Sustainable development goals (SDGs), leadership, and Sadhguru: SELF-TRANSFORMATION becoming the aim of leadership development

The context of the SDGs resembles the properties of a complex adaptive system (CAS). CAS requires a specific form of leadership and leaders capable of creating social movements and via that way inducing large-scale system transformation towards the attainment of SDGs. Leaders capable of creating social movements tend to be those who occupy the highest levels of adult development (also referred as orders of consciousness). In this paper, we study the leadership approach towards the attainment of SDGs of leader, humanist and mystic from India Jaggi Vasudev Sadhguru. We have chosen him because he has initiated several social movements that have already created effects specified by SDGs. We study his approach to leadership by applying Kegan's (1994) framework of meaning-making and subject-object theory for the 5th order of consciousness. After analyzing Sadhguru's approach from that perspective, we discuss how leadership development programs should be re-designed to produce more leaders of Sadhguru's type. We contribute to the gap between adult development and leadership development if the aim is to facilitate the vertical development of participants towards the highest order of consciousness which in effect will be more capable of attaining SDGs.