July, 24, 2026 | Mike Rowlands | Blueprint for Resilience | Leadership

Turning Leadership Inside Out

In an unprecedented time of complexity, when change is being thrust upon us, the Inner Development Goals offer a perspective on the inner change we each need to be better leaders in the face of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

Mike Rowlands
Partner and CEO of Junxion, Mike has spent more than 20 years working to catalyse social responsibility and sustainability.

To affect the systems around us, changing them for the better, our starting point may be intimate and personal: What if leadership begins with the internal practices of our relationships with ourselves and our patterns of thinking?

Let’s start by considering our context. It almost goes without saying that we’re in a time of incredible uncertainty—a convergence of a potentially existential climate crisis, runaway biodiversity loss, dramatic societal polarization, and rapidly widening economic inequality.

This is the first in a pair of posts expanding on a keynote address delivered by Junxion’s CEO, Mike Rowlands, at this year’s Greater Purpose Conference West, focused on the Inner Development Goals, for which Mike is an Ambassador.

Against this backdrop, the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) marked a rare moment of global consensus—a shared recognition that change is imperative, and setting out a framework for bringing about a more sustainable future, where nobody is left behind. They act as a blueprint for the purpose economy, designed around long-term well-being for people and the planet.

The support has been undeniable—across sectors and geographies, organizations have stepped up to adopt and report against these goals. And yet, progress is falling short.

Nearly half of the goals are progressing too slowly, and about a fifth are actively regressing. It’s clear that as a global system, we’re losing ground, failing in our pursuit of a sustainable future for ourselves and for future generations.

This could stop us in our tracks. Certainly, it should have us worried—and many are, to the point of despair.

For business leaders, this gap is reflected in stalled initiatives, fatigue around change efforts, and strategies that struggle through execution.

This raises a curious possibility: that our traditional approach to leadership, not our ambition, could be the missing piece. This would mean the barrier lies in how business leaders define problems, make decisions, and inspire others within the systems we’re trying to change. If we want different outcomes, we need to rethink what we do and how we do it. We need to change how we lead.

Put another way, we’re not going to solve for the Sustainable Development Goals at the same level of leadership that got us into this mess!

Our Inner Lives: A Source of Leadership Superpowers

As humans, the moments we experience—and the stories we tell ourselves about those moments—shape how we see ourselves and navigate the world around us.

Often we fail to realize how our personal experiences shape our expectations of ourselves and our performance. The first pillar of the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) is ‘Being,’ the work we do to cultivate our inner life: “Deepening our awareness of inner experiences and their dynamic relationship with the world around us nurtures embodied presence, clarity of purpose, and thoughtful responses when we face complexity.”

Similarly, our patterns of thinking, or processing information and forming actionable insights, can be hampered or enhanced by our experiences. So wise leaders also develop, monitor, and manage their ‘Thinking,’ the second pillar of the IDGs: “Expanding clarity, considering diverse perspectives, and imagining long-term consequences help us navigate complexity and make wiser decisions in our interconnected world.”

We tend to see these personal factors as a separate set of traits from our identities as professional leaders. After all, leadership, especially in business, is often defined in terms of the actions we take: strategy, execution, and results shape our views of leadership. But this separation between internal traits and capacities on the one hand and objective results on the other is insufficient if we’re to develop the leadership to achieve complex goals like those embedded in the SDGs.

Five Learnable Skills in the ‘Being’ Dimension: Inner Compass, Integrity & Authenticity, Openness & Learning Mindset, Self-Awareness, and Presence.

Leaders who have strong self-awareness and personal values tend to be better at articulating challenges and ideas, which means the organizations they run tend to be more innovative. In fact, a Harvard Business study found that business leaders who test higher for integrity and other similar traits deliver five times the return on assets and generate significantly higher levels of team trust and retention.

These positive outcomes aren’t accidental. These leaders have learned or taught themselves to take in multiple perspectives, anticipate future challenges, and recognize the interconnection and interdependence between systems. In other words, they’re practicing systems thinking, scrutinizing the dynamics behind the way social, environmental, and economic issues intersect. From a governance perspective, this training shows up in a greater ability to hold on to purpose in the long-term, withstanding short-term pressures.

Five Learnable Skills in the ‘Thinking’ Dimension: Critical Thinking, Perspective Skills, Systems Thinking, Long-Term Orientation & Visioning, and Creativity.

“What if leadership isn’t about a campaign, or a plan, or a project, or a program? What if it’s not about a role, or a position? What if it’s about our relationship with ourselves?” — Mike Rowlands

This reframed perspective opens a much bigger lens on ‘leadership.’ It’s far more than the visible actions we see. It’s a set of skills that we continuously develop, with the goal of being able to pause and consider our own biases, reflect on all the influences and potential impacts of each potential decision, and respond with intention (rather than reacting on instinct).

How Might You Build This Inner Capacity?

If leadership is a lever for change, then we cannot reasonably expect to solve today’s challenges with yesterday’s approaches. For corporate leaders, this means that the capabilities that have driven success in the past may no longer be sufficient. Navigating complexity, deepening organizational resilience, and driving sustainable growth all depend on evolving how leadership teams see, think, and act together.

Success depends on evolving how leadership teams see, think, and act together.

The Inner Development Goals capture and convey the inner growth that each individual must cultivate in order to be best equipped to drive the outer impact they’re responsible to deliver, made tangible through a set of 25 leadership skills across five domains.

Together, these capabilities influence not only what decisions get made but, perhaps more importantly, how those decisions are determined and how they withstand the test of time. This directly informs leaders, teams, and organizations that can withstand stress and sustain ambition through dramatic change and disruption.

At Junxion, we’ve set out to weave the IDGs into our strategy and advisory work, using them as a compass when we’re helping boards clarify purpose, supporting CEOs to navigate complexity, or designing strategies that require significant change within their organizations.

If we’re serious about leading change, the work begins by examining the lenses through which we see the world, and asking questions that might have uncomfortable answers. As boards and CEOs, making space for this kind of reflection shapes how you respond to shocks, how quickly your team adapts, and how consistently you align with your purpose and values.

What elemental assumptions drive who you are and how you think? How do you process complexity and ambiguity? Where might you need to deepen your thinking?

These strategic questions reflect the inseparability of the quality of our leadership, of our thinking, and of our internal understanding of ourselves. Of course, this isn’t all the work of leadership; the ability to create meaningful change depends on how we show up in relationships, as part of a vastly interconnected network of systems we aim to transform, and on the actions we choose to take.

In a world defined by interconnection, where companies are profoundly entangled with the pervasive and widespread problems humanity faces, leadership is a collective pursuit—one that depends on how boards, CEOs, and their teams show up together.

That’s where we’ll turn in our next post.