Delivering safer communities in times of polycrisis: leading for resilience

A conflicted world continues to polarise us, fragmenting our relationships, and paralysing our ability to work together. A world working in concert, through collaborative and coherent international organisations and interventions seems to have evolved into an impossible dream. So, we need to reflect more on how we might cope with this complexity and with a changing geo-political landscape over the next ten years or so. Looking back, 2024 was always going to be difficult, demanding and testing, all and at the same time, with safety and security challenged in new ways. This has clearly been the case.

In many ways, our journey through 2024 has redefined our sense of crisis[1].  Crises occur cyclically and are characterised by the perceived value of loss, probability of loss and perceived stress. This creates complex decision problems for all those focused on keeping us safe. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) report on Global Risks[2] presented at Davos in 2023 introduced the word “polycrisis” to refer to “a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part” (WEF, 2023). The WEF report and others, including the regular threat assessment of the US intelligence community, reveal that when it comes to crises, leaders are preparing for a long road ahead.

This note looks briefly at how recent thinking about leadership in such febrile and polycrisis-characterised times might impact on approaches to security when discussions, decisions, deployments and disruptions must take place in a context of complexity, uncertainty and the unknown.

Never before have we been so cognisant of what we do not know.

So, what hope for effective, meaningful interventions when the terrains for action are so challenging? By focucsing on leadership, we highlight the importance of a new leadership that can help to make sense, to make positive change more likely and confront the unknowns in our immediate futures. To manage their part of polycrisis, leadership needs a globally connected mindset, a systems outlook and orientation, and must invest in additional individual and

collective know-how and capabilities that enable them to think about their contribution to safety and security innovatively.[1]

Leadership matters

By convening, curating, and enabling, leadership can have significant impact supporting the choices evident between past approaches, current and existing strategies and what the future may hold.  We have acknowledged that modern leadership is reacting to fragmenting winds of change, turbulence, and uncertainty. This crisis-context creates opportunity for leadership to become architects of change, to anticipate, innovate and take control. So, we can elaborate what we might seek to do, the alternative improvisations, innovations, and focused responses to new conflicts, and how we might see operations, as nimble and adaptive in a complex world.  We should also reflect a little on how the quality of and investment by leadership in times of crisis, through the choices that need to be and can be made, can become positive game-changers.

After all, it is leadership that helps to make sense of contexts and helps positive and deliberate actions to happen; when it works well, leadership enables people and organisations to be nimble and adaptive, and super-sensitive to context.[2]

As others have observed, throughout 2024, people, organisations and countries around the world are trying to grapple with an ever-growing number of unprecedented political, security, economic, information, environmental and health challenges. The war in Ukraine grinds on, geographically alongside a very tangible instability and fragility of many ‘Western’ governments, watch Germany, France, Romania and Spain among others.  A series of military coups in Africa is seemingly becoming a “new normal”, while the war between Hamas, Hezbollah and Israel has taken the conflict cycles of the Middle East to a different horrifying level. December 2025 saw Syria unfold and unpack before our eyes with a collective holding of breath waiting for the next stage to emerge. Globally, violent conflicts are increasingly prolonged and protracted. Moreover, transboundary threats are aggravating the situation, from the impact of the pandemic and climate crisis to the spread of transnational organised crime and cyber insecurities and attacks. The gap between governing elites and those governed continues to widen. While decisive action to promote peace, security, human rights, and sustainable development is urgently required, the international community is increasingly fragmented, polarised and often in conflict.

In this context, how can a new future leadership meet the challenges of today and tomorrow? How can they inspire a clear resilience for people and their communities. The nurturing, inspiring,

enabling and empowering of leadership structures, networks, organisations, and individuals committed to making a concrete, positive difference for a more secure world is as critical as ever. This is a moment when worldwide diplomatic efforts to end violent conflict are failing; more leaders are pursuing missions militarily -and more leaders believe they can succeed in this way. In this polarised and polarising world, there are 21^st century choices for leaders; at the global level, the United Nations has invited the world to develop, and work to, a New Agenda for Peace[1]. A new Pact for the Future and a Declaration for Future Generations was signed by Governments at the Summit of the Future at UN Headquarters in New York in September 2024. At the same time work in the academy is exploring how leadership can support, enable and empower others to create a more resilient context, more secure and more prosperous for a just and thriving future. Despite our difficulties in resolving each and every security threat, we better understand now how leaders, followers and communities can step up to transform threatening scenarios into prospects, potentials, and possibilities. Leadership can make choices: a conflicted world can step back or move forwards.[2] Leadership can choose to build capacity to withstand or to recover quickly in difficult times.

Radical new behaviours are required[3]

Unexpected qualities emerge for a refreshed leadership:

• Asking the right questions. Is it really the case that the tried and trusted approaches of the past will best inform strategies for the future? In changed contexts, this is not necessarily the case. As we discuss below, asking the right questions is key to acquiring relevant knowledge about current challenges.

• Working with complexity. Security agencies need to be able to work creatively. Technical experts are often caught in linear and reductionist modes that fail to adapt to emerging complexities and leadership often struggles with grasping the intricacies of operating within complex adaptive systems.

• Leadership must prioritise the cultivation of trust. It is no longer the case that when a leader appears to work effectively, trust is earned and built. Trust is formed and broken horizontally between individuals (e.g., affiliation, affection) and vertically between institutions. Distrust of both authorities and institutions has increased enormously in the last decades.

• Being agile and adaptable to the profundity of contemporary change. These are difficult behaviours. Nothing stays in place for long; processes are continuously updating. Positive experiences and past-successful solutions will neither be sustained nor sustainable without agility and adaptability.

• Investing in continuing learning. The current intensification and disruptiveness of both social and technological change requires a humility that continuous learning matters; a leadership commitment to mainstream learning, experimentation, and innovation.

• A new leadership that engages with the whole. The definitions of leadership vary and typically romanticise leaders. Leadership is often defined by what leaders do. We should be less leader-centric and emphasise the active engagement of the whole and be inclusive and empathetic about the role of all participants or stakeholders. 

• Acknowledgement that not everyone is a winner! Central to any refreshed approach must be a commitment to manage and make meaning of loss and suffering for those stakeholders excluded from success.  

• Mainstreaming the relationship between local and global. Leadership at global and local levels are not mutually exclusive and calls for localisation should not create detachment from the global context.  Old assumptions of unilateralism and tribalism must adapt to the interdependences. Global issues have local impact and vice versa.

Having courage -coping with polycrisis.

To the what and how of we cope in times of polycrisis, we must add the why? -the purpose- and encourage a discussion about the sustainability and long-term impact of each intervention. The purpose of 21^st Century security will be more than just preparing for and responding to events; to be sustainable in positive change it must also be about recovery -building future contexts and relationships likely to survive and improve overall security. In this sense, a more effective overall leadership can and should place emphasis on purpose-focused qualities. Courageous leadership requires

• a non-negotiable commitment to an ethical approach. Our focus on security must be characterised and designed as to “do no harm” at minimum; and at best to protect and sustain human rights. Processes must try to find a way to protect one person’s rights and needs against and alongside the rights and needs of others.

• an open and inclusive approach to all stakeholders. Inclusivity is the practice of bringing people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized into a process. Inclusivity typically leads to outcomes that are balanced and include multiple perspectives.

• an ability to listen, hear and reflect on conversations in the public square. More impactful security processes mobilize inclusive and civil conversations. Through convening small and large groups, for example Citizen Assemblies, there is a huge potential for civil society to inform the process and affect policy. Generative conversations that bring about new ideas from the people who are present in the process should be ongoing, carried out consciously, and deliberately at various points in time. This joining-up within communities, a whole-of-society approach can help make new security regimes fit-for-purpose.

• embracing multigenerational solidarity and continuous learning. Full community engagement encompasses promotion of a multigenerational approach to learning. A holistic approach to education can move people from apathy to empathy and intergenerational dialogue can strengthen critical thinking and mobilise social media and digital technology as a force for positive change.

• being defined by questions and not answers. Forms of governance need to become educated consumers of information. Inquisitiveness, healthy skepticism, and openness to different questions lead to a fuller understanding of challenges and therefore better solutions. Leaders receive the answers to the questions they pose: when leaders ask the wrong questions, they receive the wrong answers and overall leadership struggles. Technical experts can inform leadership on specific topics, but interdisciplinary, non-linear solutions require coordinated input from multiple stakeholders. Given the existing silos and polarisation, better governance needs breadth of both exposure to a diversity of experiences and training.

Polycrisis will change the role and impact of leadership itself:  new emphases on process and priorities will emerge and be reflected in the relationship between the security function and communities under stress. In refreshing approaches to leadership, we will want to see a stronger commitment to sense-making, to agile and speedy decision-making, to approaches that don’t just ‘do’ but enable others to contribute; that coordinate and encourage joint-learning. Above all it will be an open leadership where communication before the event becomes more prevalent that reporting on events after they have happened.[1]

\Leading for resilience

An often-cited obstacle to change is the unknown. Acknowledging the unknown and restating its impact on effective security will not however always be helpful. New leadership

contributions can invest in knowledge and frame uncertainty with different emphases. This responds to the questions: what do we need to know?  and where should we invest in knowledge?

Investing in knowledge

So how can we become stronger in uncertainty, and more likely to be adaptive, value learning and mobilise anticipation. In essence how do we lead for resilience?

Firstly, whereas we may not be able to forecast events and anticipate all eventualities, we must be clear about the challenges that are faced. Investing in knowledge about challenges in times of uncertainty is crucial and distinguishing between critical and less-critical challenges is good investment.

Secondly, investing in knowledge about what is possible, rather than what is desirable, helps ground service delivery and service partnerships. Both can help effectiveness and build solidarity with and between stakeholders.

Similarly, thirdly, is strong acknowledgement about who is needed ‘on the team’. In an era of enhanced uncertainty and turbulence, this is a commitment and acknowledgement that collaboration and teamwork matters.

Fourth, is knowledge and clarity about competence; being clear about skills and abilities that exist or need to be developed and supported, and about how these match the challenges identified, provide a strong agenda for ensuring a close fit between organisational strengths and needs.

In these ways, the uncertainty and the unknown need not be as constraining; a focus on knowledge about roles, contributions and purpose, rather than knowledge per se is likely to be so much more important in the current era of polycrisis.

This brief note asks questions about the future of security management in this current context, particularly about its leadership. Moving forward positively embracing change is not in the solutions, but in the questions we ask. Globalisation and technological advances challenge

leaders to operate within a complex system characterized by disruptions, uncertainty, interdependencies, rapid change and unpredictable outcomes. We have suggested that a set of characteristics are more likely to help with positive responses. We have looked, also, at questions about the purpose of such leadership and the importance of process.

Hopefully these ideas are not too contestable, but the detail and consequences will be crucial. And there are areas where further research would help.

There is the question of power - how it works and the difference it makes within leadership. The way that we manage security, its leaders and leadership, cannot be ambivalent about power and the complexity of acting or making choice, even where exercising power may include difficult, unpopular or expedient components versus exercising leadership that is deliberate and ethical but may be less expedient.[1]

Similarly, there is the question of the possibility of a solutions-based focus where stakeholders mobilise their own communities in support of solutions via tactics such as citizen diplomacy and community leadership[2]. Such activists require tools and agency to be effective, and this may require leadership to take a step back from the front line.

In our 21st Century world context, there remains the question about empathy and how we approach and feel for others[3]. Leadership has a choice between self-centredness and selflessness, and whether to focus on and within private or public space. A key challenge is how stakeholders maintain a focus on empathy and on a compassionate collaboration likely to support movement towards a better world. 

December 2024

Professor Mike Hardy CMG OBE FRSA

Mike Hardy is Professor of Intercultural Relations and a founding Director of the Centre for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations at Coventry University www.coventry.ac.uk/ctpsr. researching and writing on community cohesion, human security and public leadership. Mike is Board Chair of the International Leadership Association www.ilaglobalnetwork.org, He is an adjunct Professor of Leadership at the Communications and Business Institute, LSPR Indonesia. https://www.lspr.edu/. Mike is a member of ICESCO International Advisory Board and senior adviser to the World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue, the Baku Process.