Brisbane, 23 October 2019 — If you’re still waiting at your table, it’s time to take a walk.

This week, I joined water professionals from all over the world to discuss how to we can find better solutions to restore the world’s rivers to a better state for future generations.

Where water was abundant before, many rivers have run short of water. There is no longer enough to satisfy everyone’s needs, especially for the ecosystems that sustain economies and communities in the longer run.

As the fight to allocate scarce water in rivers becomes more intense, there are winners and losers, we were told by keynote speakers at the 22nd International Riversymposium hosted by the International River Foundation in Brisbane.

The challenge of distributing water is becoming more complex when people living upstream and downstream in the basin are holding very different views on what water should be used for.

While water scarcity is a challenging issue, experts at the symposium agreed that the problem was more about people than water. Leadership was seen as a central issue.

“We must understand what it is like to walk in other’s shoes,” said the keynote speakers, arguing for people to get out of their comfort zones and traditional mindsets.

An industry representative made that point even more compellingly. If you’re waiting at your own table for people to come and join you, he said, that’s not going to help. What you should do instead is to meet other stakeholders at their table.

To solve our world’s increasingly challenging problems of sustainability, it’s time to take a walk and have conversations with an open mind.

In the Grow3Leaders community, we practice this skill on #WalkingWednesday when we will walk—literally or figuratively—to meet people where they are, and enter into a good conversation with them. There is much to learn from these experiences.

If you are interested, visit Grow3Leaders to request your invitation to join us, free of charge, and not free of commitment.

As leaders, we commit to challenging people’s mindsets, starting with our own. It’s not good enough to approach problems with our default mode of thinking. We need to take new perspectives and learn to work with people who hold different worldviews.

If you’re still waiting for people to join you at your table, it’s time to take a walk!