About | Enlightened Enterprise Academy

DAUNTED?

Today’s overlapping crises expose the failures of outdated Enlightenment thinking. A New Enlightenment is needed. Join the Enlightened Enterprise Academy to participate in global learning network of pioneers and help shape it. Together we can make it happen. And together the journey will be less daunting.

"Undaunted: How Successful Leaders Face Up to Wicked Problems and Avoid Predictable Surprises" was the title of a lecture Paul Barnett, Founder of the Enlightened Enterprise Academy gave in late 2019, and the title of a conference he curated in March 2020. Between these two events the COVID pandemic emerged and the themes were suddenly very real and topical.

It wasn't long after nations went into lockdown's and implemented emergency measures that people started expressing the hope we might "build back better," and that a "better new normal" might be possible. Nobody was very clear about what "better" meant, but it highlighted a pre-existing dissatisfaction with the status quo. Why?

On reflection Paul concluded there was a general sense that "the system isn't working" - that none of the systems we depend on were working well. The banking and finance system had crashed around ten years before, but concern was being expressed about the failings in health, government, the legal system, education, energy, transport etc.

In the last five years things have become much worse in the eyes of many, and in reality. The pandemic, wars, geopolitical tensions and troubles with international trade - all have exposed many serious flaws. Extreme levels of inequality, the myth of meritocracy, the rise of political extremism and the collapse in social cohesion. They are clear to see and impossible to ignore.

The world had been described as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) several years before the pandemic; the result of many factors including digital disruption and climate change. More recently the challenges have been labelled a Metacrisis and a Permacrisis.

During his reflections, Paul came to a conclusion these trends are the symptoms of something far more important. Back in 2020 he realised we are at the early stages of a epochal change. the type that is measured in centuries not decades. He suggested that in time it will be recognised as a period of upheaval on a par with the transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment three centuries ago, or even greater.

Paul argues changes are needed. Enlightenment thinking still dominates the way many see the world, in the West especially. But much of that thinking is at best limiting, and at worst dangerously outdated. For this reason he began to argue that we need a "New Enlightenment," to transcend the limitations and the flaws of the first. And this thinking led to the creation of the Enlightened Enterprise Academy in early 2020.

A growing number of other people are now demanding change. Some wish to help drive progressive change. The Enlightened Enterprise Academy believes such people exist at all levels, in organisations of all types, and in all parts of the world. We wish to support those people in pioneering the New Enlightenment.

UNLEARN

The New Enlightenment requires us to align our thinking, being, and doing to the pursuit of a more dignified and sustainable future.

To become enlightened, we must first become conscious of our existing ways of thinking: why we think as we do, how these habits shape our sense of self, and how they drive our actions. Too often we operate on autopilot, repeating inherited patterns. This is not surprising: for more than three centuries, the ideas of the Enlightenment have been deeply embedded in Western thought and have influenced the wider world.

The Enlightenment gave us powerful tools: the scientific method, technological innovation, and the ability to analyse phenomena down to atomic levels. These advances enabled progress and control. Yet the shadow side of the Enlightenment is equally clear: an overemphasis on reductionism, dominance, and abstraction, has contributed to many of our current crises.

To move beyond these limitations, we must consciously distinguish between what still serves us well and what no longer does. Just as importantly, we must recognise that language and stories are the vehicles by which outdated assumptions are sustained. By creating new narratives, we create space for new ways of living. This is the essence of a New Enlightenment.

A central task of this New Enlightenment is aligning thinking, being, and doing:

Thinking differently: examining inherited assumptions, questioning entrenched categories, and cultivating fresh perspectives. Thinking shapes the lens through which we interpret the world.
Being differently: allowing these shifts in thought to transform our sense of self and our way of relating, to each other, to nature, and to the future. Being is grounded in values and intentions.
Doing differently: translating renewed thought and renewed being into practice, through choices, actions, and systems that embody dignity, responsibility, and care. Doing makes the new real.

When these three dimensions are aligned, change becomes coherent and sustainable. Thought without practice drifts into abstraction; action without reflection descends into reaction. Integration is what allows us to transcend the shadows of the past and step into a different future.

Importantly, there have always been voices warning of the limits of the first Enlightenment. Though often ignored, they are not lost. They provide the foundation for Paul Barnett’s first book with the Enlightened Enterprise Academy, Beyond the First Light: A New Enlightenment is Called For. Currently being serialised in The Salon, and in print in late 2025, the book reframes these warnings as a call to action.

This call will be deepened through dialogues, future publications, and practical initiatives from the Academy. Their purpose is not merely intellectual, but practical: to help leaders and organisations learn to think, be, and do differently. Only then can we build the foundations of a New Enlightenment capable of meeting the challenges of our age.

A NEW

ENLIGHTENMENT

The Enlightenment gave us reason. The New Enlightenment must give us dignity.

One of the defining features of the Enlightenment was separation. On the one hand, this meant breaking things apart to understand them, analysing nature down to the atomic level. On the other, it meant separating humanity from nature and the universe, of which we are inseparably a part. As cosmologists such as Brian Swimme remind us, this dualism was never real; it was only a way of thinking. Yet it gave rise to the belief that we could control and exploit whatever served our purposes.

That mindset shaped not only how we relate to the natural world but also how we treat one another. People became “human resources.” Relationships became transactional. Our ways of thinking and doing reshaped our ways of being, often to our own detriment. And we now struggle to see the whole for the parts, "the wood for the trees".

Our understanding of value has been distorted, reduced to price and stripped of dignity. As Oscar Wilde observed, we know "the price of everything and the value of nothing." Robert Kennedy expressed much the same concern when he lamented that GDP measures everything “except that which makes life worthwhile.”

The New Enlightenment seeks to expose these distortions and help us transcend them. It calls us to question what we value, how we value, and how we relate - to each other, to other beings, and to the planet and our environment.

Systems thinking can restore the big picture that reductionist thinking obscured. And Paul Barnett’s Dignity Theory of Value, being developed through the Enlightened Enterprise Academy, highlights a way of thinking about value that can supplement Value For Money based decision-making. The result will be better decisions.

Paul is currently working on a series of three books that will explore the New Enlightenment in depth, alongside dialogues, publications, and initiatives of the Academy. But one thing is already clear....

The adoption of this New Enlightenment, rooted not in separation but in dignity, will represent nothing less than a paradigm shift in how we think, how we live, and what we do to create value.

Paul does not have all the answers. It will take the collective brain of a global faculty and membership to realise the New Enlightenment. So we invite you to be part of these efforts.