Life planning pioneer George Kinder is embarking on a worldwide mission to spread the movement he helped start nearly 30 years ago. The world is ripe for such an undertaking, he says.

“We’re at a time of crisis, and it’s a crisis for the whole planet and a crisis for democracy,” Kinder said in an interview at NAPFA’s fall conference. “I think we have a choice, and the choice is, do we allow hierarchies of power to accumulate more power?”

Kinder, a driving force in life planning alongside the late Dick Wagner and other innovators, argues that people have “nothing that we can trust to deliver us a healthy society.” Adam Smith’s theory of self-interest as a driver of the economy has fallen out of whack due to the power held by corporations and governments, he says.