The LEADS INSTITUTE “core competencies” are as follows:

• Build and develop trust between participants who are considered equal co-developers in the network;
• Promote interactivity to facilitate stakeholder’s engagement and nurture social learning;
• Promote common interests, understanding, approaches, and standards to enhance the community’s ability to respond to challenges;
• Favor the need-to-share as opposed to the need-to-know.

To achieve the ambitious agenda of promoting new global partnerships to enhance resilience and bring about rapid, decisive responses to complex emergencies, the following key features of the LEADS INSTITUTE enable a nimble composable organization that can be modified or reorganized based on the needs of the client:

• The LEADS INSTITUTE “Powered by Digital Mind” helps each client develop a resource center where key knowledge can be easily accessed. We believe that considering the rapid speed at which knowledge accumulates, an actionable resource center should be designed with the goal of making the right content available to the right person at the right time. Here, knowledge curation through artificial intelligence, automated multi-lingual capabilities, and universal knowledge grounded in localized experience are key desirable technical features.



• The LEADS INSTITUTE also offers each client a strong analytics and visualization component to help users rapidly make sense of the vast knowledge available. With the increasing amount of knowledge available and the volume of data available, having information/data at one’s fingertips can lead to information overload. Having the ability to make sense of it through data analytics and visualization is key to making knowledge actionable. Analytics and visualization can also help break down information silos and bring about holistic and systems approach necessary to imagine the creative solutions to tomorrow’s challenges. It is fundamental to anticipating, detecting, and understanding the problems.



• A third component of the LEADS INSTITUTE approach focuses training modules that allow users to learn by doing. Training is the component that allows users to get better through practice, self-perfection, and minor innovations and adjustments, otherwise designed as the learning curve. Past experiences in NATO (with the Partnership for Peace) attest to the robustness and validity of such approach.



• The fourth component of LEADS INSTITUTE is the development and nurturing of a vibrant community of interest composed of engaged users allowed to share, discuss, and debate issues. The community will be able to foster social learning through engagement and exchanges, data sharing, and resource providing. The maintenance of the community of interest is no small feat. It requires a Social Media component that allows the community to remain engaged over time in a sustainable manner. It requires administrators, sub-administrators, and moderators who can keep the interactions flowing both from a technical and from a social engagement standpoint. It also requires intrinsic motivators to keep the community engaged over time.