What people think they can do together can shape outcomes as much as any policy or formal plan.

Albert Bandura was one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. Long before “social emotional learning” or “mindset” became common language, he argued that change is a process of learning—how people gradually develop new ways of thinking and acting.

Embracing the challenge of renewal in personal and political life

Parker J. Palmer is a writer, educator, and activist whose work sits at the intersection of spirituality, education, community, and democratic life. A lifelong Quaker, he doesn’t celebrate Easter in a traditional liturgical sense, but engages it as a season and symbol of resurrection, resistance, and renewal. In a recent essay, he reflects on how “resurrection” can feel more threatening than comforting, both personally and politically, because genuine new life asks us to leave behind familiar forms of “death-in-life” and risk change.

Education belongs at the center of any serious conversation about the future.

We have confused education with the delivery of content. For more than a century, most schools in the industrial world have been organized around a simple transaction: adults hold knowledge; children receive it. The measure of success is how much sticks. The tools are lessons, tests, grades, and credentials—a production line that begins with small children and ends, theoretically, with prepared adults.The theory is tidy. The results are not.Across the world, students are anxious, disengaged, and increasingly convinced that what happens in school has little to do with what matters in life.

Motivation, curiosity, and values are not add‑ons to learning; they are its engine.

Mary Helen Immordino‑Yang is a psychologist and neuroscientist who studies how emotion, culture, and social relationships shape learning and brain development. In two decades of research she has learned that it is neurobiologically impossible to separate deep thinking and durable learning from the feelings and meanings that surround them. Her book Emotions, Learning, and the Brain is a collection of research‑based essays showing that deep thinking and durable learning emerge from our emotional and relational life, not from cognition alone.

We cannot predict the future, but we can choose our direction.

Joanna Macy warns that the greatest danger we face is not collapse but our tendency to let ourselves go numb. We may not know the path ahead, but we know what we love.

"The thread running through every phase of our development is relational."

Isabelle Hau is executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and author of Love to Learn: The Transformative Power of Care and Connection in Early Education. She cares about what happens to children when no one is paying attention to them. Now she's applying that interest to the question of what happens to all of us when we stop paying attention to each other.She makes an important case that as AI reshapes education, work, and social life, the next crucial frontier is “relational intelligence” (RQ): our capacity to build trust, navigate difference, repair ruptures, and create meaning together.

We are a lot smarter together.

Bletchley Park was one of history's most consequential experiments in collective intelligence. Mathematicians, linguists, chess players, crossword enthusiasts, classicists, and clerks worked in deliberate combination — each contributing a different kind of mind to a problem no single discipline could crack alone. At its peak nearly 10,000 people worked here, three quarters of them women. The intelligence they produced together is estimated to have shortened WWII by two years.

The long game is not a strategy for winning; it is a way of belonging.

Social change unfolds over generations, not election cycles. Margaret Wheatley tells a story about colleagues who once met with the Dalai Lama while feeling deeply discouraged that their work for change seemed to have little impact. They asked whether their efforts would ever make a difference, given how dire things looked. With a smile, he replied: “Oh, don’t worry about that. Your work will bear influence in about 700 years.”

Our task is to participate wisely in a world where collapse and rebirth are unfolding at the same time.

None of us has to do everything, but each of us can do something. In Jewish teaching, Rabbi Tarfon says, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it”—a line often associated with the work of repairing the world (tikkun olam). No one is asked to save everything; each of us is asked to take up our share of the work through whatever mix of creativity, care, and courage is available to us, right where we are.

Redesigning organizations and markets so they regenerate rather than extract

Alan Moore is very clear about one thing: we have reached the limits of the old industrial operating system, built on assumptions of predictability, hierarchy, and linear cause and effect. He describes a “trilemma” of social, organizational, and economic complexity that makes those assumptions untenable: the collision of rising social expectations and inequities, increasingly intricate and interdependent organizational systems, and an economic order built for linear growth and efficiency rather than resilience and shared flourishing.

America has never been as innocent as it imagines itself to be.

Reinhold Niebuhr was a perceptive critic of the American spirit, if not downright prophetic. The Irony of American History, which he wrote in 1952, was his attempt to make sense of the United States’ rise to global power in the early Cold War.

How to build inclusion and collaboration in your communities

Susie Wise teaches and coaches leaders in innovation, equity design, and inclusive storytelling at the Stanford d.school. She wrote this book to make what she sees as a simple, obvious case: belonging is a fundamental human need and a central goal of equity work. In this compact manual, small enough to serve as a field guide, she equips everyday leaders with practical design tools to build cultures of belonging in the communities that matter to them.