What does a fractured world actually need from its leaders?

Political leaders are being asked to navigate a rupture none of them were trained for. What do they need — and who is responsible for the fact that they don’t have it?

On April 23rd, on the sidelines of the Skoll World Forum, a group of political leaders, scholars, funders, and practitioners will sit down at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, to try to answer exactly that. Before I go, I want to know what you think. There’s a question waiting at the end of this piece, and I’ll take your answers into the room.

Imagine a bear that has wandered into an air traffic control tower. The controllers don’t leave — they’re dedicated professionals, the planes are still landing, and the frequencies are still live. But nobody knows what the bear is going to do next. Not the controllers. Not the ground crew. Not the bear. There are no experts, because this has never happened before. Perhaps they bring in a man who once found a raccoon in a parking garage. Everyone just keeps one eye on the screens and one eye on the bear, asking: What will it do next?

The analogy works on two levels, and both apply here. The first is chaos — the situation is genuinely unpredictable, and nobody’s instincts are calibrated for it. The second is institutional failure — the tower was simply never designed for this. Every protocol, every training, every reflex was built for a different kind of emergency: bad weather rolling in, a delayed aircraft, a miscommunication between pilot and ground.

What we’re living through politically is both of those things at once: a situation that is genuinely unprecedented, inside institutions that were never built to handle it.

The language of politics has shifted from problems and policies to rupture and civilizational stakes. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave us language for this moment: “a rupture”, as he put it at Davos — not a transition, but a break from the post-war order so fundamental that the tools built for the previous era no longer apply. A head of government recently said, in public, that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Whether that was leadership or theater isn’t my subject. My subject is that this is now normal political vocabulary — and the people whose job it is to respond to it were never quite trained for this.

The framework we never built

When you look at what we’ve actually built to prepare leaders for moments like this, the picture is startling. Despite centuries of democratic practice and decades of leadership programs, fellowships, and academies, we still have no unified, evidence-based framework for what a good political leader actually is. Medicine has one. Aviation has one. Teaching has one. Politics, somehow, does not. The bear is in the tower, and we don’t even know what expertise would look like in this situation.

A recent Pew survey across 24 countries asked what would most improve democracy. In 19 of them, the top answer was one word: politicians. Not policies. Not systems. The people themselves. That’s understandable — and almost entirely unhelpful, because nobody agrees on what “better” actually requires.

But here is the tension that rarely gets named: at the same time, the public is demanding more from its leaders, and the job is actively breaking the people doing it. A 2023 Better Politics Foundation study found that politicians report worse mental wellbeing than emergency service workers. But that data predates the current intensity of geopolitical instability and AI-driven change. The job has gotten even harder since. And neuroscience is clear that chronic stress degrades exactly the capacities that a moment of rupture most demands — long-horizon thinking, emotional regulation, creative judgment.

We are asking more of leaders while doing less to sustain them. Those two facts belong together.

The judgment gap

This is the issue that has run through my conversations with Dr. Edward Brooks of the Oxford Character Project — not just what skills leaders need, but what kind of formation produces the judgment to act wisely in a moment with no precedent.

Aristotle called it phronesis: practical wisdom. Not competence, but judgment: the capacity to read a situation that has never existed before and act well within it. It develops through experience, reflection, and honest reckoning with failure. It can’t be installed like software. And yet, almost everything we invest in leadership development treats it as if it can — we run programs, graduate fellows, and track outputs, but almost never ask whether any of it is producing leaders who can exercise wise judgment under genuine uncertainty.

A structural problem needs a structural fix

Some governments have recognized that this isn’t a problem you can solve by finding better individuals — the structure itself has to change. Finland has a Parliamentary Committee for the Future. Wales passed the Well-being of Future Generations Act. New Zealand built a Living Standards Framework that measures government performance through health, social connection, and environmental resilience—accounting for wellbeing, not just GDP or election cycles.

None of these is perfect. But they represent a decision that someone made: that long-view leadership shouldn’t depend on an exceptional person heroically transcending a broken system. It should be built into the system.

Most governments haven’t made that decision (yet). Most leadership development organizations haven’t pushed for it (yet). The long view remains an aspiration rather than a design principle — not because it’s impossible, but because nobody with the power to change the structure has decided it’s their job (yet). That is a choice. And choices have owners.

The controllers end their shift not knowing if tomorrow the tower will be clear. The system keeps running anyway. Maybe everything will eventually be okay. Maybe it won’t be. But nobody knows what’s going to happen next. The bear is still in the tower.

This is the most honest way to describe this moment. And if it’s true, we have to stop pretending the people we’re asking to deal with it have been adequately prepared, supported, or equipped for this uncertainty.

This isn’t bad luck. It’s a system producing exactly what it was designed to produce: leadership optimized for a more stable, predictable world. This means someone designed it, and someone could redesign it. The question I keep landing on, and the one I’m taking to Oxford, isn’t what went wrong. It’s who owns it.

Who is responsible for the gap between what this moment demands of political leaders and what we are actually giving them?

And what would it take for that person, or that institution, to decide it’s their job to close it?

I want your thoughts.

We are asking political leaders to navigate a potential civilizational rupture. We are giving them almost nothing to work with. What would it actually take to change that — and whose job is it to do so?

Leave your answer in the comments below. I’ll bring them into the room on the 23rd April and report back on what we discussed, what shifted, and what stayed unresolved. In the meantime, thank you for taking this seriously. Political leaders cannot meet this moment alone, and neither can the people trying to support them. Choosing to engage — to think carefully about what democracy needs and who is responsible for it — is an act of agency in itself. It matters more than you might think.

Warmly,

Lisa