Last week, January 27–30, the Tällberg Foundation convened 15 emerging global leaders and their mentors, along with members of the wider Tällberg network, for a TLML kick-off workshop in Tirana, Albania. The Social Contract Institute of Albania hosted us at the Pyramid Conference Center of Tirana. Over the course of the workshop, mentors and mentees worked in pairs as well as in larger groups to establish personal chemistry, to explore key aspects of leadership in the 21st century, and to plan the contours of their one-on-one work for 2026.A second integral part of the Tirana program included work on Tällberg’s three key 2026 themes:
- The impact of advanced AI (call it super intelligence if you want, but it’s already smarter than most of us) on society.
- The need to re-define governance as bottom-up instead of top-down, which the hubris of the last decades insisted could solve all problems everywhere.
- The re-imagination of how not-for-profits—whether in research, health care, social welfare, or elsewhere—fund themselves when governmental and multilateral support fades. Sustainability almost certainly requires dramatically different thinking and acting. We need to define and engineer new models.
The AI discussion was prompted by a dramatic reading (by participants) of a new play, The Trials of Atlas, in which AI is on trial for murder, and the participants convened as jurors to debate and decide guilt. The governance and re-modeling conversations were based on case studies: the former focused on the Amazon and Congo River basins, and the latter on CAMTech Uganda.
Beyond the intensive sessions, participants explored Albania’s unique history and culture, examining how the country navigates the dramatic forces of change that define our times.
