The Space Between Us: Leadership in a Divided Age
I was at a BBQ last weekend, the smell of charred onions thick in the air, when the conversation turned to the energy transition. I thought we were in for something good—insights exchanged, perspectives stretched. Instead, a family friend of 40 years stood up and walked out.
It wasn’t an argument. No voices raised, no insults thrown. Just a shift—something hard settling in the space between us. The warmth that had always been there faded. Silence took its place. Something had closed.
I sat with it afterward, feeling the weight of it in my chest. What had actually happened? It wasn’t about facts or logic. It was about what we were protecting, what we were afraid to lose.
And more than that, it felt orchestrated—like we were playing out a script we didn’t even know we’d been given.
The Invisible Hand of Tech on Our Minds
There’s an old saying: the map is not the territory. We all carry mental models—beliefs, assumptions, ways of making sense of the world.But those maps aren’t reality. They are interpretations, shaped by experience, emotion, and story. A map can tell you where to go, but it won’t tell you how the wildflowers smell in spring or how the light hits the mountains just right at dawn. It won’t warn you about the potholes waiting to shake your journey.
The problem is, we’re often no longer drawing our own maps.
Social media, algorithmic feeds, AI-driven narratives—these are unseen hands guiding our thoughts, shaping our instincts. We think we’re making choices, but often, the choices are being made for us. What we see, what we don’t. What feels safe to say, and what suddenly feels impossible. The world starts looking flatter, smaller, divided into neat categories: right and wrong, good and bad, us and them.
Something primal is being triggered. We are no longer listening to understand. We are listening to defend. We are being trained to shut things down, not open things up.
And where has that ever got us?
The Fragility of Dialogue in an Age of Noise
We’re living in a time of profound disruption. Politics, democracy, social justice, identity, geopolitics, war, nature, the economy—everything feels urgent and fragile. The pace of change is raising our blood pressure, making us react faster, dig our heels in deeper. And as the world speeds up, we are losing something essential:
- The ability to sit with complexity.
- The skill of navigating disagreement without losing each other.
The challenge is that we are no longer debating from a shared foundation of truth. Instead, we are surrounded by sources that reinforce our own views, algorithms that tell us our way is the right way, echo chambers that reward certainty and punish doubt.
There is no real incentive to be wrong, to step outside our own perspective. And yet, healthy democracies, learning institutions, and great companies thrive on exactly that.
I made a commitment to myself this year to fall in love with pluralism. Responding to this may be my life’s work.
The Hard Work of Holding Complexity
My husband is Ismaili. He was in Lisbon when the Aga Khan passed away, immersed in the quiet grief of a community that had lost its guide. The Aga Khan spoke powerfully about pluralism—not as tolerance, but as away of life. It is about seeing ourselves in the mirror of another’s experience.
The ancient Greeks understood this, too. They built their democracy on dialogue, their wisdom on the ability to hold competing truths.The strongest relationships weren’t the ones without disagreement; they were the ones that could hold the biggest conversations. The ancient Greeks asserted time not as a reality, but as long as it takes.
Somewhere along the way, we lost that skill and patience.Disagreement became dangerous. Debate became war. And now, too often, we walkaway from each other instead of through the hard conversations together.
Demographic shifts reveal a loosening of commitment to each other. Do we believe that being right is more important than our relationship with our family, colleagues, and communities?
It makes me wonder: If we keep walking away, what will be left?
Leadership is a Nervous System
Dialogue isn’t just about words. It lives in the body.
When we feel threatened—by a different opinion, by an uncomfortable truth—our bodies react before the mind even catches up. The heart races. The breath shallows. The jaw clenches. We are no longer listening; we are bracing.
And in a world that increasingly rewards speed, reaction, and certainty, we forget this.
We become heads on sticks, living in the rush of dopamine hits from social media and devices, dissociating from the wisdom of our own bodies. But leadership isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It’s a nervous system response.
There are tools like muscles that can strengthen conversation. Engaging in play shifts us from defence to openness. Consciously getting curious expands our capacity to listen. Simple techniques—breathing deeply, loosening our posture, even going for a walk—can soften rigidity, are scientifically proven to make us more open to others. To engage rather than withdraw.
This is what interconnected leadership is about—not avoiding conflict or seeing polarisation as an end state, but learning to understand our own bodies and minds and sense make through the grey in a way that integrates and strengthens rather than fractures.
Leading Differently: A Call to Courage
Leadership is not about taking sides. It’s about holding space. It’s about standing in complexity with a clear north star, not because it’s easy, but because it’s necessary.
Real courage isn’t about proving a point. It’s about keeping your heart and mind open when it would be easier to close it. It’s about staying with a conversation, even when your voice shakes. It’s about making room for discomfort, knowing that care doesn’t mean avoiding hard truths—it means walking through them together. About being fierce and gentle at the same time.
This is the kind of leadership we need now. Not louder voices, not sharper lines drawn in the sand. We need leaders who can be fierce and gentle at the same time. Leaders who can meet division not with more division, but with something stronger—an unshakable commitment to holding the whole.
If we want to go fast, we can go alone. But if we want to go far, we have to go together.
And going together means more than just staying in brave conversations. It means listening with care. It means making space for the beauty in another’s view, even when it challenges our own. It means seeing pluralism not as a burden, but as a gift.
Because in the end, leadership is an act of care. It is the work of weaving connection in an age of fracture. It is the quiet, stubborn belief that we belong to each other, even when we disagree.
Perhaps if we had less to defend, we could finally begin to build something new.
