In case you hadn’t noticed from my various postings elsewhere, I have recently been delivering some stuff on leadership and change in the Middle East to students of the Abu Dhabi Department of Transport. Now, we teach them that change can be precipitated by either internal or external trauma (as well as many other things) and that such trauma typically requires different responses to the ones we have historically used. While at ADMC, our venue for the events, I picked up an anthology celebrating the 22nd anniversary of the higher colleges of technology of the United Arab Emirates-the prologue is written by the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research and Chancellor of HCE. In it, he writes “It is now clear that the global economic policies and practices of the past require major structural changes for the future. It is also clear that these changes must be accompanied by appropriate social policies, greater emphasis on ethical and transparent transactions and wider individual and institutional participation in or economic activities”. Among the many questions he asks is one that particularly struck me “What differences must come about in the social and economic policies, programmes and theories if we are to smoothly and promptly reserve this global recession, live in peace and deal humanely with the needs of the world’s growing and ageing populations?”.

The global economic crisis (well, perhaps it was global but that would be how the Western-centric commentators would describe it) was surely both a trigger and an opportunity to do something different. Instead what we got, politicians doing what they know best-cutting budgets, injecting money into the economy and telling the poor that they must dig a bit deeper while rich the need to be encouraged by tax cuts for their private and commercial ventures. Has anyone seen any evidence of a radical new approach? To those of those who studied Spiral Dynamics, this crisis was a potential opportunity to shift from the rampant self-centred capitalism of orange to a more socially enlightened inclusive and green meme. Unfortunately, it looks like we have missed the boat.

Now I am a change expert, not a political theorist and so I will not suggest any solutions. What I do however suggest is that we have really really missed an opportunity. An opportunity to recognise that the capitalist system has led to massively increasing economic division even within the well-off Western Societies and even more in the developing societies of Russia, China, Africa etc.

Perhaps the young of the Arab world saw an opportunity in the global crisis that led to the Arab Spring in which case admittedly bloody revolutions might ultimately result in better life chances for their populations. Perhaps the economic pressures on the West have been spotted by China and who knows what will happen there?

If this were a single company suffering in the way that our economies have suffered, I might urge them to greater feats of employee involvement, seeking their input and their ideas to save the company and move it forward. What do we get instead – autocratic powerful managers with titles like Chancellor or Prime Minister or President deciding what is good for is all? This would not be the right answer in a commercial organisation, why should it be the right answer in a national economy?

I read a joke piece a few months ago (at least I think it was a joke) that one option might be for the government to give every adult in the UK £1 million with the proviso that they must buy a house and a car and gave 10% to charity and invest some of it in their own pensions etc-thus stimulating the housing market, the automobile market, the big society etc. A joke, or a radical option that just might generate something different and new? Of course, as with all change, we will never know unless it is tried. And it is always easier to try and do what we always did. The problem is that we will always get what we always got-an economic crisis.

Go on-have your say and please make it change centric rather than Political