Chris Lowney on Leadership, Resilience, and Spirituality in a Changing World

At Hekima University College’s Research Week, Chris Lowney, noted author, leadership expert, and former Jesuit seminarian, delivered an engaging and reflective keynote on “Leadership and Resilience in a VUCA World,” a world marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

Lowney began warmly, recalling his personal connection to Kenya, where he met his wife while serving in Kakuma Refugee Camp. He expressed gratitude to Prof Elias Opongo for the invitation to be part of this year’s research week. Admitting he was “not a scholar in peacebuilding,” Lowney explained that his reflections on leadership might offer insights into the themes of spirituality, peace, and resilience raised earlier in the week, particularly by Dr. Tekla Wanjala.

He challenged the audience’s common notions of leadership as belonging only to the powerful or famous. “When we hear the word leader,” he noted, “we think of presidents, bishops, or CEOs. But each of us can show leadership wherever we are.” True leadership, he said, is grounded in everyday acts of courage, empathy, and integrity; qualities all people can embody.

Lowney emphasized that in today’s fast-changing, stressful world, resilience has become a critical leadership skill. Individuals, he argued, must rediscover their own agency and help others find theirs, particularly in contexts of conflict or disempowerment.

Drawing from a U.S. military acronym, Lowney described today’s environment as VUCA: a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. This instability, he said, makes decision-making harder and heightens the need for resilience at both personal and societal levels. Yet public confidence in traditional leaders such as political, business, religious, or educational has sharply declined. “We live in complicated times,” he observed, “and we don’t feel very good about the leadership we’re getting.”

Based on leadership research, Lowney identified several core traits of resilient people. These includes Optimism:  not naïve cheerfulness, but a hope that “claims the future,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison; Emotional regulation:  the ability to understand and manage one’s feelings under stress; Self-efficacy which is belief that one can still act and influence outcomes; Social support where one draws strength from community; Perseverance which is the grit to continue amid setbacks; and a Sense of purpose, grounding one’s actions in meaning.

Lowney then connected these leadership traits with spiritual traditions, especially Ignatian spirituality. Reflecting on the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola, he described the Jesuit founder as “a model of perseverance and reinvention” after failure and injury. Ignatius, he said, understood that “worthy vocations require resilience.”

Mapping psychological research onto the Spiritual Exercises, Lowney showed striking parallels where: Sense of purpose aligns with Ignatius’s teaching that humans are created “to praise, reverence, and serve God;” Optimism mirrors the Ignatian invitation to recognize “how much God has done for me;” Self-efficacy is echoed in the question, “What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ?” Emotional regulation resonates with the daily Examen; and Perseverance appears in Ignatius’s rule: “In desolation, never make a change.”

Quoting Martin Luther King Jr., Lowney underscored that spirituality transforms suffering into a creative force. He linked this insight to Dr. Wanjala’s story of women reconciling in post-conflict situations: “They didn’t use these words, but that’s what was happening, they found resilience from the depths of their own spirit.”

In closing, Lowney invited participants to see leadership and resilience not as elite qualities, but as daily spiritual practices, which basically means ways of living faithfully, courageously, and compassionately amid uncertainty.