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I resolve to embrace a sense of vuja dé. We’ve all experienced déjà vu—looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you’ve seen it before. Vuja dé is the flip side of that—looking at a familiar situation (an industry you’ve worked in for decades, problems you’ve worked on for years) as if you’ve never seen it before, and, with that fresh line of sight, developing a distinctive point of view on the future. The challenge for all of us is that too often, we let what we know limit what we can imagine. This is the year to face that challenge head-on.

The most creative leaders aspire to learn from people and organizations far outside their field as a way to shake things up and make real change.

The contagion of Alabama’s shame became apparent in April, during the oral argument before the Supreme Court on Arizona’s immigration legislation, the test case for several similar state laws aimed primarily at Hispanics. All have been substantially blocked by federal courts, except Alabama’s, most of which went into effect last fall, catastrophically achieving the goal Arizona calls “attrition through enforcement” — also known as “self-deportation.”

I realized how dismayingly reliable Alabama remained as the country’s moral X-ray, exposing the broken places.

If Alabama, the cradle of the civil rights movement, can retool Jim Crow as Juan Crow, what have we learned?

In your opinion, what is the most effective way to teach compassion? Or is it even teachable? I would agree the first step is to expose people to the truth which they otherwise would not know. However, is it enough? How do we get people to go beyond sentiments? And when they do act, how can they realize that they should not only help victims, but also look into the cause of that injustice, and try to eliminate that cause? What should be the core elements of a humane education? What can end the sufferings and atrocities of this world? Coming from a nation that was troubled by civil wars and foreign invasions for thousands of years, these are the questions I constantly ask myself. I would appreciate it if you could shed light on them with your insight.

I also think that the best way to build compassion is to get students to encounter suffering directly in ways that make it real. That means getting students out of the classroom to prisons or poor neighborhoods, or at least into encounters with real people who put a human face on various problems. This is one reason why I’m a huge fan of getting students to travel abroad