Then there are the perennial problems of inequities in educa tion and access to opportunity; countries and cultures that privi lege one elite group while repressing others; nations that are failing and devolving into warring fiefdoms-and on and on.
Problems of such complexity and urgency require an approach to problem-solving that integrates our self-awareness and how we act, and our empathy and compassion, with a nuanced understand ing of the systems at play.
To begin to address such messes, we need leaders who focus on several systems: geopolitical, economic, and environmental, to name a few. But sadly for the world, so many leaders are preoccu pied with today's immediate problems that they lack bandwidth for the long-term challenges we face as a species. Peter Senge, who teaches at the MIT Sloan School of Manage ment, developed the "learning organization," which brings a sys tems understanding into companies.15 "Essential to understanding systems is your time horizon," Senge told me. "If it's too short, you'll ignore essential feedback loops and come up with short-term fixes that won't work in the long run. But if that horizon is long enough, you'll have a chance of seeing more of the key systems at play."
"The bigger your horizon," adds Senge, "the bigger the system you can see."
But "transforming large-scale systems is hard," said Rebecca Henderson at an MIT meeting on global systems. Henderson teaches on ethics and the environment at Harvard Business School and uses a systems framework to seek solutions. For instance, re cycling, she points out, represents "change at the margins," while abandoning fossil fuels altogether would represent a system shift.
Henderson, who teaches a surprisingly popular course at the business school on "reimagining capitalism," favors transparency that would accurately price say, C02 emissions. That would cause markets to favor any means that lowers those emissions.