Between Fault Lines and Front Lines: What the Past Months Have Taught Me About Leading in Unsteady Times
PositiveMinds | Positive Stories | Edition 065
Illustration by A. Coulibaly with canva.com
The World Is Shaking—and So Are We
We are living in a time when the very foundations of the world order are shifting—like tectonic plates grinding silently beneath our feet. What once seemed unshakeable is now unmoored. The post-World War II framework designed to foster peace, international cooperation, and multilateralism is being tested at every fault line.
Liberalism is not dying loudly but fading quietly. Autocracies no longer hide; they perform. Truth competes with lies and often loses. Multilateral institutions feel brittle. In this disorientation, the gravitational pull is toward self-reliance, protectionism, and the law of the strongest. These are the new tectonic forces shaping the terrain: lies, silence, revisionism, political autism, and totalitarian ambition.
And like tectonic plates, their movement is slow, sometimes imperceptible—until it's not. Until the quake hits.
When the World Outside Is Chaotic, the World Inside Becomes Fragile
When external chaos intensifies, our internal worlds—organizationally and personally—become more exposed and vulnerable. We lose our bearings. The compass spins. In moments like these, the spotlight turns inward. People turn to their leaders—to us—not only for direction but also for anchoring.
And here lies the paradox of modern leadership:
When we speak with precision and data, we risk seeming cold or disconnected.
When we lead from the heart, we fear being dismissed as emotional or manipulative.
When we try to project confidence in the face of uncertainty, we may feel like frauds—especially when that confidence slips into the realm of toxic positivity, masking doubt and struggle with forced optimism.
We begin to split—torn between mind and heart, strength and softness, decisiveness and doubt.
Some days, we are like pendulums. Other days, we feel like we're inhabiting different selves altogether. Bipolar, even. Schizophrenic, perhaps—not in the clinical sense, but in the sense of disintegration between what we know, what we feel, and what we can express. Our internal narrative fractures: we doubt ourselves, our roles, and whether we can offer anything meaningful when everything around us is in flux.
But must it be this way?
Reason and Emotion Are Not Enemies—They Are Partners
One of the most powerful reflections I've had over the past few months is that we have wrongly positioned reason and emotion as binary. The rational mind and the emotional heart are often portrayed as competitors—as if to be clear-headed, we must silence our feelings. But this false dichotomy weakens us.
In reality, our teams need us to embody both. They want to hear the facts and know we feel their impact. They expect honesty, but they also crave humanity. When we lead with one and not the other, we miss something essential.
In times of crisis, our greatest strength lies in being rational and compassionate at once. It’s not either/or—it’s both/and. The heart and the brain are not opposing forces; they are an inseparable couple. That union is where integrity lives.
Carrying the Weight Alone Is Not a Measure of Strength
Another belief we must let go of is that being strong means carrying the burden alone. Many of us fall into this pattern—not out of ego, but out of care. We think: If I take on the weight, I protect my team. But our colleagues don't want us to shield them from reality by sacrificing ourselves. That doesn't make them feel safer; it makes them feel powerless.
They want co-ownership of the burden. They want to build the protective screen with us, not stand behind it passively while we burn out in front. They don't want to be problems we need to solve—they want to be part of solving the problems.
The best protection we can offer is participation. Shared responsibility creates shared resilience. It’s how we move from fragile to antifragile.
Not Every Situation Has a Script—and That's Okay
We crave certainty. We want roadmaps, templates, and decision trees. In many cases, these tools serve us well. But not in all cases. In moments of turbulence, we must recognise the limits of planning. There is no manual for leading in a world of tectonic shifts.
This is where the Cynefin framework is especially helpful. It reminds us that not all situations are created equal:
In clear contexts, cause and effect are obvious, and we can rely on best practices.
In complicated situations, expertise and analysis help us make decisions.
But in complex or chaotic environments, the rules are different.
In complexity, we must probe, experiment, and learn in real time. In chaos, we must act to restore order and then make sense of what's happened.
Waiting for perfect clarity in these moments is not leadership; it’s paralysis. We must become comfortable navigating the grey. That’s not a weakness—it’s the wisdom of experience.
When the Ground Moves, We Anchor Each Other
As the global tectonic plates shift, the temptation is to hold tighter to old certainties. But perhaps what we need most is each other—not just as colleagues or professionals but as humans charting a course through uncertainty together.
We will make mistakes. We will misread signals. We will sometimes move too fast, and at other times, not fast enough. And yes—as the situation shifts, so do the realities. We may support one position today and stand for its opposite tomorrow. It is not manipulation or dishonesty; it is the courage to adapt with integrity in an ever-changing landscape. Through it all, we will keep showing up—with our heads, our hearts, and our hands. Because when the ground moves beneath us, we become the anchor for one another.
Let's keep building that steady ground together.
