Japan is shunning the outside world and becoming inward looking --- this sense of crisis is what drove me to start the Global Agenda Seminar (GAS) series in 2010 with Academyhills. It was a program to develop global leaders from Japan who would tackle a global agenda. I have served as the main instructor for this series over the last decade.

Through this series, I wanted to provide opportunities for young people in Japan to keep up with what is happening in the world and think about what they can do to solve global issues. I have always felt that the younger generation in Japan has limited access to work in global fields.

As we prepare to go on to the next phase of the GAS series, I think this would be a good time to reflect on our activities to see what we have accomplished and what challenges remain.

Under the GAS series, we have held an intensive program almost every year in which we discussed global issues and tried to come up with solutions. The total number of participants during this 10-year period exceeds 300.

When we launched GAS in 2010, we began with typical global issues, including climate change, alternative energy sources, hunger/food shortages, human rights/refugees, and project finance for developing world.

As we continued the series in years that followed, our topics broadened to include topics such as journalism, foreign policy, presentation/storytelling, social investment, space, and music. During this time, we invited young experts in respective fields to share with us their experiences and issues they faced and give the participants the opportunity to develop solutions.

We also tried different formats such as a 10-month term, 3 separate short terms (3 months with specific topics each), 5 months with some basic skills training, etc., and we finally settled on the two-tier session in this series.

One was to have several-month long fixed-date intensive programs with a fixed group of members and the other was to hold a one-time seminar open to anyone and to which we invited guest speakers with me serving as moderator.

One outcome of the past GAS open seminars is the publication of the book (in Japanese) entitled “Talpiot - How Israel Develops Technology Leaders” in March 2020. The base idea of this book came from the seminar we held at Academyhills in November 2018 under the GAS series: “What makes Israel a hotspot for innovation? ～The truth behind the most elite program in the Israeli Defense Forces～”

During the last phase of the 10-year project, the focus of the program shifted from discussing a global agenda to how individuals would survive in the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) world. So the theme was set around the topics of “self-branding” and “working-across differences (how to embrace diversity in the workplace)”

It was a process of trial and error, and we had mixed results from the past intensive program. Some years, we were very successful, and all the members maintained their motivation and stayed together until the end with the final project. However, on the other hand, there were some cases when the program did not go that well as we failed to satisfy some participants during the course because of an ambiguous goal leading to confusion.

What I always had in mind is that we wanted to try something new ourselves. New challenges often end up in failure, but I wanted to show the participants that we all should not be afraid of failure and give it a try. When there were times we did not do well, we discussed why it went wrong and tried to refine our program.

Our original and continued objective for the GAS series has been to develop people with awareness of global issues (beyond Japan and their own job), and who have the capability to think hard to develop solutions and to take decisive actions to make them happen. Thus, we tried to provide as many opportunities as possible for participants to practice their own problem definition, solution development and execution.

Some exciting projects were produced by the alumni of the GAS such as the new technology venture avatarin Inc. launched by ANA Holdings Inc. and JEPLAN Inc., an environmental startup specialized in recycling among other things.