Nearly a full day of travel will bring 14 students from Johns Hopkins University’s Advanced Academic Programs division together in the Southeast Asian city of Singapore for an eight-day immersive learning residency from March 22-30, 2026.
The trip marks the first field experience for students enrolled in Leadership in the Global Polycrisis, a new course within the MS in Organizational Leadership program. Students enrolled in the MS in Data Analytics and Policy, the Master of Liberal Arts, and the Environmental Sciences and Policy programs will also join, creating an interdisciplinary learning cohort.
Designed and led by lecturer Richard Slimbach, a long-time advocate for experiential education, the course examines how leaders can navigate the intertwined global crises affecting ideology, energy, economy, ecology, technology, and food systems that collectively impact planetary health. Students begin by unpacking these issues through classroom seminars, then apply their learning on the ground in Singapore – a city-state that offers a unique lens into how centralized governance can pursue economic prosperity while confronting climate, energy, and other challenges.
During the residency, students will meet with governmental and nongovernmental leaders and visit key sites to explore how Singapore addresses systemic pressures while planning for a sustainable future. Slimbach notes that the country “provides a model of a more centralized government and has enjoyed tremendous prosperity over the last few decades, but outside of what most of us have been trained to think is only possible under a democratic structure.”
Slimbach brings more than 50 years of expertise in global issues, social anthropology, and international development and has led field programs in more than 50 non-Western countries. The timing of this course coincides with his forthcoming book on the global polycrisis, a convergence he describes as “two sides of a single coin.”
For Slimbach, expanding students’ understanding of global systems is essential to developing capable leaders. “We tend to get siloed in our own organizational cultures and focused on immediate problems or threats,” he said. “I think there is a growing need for this larger contextual understanding, especially given the frustration many feel when trying to achieve goals against systemic barriers.”
He emphasizes that the transformative impact of the course relies on combining conceptual learning with direct experience and provides lessons that cannot be gained from just a book or a class lecture.
“If you want to change the systems, you have to be changed yourself,” Slimbach said. “So as a leader, you have to understand systems through a combination of both conceptual and first-hand learning. Then you have to allow that to fall from your head to your heart and change your own vales, your own lifestyle, so that the system analysis and personal transformation go hand-in-hand. This is what brings about the ethically driven leadership that is in such short supply today, at every level, and that we aim to develop in our program.”
Slimbach points to historical figures – from Mandela and Gandhi to Havel, Chomsky, Crazy Horse, and King, Jr. – as examples of leaders who have paired systemic insight with moral clarity. While he has encountered these figures only through books, he believes that real exchanges with contemporary change-makers can spark similar shifts in students’ thinking and grow effective leaders.
“The rare leaders who are able to think systemically, as well as to act out of an internal moral compass, are very, very rare,” he said. “But I think that direct encounters with those who are working to improve the world and repair the effects of broken systems is what galvanizes change. I think there are students, who are now disillusioned enough with the status quo – but who have a realistic hope, not a false or a pollyannish hope – who want to think in new ways and build new types of organizations. This is my and program director’s Frances Wu’s hope for this course and this trip and for these future leaders. I am energized by listening and learning from the rising generation and am interested in keeping my ears to their dreams, questions, and concerns. I have come to know that, in my short time at Hopkins, there is an undeniable pursuit of excellence here and a guiding desire to live out the motif of planetary flourishing. That captures the goal of this course and the goal of my life.”