The Basecamp Manifesto: How A Secure Base Can Save Your Life and Leadership In A Scrambled World

It is often said that it is lonely at the top. But this loneliness can be dangerous, not only to the leader but also to the led. It turns out we hold our environments as we are held. If we are not held in a caring and daring fashion, it shows up in how we live and lead.

The Basecamp Manifesto is a formative work on developing and sustaining leadership skills. Here, Terence Young outlines the development of a changed narrative around leading organizations. Rather than the often-stereotyped perception of leadership as a solitary ascent to the top-followed often by an equally solitary descent down the leadership peak-Young has created a framework for leadership that relies on developing a "basecamp" of companions. Like the familiar basecamps of extraordinary physical ascents of Mount Everest and other spectacular and spectacularly challenging peaks, a leader's basecamp is a secure base of trusted and trusting peers that shape and nurture you during the ascent to leadership. Young presents the gifts that current and future leaders should find in a secure base: greater clarity in the sense-making process, enhancement of agility in navigating dynamic situations, building endurance to face challenges, and fostering generativity for greater productivity and innovation in one's life quest.

The Basecamp Manifesto is written for leaders of all organizations, whether for-profit or nonprofit. Whether a business leader, an educational leader, a political leader, a religious leader, or other society-facing leader, all leaders face particular and specific challenges in leadership: How do I lead and navigate with those in my circle through a world of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity?

For the sake of those you lead, Young's groundbreaking work says to leaders: find your people; find your secure base; find and shape and nurture the circle of trust that can make you a quality leader. The Basecamp Manifesto can help you to become intentional about shaping relationships where clarity, agility, durability, and generativity can be found and fostered.

Terence C. Young is currently the Director of Basecamp Leadership Consulting. He is also the Coordinator for the Intensive Master Program at Crest Leadership. He has over thirty years of nonprofit experience in congregational leadership across Canada, including eleven years as lead pastor at First Alliance Church in Calgary. He was also an associate professor (2013-2021) and the chair of the Professional Studies Programs (2017-2020) at Ambrose University in Calgary. Terry's doctoral work (PhD) was on holding environments for leaders and the need for all leaders to have a secure base from which to live and lead. He is dedicated to encouraging and inspiring men and women toward wise, calm, and healthy engagement on the front line of leadership.

Terry is married to Maureen and together they have four grown children and nine amazing grandchildren. They live in Creston, British Columbia, where golf, bass fishing, and biking are their favorite activities, with bike tours abroad ever in view for the future.

This book has been a long time in the writing. Terry engaged in doctoral research in the early 2000s on the experience of holding environments for leaders. This research raised the pressing need for such environments for leaders while also exposing their tragic lack. In the early phase of Terry's thinking, he was focused on clergy leaders, but over time he came to realize the need for secure bases or holding environments for leaders in all domains.