.