Where were you when Barack Obama was inaugurated? I was in Forum for the Future’s London office in a crowd of staff in front of a computer streaming the event live with a coffee mug primed with champagne. Reporters told us that the two million or so gathered in the freezing flesh in Washington was probably the biggest assembly ever of people at a political event. We were part of a vastly greater worldwide audience as we raised our make-shift champagne cups and listened attentively to Obama’s first speech as 44th President of the USA.

Of course Forum for the Future is strictly non-aligned when it comes to big P or party politics, so what were we doing downing tools early to celebrate Barack Obama’s big day? Well, we are very partisan to small p politics, serious about sustainability, and if aviation can trump the Climate Change Act in a matter of weeks here in the UK, there’s not much of scale to be excited about right now.

We are also huge on good leadership – in both the public and private realms that shape our lives. It is another commodity in short supply and, despite sparks of excellence amongst our partners, microscopically so when it comes to leadership with sustainability as its central purpose.

The excitement around Obama is not because he is a Democrat replacing a Republican, but because he seems to be what we need right now – that one in a million leader who can help the world pause, take a deep breath, and use the best humanity has to offer to get us on track for the things we say we really, really want. Which, according to Tuesday’s global vox pop and legions of social surveys and research, is to feel good about ourselves, our relationships with others and the place where we live. A wish expressed locally and globally.

Our interest in the new US President is about who and how he is, or at least what he promises to be. With our students on the Forum’s Leadership for Sustainable Development Masters I’ll be discussing the evidence for and against him being that leader in a million. Like others we will unpack his speech, its form and its contents but from a sustainability perspective. We’ll reflect on how he uses words to create positive visions: tying "imagination to common purpose" for example; or promising to “extend our hand if you will unclench your fist”.

We’ll discuss whether the way he repeated and intertwined the challenges – rebuilding the economy, helping the poor and disenchanted, and caring for the ecology of the Earth – means he has truly ‘got’ the indivisibility of the problems he - we - face and therefore the solutions to be crafted. And will his team, his substitution of science for ideology, and his wish to restore trust in government, be enough to take us out of the ecological and economic recessions in time? What happens next, he made very clear, was a responsibility shared between leader and citizens.

We’ll ask: if he can’t then who can? And if he doesn’t, is it because at this pivotal moment in history the rest of us failed to mobilise our imagination to the common purpose of sustainability?

Which is why it is much less important where you were when Barack Obama took his oath than what you did afterwards.

Image: mistydawnphoto