The 21st century leaders face complex problems, ranging from terrorist attacks, the growing elderly population and the bad effects of global warming. How did these problems arise and what are innovative solutions to these complex problems?
Through the continuous development of our economy, there will be a continuing need for fossil fuels in the world. Although with the development of other sources of energy, fuels remain the world’s most important energy source. This will bring out the importance of Islam as a big provider of oil. The Islamic countries occupy a major percentage of oil providers. These countries will be enriched with export of their fuel and become major leaders in the world economy; however, this may have other global impacts. As the Islam is gaining more economic and political power the conflict between nations also increase. The impact on the Western world would be the devastating effect of terrorism bought in by these countries. Through the chaos built into the society of Islam, more and more people suffer from wars, conflicts keeping them away from global peace and welfare. The situation worsens when different religious background fight for each other’s status and beliefs and the lack of communication and understanding between people decreases. The fight over fossil fuels also creates one of the world’s biggest problems. There is growing violence and inflamed extremist movements in the region, contributing to human injuries and death.
The tragic experience of 911 puts the whole issue into perspective. The September 11th has become an important date in history. On this date, Islamic extremists upon the States of America attacked the most active economic centers of New York. The incident constituted a terrorist suicide attacks. The attack resulted in badly damaged buildings and destroyed the World Trade Centers and thousands of death and injuries. The motive of the attack was to bleed America to bankruptcy. The whole mission was a planned terrorist attack by Al-Quaeda and was condemning the Americans for plundering their resources. With the increase in political and economic power in the Islam, more and more Americans are under threat of new terrorist attacks and the main Islamic region also experiences terrors and wars. Another example of terrorist attack is the Anthrax attacks that happened in the States taking lives of other innocent people.
The solution to this problem is a complex process, not to be done in only one day. First of all, the States improved their security system and predicts about other terrorist attacks and make appropriate defense to these attacks. An improved security system and immigration and custom policies can decrease the number of terrorist attacks in the country. Moreover, through action of rebuilding up the country after its attack on Islam, the Americans are trying to change opinions of Islamic people on the nation. However, if the fundamental problem of misunderstanding, mutual conflicts and wars are not solved, there will be continuous bad outcomes within the Islamic countries. What more can we do in improving the system and reduce mutual conflicts and spread peace over the region? A number of actions have been taken including making of documentary movies informing the public about the devastating effects of September 11th on economy and its cause. Children in the Islamic countries are coming together in hope of gaining mutual understanding and cooperation in achieving peace in the countries. “Promises” is a documentary movie made on the issue to educate people about the importance of mutual talking and understanding of the cultural differences between nations. There are already steps taken by people to increase connectedness between people. Peace declaration and speeches can be given at a national level in order to promote world peace and welfare. For countries at war, there is big need for shelters and food. Proper resources can be taken into these countries through donations. There is need of collective effort into improving the situation in these Islamic countries and the promotion of world peace.
There is an increasing trend of growing elderly people in the world population. All the baby boomers generations will soon reach their time of retirement. The increasing trend poses problems of working labor, since there are much less number of x-generation that will be in the work force. Through statistics, there will be the same number of 0-14 and 15-29 years old people from the year 2002 to year 2050; however, the number of people from 30-64 and 65 years old will be increasing from around three billions to six billions. How is the world going to cope for this increase in the elderly population and what are the impacts of this in our every day life? First, the people available to work will decease rapidly and there will be increased demand for human welfare from the elderly population. This dependency to welfare will soon have a big impact on economy and makes the economy more vulnerable. The increased demand for human welfare will cause a shortage in the welfare system and will require more positions in the areas like health care.
The area of health care will experience a big shortage of staff, especially in the age vulnerable countries such as Japan and Italy. With the number of health care professionals right now, we are experiencing constant shortage of physicians and nurses, making their working environment extremely harsh. There are often over-worked clinicians, surgery staffs and nurses. The number of mistakes also increases due to this overload of work and shortage of equipment in Quebec. What is the solution in to decreasing the number of iatrogenic problems in the present health care system? What will we be facing with decreased number of workforce in global economy? There are actions to be taken in order to better prepare us into this big change.
There are innovative ways we can solve this problem. First, there are increasing number of trained doctors and nurses in Quebec. We must provide them with the best leadership trainings to increase their sensitivity to patients. There are the pre-medicine programs preparing the very best leaders becoming doctors at a very increased pace. We can provide in addition a leadership-training program focusing on quality, people and service, knowledge, innovation, action and results and goals and productivity. These trainings will be very beneficial to today’s health professionals facing information overload, chaos and complexity in their job fields. There will be improved communication between the trainees by providing them with small group discussion and talks in groups of 15 to 20 people with a specified leader each time. In this way, everyone will have the chance to lead the group and experience the art of leading. There will be more information sessions on leadership training and prepare them in becoming best leaders in the new 21st century. After experiencing these well-prepared leadership programs, future physicians will be better prepared in the workforce to face shortage problems and become real leaders.
At the fast pace of industrial revolution, there are also more and more environmental changes accompanying it. Environmental problems such as air pollution, water pollution and green house effect leading to global warming all have contributed to the gradual change in environment. The wastes produced from industries are dumped into water supplies, filling it with waste materials. This contributes to the growth of green algae in water and changes our whole ecosystem with extinction of certain species of aquatic lives. Smokes come from factories leading to air pollution and cars emitting carbon dioxide makes a hole in the ozone layer, removing our protective layer from the sun, exposing us to the bad effects of ultraviolet light. Global warming from green house effect melts down the arctic glaciers, leaving us the risk of loosing our land mass in the future generations to come. How much do these environmental problems affect our everyday life?
Well, the question is answered when we become aware of the floods and tsunamis happening each year in the Island countries and countries close to the sea. Also, droughts are happening more and more frequent in some areas of the world. The impact on the global scale is huge, with countries losing their shelters, families, homes and schools. In addition to this, farms and fisheries and entire communities vanished at Indonesia in 2004 during a attack of tsunami. Rebuilding of the area takes lots of resources and needs a global rescue. Droughts remove food and resources for people living in the area. Tsunami also takes away non-returnable human resources. In the tsunami on Indian Ocean, there were 230.000 people killed. The impact of this on economy is also obvious. The loss of resources and the costs of rebuilding them up are big.
However, there are solutions to the problem of environmental changes. As the world becomes more and more aware of the changes taking place, more and more actions are brought to reverse the change and prevent it from worsening. City governments are planning out projects to raise environmental concerns and tells people about the importance of recycling and energy saving. There are innovative ideas educating communities such as Clean-up Chinatown, Summer Environment project that teach people the importance of keeping our living environment free of wastes and reduce the amount of waste we produce. The education of these issues should start from a young age. The kids themselves are important consumers of a variety of products and can influence their parents on the awareness of environmental protection. So, there is need to give talks to primary, high school or even university students about the bad effects of pollution and global warming, train them into practicing the reduction of wastes and carbon dioxide from cars. Corporations should adopt quantum seeing in order to see the impact of their actions on the external world and should be trained to have quantum thinking and think holistically about the global impact of the actions rather than producing their own product and make a profit.
Overall, as a McGill graduate perspective, the issues of Islamic country instability, the growing elderly populations and the environmental problems, such as global warming are having continuous impact on the society. It is the responsibility of future leaders to solve the problem and give out innovative solutions. There are changes and things already done to prevent the worsening of the problems. Leadership and innovations are the keys to this complex problem.