Leadership for Large-Scale Change

On May 1–2, 2025, the Aspen Institute and the Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance convened 100 experienced practitioners — nonprofit and foundation leaders, former government administrators, CEOs, and scholars — at our D.C. offices over an agenda on “Leadership for Large-Scale Change.”

I was invited to attend, formally in my capacity as an Aspen Institute Communications Associate, but also as someone with a long-standing interest in the art and practice of leadership, rooted in my days working for the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program and as an MBA graduate.

For two days, participants discussed the distinctive challenges of and skillsets required for achieving societal goals that transcend the means and modes of any single individual or organization, exploring the possibility of formalizing a program that would do so rigorously and regularly. Sessions were anchored around case study workshops —  in which iron sharpened iron on issues ranging from youth social and emotional learning (SEL), decarbonizing the global shipping industry, and ending preventable deaths of newborn infants — before unveiling frameworks of systems change to illustrate what it might be like to study large-scale change as a field.

What interested me most were the unplanned conversations — especially the ones which raised the tensions and even paradoxes in pursuing large-scale change. I’ve worked with the Aspen Institute in some capacity dating back to 2019. What makes this organization, and the people who work here, so special to me is the capacity and inclination to curate a room of unlikely allies, and create space for them to say what’s often left unsaid.

I left personally invigorated:

• By the health policy expert proposing that the strongest signal our brains respond to is fear, and if left unmanaged, fear will spread more quickly than anything else you might be trying to spread in a network;
• By the idea that people are not resistant to change. People are good at change, but resistant to being changed;
• And by a quote of the author Anne Lamott, that “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.” We all know lighthouses  in our lives, steadfast in serving their communities without personal credit or attainment.

Participants from four continents, across various sectors and focus areas, shared their experiences and hopes, tested one another’s assumptions, and refused to shy away from the tensions that come along with such daring propositions of large-scale change.

Nathaniel Foote, co-lead of the meeting (along with the Aspen Institute’s David Langstaff) and co-founder of the Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance, shared his observation of the “field” of large-scale leadership of social change: There is a lot of investment in identifying and supporting rising leaders, such as through fellowships and grants, but not as much support for advanced practitioners who are leading change efforts that may take decades, or even lifetimes, to achieve. 

How does large-scale change really happen? Is there a science to large-scale leadership? Or should we prioritize deep, inner work, and the results show for themselves?

The Aspen Institute and the Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance aim to continue experimenting with what it would be like to dance with such questions, so that changemakers can systematically and thoroughly learn from each other’s mistakes and successes, and rise to the scale and complexity of our urgent challenges.

If you are interested in joining the conversation and the growing community forming around the Leadership for Large-Scale Change initiative, please reach out to the organizers, David Langstaff ([email protected]) and Nathaniel Foote ([email protected]), or follow along at https://www.largescalechange.org/.