Cast your mind back to a time before this tiny virus had us in its grip.

How were we doing?

If there was an end of term report card what might it say?

Well, of course, we have worked hard. We have been industrious. Much has been achieved.

• The world has been shrunk. Men on the moon. Women in to space

• Massive improvements for many in medicine, health and wealth

• A greater choice of consumer goods than ever and more sophisticated financial products and services to help us own them

But it is not all puppy dog tails and sweet, sweet roses.

• Globally we have millions of people without enough food and shelter fleeing wars and discrimination – running from their fellow humans

• Habitat being destroyed and species extinction running at alarming rates

• Climate collapsing, with real fears that sea level rises will make the floods caused by increasingly warm winds carrying higher than level moisture levels look like April showers

• Plastics, visible and invisible inside our bodies and in every place on earth

• Widespread deplorable practices of animal husbandry required to provide us with affordable volumes of flesh, milk and eggs

• An accumulation of capital, wealth, by a few massive corporates, celebrities and billionaires. While millions live and die in poverty with little or no chance of escape

• Societies patterned by unfair discrimination

• Air that is not safe to breathe. Water that is not safe to drink. And a civilisation that can be bought to its knees by such a simple thing

• Our children suffering levels of anxiety and poor mental health that we have not been able to respond to with timely care and compassion

• Hundreds of millionaires, billionaires, politicians and celebrities taking private jets to Davos to wring their hands over the state of the world

For some the message is loud and clear. Leadership is failing us. As leadership developers we have to accept, explore and develop our role in this.

Perhaps we can help best by exploring whether leadership and leadership development is failing us and the planet? And if it is, then as leadership developers, educators, citizens, what is our role in this?

And how might we learn and develop ourselves and our practice?

Over the coming weeks and months we will hold a series of online meetings with an aim to develop a generative dialogue to explore this issues surrounding Leadership and Leadership Development with a view to learning together and looking for possibilities of a new way forward. To generate a community of people who carefully and gently construct and develop a ‘pool of shared meaning’ from which new possibilities might form.

If you are interested in developing this new way of organsing together please do join the conversation.

Once you have booked your place we will send you details of how to join the conversation.

John Varney and Mike Chitty