Greetings from the air as I travel to Manitoba again this week. This part of the world is still blanketed in snow, and I feel like a messenger of spring after the amazing weekend of sun at home in Vancouver!

This past week has been a holy one for many millions of Jews and Christians, celebrating Passover and Easter  respectively. The two holidays are of course inextricably linked, and both, in their own beautiful ways celebrate liberation. And that got me thinking,  what does liberation look like through a lens of leadership?

There are a number of possible places to go in exploring the question; we might for example wonder what we mean by liberation, and or what we mean by leadership in this context. Both very important questions. What about if we wondered about the changes we have seen in the last 10- 15 years and the emerging changes coming up? Might they give us a hint that the main focus for leaders in the coming years will be liberating ourselves and each other from arbitrary top down authority and management, and towards how to engage on a more colleague to colleague, association based  economy. Moving from I’m the leader because of my time served, or my experience gained competence and more on a shared leadership model where our leaders come out of expertise and knowledge in a particular competence area for a given time under the circumstances. And that lens raises the very important question, what of wisdom? Interesting research highlighted in a recent Ideas program on CBC Radio http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2013/02/27/a-word-to-the-wise-part-1/ notes that ‘selfishness and evil can be included in definitions of intelligence, but not in definitions of wisdom.’ In other words, as we move into a more shared leadership model, we need to find ways and means of honouring wisdom to counteract the risk of a group of simply intelligent humans making very bad decisions. And, the research shows that ‘wisdom’, that is self awareness, compassion for others, and action towards common good is not simply dependent upon chronological age, although that is clearly one way of developing it. Neuroscience is showing that making time for contemplation and meditation will actually increase the brain’s ability to be more self aware, be more compassionate and more likely to choose actions towards the common good. Young or old, we can be wiser, if we choose. And in the emerging economies, we will need as much wisdom as we can muster.

May we each find some time this week for contemplation and meditation to start to increase our individual and collective wisdom.