One Young World 2021 Munich Summit: Reflections on a Better Future
The following is a reflection piece written by Co-founder and Chief Research Officer of the Good Data Initiative (GDI), Ari de Fauconberg, who recently attended the One Young World 2021 Munich Summit as a Solidarität Scholar while representing GDI.
In July 2021, I had the pleasure and privilege of attending the One Young World 2021 Munich Summit as a Solidarität Scholar, representing our work at Good Data Initiative (GDI). Given our ambitions within the GDI team to build the leading platform for intergenerational and interdisciplinary debate on the data economy, this seemed an ideal event to connect with similarly driven, social change-focused young leaders from over 190 countries. My goal was to leave at the end of our four days together with new connections and friends, clearly identified spaces to collaborate, and sparks of ideas for how we might help move each other’s organisations forward in our missions.
The reviews I had read about the world’s “biggest and most impactful youth leadership Summit” before I attended were polarized, yet intriguing. The vast majority of delegates who had attended past One Young World Summits in cities as diverse as London (2019), Bogota (2017), Ottawa (2016), Bangkok (2015), and Johannesburg (2013) recounted their time with glowing reviews online, depicting it as “inspiring,” “awesome,” and — in such high numbers I could not help but find it unusual — “life changing.”
The rare negative review I found primarily focused on criticizing what one non-participant dryly described as (to paraphrase) an over-saturation of “star” power; a looming presence of corporate sponsors within the summit; and for one reviewer, a sharp critique that he had found the summit mostly an exercise in platitudes. Yet, profiles of delegates past seemed to suggest that most were not ‘merely’ talking: They were taking concrete action through their organizations and initiatives to drive positive social, environmental, and/or economic transformations within their local communities and effecting change on the global stage.
As a PhD Candidate specializing in themes around organizational change and sustainability, I was intrigued. (I later found out over 44,000 other candidates must have felt the same, leading to a 1% acceptance rate.)
Delegate invitation in hand — and, careful to keep a curious and open mind — I packed my bags and soon found myself in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, surrounded by other selected young leaders from over 190 countries.
A bit about the venue: Ongoing COVID-19 health restrictions meant that we would be engaging in a hybrid conference format over the four days of the Summit.¹ Approximately 500 delegates (myself included) participated live at the Olympiapark and BMW Welt event venues in person; around 1,200 delegates attended virtually via the One Young World digital hub; and approx. 70 or so delegates attended an in-person “hub” on the United States’ East Coast.
While on the S-Bahn to my hotel, I scrolled through the agenda of planned keynote speeches, plenary sessions, and delegate workshops. It felt as if I were reading the front page of BBC News. Listed speakers ranged from Nobel Prize winner and founder of the Grameen Bank Professor Muhammad Yunus, to Chancellor of Regent’s University and social advocate Lord Dr. Michael Hastings, to Harvard Business School Professor Emerita Shoshanna Zuboff² — as well as international “Goddess of Pop” Cher, Irish musician and activist Sir Bob Geldorf, Formula One World Champion Sir Lewis Hamilton, and 2000s icon and entrepreneur Paris Hilton.
To put it simply: An academic conference this was not.
What is One Young World?
One Young World describes itself as a youth conference (18–30* years old) focused on identifying, promoting, and connecting “the world’s most impactful young leaders to create a better world, with more responsible, more effective leadership.”³ In short: Co-founders David Jones and Kate Robertson, along with their One Young World team, have developed what organisational scholars might arguably term a ‘field-configuring event’ designed to connect “the brightest young talent from every country and sector, working to accelerate social impact” for the purpose of amplifying delegates’ social change work. Drawing on One Young World’s deep public and private sector connections, their team has crafted a space where existing public figures and global leaders meet emerging ones.
So far this intention seems to be working well. Since its founding in London in 2010, the non-for-profit organization has grown to encompass a global network of over 12,000 young leaders (former delegates, now called ‘One Young World Ambassadors’ following the completion of their summit experience). These Ambassadors work together with One Young World to accelerate existing initiatives as well as establish new ventures where needed. In addition to this network of youth talent, One Young World has also partnered with over 190 global businesses, NGOs, and educational institutions to provide support for these delegates’ initiatives and offer multiple points of access where delegates and organizational representatives can connect.
The Summit Experience
A bit of COVID-19 related context: I will preface this part of my reflection by offering a quick side note that this was the first organised event I attended with more than twelve people since the European outbreak of COVID-19 in March, 2020.
First: Cameras were everywhere.
This is, of course, to be expected as part of a large, hybrid event simultaneously live streamed to over a thousand participants around the world.
Yet, I would also argue that the smoothness and professionalism of the teams filming, taking photos, and reminding participants to #OYW2021 can be explained by the extensive communications and public engagement backgrounds of One Young World’s co-founders.
Kate Robertson was previously Chairman of the Havas group (one of the world’s largest global communication groups) from 2006–2015 as well as Global President from 2013. David Jones, meanwhile, previously also worked as CEO of both Havas and Havas Worldwide, and has won awards for his work in advertising (including induction into the American Advertising Federation’s Hall of Achievement in 2005). Suffice to say, the cameras were plenty; the lighting and photo-op backdrops were excellent; and, overall, the on-stage technology operated exceptionally smoothly for such a large hybrid event.
In a world where attention remains at a premium, being able to capture your audience’s focus while providing opportunities for participants to generate their own related content is key. One Young World excels at this – though I would argue, not to the exclusion of providing substance as well.
The Summit Structure
The Summit itself was structured in six plenary session themes spread across three core days: (1) The Climate Crisis, (2) Rights and Freedoms, (3) Education, (4) Conflict Resolution, (5) Future Economies, and (6) COVID-19. These themes had been chosen by their community of 12,000 Ambassadors as those most important to explore at this year’s Summit. Each session featured (a) keynote speech(es), followed by a panel of One Young World delegate speakers who connected the theme to their lived experiences and social action organizations. Between these plenaries were workshops, networking events, and an enjoyable series of delegate dinners showcasing restaurants around Munich.
For me as well as many others with whom I spoke at the Summit, the youth delegates’ speeches were the most immediately impactful moments of our four days together. Selected delegates shared the deeply personal and often vulnerable stories behind their motivations to shape our future world through their initiatives, frequently touching on (unfortunately) common harrowing or outright traumatic incidences that had driven them to grow towards their current goals. Their words infused humanity back into experiences that are commonly stripped into mere statistics when mentioned in the popular news.
A few of the selected delegate speakers⁴:
Lavau Kwalam Nalu, a blak Melanesian multi-disciplinary storyteller and Humanitarian from Papua Niugini, spoke openly of his experience as a medical student suddenly called upon to rise up and help his country battle the COVID-19 pandemic in the midst of a desperate lack of needed medical supplies.
Ecuadorian delegate Daniela Fernandez, the Founder and CEO of Sustainable Ocean Alliance, delivered a polished and impassioned call for greater awareness of and protections against the critical climate and sustainability challenges facing our oceans today.⁴
Still another delegate speaker, gender activist and registered nurse-midwife Mamello Makhele, stressed the need for ensuring women’s bodily autonomy based on her experience of pushing for improved healthcare service delivery in rural areas of Lesotho, where early and forced teenage marriages have led to high maternal mortality rates.
While most delegate speakers attended in person, non-delegate speakers attended in equal parts live and via video (for example, Belarusian politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, American-born British financier and force behind the Magnitsky Act Bill Browder, and President of the International Olympic Committee Thomas Bach).
Those who spoke on the main Summit stage included the previously-mentioned Sir Bob Geldorf, BMW AG Managing Board Member Ilka Horstmeier, Dutch businessman and former CEO of Unilever Paul Polman, model and refugee Halima Aden, and Judge and President of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals Theodor Meron, among others. These speeches were sometimes also followed by Q&A sessions with delegates in breakout workshops, offering an even more intimate opportunity for participants and speakers to connect on topics.
After nearly a year and a half of virtual calls and conferences, it felt invigorating to be sitting in a (socially distanced) audience once more. Zoom simply does not replicate the same level of attention engagement as being part of a live audience listening to an in-person speaker.⁵
First Reflections
Looking back through my notes from the Summit, I am still struck by the breadth of speakers who took to the main stage as well as led the +30 workshop sessions: Their diversity in ages, self-identities, and life experiences encompassed an intergenerational, international, and inter-sectoral spectrum rarely found at a single event.
Of course, it must also be acknowledged that a certain degree of power and privilege is already necessary to attend an event like this. To understand how to shape and present a compelling personal narrative adhering to accepted international cultural templates of social activism; to have founded a change initiative gaining traction at a local and/or international level; or to even know of One Young World’s Summits, requires prior engagement with a network of existing leaders and change makers.
Yet, I would argue that this caveat speaks as evidence to the organisers’ goal of connecting the world’s young leaders already driving social change who are seeking to accelerate their initiative’s impacts. To be invited requires proof that a delegate has previously worked to organise action on a specific issue and that they can show a resulting real world change that they, in turn, hope to scale.
As prior academic research on innovation and entrepreneurship has shown, generating an initial idea is only one part of the equation when developing a successful innovation, venture, or even movement. Innovators also need a healthy dose of risk-taking behavior and a bias towards action, too. To dive into the messiness of organising a team, testing ideas, iterating and adapting, gathering resources, and moving forward even when the risks seem high, requires these behaviors alongside a certain degree of resilience. That resilience builds with experience and is key when predicting the future success of any given venture. The delegates I met at this year’s One Young World had, for the most part, already gathered this initial experience and were busy building their resilience — and enabling networks — further.
Turning now to more specific notes: The “star power” speakers who attended were for the most part great fun, as would be expected from people whose profession demands they be able to command a room with their performance and capture attention with their energy. (For example, actor and anti-sexism/pro-women’s rights activist Terry Crews was great at this in-person. I found it an unexpected delight to hear him speak about organizational change and the need to challenge authority through his analogies of airline industry regulation in the 1970s. Good stage presence!)
These speakers were interspersed between engagements with the Summit’s private sector partners. These partners mostly seemed to leverage their time at the Summit as a way for senior executives to either discuss or deliver speeches about organizational purpose and sustainability strategies on the main stage while younger organizational members ran knowledge-sharing workshop sessions for their fellow One Young World delegates.
For the most part, these senior executives’ talks were composed yet authentic, focused on youth-targeted pitches around three main areas: (1) actions their organisations are taking towards (and a further need for) addressing pressing social and economic inequalities; (2) the need for youth support in embedding cradle-to-cradle design in their products and services; and (3) their concerns around climate change. What I found particularly surprising, however, was the resounding message by many speakers — and especially the Summit’s corporate partners — of the need for young people to hold multinational corporations and national leaders to account (i.e., understood to be those with power) when it comes to how we can collectively address the most pressing social, environmental, and economic challenges in the world today.
Final Thoughts
Unlike the critical reviewers I had come across online before my experience as a delegate, I did not find this year’s One Young World Summit to be mostly an exercise in platitudes nor overshadowed by a looming presence of corporate sponsors. Rather, most speeches, workshops, and networking sessions seemed specifically designed to give delegates space to both connect with others whose goals and experiences resonated with them and ask for help where needed. Many delegates and representatives alike seemed candid about their work. Most offered criticisms where due, yet framed them by asking, “what can be done to make this better?” Perhaps it was the experience of attending such a large in-person event after the forced social hibernation of this past year, but I found this sense of authenticity to be refreshing.
In the spirit of this candor, I will also admit that I now grasp what prior delegates meant by saying their One Young World Summit experience was “inspiring,” “awesome,”and — dare I say it — “life changing.” This was an event that seeped into your bones if you let it, carrying waves of emotion that saturated the crowd as youth speaker delegate after delegate from around the world took to the main stage and shared their experiences of being called to step up to life-altering responsibilities when they weren’t ready — as child soldiers, wheelchair-based refugees, assault survivors, medical students finding themselves without desperately needed supplies to support their communities in the heart of a frightening pandemic. The list goes on and on.
Yet, the underlying message that repeated surfaced and accompanied the delegates’ stories was one of the human need for connection —those weak and strong ties we call on as we navigate our own hardships, seek to make sense of them, and grow. In shared moments away from the main stage and formal side sessions (often over food), I spoke with my fellow delegates about the speeches we had just heard. The speakers’ stories, I found, opened up conversations about heavier topics often not discussed with new acquaintances — generational trauma, activist burnout, fears over increasing disinformation campaigns — as well as inspirational ones of our personal and organizational goals, of our dreams and hopes for the future. While the former offered moments for camaraderie and compassion, the latter often sparked new ideas and resulted in a flurry of exchanged LinkedIn QR codes.
Both the delegate and non-delegate speakers alike also touched on what I would argue was a second reoccurring theme throughout the summit: That of today’s youth being tasked by their elders (and themselves) with leading large scale societal change processes around the greatest challenges facing the world today, even while suffering effects themselves. Mitigating the ongoing climate crisis; safeguarding fundamental human rights and freedoms; guaranteeing basic education for all regardless of age, ethnicity, ability, or gender; pushing for conflict resolution alongside just and fair peacekeeping processes; securing the right to meaningful work with worker protections; and ensuring that the growing inequalities of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic do not become calcified—these are but a few of the wicked problems where the youth delegates in the Olympiahalle were asked to hold existing leaders to account. As other delegates pointed out to me, a not-uncommon interpretation of the unspoken second half of that request⁶ seemed to be that young leaders must do this for the future of humanity since many of those currently in positions of power have demonstrated an inability to effectively steward such large-scale and complex social responsibilities themselves, using the present tools at their disposal.⁷
In supporting this drive towards actualizing a better future for humanity, events like this year’s 2021 Munich Summit are important mobilizers. They offer an opportunity to build community, foster the spread of ideas (e.g., encouraging innovation and the sharing of best practices), and develop both weak and strong personal connections between existing leaders and rising change makers. The personal growth and resilience needed to rise to the daunting challenges discussed at the Summit, too, come only in part from internal sources. Instead, they draw much of their strength through the networks and roots that surround and ground us. In gathering together their selected delegates this year in Munich, the One Young World team has sought to reinforce and expand the potential of this network to affect positive social change through the now +12,000 One Young World Ambassadors located in over 190 countries around the world.
For anyone who did not take part in this event, I still think that the Summit’s speakers’ overarching message was clear: Both existing and emergent leaders have a shared responsibility to effect positive, accountable, and transparent transformations in their local and global communities. Furthermore, this responsibility must accompany and match leaders’ power if we have any chance to successfully steward ourselves towards living in a just and fair future world.
Reflections on the Good Data Initiative
On a note more closely related to our work at the Good Data Initiative, a third (and final) theme that emerged for me during this Summit was that of the continuing need for fostering regular intergenerational, interdisciplinary debate. Such engagement is critical if we are to effectively coordinate and respond in our communities to the many pressing challenges facing our world today. As research has repeatedly shown, homogeneous groups often result in echo chambers that reinforce the limited yet shared circumstances of their members. A diversity of backgrounds is needed if we are to develop creative new ideas to tackle these issues that are also a more accurate reflection of various lived experiences across society. Accompanying this, too, is the necessity for rigorous, high-quality research and analysis if private and public sector leaders are to make better policy decisions based on available evidence.
Both of these themes — that of the need for intergenerational and interdisciplinary debate, along with rigorous, high-quality research on the data economy — were motivating factors in the original vision behind our founding of GDI. Today, we are continuing to embrace this vision in the GDI team through our analysts’ research and public publication of reports analyzing core themes within the data economy, along with impact initiatives (such as the Good Data Assembly) designed to engage and empower young change makers intent on positively shaping how data are used within the context of our emergent data economy.
I am delighted to share that GDI has several research reports coming out this year (in late summer and fall) on themes related to the plenary sessions covered during this year’s One Young World Summit. Specifically, these include our research teams’ work on the following topics:
- GDI Review 02: Age of Autonomous Weapons Systems
- GDI Review 03: Digital Oceans & Open Data
- GDI Review 04: Future of Work: Passion Economy
To find out more information about these reports, as well as upcoming events and how you can get involved with our mission, visit the GDI website.
About the Author: Âri de Fauconberg
Âri de Fauconberg is the Co-founder and Chief Research Officer of the Good Data Initiative (GDI). As a PhD Candidate in the University of Cambridge’s Organisational Theory & Information Systems (OTIS) Group, Ari studies ‘grand challenges’ and specifically, how organisations transition towards long-term social, environmental, and economic sustainability. She has taught at the University of Oxford and worked for both the Smith School for Enterprise and National Geographic. Ari is an advocate for responsible data science as well as diversity & inclusion in leadership. In her current role, she is responsible for stewarding the development, growth, and execution of research projects and knowledge resources created by the GDI team.
Endnotes
[1] It should also be mentioned here that the event was managed with strong COVID-19 protections, including but not limited to: (1) proximity trackers, (2) mandatory rapid COVID-19 testing every morning (after which participants received a sticker permitting them to attend that day’s events), (3) social distanced seating inside, (4) an emphasis on outdoor dining options and networking spaces, and (5) FFP2 masks whenever standing or walking around (especially indoors).
[2] Prof. Zuboff is the author of one of my favourite books from 2018, Surveillance Capitalism, which focuses on what she terms an ongoing ‘epistemic coup’ created by the commodification of personal data for the purposes of profit and concentration of societal power. Since becoming a Professor Emerita, Zuboff has devoted herself to scholarship and activism seeking to raise awareness of this phenomenon across both academic and public spheres.
[3] Many of the official One Young World sources mention the Summits being described by CNN as the “Junior Davos,” though I was unable to track down the original source.
[4] These three are only a few of the select delegates given space on the main Summit stage to amplify their voices and call for action. To read the biographies of the other non-delegate and delegate speakers alike, visit the One Young World Munich Summit event page.
[5] Her words had particular resonance given two researchers at GDI, Emma Clarke and Katie Green, have been working for the past eight months on our upcoming GDI Review, Digital Oceans: Open Data. This report focuses on the importance of mobilizing inter-sectoral collaboration in generating, unlocking, and providing open access to ocean data to understand the essential role that oceans play not only in our daily lives, but in tackling the climate and biodiversity crises our planet faces.
[6] Some speakers, including Sir Bob Geldorf, were more explicit in variations on these claims.
[7] For a related and interesting read about intergenerational conflict and tensions in the workplace, I would recommend checking out Urick et al.’s 2017 study on ‘Understanding and Managing Intergenerational Conflict: An Examination of Influences and Strategies.’ [link: https://doi.org/10.1093/workar/waw009]
