About Lindsay Levin
Lindsay Levin is a strategist, founder, and facilitator who has spent more than two decades working with leaders to navigate complexity, drive systemic change, and act with purpose. Her career began in business, where she founded several companies, led turnarounds and built people-centered cultures. But early on, she recognized a deeper challenge: without a stronger connection to values and to each other, even the most successful systems fall short.
In 2001, she founded the social enterprise Leaders’ Quest to help leaders align what they do with what they stand for—bringing them into direct dialogue with the world’s toughest issues and most inspiring change-makers. That work laid the foundation for her next chapter: co-founding TED Countdown in 2019, a global initiative to accelerate climate solutions through collaboration, storytelling, and action.
Lindsay later launched the Blue Dot Collective to support projects that bridge sectors and disciplines—addressing big questions around leadership, climate, and conflict. She also serves as a facilitator with Uniting for a Shared Future, an Israeli-Palestinian coalition focused on political resolution grounded in mutual recognition and human dignity.
What ties all of Lindsay’s work together is a belief in the power of experience. By stepping outside familiar roles and engaging across differences, she helps leaders see their work and their responsibilities through a wider lens.
She is the author of Invisible Giants, a book about people quietly reshaping the world from the ground up.
Featured Talks
“Leadership in the Age of AI” with Paul Hudson
TED Countdown 2024
Lindsay Levin, in conversation with pharmaceutical CEO Paul Hudson, discuss how AI eliminates "unglamorous work" and speeds up operations while collaborations across competitors can dramatically boost sustainability.
“An Action Plan for Solving the Climate Crisis” with John Doerr and Ryan Panchadsaram
TED Countdown 2021
Lindsay Levin, in conversation with engineer and investor John Doerr and systems innovator Ryan Panchadsaram, lay out six big objectives that—if pursued with speed and scale—could transform society and get us to net-zero emissions by 2050.
“CompassionX: The Bridge from Cleverness to Wisdom”
TEDxExeter 2016
As we seek durable solutions to some of the most pressing issues facing us all, how do we bridge the gap between cleverness and wisdom? In this wide ranging talk, Lindsay unpacks how compassion often holds the key.
Podcast Appearances
“The Head and The Heart of Radical Leadership”
Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast, 2020
Lindsay joins hosts, UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres, political strategist Tom Rivett-Carnac, and sustainable business consultant Paul Dickinson, to discuss her work reshaping what leadership looks like through vulnerability, listening, and looking within ourselves to find our collective humanity.
“Wise Leadership”
The Way Out Is In: The Zen Art of Living Podcast, 2021
Lindsay joins hosts, Zen Buddhist monk Brother Phap Huu and practitioner and journalist Jo Confino, to discuss wise leadership and new ways of creating change and harmony in turbulent times.
Further Reading
Invisible Giants: Changing the World One Step at a Time
Published in 2013, Invisible Giants is about leadership, choices in life and the potential in everyone to make a difference. It tells the stories of some of the remarkable people Lindsay has met, and their impact on the world.
They are individuals who have overcome a lack of education and resources to re-energise their communities, and business leaders who strive to integrate purpose alongside profit. They are female activists in slums campaigning to end the exclusion of girls from school, and environmentalists tackling the effects of industrialisation on the world's ecosystem. They are the people we meet every day, who are revisiting their life choices.
It's also the story of Lindsay's own quest to ask: "what really matters?" and to figure out where the answers can take her.