When you look at the world today it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that there’s a crisis of leadership.

Political leaders are killing people to serve their own ambitions while flouting the international order, that’s kept us all safe for more than 75 years. Some corporate leaders are also indirectly killing people because they’re so focused on financial performance and putting profits ahead of people.

Either way appalling leadership is causing incredible suffering for millions of people.

The problem is global, but two of the most indefensible examples in the UK, that are continuing to ignite public outrage, are the Post Office scandal and the persistent pollution of the UK’s rivers, by the water companies.

How do we stop this depressing parade of ‘bad actors’. How do we stop all this pain and suffering?

It’s clear that leaders don’t do terrible things to be deliberately malicious. Most believe they’re actually doing something positive. There are very few genuinely evil people in the world, despite the stories we’re fed by Hollywood.

The problem is we have unsophisticated leaders, who are in over their heads, wrestling with a level of complexity that they’re simply not equipped to deal with. Their immaturity often manifests as excessive self-belief. It’s common for these leaders to believe that they’re the “smartest person in the room”. Some think they’re above the law and can manipulate markets or the system for their own benefit.

Interestingly, the pattern of bad behaviour is almost identical in most of these scandals. This is because these leaders are all operating from the same basic level of immaturity. Put in very basic metaphorical terms: six-year-olds will behave like six-year-olds. The choices a six-year-old makes and the justification they give for their bad behaviour is the same regardless of which country or which organisation they are operating from.

Let’s zoom in on one of largest corporate accounting frauds in US history - the 2001 Enron scandal. The architects of this sorry story were chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay, aided and abetted by COO Jeffrey Skilling and CFO Andrew Fastow.

It was said of Ken Lay that, at University, he was one of the most ethical, strait-laced and righteous people, and that the young Ken Lay would have been horrified by the man he later became.

This remind me of the CS Lewis quote, and I paraphrase; “the road to Hell is a gradual one, soft underfoot, without signposts”.

Lay died prematurely before he could be sentenced. Skilling got 24 years in prison and Fastow was sentenced to 6 years. Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on this scandal, was cited as one of Time magazine’s person of the year in 2002.

Many books have been written about such scandals; many films and documentaries have been made detailing the terrible things that have been done, in virtually every industry. All of them point to a profound failure of leadership and a profound lack of maturity.

Will they happen again? Yes, 100%. So, here’s the most interesting question:

Can they be prevented?

As someone who’s spent his life researching the causes of human suffering then testing solutions that can reduce the risk of poor decisions and poor leadership in organisations, I came to the conclusion that leaders exist on a continuum of pebbles to sponges.

In many ways this is an update to Carol Dweck’s work on fixed and growth mindsets, with less of a bias toward cognitive capability and expanded to include multiple intelligences or what are now called “lines of development”.

Dweck's work is now considered somewhat out of date. Partly because the evidence has since suggested that children with ‘growth’ mindsets don’t perform any better than children with ‘fixed’ mindsets.

Dweck originally suggested that people with a fixed mindset tend to avoid challenges (in case they fail and expose their limitations), give up easily when faced with obstacles, see effort as pointless or even as a sign of inadequacy ("if you're truly talented, you shouldn't need to try hard"), and feel threatened by the success of others. They also take criticism personally rather than see it as useful feedback.

In contrast she suggested that people with a growth mindset believe that abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Intelligence and talent are seen as starting points. People with a growth mindset embrace challenges as opportunities to stretch themselves, persist in the face of setbacks, see effort as the path to mastery, learn from criticism, and draw inspiration from others' success rather than feeling envious.

Personally, I am in the latter camp, and, as a developmentalist, I believe nearly everyone can develop. I see leadership development in the same way that I see child development. Children go through very well-described stages of physical development, as well as cognitive and emotional development. The same is true for all adults.

This means everyone can ‘grow up’. But that doesn’t mean that they do.

And the nuance here is that adults may grow up in some of their ten key intelligences and not in others. You can have adults who are cognitively very sophisticated but have very low emotional intelligence, for example.

Helping leaders to grow up, to become more mature and sophisticated can’t happen if they first don’t ‘wake up’ to the fact that they can, or in some cases need to, grow up.

Also growing up sometimes is about timing. You can’t force puberty to happen any more than you can force someone to grow up morally, emotionally or behaviourally. Dweck has now conceded this point and admitted she placed too much emphasis on effort and ignored timing.

Growing up is also about receptivity. The best coach in the world could sit with some leaders for hours, every day, and there might still be no change. Nothing is really going in (they have yet to wake up). No flexibility, and little adaptability.

This is what we call a pebble.

Thankfully, other leaders are an absolute joy to work with.

They’re ambitious about their own maturity and curious about what it takes for them to level up and become a more sophisticated version of themselves. They dedicate time and effort to improving their intelligence across the ten key lines of development. These are the “sponges”.

So, we’re suggesting that there’s a nuanced continuum that covers all the ten key intelligences. This continuum allows us to move from a pebble to a sponge.

The question you should be asking yourself is: “where am I on this continuum?”

And: “Can I become more of a sponge across all the intelligence that matter?”

If you really want to get fancy, sponges can occasionally ‘shut for business’ and act a bit like a pebble for a short period. This actually enhances their ability to function as a sponge (so the simple continuum metaphor has more depth, but let’s keep it simple for now).

Furthermore, as AI invades the workplace, it’s likely that the pebbles will be left behind

So, the future will belong to the sponges.