"Enlightened enterprises create sustainable widely shared prosperity measured in terms of human flourishing and wellbeing, so that all may live dignified lives - which is their right"
Paul Barnett
Enlightened Enterprise Academy
Many of today's biggest challenges were not challenges during the first Enlightenment. So, when it comes to addressing them, the thinking of that time leaves us in the dark. A "New Enlightenment" is essential if we are to address our 21st century challenges. And we must be willing to challenge the way we understand the world.
These arguments are central to the way the Enlightened Enterprise Academy thinks and what it does. And a core element of what it does is to run the Salon, bringing together the leading thinkers of our day from a very broad range of disciplines, to explore the challenges of our time. This approach is inspired by the Paris salons of the 18th century that were the catalyst for the first Enlightenment. We wish to be a catalyst for the New Enlightenment.
Transformational change is needed if we are to reduce the frequency and scale of the crises we have been seeing, and if we are to stand any chance of transcending the highly complex challenges we face in the twenty first century.
We are faced with many significant crises, referred to as the "Polycrisis", "Permacrisis" or "Metacrisis". They are each large scale, highly complex, systemic risks. Collectively they represent an existential risk to humanity – to whether we continue to existence, and to how we experience our existence. For this reason I prefer to speak of the "Existential Crisis", rather than use the other new terms which, whilst valuable, offer only partial understandings of the greater problem.
The transformation has to start with each and every one of us recognising why we think the world works the way it does, where those ideas came from, and why they are often wrong or, at best, not very useful today.
Faced with a crisis many choose to be Wilfully Blind, to adopt the stance of denial. They usually do so out of fear. They fear the uncertainty that is often a feature of transformational change. But there are ways to address that, and we must address it. We must address it because the crises we must transcend threaten our existence and that of future generations, or the quality of our existence and that of future generations.
Whilst the majority may choose to be wilfully blind, we believe there to be individuals at every level in every business, organisation or institution that recognise “the system isn’t working,” that many ideas are outdated, and that transformational change is needed. There are also a limited number of organisations that "get it."
We believe many of these people and organisations wish to help drive the change. They will be the pioneers of the New Enlightenment, and we wish to establish a global community that supports them. Are you one of them? Do you want to join us? The Enlightened Enterprise Academy can help you "be the change you want to see in the world," to quote Gandhi.