I've lost count of the number of kitchens and bars and living rooms, on how many continents, where I've stood with my girlfriends and, with no warning, burst into "9 to 5." We mumble the verses, half of us inventing the words, until the chorus lands and suddenly every one of us knows every syllable, top of our lungs, dancing.

Part joy, part freedom call, part protest. Every single time, beautiful power. Dolly handed to women (and everyone else) a three-minute permission slip to take up the whole room and love doing it. I thought about all those rooms this week.

On Tuesday she died, and the grief came in from everywhere at once, from people who agree on almost nothing. Trump ordered the flags lowered for a week. Australia's prime minister said it was hard to imagine the world without her. Even the King's Guard played "9 to 5", and Britain's Royal Family closed its own tribute with "We will always ❤️ you." In Uganda, the exiled opposition leader Bobi Wine wrote that her songs taught him how to love, and signed off with the same line.

Sit with how strange that is. We live in a moment engineered, with literally business models behind it, to have us furious at each other. And yet, when Dolly died, for a moment nearly everyone reached for the same word: love.

So, I've spent the week on a question: what did she understand that others didn’t, and what can (political) leaders learn from it?

She didn’t "stay out of politics." She stayed out of partisan politics. Literacy, poverty, workers, LGBTQ+ inclusion, public health: those were never apolitical. And the lesson isn't that politicians should just "be more like Dolly." She never had to pass a budget, close a hospital, or send anyone into danger. Governing means choices, and real choices make enemies. But she did understand something about trust, belonging, and hope that politics badly needs. Three things in particular.

#1 She led with the ‘for’

The lazy read is that Dolly united people by being sweet and vague and careful never to mean anything. Believe that, and you'll learn the wrong lesson: keep your head down, say nothing, offend no one. That isn't leadership.

Dolly wasn't neutral. She built her whole public life around what she was for: books, kids, workers, including people. What she refused was the frame that to be strongly for something, you first have to be loudly against someone. Almost nobody refuses that frame anymore, because the against is the faster route. It gets the click, the outrage, the applause.

That gets harder when you govern, of course. Sometimes leadership means saying no, or naming what's wrong. But one thing survives contact with real power: you can build things that don't check people's politics at the door. Dolly's Imagination Library doesn't ask if your family is red or blue. If you're eligible, the book comes. What started in one Tennessee county, because her father couldn't read, has now mailed more than 330 million books to children around the world.

That isn't just a nice sentiment. It's belonging infrastructure. She didn't announce that she cared about literacy; she put a book in the child's hands. Values become credible when people can actually feel them in their lives.

#2 She put ‘people first’

Dolly spent her love instead of hoarding it. After the Tennessee wildfires, her My People Fund put cash directly into the hands of families who’d lost their homes. In the worst of the pandemic, she funded vaccine research and told people to get the shot, which was not the safe, “everybody-loves-me” move. Values, again, turned into something you could touch.

And simply “put people first” is not anti-politics. It’s the reason politics exists. Parties, campaigns, coalitions, agencies: they’re all machinery we build to do things for actual human beings. The failure mode of every one of them, left, right, and center, is the day the machinery becomes the point, and the people become the afterthought.

So here’s a discipline any leader can adopt l tomorrow: before the position, before the win, name the actual person this is for. Then check they’re still at the center when you’re done.

#3 She made people feel ‘magical’

This one’s the easiest to dismiss as fluff, and the one I’d fight hardest to keep.

Somewhere in the worst of the pandemic, when we’d all been flattened into gray rectangles on a screen, I started wearing a Dolly Parton wig on my Zoom calls. Big hair, no explanation. I told myself it was to lift my own spirits, and it did. What I didn’t expect was what it did to everyone else. People brightened. People laughed. And more than once, people started to sing. A grid of exhausted, scattered faces, and for a minute we were a choir.

Joy alone isn’t leadership, of course; a crowd can be lifted toward ugly things too. What matters is what the feeling is used for, and hers was used to enlarge people rather than to hand them someone to shrink. Doing that takes more than just optimism, which is why I keep calling it hard hope: not the soft kind that waits for the world to fix itself, but the kind that looks straight at how bad things are and builds something warm inside them anyway.

The wig wasn’t me being in denial. It was hard hope with big hair. And that turns out to be what people are asking for: Gallup finds hope is now the quality they most want from their leaders, ahead of even trust. Dolly supplied it in bulk for seven decades without ever once pretending the world was fine.

So what do we steal from Dolly?

You can’t just “be Dolly.” But strip away the rhinestones, and three things carry over — to a country, a party, a company, or even a kitchen full of your best friends:

#1. Lead with the for. Name the thing you’re building before you name an enemy, and make that the headline. Opposition is part of politics, but it doesn’t have to become your whole identity.

#2. Put the person first. Parties and processes are machinery. People are the point. Name the human every decision is for, and keep them at the center.

#3. Lift people. Build moments that give people agency, connection, and possibility. Make the room stand taller, then step back and let them have it.

And underneath all three: be a builder. Most causes are fluent in the why and the what, and then go mute on the how. That grinding, unglamorous delivery work is what I’ve long called the elbow grease gap, and it’s where great ideas quietly go to die. Dolly was fluent in the how. She didn’t just tell us what she valued. Books showed up at houses. Money showed up after disasters. She institutionalized what she was for, because people don’t feel your values through your speeches. They feel them through what changes in their lives.

It took a grave, this week, to get people who agree on nothing to mourn together. The unity was real, and it should make us ask why it takes a death to find it.

Wherever you are, and I know a lot of you are nowhere near Nashville, there’s a Dolly-shaped hole in your corner of the world. Someone has to lead with the for, put the person ahead of the position, and make everyone stand a little taller. She did all of it for seven decades without becoming a partisan figure. But putting people first isn’t a retreat from politics. It might be the best of it.

That is hard hope in practice: not waiting for the world to soften, but building the warmth yourself. It might as well be you.

So sometime soon, start with the small version. Put on “9 to 5,” too loud. Mumble the verses. Wait for the chorus. And when it lands, because it always lands, sing it like you mean it, with whoever’s in the room. That’s where it starts: the joy she handed out passed on to whoever is standing next to you.

Warmly,

Lisa

P.S. If this landed, send it to someone who leads with what they’re for. And tell me in the comments: which of the three (leading with the ‘for’, putting people first, lifting people) does your community do best, and which is it starving for?

I’d love your help.

In late September, I’ll be facilitating a session at the Athens Democracy Forum called Courageous & Uncomfortable Conversations. Rather than decide the agenda myself, I’d like to bring your questions into the room.

What’s the conversation those of us who care about and work on democracy keep avoiding? Leave your question in the comments and I’ll bring as many as I can to Athens, credit you, and report back on what happened.

The timing matters.

According to Freedom in the World 2026, Freedom House’s latest annual report, 2025 marked the 20th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. Just 21 percent of the world’s people live in countries rated “Free,” down from 46 percent two decades ago. Twenty years is a long time to be heading in the wrong direction. At some point, that has to provoke uncomfortable questions not only about what’s happening to democracy, but about those of us trying to strengthen and defend it.

What are we getting right? What isn’t working? What might we need to do differently?

This isn’t a moment when those of us who care about democracy can afford to save our hardest questions for the hallway.

The Hallway Gap

I’ve been to a lot of democracy conferences, and I’ve noticed something: the most interesting conversations rarely happen on the panels. They happen afterward, in the hallway, over coffee, at dinner, in the bar. That’s when people say what they’re actually thinking.

Have those of us working on democracy become too insulated, talking more to one another than to the people whose trust democracy depends on? Are anti-democratic actors choosing the battlefield while we chase the latest outrage or distraction? Are we making the right moves and investments for this moment, and how would we know?

Then it gets closer to home. Are we sticking with strategies because they work, or because they’re familiar, fundable, and safe?

Eventually, it gets personal. What do I believe that might no longer be true? What won’t I say because a funder, colleague, ally, or friend is in the room? What if the strategy I’ve championed isn’t working? And perhaps hardest of all: Do I/we actually know what I am doing? Do I/we have the leadership, mindsets and skills needed to actually make a difference here?

I’ve started calling this the Hallway Gap: the distance between what we’re willing to say privately and publicly.

It’s not created by bad people. It’s created by good people managing understandable fears. I know because I’m one of them.

Why the Gap Exists

There are questions I’ve been willing to ask privately that I haven’t always asked publicly. Sometimes because I haven’t thought them through enough. Sometimes because relationships, funding, and reputations matter. And sometimes, if I’m honest, because I don’t enjoy being wrong in front of other people.

The conversations we don’t have don’t disappear. They move into smaller circles. Assumptions go untested. Questions that might have helped us learn earlier surface only when the evidence becomes hard to ignore.

Behavioral economists call part of this information avoidance: avoiding information even when it could be useful because knowing carries psychological or practical costs. Russell Golman, David Hagmann, and George Loewenstein found evidence of it across areas from health to finance. I wonder if those of us who care deeply about democracy do something similar. Asking whether something we’ve invested years of our lives in is actually working, can be painful.

There’s more at stake than ideas. Careers, organizations, funding, friendships, reputations, and identities can become wrapped up in how we’ve understood a problem. Changing our minds can mean admitting that something we championed didn’t work, that someone we disagreed with had a point, or simply that a strategy built for one moment no longer fits the world we’re in.

That’s the courage I’m interested in, not just saying the most provocative thing in the room. The courage to seriously entertain the possibility that we might be wrong, or that we could do it better. To hear something we’d rather dismiss and ask whether there’s something in it we need to understand. To change course when the evidence tells us to.

And here’s what makes me optimistic: we already have many of the questions. I hear them all the time. They’re just happening in the hallway.

Imagine what becomes possible if we bring more of that candor into the room where it matters, and actually learn from the experience, intelligence, disagreement, and doubt already there.

Questioning ourselves isn’t an admission of failure. It’s how we get better. If we can close even part of the Hallway Gap, we can learn faster, adapt sooner, and go further.

An Experiment

That’s the idea behind Courageous & Uncomfortable Conversations in Athens: bring the hallway conversations into the open. Not to provoke or embarrass, but to see what becomes possible when we ask harder questions together.

I’m not expecting us to solve them in one session. I’d be suspicious if we did. But we can question assumptions, surface what’s not working without dismissing what is, and disagree while remaining committed to the larger project of democracy.

The point of uncomfortable conversations isn’t the discomfort. It’s what they can unlock.

Help Shape the Conversation

Here are a few of the harder questions my colleagues and I have been asking ourselves. When we’re together, I want us to go beyond the surface answer, the one we’ve all heard, and probably given, before. What’s underneath it? What aren’t we seeing? What’s harder to say out loud? What might we discover if we stay with the question a little longer?

1. What are anti-democratic movements giving people, such as belonging, agency, identity, purpose, and power, that democracy isn’t? And what would we actually change if we took the answer seriously?

2. Have we fallen for the culture-war trap, fighting on battlefields others chose for us while more fundamental shifts in power happen elsewhere? What are we being distracted from?

3. If we weren’t trying to save the democracy we inherited, what democracy would we build for the world we’re entering? What would we have to let go of to get there?

4. If we had to stop funding 30 percent of what we currently call democracy work because it isn’t changing the trajectory, what would we stop? Where would the money go instead?

5. What if part of the problem is us? What if our institutions, incentives, funding models, and ways of working are making it harder for democracy to adapt? What would we actually change about ourselves?

Those aren’t the questions. They’re some of ours. We’re much more interested in yours.

Leave your question in the comments. I’ll bring the ones that make us most uncomfortable into the room, credit you, and come back and write honestly about what happened: what people engaged with, what nobody wanted to touch, what surprised me, and whether we managed, even a little, to close the Hallway Gap.

I don’t know where the conversation will go. That’s exactly why I want to have it.

Warmly, with humility, curiosity and gratitude,

Lisa

Anyone who knows me knows I love to dance. So there’s something quite funny about the leadership idea I currently can’t stop thinking about: it starts on a dance floor and ends with me leaving one.

I didn’t expect to learn that lesson on a mountain. But that’s exactly where it caught up with me.

The trail that kept changing its mind

Last Sunday, on my 53rd birthday, I climbed to Evergreen Lookout in Washington State. We had three generations on the trail: my 78-year-old father, who taught all of us to love the mountains before any of us could carry our own packs, my baby brother, my 19-year-old son Bruno, my niece, and me.

The trail couldn’t seem to decide what kind of trail it wanted to be. Punishing switchbacks for a stretch, then suddenly a meadow full of wildflowers, then back to switchbacks, then another meadow, each one somehow prettier than the last. By the time we cleared the tree line, the views were the kind you don’t really have words for. You just stop talking.

That’s the “balcony”.

I didn’t have to reach for that metaphor. It simply arrives naturally once you climb high enough above the thing you usually stand inside to see the expanse beneath you.

But the metaphor isn’t only about the view.

It’s about watching my father, at 78, struggle on some of the steeper switchbacks and keep climbing anyway, setting exactly the same steady pace on the way up and on the way down. No shortcuts. No easy way out. The exact determination he always taught us – the satisfaction of earning something beats the ease of skipping it.

And it was watching Bruno, at 19, on this trail for the first time — still just beginning to really see, the way you’re early at seeing almost everything at 19. He’s still building the muscle for looking beyond the next switchback.

But this hike wasn’t something any of us watched from a distance. It was teamwork. Bruno did the bulk of it, sometimes gently pushing, sometimes pulling, always encouraging Grandpa up the mountain with humor, never once making it look like a chore. The rest of us filled in around him: my brother steadying a pack strap here, my niece calling out a loose rock there, and me just close enough that my father knew none of us were going anywhere without him. Getting a 78-year-old up and down a mountain isn’t a solo act, not even for someone as stubborn as my father, but it was Bruno who carried most of it.

And in between all that effort, we kept stopping, all of us, pointing things out to each other: a meadow gone wild with wildflowers, views of familiar peaks from a different angle, and the smell of warm pine in the sun. The mountain didn’t save the good part for the summit. It handed us pieces of it the whole way up, and every one of us wanted the others to see it too.

At the Lookout, I found myself zooming out — not just across the landscape, but across time. Three generations, one trail, one family moving together, each of us doing whatever needed doing and taking all of it in. My father, six decades further down the trail than Bruno; Bruno just beginning. And me, somewhere in the middle, realizing the “balcony” isn’t only spatial. It’s temporal. Turning 53 on a mountain that my father taught me to love, with my son helping him to the top, gave me a view that had nothing to do with work, and everything to do with perspective.

The floor and the balcony

There’s an old idea in leadership theory about the difference between being on the dance floor and being on the balcony. On the floor, you’re in it: moving, reacting, catching an elbow, matching the mood of the room. From the balcony, you can see the whole thing at once: who’s dancing with whom, where the energy is building, where it’s fading, which groups aren’t mixing.

Let me be careful here, because there’s a lazy version of this idea I don’t actually believe. The lazy version says the floor is where lesser leaders get stuck, and the balcony is where the wise ones live. That’s nonsense. You cannot lead from the balcony alone. Nobody trusts a leader who only ever watches from above. The floor is where relationships are built and where the real information lives.

My point is much smaller than “leave the floor and ascend to the balcony.” It’s this: some of us are so at home on the floor, so genuinely happy there, that we purposely never build the muscle for stepping up to the balcony.

I am one of those people.

I should be honest about something else, too. This idea follows me everywhere: the balcony, the lookout, whatever you want to call the place where you finally see the whole shape of things. I know the theory. I’ve probably told other people to “get on the balcony” more times than I can count.

And still, most weeks, I’m the last one to notice I’ve been on the dance floor for months, moving fast, mistaking motion for progress, until something interrupts the rhythm: a birthday, a mountain, or someone I love asking a question I didn’t want to answer.

The metaphor isn’t a skill I’ve mastered. It’s more like a friend who keeps showing up and asking, “Have you looked at things from above lately?”

Half the time, my honest answer is no.

That’s part of why actual lookouts matter to me so much. The real ones. On real trails. With real switchbacks. They don’t ask my permission the way the metaphorical balcony does. A mountain doesn’t care whether I feel like stepping back today. It simply makes me climb. And eventually, it hands me the summit view whether I was ready for it or not.

Why I’m stepping off the floor

I’ve spent the better part of thirty years building organizations. I wouldn’t trade those years for anything. They’ve been some of the most meaningful of my life.

But somewhere along the way, I became exceptionally good at staying on the dance floor: solving, responding, building, moving. Less good at climbing to the lookout before deciding where to dance next.

So here it is: I’m taking a writing hiatus and a two-month sabbatical.

I don’t want this to read as a disappearance, because it’s the opposite. It’s me finally doing, on purpose, the thing that’s hardest for someone who loves the dance floor as much as I do: leaving it while the music is still good.

I’m under no illusion that the work grinds to a halt without me, or that anyone is circling the calendar waiting for my return. The music will keep playing just fine.

That’s actually the point.

If I can’t step away without convincing myself the whole room falls apart, then I haven’t really learned anything from the balcony.

What the research says, and what I’m hoping to discover

“Leaders need rest” has become such a familiar cliché that it’s easy to nod along and then check your email anyway. But there is meaningful research behind it. Studies suggest extended breaks can improve well-being, reduce stress, increase creativity, and even strengthen organizations by creating space for others to step up. Some of the evidence is stronger than others, and I’m careful not to overstate it.

What interests me most isn’t simply whether a sabbatical helps me rest.

It’s whether it helps me return seeing differently.

This sabbatical isn’t an escape from work. It’s an investment in the next thirty years of it. If the next chapter of my work is going to matter as much as the last one, it deserves more than momentum.

It deserves perspective.

That’s ultimately what I’m testing over the next two months—not whether I can stop working, but whether stepping away changes the way I see the work waiting for me when I return. Whether distance lets me ascend to the balcony, taking in the whole floor rather than being lost in the crowd of it.

Questions I’ll be carrying with me

• What have I mistaken for urgency?

• Where have I mistaken activity for progress?

• What am I still doing simply because I’ve always done it?

• If someone described my last year from the outside, what would they notice that I’ve stopped seeing?

• What would success look like if I were standing on the balcony instead of the dance floor?

Warmly,

Lisa

P.S. I’d love to hear from you. When was the last time you stepped off the dance floor on purpose, while the music was still good? What did you see from your own balcony?

When I was a little girl in Everett, Washington, I was the Statue of Liberty.

I was just ten years old, wearing a white suit and holding a tin-foil torch as I walked down a street I’d traversed countless times before. Even with the whole town watching, it somehow felt like the most natural thing in the world. My cousins and brother made up the rest of the cast, dressed as Abraham Lincoln and Uncle Sam—a young girl’s vision of our nation’s founders. My mom walked beside us, while my aunt roller-skated along as a red, white, and blue clown.

Since this moment, I’ve thought a lot about why I wanted to be her.

Some of it was simple. She was a woman. When you’re a little girl looking at the list of characters a town hands out for the Fourth of July – the generals and the presidents and the founding fathers – you figure out pretty quickly that almost none of them look like you. But Lady Liberty did. She got to stand for something huge, and she got to do it as a she.

But it was more than that, even if I didn’t have the vocabulary to say so at the time. She meant light. She meant hope. She meant “welcome”, the warm kind, the kind that says the door is open and you’re expected and there’s a place for you here. What I didn’t know then is that this wasn’t close to the meaning she started with.

The most radical thing about the woman with the lamp

The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, and the people who built her made no association with immigration at all. Her real name is Liberty Enlightening the World. She was a monument to republican ideals and to the friendship between two nations. The “welcome” we read into her now came later, and it came from a poem.

In 1883 a New York poet named Emma Lazarus was asked to write something to help raise money for the statue’s pedestal. Lazarus was a Jewish woman who, right at that moment, was working with refugees: Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms, arriving with nothing. She almost said no. A friend talked her into it by pointing out what the statue would mean to the people sailing into the harbor. So she wrote “The New Colossus,” and in fourteen lines she changed what the statue was for, and maybe what the country was for too.

The whole poem turns on a contrast. Lazarus set her “mighty woman with a torch” against the Colossus of Rhodes, the old warrior statue that stood for military might. But hers isn’t a giant of conquest, she said. As the Poetry Foundation puts it, Lazarus chose to honor not the courage to fight the enemy but the willingness to accept the stranger. From the statue’s hand, she wrote, “Glows world-wide welcome.”

Which means a little girl in Everett, reaching past the soldiers and the founders for the lady with the lamp, was making the same choice Lazarus made without having any idea she was doing it. Welcome over conquest. What you’re for, over what you’re against.

That’s the choice a parade makes, in every culture on earth. And I think we’ve seriously undervalued it.

The politics of “for”

Regular readers already know my bias here I’d rather talk about what I’m for than what I’m against. I even wrote a piece about picking awe over outrage. This piece is in that same direction.

Let me be careful here, because there’s a lazy version of this argument I don’t actually believe. The lazy version says that parades choose to be “for” so they are good, and debate is bad. That’s nonsense. Parades are not always “for”, and democracies need disagreement. They need the argument out in the open. That’s a feature, not a bug, and I’d fight anyone who tried to take it away.

My claim is smaller than that and harder to wave off. We have built endless infrastructure for the “against” and almost none for the “for”. We’ve got debate stages and op-ed pages and comment sections and entire platforms engineered to have you furious at a stranger by lunchtime. Yet, for the other thing, the experience of standing next to somebody unlike you and realizing you’re on the same side of something, we’ve built almost nothing. That muscle has gone soft from disuse.

Say “parade” and plenty of people don’t picture this. They picture Red Square, or Pyongyang, rows of soldiers goose-stepping past a reviewing stand, missiles on flatbeds, a leader’s portrait held up by people who didn’t get a say in whether they’d be there. That’s a parade too. It’s built the same way, technically: people in formation, moving together, watched by a crowd. But it exists to display obedience, not choose it. Nobody in that procession is there because they wanted to be, and that’s the entire design of it.

A community parade, the kind built around a local festival or theme, is what belonging looks like when the same tools (formation, procession, a crowd, a route) get used for the opposite purpose. Nobody wins. Nobody’s marching because they were ordered to or because their absence would be noticed and reported. A few thousand strangers agree, for an hour or two, to face the same way and move at the same pace and cheer for people they’ll never meet. That’s the whole difference between the two kinds of parade, and it’s not a small one. The marching band and the volunteer firefighters and the guy who’s been polishing his 1962 convertible for three weeks, and the tiny-tot dance troupe wobbling out of step and the clowns and the scouts and the dog club and the council member who’s actually walking the route, shaking hands the whole way. All of them in one procession, claimed by one crowd, on one morning, because they chose to be. Everybody belongs to the thing because everybody opted in.

A barometer hiding in plain sight

Here’s a claim, and I want to be honest that it’s a claim. It’s my idea, not a settled finding.

I went looking for research that treats a parade as a way to measure a community’s health, the way a doctor reads your blood pressure. I couldn’t find it. There’s good work on how festivals create social capital — how gathering to celebrate builds trust between people. And there’s a deep literature on why moving in time together bonds us, which I’ve written about before. But a parade is a reading you can take right there from the curb, and that’s the one I’m planting my flag on.

Two caveats first, because a skeptic deserves them. There’s no parade index. It’s a reading, not a metric, though doctors read plenty by eye before they reach for an instrument. A parade is a window, not an engine. It doesn’t make a community healthy. It lets you see what’s already true. So the next time you’re at a parade, anywhere, here are four things you can read.

Range. Who’s in it? Not how many, who. A healthy community can put startling variety into one line and not fly apart. The veteran and the new immigrant. The church group and the drag troupe. The banker and the union local. The wider the range a town can hold and still call it “us”, the healthier it is. And a parade with only one kind of person in it is telling you something too.

Generations. Look at the curb, not just the street. When people show up at dawn with lawn chairs and a hand-drawn map of the route, grandparents next to grandkids, you’re looking at something that got handed down on purpose. When only one generation turns out, the inheritance is breaking somewhere.

Solemnity and humor. The best parades hold both, minutes apart. There’s the quiet for the fallen, the veterans, the honor guard. The space left on purpose for the ones who didn’t come home. And then, almost right away, the guy dressed as a hot dog and the dog wearing sunglasses. A community that can be reverent and ridiculous in the same hour is in good emotional health. One that can only do solemn is brittle. One that can only do spectacle is hollow.

Smell, sound, and tongue. Close your eyes for a second. How many languages are in the air? How many kinds of food? In a healthy parade you can catch three cuisines from one spot on the curb, hear the announcer switch languages, watch faces from four continents go by, and none of it feels like a problem somebody has to manage. It just feels like the place.

My country turns 250 this weekend. Two and a half centuries later, and we still can’t agree on much—which, if you squint, is its own kind of tradition. We’re divided, we’re tired, and we’re not exactly sure what’s next. And yet, I love it. Not because it’s flawless, but because it’s still trying.

On Saturday morning, my hometown will do the one thing it’s never stopped doing, even through the worst of years. Everett will close a street. People will drag their lawn chairs out before the dew is even off the grass. Someone’s uncle will over-decorate a convertible. A dog will refuse to heel. And somewhere, a kid with a tin-foil torch will stand there, meaning something huge without even realizing it—just like I did on that same street, all those years ago.

I’ll be on the curb early, in the same downtown where I once marched as the woman with the lamp, taking the temperature of a 250-year-old patient that’s never been fully well, but hasn’t died either. I’ll be reading the street, counting the cuisines, and hoping the range is a little wider than last year. After that, because some traditions are sacred, I’m heading to a minor-league baseball game. The Everett AquaSox are kind enough to end the night with their own fireworks. Since the next day is my birthday, I’m going to pretend those fireworks are a day early—and call them mine.

Wherever you’re reading this—and I know many of you are in different countries—you’ve got your own version of this. A carnival, a procession, a saint’s day. A street that fills up once a year. Go stand on the curb. Read your own barometer. Then, ask yourself: what would it take to make the range of who gets to march a little wider?

Because a country, just like a parade, isn’t measured by whether everyone is moving in perfect step. God help us if we ever do. It’s measured by how many different people we can fit onto the same street, on the same morning, still willing to wave at strangers.

If you lead anything — a city, a party, a neighborhood, a company, a family — you have more power than you think to make these moments happen. Not as the leader up on the float, waving. The opposite of that. Your job isn’t to be the center — it’s to build the conditions where a whole mix of people can come together and discover they’re one thing, then step back and let them be the center of it. The best leaders I’ve met anywhere understand this in their bones. Belonging isn’t built in the debate hall. It’s built in the street.

That means, first, creating shared space. Belonging comes from proximity — same place, same time. Pick spaces where people gather, not stages where they watch.

It means giving people a role, not a seat. If everyone present is doing something, it becomes theirs. If most are watching, it stays only yours.

It means mixing people who wouldn’t otherwise mix. Belonging happens across difference. Left alone, people cluster with people like them — someone has to engineer the contact.

It means lowering the barrier to showing up. Free, informal, low-commitment. Check what’s quietly filtering people out: cost, timing, formality, language.

And it means stepping back at the key moment. Hand off the mic, skip the photo, let credit diffuse. Staying at the center pulls attention back to you instead of to each other.

None of it holds without protecting it afterward. One event isn’t belonging — repetition is. The ongoing job is unglamorous: keep funding it, keep it informal, defend it from being watered down.

We already know how to build the infrastructure for outrage. This is the harder, quieter work of building the infrastructure for belonging and it's worth it.

Warmly,

Lisa

P.S. If this one landed for you, send it to someone who’s drawn more to what they’re for than what they’re against. And tell me in the comments: what’s the parade or the festival that takes your community’s temperature? I want to hear about your street.

You’re probably reading this with one eye on the World Cup.

Half the planet is watching right now—strangers in matching jerseys hugging in bars, whole countries holding their breath. Work productivity is quietly collapsing across a dozen time zones. Almost nothing else pulls so many different people in the same direction at once.

This is worth reflecting on. The World Cup creates a sense of shared purpose among people who may agree on little else, turning a fleeting moment of joy into a collective experience. It is a powerful model of unity. Political leaders struggle to recreate this kind of spontaneous unity.

This is a piece about sport and belonging, and what leaders can learn from both — centered on a basketball speech.

I’ve previously explored my sports obsession—and what political leadership can learn from the game—in The Metaphor That Finally Makes Sense of Modern Politics.

My first team was my hometown team, the Seattle SuperSonics. I spent my childhood with my mom on the living-room floor, bathed in the glow of our old TV, sitting way too close to the screen, watching them claim the 1979 NBA championship. I can still see Jack Sikma’s pioneering “Big Stretch” signature reverse-pivot jumper, and “Downtown” Freddie Brown’s effortless long-range shots, even before the NBA instituted the three-point line. Those games are hardwired into my DNA. (I’m counting the days until they return; I’ve already promised myself a seat.)

But… I also lived in New York for over a decade. I had both of my babies there. From the day I arrived, I felt like a New Yorker. Not eventually, but right away. I feel like New York hands you belonging before you’ve earned it, then dares you to live up to it. I took the dare. The city got into my blood the same way the Sonics did: as a feeling of being part of something collective, swept into a crowd that had decided I was one of theirs.

So, when I watched NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani speak at the Knicks Championship parade last week, I felt all those feelings again. He took a city of strangers and made everyone feel like they had been there for the whole 53-year wait. Great rhetoric does not guarantee great governance, but it can reveal something about how a leader understands community and belonging.

I want to walk through the speech with you, focusing on the specific moves that do the real work. I highly recommend watching the video of the speech if you can, because as we all know, delivery matters. A game brings people together on its own; the win does the work. A speech doesn’t have that luxury. Mamdani had to build the same feeling out of words alone — doing on purpose what the game did by accident.

This isn’t about whether you like him or his politics; it’s about what you can learn from his leadership. What looks like a sports speech is a working demonstration of how political leadership creates belonging. Once you see these moves, you can’t unsee them.

Move one: he made everyone a witness

Watch and listen to how he opens.

“For 53 long years, we have watched, and we have waited. We have watched from nosebleeds and through gritted teeth, on televisions in the windows of electronic stores, and from projectors balanced on fire escapes.”

He doesn’t start with the team. He starts with us. He names where we were—the nosebleeds, store windows, fire escapes. The cramped apartment where you sat alone with your head in your hands.

That’s a leader telling a fractured city that whatever corner you watched from, you were part of this. He builds the “we” before he ever mentions the win.

The lesson: Belonging often starts with recognition. Name the specific, uneven ways people lived through a moment, and the “we” you build on top will feel real instead of imposed.

Move two: he honored the people who never got the glory

Most politicians would thank the stars. Instead, Mamdani spends a stunning amount of time on the players who lost for years.

He names Toney Douglas, who he watched tie a franchise record from the stands in 2011. He names Jared Jeffries and Lance Thomas and Langston Galloway as “players who gave everything, every game, even when a 20-win season was all that was in sight.”

“This championship belongs to them, too, because championships aren’t just built in one season.”

Read this as a leadership statement, and it transcends basketball. It is a theory of how anything good is built: by people who put in work long before the win was visible, who held the line through the bad years. He tells every overlooked person in that crowd that their unglamorous effort counted.

The lesson: Belonging means honoring the people who did the work when no one was watching. The leader who only celebrates winners builds a thin, fragile “us.”

Move three: he turned a comeback into a creed

This is the heart of it. He walks the crowd back to Game 4: down 20 with nine minutes left. Analysts gave the Knicks a 0.4% chance.

And then:

“It is in that .4% that we go to work.”

He repeats it like a drumbeat. In that 0.4% is where Brunson proves the doubters wrong; where Karl-Anthony Towns finds the strength to mourn his mother and still pull in rebounds; where Jose Alvarado shows every kid in public housing that a son of Brooklyn and Queens can win for all five boroughs.

Then he pivots from the team to the city: :

“The Knicks did not just win for New York City. They won like New York City. What is New York if not your back up against the wall? A dream that feels just out of reach? A rent payment you don’t know how you’ll ever make?”

That is the move. A 0.4% chance stops being a basketball stat and becomes a portrait of their lives, and the comeback becomes proof of what they already survive every day.

The lesson: The most powerful civic stories are mirrors. People belong to a story the moment they see their own life inside it.

Move four: he named the rarest gift of all

Buried in the middle of the speech is the line I keep coming back to.

“So often, when this city comes together, it is because we are forced to by a moment of tragedy or adversity. What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy.”

I’ve thought about that sentence more than any other. It is true of every city, yet almost no leader says it.

We often come together for funerals, disasters, or attacks. Too often, grief is the glue. Mamdani noticed that this time the glue was joy,and that joy is rarer and more precious than we admit.

This is what sport does. It manufactures joy at scale, letting strangers feel it together. A leader who names why it matters helps people carry that feeling longer.

The lesson: Joy may be one of the most underused tools in politics. Don’t wait for a crisis to bring people together — and when joy does the gathering, say so.

What he doesn’t do, and why it matters

Notice what is missing: he never makes it about himself. There is no “my administration” or list of accomplishments. He ends not with a demand but with a request: “One last time, New York, stand with me.”

Stand with me. Not look at me. That is the grammar of belonging.

Now the cautions, because belonging cuts both ways

If I stopped here this would merely be a fan letter. And I’d be doing the exact thing I warn leaders against: showing you only the flattering half.

Belonging is powerful, which is precisely the danger. The same speech that unites a city can, in other hands, exclude others. “Us” can turn into “us versus them” faster than expected.

So hold these next to the lessons.

Service can be a costume. Some dismissed the display as performance. Research shows that while serving others draws better people into politics, doing so in public also covers those wearing a ‘costume’ of service. You can’t always tell conviction from choreography, but you can watch what leaders do after the confetti has been swept away.

Avoid owning what you didn’t make. That joy came from the people, not City Hall. A leader can only tend it. Treating collective belonging as personal property turns something public into something private.

The test for all of it: Did the speech make the circle bigger — or put the speaker in the center of it? Read Mamdani’s speech again. For eight minutes, he kept choosing bigger.

It is vital, however, to be clear-eyed about the limitations of this model. Rhetorical belonging is a fragile bridge, not the destination. It gives leaders the opportunity to build trust, but it does not create trust on its own. A leader can master the rhetoric of belonging and still fail to address the structural conditions that undermine it. Inclusion is not a substitute for governance; it is a multiplier.

Why this isn’t really about basketball or the World Cup

Trust often follows belonging. People trust institutions once they feel they belong to a place. Belonging is rarely built by policy papers. It’s built in moments like this—by leaders who know what to say when the moment arrives.

Mamdani knew what to say. He stood in front of his city and told it the story of itself, honored the people who’d been forgotten, named the joy out loud, and asked everyone to stand together rather than to look at him.

Whether he keeps faith with that craft after the parade is the only question that matters. It’s the one none of us can answer yet.

Watch the World Cup. Feel that pull toward strangers. That feeling is the raw material of trust, which is the raw material of democracy. Leaders worth watching widen that feeling rather than weaponize it.

This is the thread I’m pulling on during my sabbatical: the ties between sport and better politics, and how their relationship can lead to better outcomes for people and the planet. I’ll have more to say soon.

Warmly,

Lisa

A member of the German Bundestag recently described her mornings to us by contrasting them with those of a predecessor. A friend’s father served in that same parliament from the 1970s through to the early 1990s. Every morning, he’d settle into his office for a quiet hour alone, reading the newspaper and catching up on the world before his day officially began.

Her reality is vastly different. She checks the news too, but by then eighty Signal messages have flooded in, a call is coming through, emails are piling up, and she might already have a Zoom call before her day has even officially started.

These are two members of the same parliament, holding the same title, just thirty years apart. Yet their jobs are unrecognizable from one another. The demands of the role have shifted dramatically, yet far less has changed about how we prepare people to meet them. Our new study set out to uncover what that disconnect looks like in practice.

What the study found

Funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung, this study conducted by the Better Politics Foundation followed newly elected Bundestag members through their first year.

Drawing on fifty interviews across the political spectrum, the findings feel universal. Germany currently holds the top position in the Better Politics Index, a pioneering global benchmark that treats the development and support of elected officials as essential infrastructure for a healthy democracy. If these gaps exist in one of the most well-resourced systems, it suggests representatives everywhere are likely facing similar, if not steeper, challenges.

Here are the study’s takeaways:

• The first year is a marathon run at a sprint pace. The hope that things will calm down after a few months rarely materializes; the pace stays relentless from early morning until night.

• Learning happens on the fly, not through training. Across every skill the job demands, people pick things up informally, in the moment. The system assumes competence rather than building it, despite a clear hunger for structured guidance.

• Informal networks are essential infrastructure. Access to knowledge, influence, and support often hinges on informal relationships within and across parties. This works for the well-connected, but it quietly reinforces existing inequalities for everyone else.

• Mentoring is wanted, but only happens by accident. The single most requested form of help is an experienced person to talk to in the first weeks. But right now, it materializes only through luck: office proximity, a familiar face, an old connection. Even then, it’s the newcomer who has to know to ask.

• Overnight, a representative becomes an employer. You win a seat and are suddenly managing a small organization, usually with no preparation. Almost every MP names this as one of their greatest and most underestimated challenges. Talent on a stage doesn’t make someone a good manager, and when it doesn’t, the people working for them bear the cost.

• Overload is treated as a personal failure, not a systemic one. Exhaustion is widespread, but admitting it is seen as a career risk. So the subject stays taboo, and institutional support beyond basic work-life-balance measures is largely missing.

• The most valuable skills are the ones no one asks for. Negotiation, political judgment, and getting clear on one’s own role and goals are abilities MPs tend to assume they already have, so they rarely name them as needs. Yet, those who are trained on these capabilities in a structured setting consistently rate them as among the most useful things they learn. The need is hidden; the impact is high.

A role transformed

It’s clear why this is happening: the demands of political office have evolved beyond recognition. Communication is instantaneous, scrutiny is constant, and the debate culture has sharpened. A representative is now expected to be reachable, visible, and an expert on a massive range of issues. As one first-term MP noted, there’s no job description, just endless, mounting expectations.

The toll is real. Our international study Mere Mortals found that politicians’ well-being is, in some cases, lower than that of emergency service workers. When people are constantly in crisis mode, their capacity for the very things the work depends on — careful negotiation, patience, and long-term thinking — erodes. Persistent overload isn’t just a personal struggle, but a structural weakness in democracy itself.

In other high-stakes fields like elite sport or top-tier business, we systematically invest in development and mental resilience. We wouldn’t expect someone to thrive in such an intense environment without support. Yet in politics, we still operate as if competence is an inherent trait that arrives fully formed. That gap is where new representatives are left to struggle alone.

The whole journey, not the finish line

We view this through the Political Leadership Impact Path, our bespoke model at the Better Politics Foundation that maps a political career as a loop rather than a ladder, one people re-enter and revisit as their roles change.

Seen this way, the gaps become obvious. Support (if any) often arrives in bursts — during the campaign when there’s no time, or during onboarding when there’s too much to process all at once and then thins out exactly when it would help most. And the needs themselves keep moving. At the start it’s practical questions about communication and setting up an office; later it’s strategic press work and ruthless prioritization; over time it’s self-care, role clarity, and strategic direction.

Support delivered once, at the beginning, can’t keep up with a target that keeps moving throughout the political path. And one transition carries more weight than the rest: stepping into office and starting the work. This is where early habits are set, first failures compound, and credibility is established or lost. It is precisely this high-stakes passage that the burst-then-silence pattern serves worst — everything dumped at onboarding, then little sustained support through the months when the role is actually taking shape.

What actually helps

The good news is that much of this is solvable, and that where support is offered, it’s embraced. But the study is equally clear on something more difficult: no single actor, and no amount of individual grit, fixes this alone. The taboo, the missing structures, and the mistimed support are properties of a whole ecosystem, and they shift only when parties, parliaments, foundations, and cross-party groups actually coordinate rather than work past one another. With that in mind, here’s where to start:

• Formalize mentoring systems so that every newcomer can count on it.

• Teach leadership and management as a core competency through structured introductory training and offer refresher courses.

• Destigmatize overload. Leaders who speak openly about the strain lower the barrier for everyone else. Structural problems need structural solutions, not just personal resilience. For example:

  • A senior politician saying, “I don’t take calls after nine because tired people make bad calls on behalf of the country.” That framing, where the limit reads as competence rather than weakness, is the only one that holds up when your opponents are looking for a soft spot.

  • Party leaders standing behind a colleague who steps back for health reasons without that being the end of their career. Jacinda Ardern’s “not enough in the tank” resignation got a lot of attention, but it was an exit, not an example of how to stay, which tells you how little room there still is to do this and keep going.

  • Leaders being honest that the job has limits built into it: nobody masters defense, health, the budget and foreign affairs all at once, so leaning on others isn’t the leader falling short — it’s the role working the way it’s supposed to.

• Build in methodological decision-making. For example:

  • A dedicated “futures” committee inside parliament. A permanent “futures” committee whose whole job is the long view: what the country faces in twenty years, not next year’s budget. Finland has one, its Committee for the Future, a standing all-party group of 17 MPs acting as parliament’s in-house think tank on long-term threats. The fuller version would route major bills through it for a “what could this look like in twenty years” check, the same way bills already get a routine cost estimate before they’re voted on.

  • A non-partisan foresight office working for parliament, not the government. Long-range thinking mostly happens inside the executive, who have every reason to forecast a future that flatters their plans. Give parliament its own futures analysis so the opposition isn’t stuck with the government’s version. The model already exists for money: the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility and the US Congressional Budget Office were built so everyone argues over the same non-partisan numbers. A foresight office does that for the future, one shared forecast instead of whoever’s in power owning the only one.

  • A required “imagine it failed” step before any big decision. A required “imagine it failed” step before any big decision. Before signing off on something major, run a pre-mortem: assume the policy collapsed two years on, and explain why.

• Create cross-party spaces — and run them deliberately. The best learning happens when rival-party representatives speak candidly in a setting their own parties can’t offer: small recurring groups, Chatham House rules, a neutral facilitator, stable membership, a shared task. Germany’s Brand New Bundestag and JoinPolitics do this, convening politicians from the Left to the CDU/FDP “at eye level” with civil society. Participants consistently say the relationships outlast the training content, which is why the convening itself is the deliverable.

Here’s the part that should matter to everyone who has never run for office and never will: the quality of the decisions that shape your life depend on the quality of attention the people making them can bring. Exhausted decision-makers, working without support in a job that has outgrown its preparation, make worse choices. Supporting representatives isn’t just sympathy for a profession few of us envy; it is, surprisingly, a matter of self-interest. It’s maintenance on the system we all depend on.

If you want to know more about our Bundestag study, come to our launch event on 25 June, 17:00–18:30, at the Deutscher Bundestag (Platz der Republik 1, Berlin). It features a cross-party panel with sitting MPs from the SPD, CDU, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, and Die Linke. Register here.

Warmly,

Lisa, with Cäcilia Riederer, Senior Program Manager at the Better Politics Foundation.

Special thanks to lead researcher Corina Scholz.

P.S. Although this study was conducted in Germany, we believe the pattern is close to universal, and the model travels. If you’d like to see this research replicated in your own country, we’d love to hear from you.

“Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Lord Acton wrote that in 1887. History keeps proving him right.

We assume the corrupted leader had a hidden flaw that finally surfaced. Sometimes that’s true. But the neuroscience points to something we tend to miss: it’s often not character at all. It’s what high status does to a working brain.

I’ve watched the same person become someone else simply by changing roles. That shift doesn’t show up on a personality test. It shows up in how the brain handles power.

So if we want better politics, we can’t just pick better people. We have to build systems that account for what power does to all of them.

I recently re-watched Triangle of Sadness - Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning comedy about wealth and survival - and it plays less like allegory than like a case study.

The setup: a luxury yacht of the ultra-rich, waited on by an invisible crew. The yacht sinks. A handful wash up on a desert island, where the only person who can fish, build, or lead is Abigail, the woman who cleaned their toilets. Status flips overnight - and so does she. I’ll use the film throughout, because it shows what research can only name.

Three patterns

Research on the cognitive effects of power points to three recurring ways power reshapes thinking. They tend to show up regardless of country, background, or character - which is the unsettling part. This isn’t about bad people. It can happen to good ones too.

The fix isn’t just better people. It’s environments that hold these shifts in check.

1. People become harder to see

Power focuses the brain on goals and dampens sensitivity to social cues. Other people start to register as means, not as humans. It isn’t cruelty - they’ve stopped seeing you.

In a now-classic set of experiments, people primed with power were measurably worse at taking another person’s visual perspective and at reading others’ emotions - power seemed to almost instantly impair the ability to appreciate others’ points of view (Galinsky, Magee, Inesi & Gruenfeld, 2006).

On the yacht, the guests can’t see the crew as people - they see them as props. Then the ship sinks, Abigail becomes the island’s only competent survivor, and she runs the exact same filter on her former bosses: withholding food, trading privileges for loyalty. Same mechanism. New hierarchy.

2. Risks look smaller than they are

Power tends to activate the brain’s approach and reward systems. Upside gets amplified; danger gets discounted. Surround a leader with people who only agree, and the bubble seals shut. This approach/reward tilt is the core of Keltner, Gruenfeld and Anderson’s theory of power; elevated power pushes attention toward rewards and away from threat and constraint.

The guests show this before the storm ever hits. Every need anticipated, every discomfort smoothed away - a system built to confirm everything is fine. By the time the danger is real, they’ve lost the instinct to read it. They never had to use it.

3. Living in the clouds

Status pulls thinking toward the big picture and away from how the work actually gets done. Social distance breeds abstraction. Leaders start treating critical feedback as disloyalty - when it’s usually the system trying to stop a bad idea.

The billionaires live in pure abstraction: aesthetics, ideology, self-image. Stranded on a beach, the most “visionary” among them are the most helpless. The one who knows how to fish is the woman who cleaned their toilets.

The courage to slow down and see who isn’t in the room

Early in my career I worked for a politician I admired. The week he won, his base pushed hard for a sweeping housing change. Popular. A clear mandate.

He said no. Not because he disagreed, but because he asked the hard questions: What happens to current renters? Can the schools and roads absorb the growth?

His supporters were furious. He didn’t cave - he laid out the trade-offs and promised to revisit it once protections were in place. Weeks later, his coalition hadn’t broken. It had grown.

Power pulls everyone toward the opposite - toward the room, the base, the people already shouting. He felt that pull too. He just refused to let it decide for him. He saw the people who weren’t in the room. He came down from the clouds to look at the ground.

That isn’t natural. It’s a practice. And we can build environments that make the practice easier.

Switches and Dials

In my “Switches and Dials” framework, some things are switches - always ON. Integrity. Honesty. Flip one off and the leader has failed, whatever the polls say.

Everything else is a dial: speed, risk appetite, vision versus detail. You turn them up or down to fit the moment.

Here’s the twist: power messes with your dials automatically. It turns vision up and empathy down - not by choice, but as output. And if the dials drift far enough, the integrity switch starts to flicker.

Corruption isn’t a moment. It’s a slow drift, one small rationalization at a time.

Triangle of Sadness makes a blunt argument through its plot: “everyone’s equal” is the oldest lie power tells. The film shreds it. Nobody’s switches stay on once the dials drift far enough. Not the guests. Not the captain. Not Abigail.

Character is the switch. The dials are the system. And systems require design, not just good intentions.

What better design looks like

Build in friction. Don’t let everyone agree. Use red teams and pre-mortems - imagine the project has already failed, then work backward. It takes two or three open dissenters to make it safe for everyone else to speak.

Make rest non-negotiable. Exhaustion guts the parts of the brain that handle empathy and risk. This isn’t wellness; it’s governance. New Zealand’s 2019 Wellbeing Budget built long-term wellbeing measures into the actual decision-making.

Protect the critics. People are wired to fear challenging high status. Whistleblower protections and independent oversight are the brakes for when a leader’s brain starts to drift. Nobody could challenge the ship’s captain, who checks out entirely when the crisis hits. Nobody could challenge Abigail. The absence of legitimate dissent made both disasters worse, faster.

Keep people moving. Power effects are tied to the role, not the person. Term limits and rotation aren’t tradition - they stop a brain from getting stuck in high-power mode.

The outsider advantage

Outsiders often read reality more clearly, because they’ve never been rewarded by the bubble. A cross-country study found that greater representation of women in parliament is associated with lower corruption (Dollar, Fisman & Gatti, 2001). But the causation is contested, and the contest is revealing: later researchers argued the link is structural - women rise more easily in open systems that already punish corruption, while entrenched networks of corrupt officials actively suppress outsiders’ access to keep the benefits flowing (Esarey & Schwindt-Bayer, 2018). That’s power doing what power does: protecting itself by deciding who gets into the room.

Abigail captures the double edge. She’s the most competent person in the lifeboat - the only one who can fish, lead, keep people alive. Her years of being ignored gave her a clearer read than anyone. But once she holds power, she starts protecting it: rationing resources, managing threats. Facing the loss of her position, she reaches for a rock. Östlund doesn’t play it as panic. It reads as calculation. And that’s the unsettling part - not that the brain-based account is wrong, but that the two may be the same thing seen from different angles. A brain reshaped by power doesn’t experience itself as distorted. It experiences itself as finally seeing clearly. Power changes what rational feels like from the inside - which is exactly why you can’t expect the powerful to talk themselves out of it.

This is why whistle-blowers matter. They’re a kind of within-outsider - people inside the structure who never fully assimilated to it, and so kept the capacity to see what everyone rewarded by the bubble has stopped noticing. A beneficial fifth column. The same logic runs through the case for a diverse inner circle: the value isn’t representation for its own sake, it’s that someone in the room still has an undistorted read.

Outsiders also pay a tax. The threat of confirming a negative stereotype (Steele, 1997), and the belonging uncertainty that comes with being the only one of your kind in the room (Walton & Cohen, 2011), undermine focus and judgment. If we want diverse leadership to work, we have to support it structurally - not just open the door and walk away.

Diversity isn’t only an equity argument. It’s a cognitive-architecture argument. Different lived experiences mean different ways of seeing, and that recalibrates what power distorts. But only when those leaders are backed, not just invited.

On deliberative democracy

Citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgeting put ordinary people in the room - people whose brains haven’t been marinating in status. In Ireland, a citizens’ assembly helped break years of deadlock on the Eighth Amendment, paving the way to the 2018 referendum. Part of why it worked is that the brains in the room weren’t distorted by power - the social distance that pushes the powerful toward abstraction and away from the concrete (Liberman & Trope, 2008) simply wasn’t operating on them.

The catch: leaders tend to listen only when it suits them - the high-power brain filtering out anything off-plan. So these processes need binding force or real public accountability, otherwise they’re theater.

We also need to train leaders to sit with uncomfortable questions and listen to understand, not just to respond. That’s not a soft skill. It’s brain training. At the Better Politics Foundation, we pull both levers: better systems, and leaders who can manage their own wiring.

The Dark Triad

Everything so far has been about how power changes ordinary brains. But there’s a second mechanism, and it runs the other way. Some people don’t need power to change them - they arrive already tilted, high in Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. Those traits can give them an edge on the climb, which means power doesn’t just corrupt good actors; it can hand an advantage to the wrong ones. The instincts that get them to the top are the same ones that ignore the brakes once they’re there.

These are two different problems. The first - power distorting a normal brain - is why you need guardrails for everyone. The second - bad actors self-selecting into power - is why you can’t rely on character screening to catch them, since the traits that win power are the ones that hide best. Good design has to do both jobs at once: restrain the brains that drift, and contain the ones who were already adapted to exploit it - whether that’s a fixed disposition or a habit the climb rewarded.

Designing for balance

These shifts aren’t moral failings. They’re responses to a role. Assign someone power and their thinking tends to change quickly - which tells you exactly where to put the guardrails.

We choose leaders for their past and then forget to build the system that protects their best instincts once they’re in office. Make perspective-taking and accountability structural, and you help leaders stay the people you elected.

That’s not cynicism about leaders. It’s realism about humans.

Triangle of Sadness ends with the rock still raised. We never see what Abigail does. But the point lands anyway: when the system has no brakes, even the people we root for reach for the rock.

Warmly,

Lisa

P.S. Thanks to my colleague Rebekah Ison, our Head of Philanthropy and Insights, whose notes from a recent NeuroLeadership Institute webinar shaped this piece.

A note on the science: these patterns are tendencies measured across groups, not laws that fire identically in every person — and we’re still learning exactly how the brain produces them. Treat this as a useful guide, not a finished map.

Key sources and further reading

• Keltner, Gruenfeld & Anderson (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2). https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.110.2.265

• Galinsky, Magee, Inesi & Gruenfeld (2006). Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological Science, 17(12). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01824.x

• Dollar, Fisman & Gatti (2001). Are women really the “fairer” sex? Corruption and women in government. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 46(4). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-2681(01)00169-X

• Esarey & Schwindt-Bayer (2018). Women’s representation, accountability and corruption in democracies. British Journal of Political Science, 48(3).

• Swamy, Knack, Lee & Azfar (2001). Gender and corruption. Journal of Development Economics, 64(1).

• Steele (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American Psychologist, 52(6). https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.52.6.613

• Walton & Cohen (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes. Science, 331(6023). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1198364

• Liberman & Trope (2008). The psychology of transcending the here and now. Science, 322.

• Smith, Jostmann, Galinsky & van Dijk (2008). Lacking power impairs executive functions. Psychological Science, 19(5).

• Klein (2007). Performing a project premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85(9).

• Zenko (2015). Red Team. Basic Books.

• New Zealand Treasury, Wellbeing Budget 2019.

• Courant (2021). Citizens’ assemblies for referendums and constitutional reforms. Frontiers in Political Science.

• Curato et al. (2017). Twelve key findings in deliberative democracy research. Daedalus, 146(3).

• Rock (2008). SCARF: A brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others. NeuroLeadership Journal, Issue 1.

• NeuroLeadership Institute, Cognitive Effects of Power webinar.

• Heidrick & Struggles. Wired and unaware: The neuroscience behind leaders’ greatest liability.

I encounter some version of this skepticism constantly.

Last week, a funder I admire, someone with extensive experience in democratic governance, looked me in the eye after a presentation and asked: "How do you guarantee the leaders you develop won't use what you teach them against democracy?"

It’s a question we get often.

What if you accidentally train a better authoritarian?

It sounds like a responsible concern. However, it hides a dangerous assumption: that doing nothing is a neutral choice.

It isn’t.

Failing to invest in leadership is still a choice—one that leaves the world’s most consequential roles to whoever happens to stumble into them or craves power most desperately. We aren’t protecting democracy by standing back; we are abandoning the field.

We train pilots to manage turbulence and surgeons before they ever hold a scalpel. Yet in politics—the field that determines whether wars are fought, pandemics are managed, and democracies survive—we routinely hand over the cockpit after takeoff and wonder why so many flights crash.

“The real question is not ‘what if one turns out badly?’ it’s ‘what happens if we don’t invest?’ and ‘what if one is the next Nelson Mandela of their country?’”

The governing workforce nobody trains

Worldwide, there are an estimated 8.5 million elected officials. Approximately 35.6% are women.

We often discuss “politicians” as if they were a small club of famous faces. In reality, the global governing workforce looks like this:

Just 71 democratically elected heads of state or government shape the lives of roughly 45% of the world’s population. They could all fit on a single school bus.

Roughly 46,000 national parliamentarians serve in the world’s legislatures. That is fewer people than attend a single Premier League football match, yet they write the laws that govern billions.

Then there are hundreds of thousands of mayors. The mayors of the world’s 300 largest cities alone collectively govern more than a billion people — more than the population of Europe.

Beneath them lies the real infrastructure of democracy: more than 8 million subnational and local elected officials. This includes village council members in India—where there are 3.1 million local officials—as well as municipal councillors in Brazil and school board members in the U.S. Collectively, they outnumber the populations of Denmark, Finland, and Norway combined.

Almost none of these individuals were systematically prepared for one of the most vital roles in society.

Citizens already know the answer

A 2025 Pew Research Center study across 25 countries found that majorities in 20 of them demand significant political reform. Nearly half of respondents believe few or none of their officials are honest, while similar numbers feel politicians are out of touch with ordinary needs.

When asked what would improve democracy, the most frequent answer wasn’t better institutions—it was better political leaders.

Citizens aren’t asking for better laws; they are asking for better people. The diagnosis is clear; the question is whether we will act on it.

Citizens are diagnosing the problem clearly. The question is whether we’ll act on it.

Every other profession accepts this logic

Medical schools train doctors, yet some commit malpractice. No one argues we should stop training doctors. Business schools develop executives, and some fail spectacularly, but we don’t conclude that leadership development was the error.

In every high-stakes profession, we accept that developing capacity is better than leaving people unprepared. We build accountability into the system to mitigate the risk of failure.

Only in politics do we suggest that the risk of one bad actor should preclude developing everyone else, despite politics being far more consequential than medicine or law.

Leadership quality is designable — not fixed

Resistance to investment often stems from “magical thinking”—the hero narrative that good leaders simply emerge. The research proves otherwise.

A field experiment published in The Review of Economic Studies tested framing political office as service rather than status. In a randomized trial across 192 villages, communities presented with “prosocial” reasons for running produced more candidates, better candidates, and policies more aligned with citizen desires.

“Prosocial” is the core of our work at the Better Politics Foundation. We develop leaders whose motivation is the welfare of their constituents and the planet—problem-solvers with the skills to deliver results.

Voters are increasingly electing outsiders—teachers, doctors, and activists. These leaders arrive with strong values but often lack governing skills. They know the why and the what, but the how—coalition management and policy implementation—is where good intentions often stall.

We are seeing the consequences. In the UK, over half the House of Commons elected in 2024 are first-timers. In Bolivia, a former police captain with a massive TikTok following helped end 20 years of single-party rule, but entered office without preparation. The resulting instability demonstrates the cost of unreadiness.

The argument against leadership development assumes a stable class of career politicians. In reality, it is first-time officeholders who are answering the call and they are flying without a map.

What we teach is not morally neutral

At the Better Politics Foundation, we prioritize transformational, prosocial leadership that optimizes for feedback rather than control.

Our Elbow Grease Gap framework addresses a common imbalance: leaders spend 80% of their time on the “why” and “what,” but almost none on the “how.” Closing this gap requires humility and accountability—traits that authoritarians typically avoid.

A leader trained to run pre-mortems, build feedback loops, and ask “who benefits from things staying the same?” is being developed in a direction. Toward transparency. Toward democratic accountability. The tools and the orientation are woven together.

Could someone misuse these skills? Theoretically, yes. But refusing to teach democratic governance because of potential misuse is like refusing to teach critical thinking because it could be used for propaganda. We must build the systems we believe in.

The real risk is not building

History is full of leaders who held democracy together during “hinge moments.” Almost all were mentored and tested long before their moment arrived. The pipeline existed; it just wasn’t labeled “leadership development.”

Vaclav Havel spent two decades as a dissident playwright, imprisoned multiple times, building networks through the Charter 77 movement and samizdat publishing. When Czechoslovakia’s hinge moment came in 1989, he was ready — not because anyone had trained him for the presidency, but because the dissident community itself had been his pipeline: a decentralized network that tested his moral authority, strategic thinking, and ability to hold coalitions together under pressure.

Nelson Mandela was identified and mentored by Walter Sisulu, who brought him into the ANC, connected him to key allies, and shaped his political education throughout the 1940s and 50s. His 27 years in prison then became an involuntary but formative leadership program — he studied, negotiated with prison authorities, mediated disputes among inmates, and deliberately prepared himself to govern.

Imagine designing that pipeline intentionally for hundreds of leaders across dozens of countries. Most of the investment compounds quietly through better governance and stable coalitions. A few generate outsized returns. We shouldn’t abandon an investment strategy because of one possible loss; we should design for accountability.

The objection—”What if one turns out badly?”—sounds like caution, but it serves as a justification for inaction.

So here’s what I’d say to anyone asking this question sincerely:

If you work in philanthropy: Invest in political leadership as long-term capacity building, much like science or education. This is leverage; the quality of political decisions determines the success of every other investment you make.

If you work in politics: Normalize coaching and continuous learning as strengths. Even the world’s best athletes have coaches.

And if you’ve ever thought people like me should be in politics more often — you may be exactly who democracy needs.

The real question is whether we will invest now, or wait until the next crisis forces us to wish we had.

Warmly,

Lisa

A few weeks ago in Lucerne, I helped host Heidi's Table — a dinner gathering of people dedicated to social impact for kids. The name is a nod to the iconic Swiss children's book Heidi, reminding us of the story's core lesson: that authentic connection and nature are the true medicine for children. The ask was simple: bring your favorite children's book. I brought The Gruffalo.

If you haven't read The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson, the plot is deceivingly simple. A small mouse walks through a deep, dark wood. A fox invites him to lunch. So does an owl. So does a snake. Each one wants to eat him.

The mouse has no claws, no wings, no venom. What he has is a strategy. He invents a terrifying creature in vivid detail, the Gruffalo, and claims it as a friend with a taste for fox, owl, and snake. Each predator, not wanting to be the next meal, runs. Then the Gruffalo shows up. For real. The mouse doesn't panic. When the Gruffalo threatens to eat him, the mouse says: follow me, and you'll see that everyone here is afraid of me. They walk through the wood together, and one by one the snake, the owl, and the fox take one look and flee. They're not running from you, the mouse says. They're running from me. And the Gruffalo, terrified, runs too.

A tiny mouse. No power. Just a story, a strategy, and the nerve to execute it — twice, in completely different circumstances.

I think about this book a lot when I think about politics.

The Mouse and the Bear

I’ve written before about the bear in the air traffic control tower — the idea that political leaders today are inside a situation nobody was trained for, where nobody knows what the bear will do next, but the planes keep coming and somebody still has to land them. The Gruffalo is the children’s book version. The mouse is a small creature inside a system actively trying to consume him. There’s no protocol. Nobody trained him. And then the thing he invented to protect himself becomes real and turns into its own threat.

We are living in a political moment where the narratives leaders built to manage one set of problems have taken on lives of their own — inside institutions never stress-tested for this kind of rupture. The difference between the mouse and most leaders? When the terrain changed, he changed with it. For half the book his strategy is talking about a monster that doesn’t exist. The moment it turns up for real, that move is worthless, so he drops it and starts using the Gruffalo instead. He didn’t cling to what worked five minutes ago. He recalibrated and acted.

The Mouse Has Switches and Dials

This is where my Switches and Dials framework meets a children’s book.

The mouse’s switches are always on. He never lies about who he is — he’s a mouse, not pretending to be bigger or stronger. When his invented story collides with reality, he doesn’t deny what’s in front of him. He owns it immediately. Integrity and accountability: always on.

But his dials are extraordinary. Take transparency — with the predators, he is strategically opaque, revealing just enough (the idea of a monster) to terrify them. With the Gruffalo, he dials visibility to the max: he makes the beast walk behind him in full view of the wood, so that when the fox, owl and snake flee, the Gruffalo concludes they must be running from the mouse. He isn’t just being seen; he’s weaponizing perception.

Watch how he dials tone — cunning and dismissive with the predators, then calm and quiet with the Gruffalo. Remember this: the best leaders get quieter, not louder, when the stakes are highest.

Watch him dial risk appetite all the way up. Walking alongside the thing that could eat you is a calculated risk of the highest order. He’s betting his life that the Gruffalo is gullible and that the predators’ fear is greater than the monster’s own ego. He can take that risk because his switches are on—his read on the situation is honest, not wishful.

And the mouse closes what I’ve called the Elbow Grease Gap — the chasm between diagnosing a problem and actually delivering on it. He doesn’t give a speech about the injustice of being small. He doesn’t convene a working group on fox-mouse relations. He builds a narrative so vivid it changes behavior, and then he lives it. A great diagnosis without a delivery mechanism is just a TED talk. The mouse delivers.

Your Turn

At Heidi’s Table, we were a room of people who feel, at times, like the mouse — small actors in a forest of much larger forces. The policy landscape for kids is a deep, dark wood: underfunded schools, crumbling childcare, a mental health crisis that’s been “urgent” for a decade with precious little delivery. There’s a bear in every tower.

The Gruffalo doesn’t tell kids to wait for a bigger ally. It tells them: walk into the woods today, with what you have, and make it work. Switches on, dials tuned, story ready.

That got me thinking: what children’s books should be written for this moment? I’d love one about Switches and Dials — a kid who learns some things you never turn off, and others you adjust to context. Where the hero isn’t always brave or always cautious, but learns when to be which. I want one about the Elbow Grease Gap — where the brilliant idea is only 20% of the work, and the hero is the kid who still shows up on day 40 when it’s boring, and nothing is going viral. And I want one that teaches what the mouse already knows: the people who look scary aren’t always dangerous, and the people who look friendly aren’t always safe.

So: what’s your favorite children’s book, and why? What did it teach you that you still carry? Hit reply. I’ll share the best answers in a future post.

The bear is still in the air traffic control tower. The planes are still landing. And somewhere in the deep, dark wood, a very small mouse is walking — not because the forest is safe, but because standing still was never really an option.

Warmly,

Lisa

Last week, someone I respect — someone smart, informed, engaged — called politicians “elected oligarchs.” The crowd chuckled. A few people nodded. It got the easy laugh these lines always get.

I am tired of it.

My colleagues and I hear some version of this every week. In workshops with civil society and business executives. In calls with funders. In green rooms before panels. At dinners with caring, thoughtful people who would never be this fatalistic about any other field that so fundamentally shapes human life.

“You can’t train politicians.”

“The people who want power only want it for ego.”

“They’re all elected oligarchs. Always have been.”

We’ve heard it so many times we’ve started cataloging the variations. The resigned shrug. The knowing laugh. The person who delivers it like a difficult truth no one else is brave enough to say. Sometimes the cynicism arrives dressed as sophistication, as innovation. Sometimes, as dark humor. Sometimes, it’s something closer to grief.

And I want to say something direct: it’s a cheap line. It gets a nod, but it lacks precision and curiosity. From people as smart as the ones saying it, I expect better.

Because “elected oligarchs” — really? All of them?

• Václav Havel, who went from prison to the presidency and dismantled a totalitarian state without a shot being fired — an oligarch?

• Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who inherited a country shattered by civil war and rebuilt Liberia’s institutions while fighting Ebola —in it for herself?

• John Lewis, who was beaten nearly to death on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and spent sixty years in public service — just ego?

• Barack Obama, who was raised by a single mother, became the first Black president in American history, and spent eight years governing under a level of obstruction and racial hostility that would have broken most people — just chasing status?

• Helen Clark, who served nine years as New Zealand’s Prime Minister, then led the United Nations Development Program for eight more, dedicating three decades to public service when she could have walked away at any point — in it for the money?

• Angela Merkel, a doctor in quantum chemistry from East Germany who led Europe’s largest democracy for sixteen years, navigated the eurozone crisis, the refugee crisis, and a pandemic, and left office voluntarily with her integrity intact — addicted to power?

• Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison, walked out without bitterness, negotiated the end of apartheid, served one term as president, and stepped down when he could have ruled for life — another strongman?

(And these are just the names you know. In every country, there are mayors, city council members, and local representatives whose constituents could tell you exactly the same kind of story. You’ve just never heard of them.)

You don’t have to agree with every decision these people made. I don’t.

But if you cannot distinguish between these leaders and the ones who disgust you, your analysis is not sharp. It’s lazy. And lazy analysis of politics is something we can no longer afford.

My colleagues and I work with political leaders across the globe — training them, studying them, sitting with them through crises and failures and moments of extraordinary courage. Some are deeply flawed. Some are remarkable. Most are mixtures. That is what humans are.

But the story that everyone in politics is irredeemable? That story is wrong. And it is doing catastrophic damage.

The numbers behind the cynicism

A 2025 Pew Research Center study across 25 countries found that majorities in 20 countries believe their political systems need major reform or complete change. In seven nations — including the United States, Greece, and France — roughly half or more wanted reform and didn’t believe it could happen. Across all 25 countries, a median of nearly half of adults said few or none of their elected officials are honest.

And nowhere is this belief system more entrenched than in Pakistan — the country where the experiment I’m about to describe took place. A 2023 Gallup survey found that 88% of Pakistanis believe corruption is widespread in their government, and 70% lack confidence in the honesty of their elections. If cynicism about politics can be shifted there, it can be shifted anywhere.

This isn’t just frustration. This is a belief system. And I’m going to show you, with one study, exactly how much that belief system costs us.

The garden

Imagine two gardens. The first has healthy soil, clean water, sunlight, and care. A wide range of plants can grow there. The second is toxic — depleted soil, contaminated water, hostile weather, and broken fencing. Over time, only the hardiest, most aggressive weeds survive.

Now imagine standing in front of that second garden and concluding: See? The problem is the plants.

That is how we talk about politics. We blame the people. We almost never examine the soil.

But there are two things the cynics never reckon with — and both are backed by hard science.

The first: your brain rewards helping other people. This is not a metaphor. The same reward circuits that fire when you receive food or money also activate when you cooperate, give, or help — brain imaging studies have shown this consistently across charitable donation, cooperation, and costly helping tasks. The idea that humans are fundamentally and only selfish is not just cynical. It is actually biologically wrong.

The second: environments shape which impulses win. Decades of behavioral research show that people adapt to whatever system they’re inside — its incentives, its norms, what it rewards, what it punishes, what it destroys. Put the same person in a system that rewards performance and punishes vulnerability, and you get one kind of behavior. Put them in a system that rewards contribution and protects integrity, and you get another. Both of those impulses — self-interest and service — live in all of us. The soil determines which one grows.

So what happens when you actually change the soil?

The experiment that should change how you think about politics

If you take one thing from this piece, take this.

In the lead-up to Pakistan’s 2015 local government elections, researchers Saad Gulzar and Muhammad Yasir Khan ran a randomized controlled trial across 192 villages in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, working with 9,310 ordinary citizens, none of whom were political party workers or had planned to run for office. Trained canvassers visited each citizen at home and encouraged them to consider standing for their village council. The question the researchers wanted to answer was simple: Does the way we talk about politics change who enters politics?

In one set of villages, canvassers framed political office the way most people already see it — around personal returns: the status, respect, and influence that come with holding a seat. In another set, they framed it around prosocial motives: the chance to serve the community, to improve public services, and to deliver for people who needed it. The researchers varied how the message was delivered: in some villages, canvassers spoke to citizens privately; in others, they spoke to them publicly, in front of neighbors.

Then they waited to see who actually ran, who won, and — a year later — how those who took office actually governed.

Three things happened when politics was framed as service.

1. Different people ran. Candidacy went up by 1.8 percentage points—an 86% increase over the baseline rate in personal-framing villages.⁷ Small in absolute terms, enormous in relative terms: nearly twice as many people stepped forward to run. And the people stepping forward were specifically more prosocial than candidates who would have been recruited under the status quo. Not just more candidates. Different candidates.

2. Those people won. The probability of being elected rose by 1.2 percentage points—a 120% increase against the personal-framing baseline.⁸ Voters chose them.

3. Those leaders actually governed differently. This is the part that stops me every time. A year later, the researchers measured the gap between what citizens said they wanted their council to spend money on and what councils actually spent money on. In villages where politics had been framed around service, that gap closed by roughly 15%. Not because citizens’ preferences shifted: citizen preferences in social-framing villages were nearly identical to those in personal-framing villages. The politicians changed. Better people entered, and they made better decisions.

And here’s the finding that has the deepest implications: none of this worked when the framing happened only in private. It worked when it happened publicly — when canvassers made that same case in front of the person’s neighbors, so the community’s shared narrative about what politics is for changed. When everyone in the village heard the same reframing, the entire selection dynamic shifted. Communities coordinated around candidates committed to the public good. Social expectations changed. And the people who stepped forward were people who, under the old narrative, would have stayed home.

Let me say that plainly. A single shift in how a community talked about politics — from “it’s about status” to “it’s about service” — changed who ran, who won, and how they governed. In a rigorous, peer-reviewed, randomized experiment.

Change the story, and you change who shows up.

Keep telling the old story, and you keep getting the old result.

The self-fulfilling prophecy

This is what the cynics miss. Or refuse to see.

Every time someone says, “all politicians are corrupt,” it gets slightly more likely that the person in their life who could be extraordinary in office decides not to try. Every time we treat political ambition as inherently suspect, we reinforce the filter that screens out the people we say we want.

My colleagues and I see this constantly. We meet people who would be remarkable leaders — principled, skilled, motivated by service — and they tell us they won’t enter politics because of how it’s perceived. Not the work. The story.

Cynicism doesn’t describe reality. It produces it.

And it doesn’t just keep good people out. It drives people toward autocrats. When citizens stop believing democratic politics can deliver — when they decide every politician is a fraud and every institution is captured — the strongman who says “I alone can fix it” starts to sound less like a warning and more like a relief. The road from “they’re all corrupt” to “at least this one is honest about power” is shorter than any of us wants to admit.

You don’t just repeat the cynicism. You become the toxic soil. And then you point at the weeds and say I told you so.

It will never be perfect. That’s the point.

Politics will never be clean. People are contradictory, tribal, short-sighted, stubborn, and occasionally magnificent. Any system built by humans carries those qualities. The question was never, can we make politics perfect? Can we make the soil good enough that more of what we need has a chance to grow?

One promising answer: blending elected politics with citizens’ assemblies. In Ireland, 99 randomly selected citizens deliberated on abortion, one of the most divisive issues in Irish life, and their recommendation led to the 2018 referendum that legalized it. An earlier assembly, the Constitutional Convention, helped pave the way for marriage equality in 2015. Given structure, good information, and real responsibility, ordinary people will take on what professional politicians fear to touch.

But assemblies aren’t magic. France’s Climate Convention produced 149 proposals; only about a fifth were adopted in full. The hard parts are real: securing commitment to act, and building legitimacy with the wider public. The answer isn’t one or the other. It’s both. Better politicians and more citizen voice. Better soil and more diverse seeds.

What I need you to do

One line. Clear enough for a t-shirt:

Tend the soil. Don’t just curse the weeds.

Five things you can do:

1. Change the story. Next time you catch yourself saying, “all politicians are corrupt,” stop. Ask instead: What kind of political environment are we creating, and who does it let grow? The Pakistan experiment proved that single reframe changes who runs.

2. Recruit someone. You know a person — a teacher, an organizer, a public health worker — who’d be extraordinary in office. Tell them. The experiment showed that public encouragement is one of the most powerful drivers of political candidacy.

3. Protect the ones who enter. When someone you respect enters public service, don’t abandon them to a system built to grind people down. Show up. Defend them when the outrage machine hits. Staying good inside a brutal system takes support, not just character.

4. Fund the soil. We spend roughly $60 billion a year globally on executive training and based on our estimates, approximately $15 million on political leadership development. That ratio is the problem. Invest in organizations doing the unglamorous work of recruiting, training, and supporting political leaders. Reach out about our Better Politics Fund for a vetted pipeline of non-partisan innovations from around the world.

5. Send this to the cynic in your life. The one who shrugs at politics. The friend who’d be a great leader but talked themselves out of it. The narrative changes one conversation at a time.

Tend the soil. Don’t just curse the weeds.

Warmly,

Lisa

Last week, I stood beneath the Acropolis at a dinner hosted by the Futurific Institute alongside the World Beautiful Business Forum — a gathering of founders, CEOs, and creative leaders exploring how beauty transforms organizations. Futurific’s CEO, Rachel Goslins, asked each of us to share what gives us awe. When my turn came, I led the room through a group “Yum” — arms waving in the air, voices together, a full-body expression of shared delight. People stopped watching me and started watching each other. Under one of the oldest monuments to human aspiration on earth, a room full of executives was grinning at strangers.

We were a little concerned for the wait staff trying to set down plates of gorgeous strawberry pavlova while we were all waving our arms above our heads. But that’s part of the point. The moment was beautifully imperfect, a little chaotic, and entirely human.

I’ve been sitting with that experience since, alongside Dacher Keltner’s book Awe: The Science of Everyday Wonder and How it can Transform Your Life, and I keep arriving at the same place: what happened under the Acropolis wasn’t just a fun icebreaker. It was a leadership act. And it points to something most leadership models completely miss. Often, it is completely free.

The Small Self

Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, studied awe across 26 countries and 2,600 people. The key finding for leaders: awe produces what he calls the “small self.” Your ego recedes. You feel part of something larger. And the effects persist — people who’ve recently experienced awe become more generous, more humble, more attuned to collective needs. Awe makes it easier for people to lead well — and harder to lead badly.

You know awe is happening when you feel simultaneously smaller and more connected. Not smaller and more afraid — that’s a different emotion. Your chest opens. Time stretches. Self-consciousness goes quiet.

Now think about what political leadership often selects for: big-self energy. Dominance, certainty, self-promotion. And think about the problems politics needs to solve: climate, inequality, polarization. These are collective-action problems that require small-self thinking. There’s a mismatch. But I don’t think it’s permanent. I think it’s a habit — and habits can change.

I didn’t need Keltner to tell me this. Some of the most formative experiences of my life have come from awe in nature — it’s where the biomimicry work I write about in this Substack comes alive. When I’m home in the Pacific Northwest, I still get it regularly. We have a phrase: “the Mountain is out.” It means Mount Rainier has emerged from the clouds — all 14,411 feet of it, suddenly there against the sky. When the Mountain is out, people tell each other. Your barista mentions it. Someone in a meeting pauses and says, “Hey — the Mountain is out.” And everyone turns to look.

That instinct — I’m experiencing something, and I want you to experience it with me — is one of the most undervalued things a leader can do. Not performing. Not directing. Just pointing at the thing and saying: Look at this with me.

Why Moral Beauty Matters Most

Keltner identifies eight sources of awe: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality, life and death, and epiphany. The order they showed up in his research matters. Moral beauty came first across all cultures. What most reliably produces awe in human beings is watching someone act beyond what self-interest would predict.

That should stop every political leader in their tracks. The most powerful tool a leader has for building trust and collective identity isn’t a policy platform. It’s the ability to surface and share stories of people at their best.

So much of political leadership runs on moral outrage. Outrage has its place — but when it becomes the default, it shrinks the world to us-versus-them. Moral beauty does the opposite. It says: Look what’s possible within us. The leader who tells stories of moral beauty is inviting people into a larger identity. Right now, the balance is off. But I see signs that it’s starting to shift.

One of my favorite pieces of media is NPR’s My Unsung Hero. As an American living abroad, it’s one of the things that still makes me proud of where I come from — this quiet insistence on surfacing ordinary people at their most extraordinary. There’s an episode I remember: a nurse named Kate Elsley, commuting during California’s Proposition 8 fight — the 2008 ballot measure that amended the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage, passing just months after the California Supreme Court had ruled such marriages legal — walking past sign after sign supporting the ban. Then one cold morning, she sees an older man standing alone on the opposite platform, silently holding a sign declaring he was against Prop 8. He wasn’t giving a speech. He was just standing there, in the cold, when he could have stayed home. Elsley has been married for 17 years now. She still tears up remembering this. She never got his name.

Here’s the leadership point: that man was leading. No title, no authority, no words — just a sign and the willingness to stand in the cold. If he can do that, imagine what a mayor or minister could do by making it a core practice to point at moral beauty in their communities and say: this is who we are at our best.

If you’re reading from outside the U.S., I’d love to know — is there something like My Unsung Hero where you are? If not, maybe that’s worth creating. Every country has these stories. They’re just not being told with intention. That could be a leadership act in itself.

Beauty Is a Leadership Strategy

Former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern (check out her book, A Different Kind of Power) showed this after the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019. She didn’t lead with anger. She wore a hijab, held grieving families, and said: “They are us.” Then she pushed through gun reform within weeks. She made herself small so the collective could feel large — and backed moral beauty with decisive action. Her approval ratings surged. That’s a data point worth taking seriously.

In the Swedish town of Eslöv, a civic hall was designed with the explicit aim of fostering “good citizens” through beautiful architecture. The building’s manager describes how the crafted brass and woven upholstery transmit “a greater respect” in the politicians who meet there. The building does some of the leadership work. That’s not an accident. That’s design. Beauty as strategy.

Now, I have to name something uncomfortable. Every authoritarian in history has understood awe. The Nazis built cathedrals of light. Strongmen build oversized monuments. So this isn’t a call for awe at any cost. It matters which direction it flows. Authoritarian awe points upward — toward the great leader. Everyone feels small, and the leader stays big. I posit that democratic awe points outward — toward each other. Everyone feels small, and so does the leader.

That’s the difference, and it’s a choice leaders make every time they step into a room. The “Yum” under the Acropolis was the democratic kind. I led it, but I wasn’t the point. The point was what happened between people once they let themselves look ridiculous together. And I had to be willing to look foolish first to make that possible.

5 Practices for Leading with Less Outrage and More Awe

1. Redesign how your community makes decisions.

Move beyond the traditional town hall, where a few loud voices dominate, and most people leave feeling unheard, toward genuine deliberative democracy: citizen assemblies where randomly selected residents deliberate and deliver recommendations, and participatory budgeting, where neighbors directly allocate real public dollars. These structures distribute voice more equally, rather than rewarding the loudest person in the room.

Then design the experience itself around awe. Open sessions with 90 seconds of silence, a piece of music, or a shared physical act before anyone speaks. Rituals like these shift people out of adversarial mode before the first agenda item, and the research on collective effervescence (another of Keltner’s eight sources of awe) suggests shared synchronous experience makes groups more cooperative and more willing to compromise.

2. Tell one story of moral beauty from your constituency.

For every story of outrage in your next speech, newsletter, or social post, include one story of someone in your district who acted beyond what anyone would expect: a constituent, a volunteer, a civil servant. Name them. Describe what they did. Let the act speak.

This isn’t soft. It’s a leadership tool for building collective identity, and Keltner’s research suggests that witnessing moral beauty makes your audience more likely to imitate it.

3. Audit your spaces.

Walk into your city hall, your party headquarters, your legislative chamber, and ask: What does this room communicate to the people who enter it? Care, or indifference?

When politicians meet in rooms designed with intention, they govern differently than in rooms that say, “Nobody cares about this place.” Beauty in civic architecture isn’t a luxury line item. It’s infrastructure for better decision-making.

4. Take your politics outside.

Hold a constituency surgery in a park. Canvass in places that remind people they share a landscape. Walk a riverbank with residents instead of sitting across a desk from them. Host your next strategy session at a nature reserve, not a hotel conference suite.

This is applied science: nature is one of Keltner’s eight sources of awe, and his research shows that even brief exposure to vastness and beauty shifts people toward more cooperative, less self-interested thinking. A conference room will never do that.

Side-by-side conversation while walking also breaks down the performative dynamics of face-to-face meetings. People talk differently when they’re moving through a landscape together: more honestly, less positionally.

If you represent a rural constituency, you already have this asset; use it deliberately. If you represent an urban one, find the green spaces, the waterfronts, the views of open sky. Every district has somewhere that makes people feel small in the right way.

5. Build your own awe practice.

The leaders I work with around the world who sustain their effectiveness over time have this in common: they actively seek experiences that shrink the ego and expand the sense of what’s possible.

Listen to My Unsung Hero between meetings. Sit with a piece of art. Read poetry before a hard week. You’ll come back to the difficult calls not depleted, but recalibrated. Then share what moved you — in a speech, at a cabinet meeting, in a party WhatsApp group. Awe is contagious. Pass it on.

We don’t need more outrage. We need more awe. And I believe we’re closer to that shift than it looks.

The best leaders I’ve encountered around the world aren’t the loudest or the most certain. They’re the ones who create the conditions for other people to feel something bigger than themselves — and then step back. That’s the leadership this moment is asking for. I think more of us are ready to offer it than we realize.

Warmly,

Lisa

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs a little more awe and a little less outrage in their feed. Thanks to World Beautiful Business Forum and the Futurific Institute for the fantastic gathering.

Let me tell you what’s actually going on in most of the rooms I walk into. Smart people. Real stakes. Urgent problems. And almost always, the same shape: we spend 80% of our time on why things need to change and what should be different — and about 5 minutes, right at the end, on how.

After thirty years of this, I want to say something direct: that gap is costing us everything.

I call it the elbow grease gap — the distance between a clear vision and the grinding, specific, unglamorous work of actually delivering it. It’s where great ideas go to die. And it might be the most important leadership problem that almost nobody names.

First — the geese

The idea came from watching the spring migration recently, outside our barn in the Uckermark — an hour north of Berlin, one of Europe’s great migratory resting places.

Cranes, ducks, geese — tens of thousands of birds moving through in a matter of days. But it was the geese that pulled my focus, as they always do. My father, Bill, was a serious bird hunter. Geese were his specialty. I grew up in their orbit, and I’ve never quite left it.

I spent countless hours of my childhood working alongside him: organizing the goose decoys, reloading shotgun shells at the kitchen table, practicing calls until I could mimic a Canada goose well enough to be convincing. I know how geese respond to one another, how the formation works, how they communicate in flight. I have watched them, studied them, and listened to them for most of my life.

Standing outside in the early morning during migration, you hear what I can only describe as a living orchestra tuning before a performance it has been rehearsing for thousands of years — layer upon layer of calls, wingbeats, honking, the occasional piercing solo cutting through the chorus. It is, quite simply, one of the most extraordinary sounds I have ever heard. A free symphony, performed twice a year, for anyone willing to get up early enough.

So when I say the geese have something to teach us, I’m not reaching for a convenient metaphor. I’m drawing on something I’ve been paying attention to for decades.

Every spring, a flock prepares to fly north. They don’t debate whether the season is turning. They don’t commission a report on conditions at the destination marsh. They feel the lengthening days, they form a V, and they go. The lead goose breaks the headwind. When it tires, it drops back. Another takes its place. The analysis is done — written into their bones — and now they’re doing the work.

Meanwhile, a group of well-intentioned people at the edge of that marsh has been meeting for three years about the declining goose population. The reports are excellent. The diagnosis is airtight. In that same time, the geese completed three migrations — some 6,000 miles of actual movement — while the thinking stayed where it was.

I want to be careful here. I’m not suggesting that complex human problems yield to the same logic as migration. They don’t. Geese aren’t running healthcare systems or navigating democratic trade-offs. I know that. But they do four things worth sitting with.

1. They separate the analysis from the action — and don’t relitigate it at the departure gate. At some point, the analysis is done. The flying must begin.

2. They rotate the burden of the how. The V isn’t a hierarchy — it’s a moving system. No one bird carries the headwind until it breaks. Someone else steps up. Organizations tend to fail here: responsibility is either so diffuse nobody owns it, or so narrow the people carrying it burn out.

3. They adjust without meetings. When the wind changes, the formation changes. Immediately. No governance process. Just responsiveness — local, continuous, real.

4. They don’t wait for perfect conditions. They fly in fog. In the rain. Because not flying is worse. The organizations I’ve watched waiting for the right moment — the right funding, the right political window, the right data — are still waiting.

None of this is instinct for us. We have to choose the how. And that choice — to move from clarity of vision to the specific work of delivery — is the one we consistently, predictably defer.

I am happiest in the how — and I’m imperfect at it

Over thirty years of building things, I’ve come to know something about myself: I come alive in the how. The mechanism. The moment a plan meets reality and has to adapt.

I had to learn to love it — it didn’t come naturally. Throwing out ideas was more fun, faster, and easier. The how is none of those things. But there is a particular joy — one that’s hard to explain to people who don’t feel it — in watching something that existed only as an idea actually start to work in the world. That’s where you can see whether you’re actually changing anything.

I still have to remind myself of that joy sometimes. The pull toward the new idea, the clean concept, the untested plan — it doesn’t disappear. It just gets easier to recognise it for what it is.

And I’m imperfect at the how. I’ve launched before the system was ready. Handed off implementation to people without the authority to course-correct. Fallen so in love with the elegance of a plan that I missed what was obvious to anyone closer to the ground.

So I’m not writing this from mastery. I’m writing it as someone who still gets it wrong — and who, after thirty years of watching the same patterns repeat on the biggest problems of our time, has run out of patience with systems that never really try.

Why our brains make this so hard

The elbow grease gap isn’t a character flaw. It’s a cognitive pattern — and a well-documented one. Which is both reassuring and, honestly, a little maddening.

Trope and Liberman’s construal level theory tells us something simple but useful: the further away something sits — in time, in space, in likelihood — the more abstractly we think about it. Strategy lives at a distance almost by definition, so leaders reach naturally for abstractions — vision, purpose, direction. Yet execution demands the opposite movement. The “how” requires descent: into the resistant system, the underfunded team, the colleague who does not behave the way the model assumed. That closeness is uncomfortable, and for many leaders quietly intolerable — which is why so many strategies are eloquent at altitude and inert at ground level.

Completion bias makes it worse. Research on symbolic self-completion suggests that when we articulate a goal — name it, share it, write it down — the brain registers a form of progress even before any action has been taken. The relief of “we have a strategy” is neurologically real, and it quietly displaces the sustained attention delivery actually requires. We feel like we’ve dealt with the problem. We’ve only described it.

And status finishes the job. “Strategic” is a compliment. “Operational” is neutral at best. The people who know where the bodies are buried — who will implement, who see the edge cases, who understand why the last three versions of this failed — rarely have the standing to be heard by the people who designed the vision.

We’ve known all of this for decades. We have done remarkably little about it.

What doing the work actually looks like

At the Better Politics Foundation, we made a deliberate choice: we were not going to be another voice adding to the 95% of conversations that stop at the diagnosis. Our mission is to move political leadership from handwringing to action — identifying what effective leaders actually need and building the global infrastructure to develop them.

We built the Better Politics Accelerator to do exactly that — working with political entrepreneurs to either establish or upskill organizations that recruit, train, and support leaders at every stage of their political journey. To date, we have accelerated 48 Political Leadership Entrepreneurs across 37 countries.

And we’ve done something else that I’m quietly proud of: we’ve named and built a field. Through the Political Leadership Entrepreneur Network, we now convene more than 150 organizations from across 57 countries — political entrepreneurs and innovators all doing the elbow grease: the unglamorous, specific, system-level work of actually changing how politics works in their contexts. Not talking about it. Doing it.

And because you can’t improve what you don’t measure, we built the Better Politics Index — the world’s first tool to measure the support and development of political leaders as democratic infrastructure across 10 countries and 4 dimensions.

What the 2025 Index revealed stops me every time I say it out loud: in most countries, political training focuses almost entirely on getting people elected — not on governing once they are elected. The campaign gets the investment. The actual work of leadership gets almost nothing. That’s not a leadership problem. That’s a how problem. And we’ve been misdiagnosing it for decades.

Six questions before anything launches

Implementation fails in predictable ways — which means it can be guarded against. I call it The How Test. I ask these of myself before anything goes out the door. I don’t always like the answers. I ask anyway.

1. Have you mapped the system you’re entering? Who benefits from things staying the same? What assumptions haven’t been tested against reality? That’s where the how breaks down — quietly, early, before anyone with authority notices.

2. Have you run a pre-mortem? Gather the people who will implement, not the people who designed, and ask: It’s two years from now and this has failed. What happened? Write it down. It’s uncomfortable every time. It has saved us more than once.

3. Do you know when something is going wrong — and do you find out early enough to fix it? That requires more than an open-door policy. It means short reporting cycles, direct access to the people closest to implementation, and a culture where the person who flags a problem first is thanked, not managed.

4. Who owns the how — with real authority? Not a coordinator. Not a committee. Someone who can make calls, redirect resources and change course without having to book three meetings first. If you can’t name that person, you’ve found your problem.

5. What are your leading indicators? By the time failure is visible, it’s expensive to fix. Name your early warning signals before you launch. If you can’t, you’re not ready.

6. Do the people doing the how have the mindset and skills to deliver? This is the most under-asked question — to the point of negligence. We spend enormous energy on who designs the vision and almost none on whether the people responsible for execution are equipped for it — not just technically, but temperamentally. Implementation requires a particular kind of person: someone who finds problem-solving under pressure energising rather than depleting, who can hold the original intention while adapting the method, who doesn’t need the spotlight to stay motivated, and who is genuinely curious about why something isn’t working rather than defensive about it. That’s not everyone. It’s not even most people. And yet we routinely hand the how to whoever is available, rather than whoever is suited. Matching the right people to the how — and then investing in their development, their authority, and their support — is not an HR question. It is a strategic one.

The more radical version of this ask

The polite version is: “Can we spend 15 minutes on the how?”

But I want to go further. Because after thirty years, the polite version isn’t enough.

What if we flipped the ratio entirely? On the issues where we’ve been discussing the why and the what for decades — where there is no meaningful disagreement that the problem is real — what if we simply stopped devoting 80% of the meeting to rehashing it? What if we walked in and said: we know why, we broadly agree on what, so we’re spending 80% of today on the how.

That means starting not with the problem but with the mechanism. Not “isn’t this urgent?” but “who has tried this before and what specifically got in the way?” Not “what do we want?” but “what would have to be true for that to be achievable — and what are we doing about each of those conditions?” Not “can we agree on principles?” but “who owns the next step, with what authority, and how will we know if it’s working?”

The why and the what do sometimes evolve — new evidence opens new doors, a different political moment changes what’s possible. When that happens, revisit them. But the test is simple: would going back to the why and what produce a different how? If the answer is no — and it usually is — then you’re not refining the strategy. You’re avoiding the work of delivering it. You have your answer about where to spend the next two hours.

The meetings I remember — the ones where something actually shifted — were never the ones with the best diagnosis. They were the ones where someone had done the unglamorous work of understanding what was blocking progress, and arrived with a specific, arguable, testable idea for how to move it. The how was the agenda, not the afterthought.

After thirty years, I want more of those rooms. Full of people who’ve settled the analysis, agreed the direction, and shown up ready to fly in formation.

The vision has had its moment. It is long past time the flight did too.

Warmly,

Lisa

This audio was recorded at the barn in the Uckermark during spring migration. Any guesses what bird this is?

She was standing on a doorstep, her newborn strapped to her chest, when someone got in her face and threatened her.

This wasn’t a war zone. This was just a local councilor doing her job — showing up in her constituency, being present for the people she represented. She kept going. She kept turning up. And the room at our roundtable last week went quiet when she described it, because we all recognized it: not an exceptional incident, but the baseline expectation of anyone who wants to hold elected office today.

Here’s the detail that stays with me: in the UK, local councilors don’t receive a salary. They receive a taxable allowance, typically around £7,000 a year on average, officially classified as part-time, voluntary public service. In practice, the role is open-ended — evening meetings, weekend constituency work, and the kind of always-on pressure she described. She was doing it all, with a newborn, for less than £100 a week.

I left that room thinking not about her resilience — which is extraordinary — but about the design of the job itself. Because what she is living isn’t a personal problem. It’s a structural one. And if we keep treating it as the former, we will keep producing the same results: exhausted leaders, a narrowing pool of people who can say yes, and governance that is worse than it needs to be.

The data we can’t ignore

A new study in Australia, led by my colleague Kimberly McArthur at the Better Politics Foundation — surveying around 300 federal, state, and local political leaders — found that almost two-thirds of politicians had their mental health damaged by the role. One in five had considered ending their life or harming themselves.

One in five.

These aren’t anonymous survey respondents. These are elected representatives — the people making decisions about your healthcare, your children’s schools, your community’s future. The research came to light after a Queensland MP found a colleague dead at his home. It shouldn’t take a tragedy to make us look at this seriously.

The science explains exactly why these numbers are what they are. Legislators across the world work hours that would be flagged as a health risk in any other sector. New MPs in the UK average 69 hours a week, with 8 additional hours of travel on top. Under sustained overload, the prefrontal cortex — the seat of judgment, empathy, and long-term thinking — goes offline. What takes over are the older, faster, threat-response circuits: reactive, tribal, zero-sum.

The very qualities we most deplore in our politicians are the ones that chronic overload reliably produces.

We are selecting the people who can survive the job. That is an entirely different thing from selecting the people best suited to govern wisely. And we compound the problem by building a role so demanding — and for local government, so financially unviable as a sole income — that whole categories of people rationally conclude they cannot do it. Parents of young children. People with disabilities. Carers. Those without a partner’s income or independent wealth to fall back on. We then wonder why our legislatures don’t look like the societies they serve.

The case for job-sharing

Robert Newman, Executive Director of Amp Health — which works with ministries of health to strengthen leadership across the developing world — brought a concept to our roundtable that I keep returning to: Collective. The idea that real leadership is not a solo act. That it never really was.

Job-sharing in legislative roles is one of the most concrete expressions of that idea. And it is more than a flexibility measure, it is a governance argument. Two people sharing a seat can bring complementary expertise, such as lived experience of disability alongside policy depth, community knowledge alongside legislative skill.

The handover discipline job-sharing requires could actually improve transparency in a world where political decision-making is often opaque. And it opens the door to people currently locked out of the system — not as a consolation prize, but as a genuine widening of the talent pool our democracies can draw from.

The assumption that legislative office is uniquely incompatible with sharing has always struck me as less an argument than a bias wearing the costume of one. The job involves representation, deliberation, and voting — all of which can, in principle, be shared.

It already works in the private sector, in senior leadership, in the civil service. The case that political leadership is the one role that can never be redesigned this way has never been convincingly made. It has simply been asserted, loudly and repeatedly, by people whose identity is bound up in the current model.

The experiments already running

This isn’t a thought experiment. People are already trying it.

In Australia, Lucy Bradlow and Bronwen Bock ran as joint independent candidates for a Melbourne parliamentary seat — alternating weeks in Canberra, handing over a literal laptop and phone every Friday. Legal barriers stalled them: the electoral commission refused to accept a joint nomination, their target seat was redrawn out of existence, and the 2025 election arrived before any of it could be resolved. But in the meantime, they founded a party, signed up 1,554 members in two months, and won a court order protecting them from a $500,000 government legal bill. They didn’t fail because the idea failed. The question of whether two people can legally share a seat in parliament remains unanswered.

In the UK, proposals for job-sharing MPs have been raised since 2012. Green Party members Clare Phipps and Sarah Cope attempted to stand jointly in 2015 and were rejected. The constitutional barriers are real — but they are political choices, not laws of physics. That means there are ways through.

Brazil is a case in point, and its language is instructive. They don’t call it job-sharing — they call it mandato coletivo: collective mandate. In 2016, Áurea Carolina and Cida Falabella were elected as separate councilors in Belo Horizonte, but chose to tear down the dividing wall between their offices and govern together as one team in a shared, open-plan space they called the Gabinetona — literally “the big cabinet,” deliberately feminized.

In 2018, five women — a journalist, a street vendor, a teacher, a trans lawyer, and a community activist — ran together for a single state assembly seat in Pernambuco under the collective name Juntas (”Together”), winning it with over 38,000 votes. Technically, only the registered candidate could legally vote or sign legislation; the others were classified as staff. But in practice, decisions were made collectively, the workload was shared, and the mandate was run as a genuinely plural enterprise.

By 2020, the practice of multiple people jointly running a single candidacy or pooling elected offices into one collective operation had grown to 313 candidacies in municipal legislatures — four times more than the previous election cycle. Brazil didn’t wait for the law to catch up. While the Anglophone debate remains stuck on whether it’s even legal, Brazil simply got on with it — and proved it works.

The questions worth sitting with

I want to be honest: I’m not arguing that job-sharing is obviously right. I’m arguing that we need to be experimenting — seriously, deliberately, with eyes open.

What could go right? Two people bringing genuinely different expertise and life experience to one seat. A handover process forces transparency as a structural habit. A pathway into politics for people who are currently locked out — and who might, a generation from now, reshape what executive leadership looks like too.

What could go wrong? A partnership that breaks down mid-term. A dominant partner who holds the seat while the other provides cover. Institutional cultures so adversarial that they crush the model before it can prove itself.

And the deepest question: is the problem the job design, or the culture surrounding it? Because you can redesign a role carefully and still have it destroyed by a culture that mistakes exhaustion for commitment and punishes anyone who asks for something different. I don’t think that’s a reason not to try. It’s a reason to try carefully, document rigorously, and build the evidence base. Brazil is experimenting. Australia tried and will try again. The UK has been debating it for over a decade. We should be watching all of it — and running more experiments of our own.

The job is designed wrong

The councilor with the newborn stayed. She keeps going. She keeps turning up for the people she represents, for less than £100 a week, in a role the system officially calls “part-time” yet treats as all-consuming.

No one should be doing a full-time job that’s labelled and paid as part-time. Either it’s recognised and compensated for what it is, or it’s designed to work as a genuine collective endeavour—something people can realistically do alongside family life and other work.

That’s what job-sharing is really about. Not flexibility as a concession. But governance as a collective endeavor — built for the full range of human experience, not just those who can endure the current design.

We know how to build better systems. We do it in medicine, in business, in sport. The question is whether we have the will to demand the same of the institutions that govern our lives.

A note of thanks and an invitation

This piece wouldn’t exist without everyone who joined us at the Oxford roundtable last week — in the room and online. The quality of thinking, the willingness to sit with uncomfortable questions, and the range of experience people brought made it one of the most energizing conversations I’ve had in years. I’ll be sharing more reflections from this important meeting in the weeks ahead — on leadership, neuroscience, and what it might actually take to redesign political life for the better. This is just the first thread to pull.

Had you come across political job-sharing before reading this? What excites you about the model — and what worries you? Where do you think it would work brilliantly, and where would it fall apart?

Drop your thoughts in the comments. I read everything.

Warmly,

Lisa

P.S. The councilor with the newborn is writing a children’s book (we’ll share it when it is done) about what it’s like to be a local politician — a thank you to her own children for the evenings and weekends they’ve shared with the job, and a way of showing children everywhere why this work matters and who actually does it. I find that quietly wonderful. If we want the next generation to trust democratic institutions, we have to help them see what those institutions look like from the inside.

A few weeks ago, I was in Florence with a small group of friends — people I love, several of whom actively support the Better Politics Foundation, and all of whom actively support each other.

It was one of those weekends that felt full in the best way: long meals, real laughter, hard conversations about aging, and the particular magic of being in a city like Florence together. All that Medici beauty and ambition still hang in the air. Patronage, power, art, history — somehow still alive in the stones.

We learned our way through the city with our guide, Andrea. He was exactly who you’d want: erudite but light, with that Italian ease that managed to look both elegant and effortless — a brown suit, a baby-blue silk scarf, a kind of casual precision that made him seem part historian, part film character. He had so much to say about art, architecture, power, and beauty that he’d regularly lose track of time, and we’d gently have to move him along. Honestly, it was a joy to watch. There’s something deeply warming about being with someone genuinely raptured by their work. Not performing knowledge. Not packaging expertise. Just in love with what they know.

The monks’ cells

The moment I can’t shake happened at the Monastery of San Marco. In the monks’ cells.

Small, spare, quiet rooms built for reflection. Rooms that seem to ask you to lower your voice before you realize you already have. On the walls were Fra Angelico‘s frescoes — the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, Noli me tangere, Christ Mocked. Images many of us “know,” at least in some vague art-history kind of way.

And then, there with them, were paintings by Mark Rothko — a 20th-century American Abstract Expressionist known for large canvases of layered blocks of color. They were part of a wider Rothko exhibition in Florence, shown primarily at Palazzo Strozzi, with additional works installed in San Marco. That pairing stopped me. The Rothko didn’t feel dropped in or imposed. They looked like they belonged there, as if they had been waiting for Fra Angelico all along. Then I found out that one of the exhibition curators was Christopher Rothko, Mark Rothko’s son. Somehow, that made emotional sense before it made intellectual sense.

Different route, same destination

Standing in the monks’ cells — the rooms where the Dominican friars of San Marco prayed, slept, and lived their entire interior lives — I found myself pulled into one of art history’s oldest tensions. Andrea presented the difference between representation and presence, and how to use that lens to look at the paintings around us.

Fra Angelico painted a fresco in each cell not as decoration but as a devotional tool — an aid to contemplation, placed precisely where a monk would kneel alone each day. These weren’t public altarpieces meant to impress. They were intimate, functional, spiritual technology. The question of whether they were meant to represent the divine or to make it present in that small room is not an art historical footnote — it was the whole point.

Representation is art as a picture of something else — a stand-in, a likeness, a sign pointing beyond itself. The painting refers to a person, a place, a story. Its job is to depict. You look through it to what it shows.

Presence is when the work stops being a window and becomes a thing in itself — when you feel you are with something, not just looking at something. The object has its own weight, its own demand on you. It doesn’t point elsewhere; it arrests you here.

Fra Angelico gives you both. We see figures, gestures, story, and theology — you can clearly describe what is happening. But in those cells, so much has been stripped away that the distance between you and the scene collapses. The paintings stop feeling like illustrations and start feeling like encounters. You don’t feel like you’re looking at something from afar. You feel like you’ve walked into a sacred moment already in progress. His representations create presence.

Yet, Rothko removes representation almost entirely. No figures, no story, no scene to decode. And yet he arrives somewhere surprisingly similar. His paintings change the emotional temperature of a room. They slow you down. They make you stay. They ask something of your interior life. In the absence of representation, he creates presence.

Representation can lead to presence, but it does not ensure it, and it is not needed for it.

I keep finding this distinction not just in art, but everywhere I look, including, perhaps especially, in politics.

What politics shouldn’t fake

So much of what we ask of political leaders now is representational: messaging, positioning, stagecraft. And those things matter. But they can be done well and still leave people cold.

People can follow a leader without feeling held by one. That gap — between being led and feeling led — seems worth taking seriously.

And it rhymes, I think, with what I felt in those cells.

Presence in leadership is harder to cultivate than representation — and much harder to fake. It’s not polish. It’s not branding. It’s not “executive presence” in the thin, over-coached sense. It’s the felt sense that a person is grounded, coherent, and morally awake. Able to hold pressure and create steadiness in others. You know it when you’re in the room with it. And you know, fairly quickly, when it’s missing.

What struck me in San Marco was that Fra Angelico and Rothko — working centuries apart, in utterly different visual languages — were both doing something deeper than depiction. They were creating conditions for presence. For attention. For a kind of interior slowing-down that lets something true land.

What if that’s what we actually need from political leaders? Not better representation, better presence. Leaders who don’t just communicate, but also orient. Who don’t just perform conviction, but embody seriousness, calm, courage, and humanity in a way people can actually feel.

What Florence does to you

There’s one more thing that has stayed with me. Rothko spent time in Florence, and the city clearly fed something in him. He wasn’t just looking at paintings — he was absorbing the city. The architecture, the history, the food, the river, the forests, and the feeling. Florence helped deepen his sense of what art could do: not just show something, but hold someone. Surround them. Alter their state.

That is what art can do when it’s really working.

It slows us down enough to notice what is true. It gives us language for something we’ve felt but not yet named. It deepens us a little.

That weekend didn’t give me a tidy conclusion. It gave me something better — a layer, a feeling, a question I’m still sitting with.

What would politics feel like if we cared as much about presence as we do about representation?

Warmly,

Lisa

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

Every year, I try to steal a week one-on-one with each of my boys. This spring was Otto’s turn.

He is 17, and this was his first time back in New York since we left when he was three. Fourteen years ago, we moved from Brooklyn to Berlin for what was supposed to be a one-year stint. We stayed. So this was not just a trip. It was a return. A city that had once held him, meeting him again in almost-grown form.

We biked through Central Park and down the West Side Highway. We saw the carousel in DUMBO. We took the ferry to Red Hook. We passed the places where he and his brother had learned to scooter on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights. He met loads of people who had held him as a baby. Watching a nearly grown young man be greeted by people who still carry a toddler version of him in their heads does something to your sense of time.

Then there were the dinner parties. Smart and chaotic, which is to say: very New York. Fast opinions. Fast laughter. Several conversations at once. Politics arriving at the table, whether invited or not.

At one point, I asked Otto how he would describe the city.

“Active, awake, chaotic, and loud,” he said.

Exactly. Duh. It is New York.

At some point during the week, I realized New York was helping me think about politics again (to be honest, I kind of always am).

Because politics now often feels exactly like Otto’s description of the city: active, awake, chaotic, and loud. Too many signals. Too much theater. Too much certainty. Too little stillness.

Over the course of the week, one political name kept coming up: Zohran Mamdani, now New York City’s mayor.

Let me be clear. This is not a political endorsement of Mamdani. Nor is that the point when I write about particular political figures. I am interested in the lessons. What citizens respond to. What earns trust and what lowers it. What helps a leader beat, rather than simply confirm, the story already attached to them.

And that was the interesting thing I kept hearing. Not that everyone agreed with him. Not that he is perfect. It was something smaller and more revealing than that: for someone that many people had initially coded as too young, too ideological, too online, too inexperienced, or too risky, a surprising number of New Yorkers kept landing in roughly the same place: “He seems steadier than I expected.”

That may not sound dramatic. But in politics, it is.

Because citizens do not meet leaders frequently. One of the most useful things brain science offers here is the reminder that the brain is constantly making predictions. We build expectations, compare reality against them, and update when the gap is large enough. Put simply, people are not encountering a political leader as a blank slate. They are encountering a running theory of that person already installed in their heads.

And here is the harder part: people like having their pre-existing theories confirmed. We do not just form stories about people. We get attached to them. That helps explain why low expectations in politics are so sticky. Once citizens expect politicians to posture, wobble, overpromise, and underdeliver, they do not neutrally observe the next leader. They are already primed to recognize the familiar pattern, and the brain does not treat all evidence equally. What confirms the old story passes through unchallenged. What contradicts it tends to get explained away. Preconceptions, in other words, are not just hard to shift — they are designed to resist opposing truths.

That is what makes Mamdani’s case so striking. He did not just have a good campaign. He managed to move the needle on something the brain is built to protect.

The example that kept coming up was snow shoveling. Numerous people said something like: Mamdani paid ordinary New Yorkers a living wage to clear snow. The more precise version is a little different. The city’s standard emergency shoveler pay was raised from around $19 to $30 an hour during the February 2026 blizzard, with overtime at $45 — a meaningful bump but not a living wage by any strict definition. But the imprecision is itself revealing. What Mamdani did was fast and concrete — a city problem, ordinary people hired, better pay, a visible result. People saw it. People could repeat it.

That is what I mean by evidence in politics. Not just what is technically true somewhere in a PDF, a policy memo, or a press release. Evidence, politically, is what is visible, legible, and repeated enough for citizens to update their expectations about politicians.

This matters even more in an age of polarization, permanent performance, and low trust. Citizens are not just skeptical — they are pre-loaded with disappointment. And it is why so many political leaders get expectation management wrong. They think it means message discipline: hype what you can, spin what you can’t, and quietly lower the bar when necessary.

But what actually moves the needle is simpler yet more demanding than any of that: Say less. Do something clear. Let people see it. Then do it again.

People do not only want confidence. They want calibrated confidence. They want a leader who knows when to project certainty, when to name uncertainty, and when to let the evidence speak louder than the performance. That is part of what I was getting at in my recent Better (Political) Leadership piece on why we so often mistake certainty for competence: the trick is not to crank confidence to maximum, but to dial it to fit the moment. People can feel the difference between grounded authority and someone free-styling under pressure.

Of course, beating expectations once is not the same as earning trust for the long haul. Weathering one storm does not prove greatness. One visible governing moment does not settle anything. But it is often how the door opens.

And that, I think, was the real current running under those New York dinners.

Not worship.
Not consensus.
Not ideological conversion.

Just a quieter, more politically consequential sentence: “he seems steadier than I expected”.

In the Big Apple, where the noise never stops and leadership expectations are often somewhere below street level, that is not a small thing. Beating the bar may be one of the most important things a political leader can do.

People are not hungry for flawless leaders. Most are hungry for reasons to revise their cynicism.

Maybe that is also why the week with Otto stayed with me the way it did. He was not meeting New York fresh. He was meeting a city that had already shaped him, and that other people still remembered for him.

Politics works like that too. A politician does not arrive as a blank slate, nor does the citizen standing before them. Both carry history. They arrive with memory, pattern, suspicion, and story.

The task of leadership, then, is not to change the story you tell about yourself. It is to change the story that other people tell about you. And that only happens one visible, concrete act at a time.

In politics, beating expectations is not a communications trick. It is what happens when reality arrives before the spin does.

Warmly,

Lisa

P.S. One of my favorite details from the trip: there is now a green “Welcome to Manhattan — Hello gorgeous” sign at the gateway to Manhattan. It is tiny. Cheap, in the scheme of city-making. But it changes the feeling of arrival. It makes the entrance clearer, safer, and more human — and it signals something about the city on the other side. Honestly, not a bad philosophy for governing. The big stuff matters. But so do the small touches that shape how people experience a place, a system, a leader. First impressions are where the prior gets set.

I’m 52 and in this territory myself. And so are most of my friends — in politics, out of politics, all of us somewhere on the perimenopause-to-menopause spectrum, comparing notes in the way women do when they finally stop pretending everything is fine. Their husbands are in it, too. Carefully. Trying to understand why the person they love is awake at 3 am, overheating, and not interested in being told to drink more water.

What I keep noticing in these conversations is that this transition isn’t just a women’s health story. It’s a leadership story. The things perimenopause and menopause make unavoidable — dealing with change honestly, carrying invisible load, needing real support, knowing what experience is actually worth — are the same things politics keeps getting wrong.

Here are four lessons. And a takeaway for each one.

Lesson 1: Lead inside the transition. Not around it.

Perimenopause doesn’t arrive on schedule. It doesn’t care about your calendar. I can tell you from where I’m standing: what worked at 38 is not always what works at 52. Pushing harder isn’t always the answer. Sometimes it’s the problem.

That sounds a lot like politics.

Too many leaders treat steadiness as the mark of strength — as if maturity meant looking exactly the same in every season. But that’s not leadership. Its performance. And performance cracks under pressure, precisely when you need it most. The partners of my friends know this, too. Watching someone they love navigate something real and significant, with no roadmap and little institutional support, has a way of clarifying what actual strength looks like. It’s not pretending nothing is happening.

The leaders who navigate transition best don’t grip the wheel harder and hope the road straightens. They lead through it honestly.

The takeaway: Design for transition. Build political systems and leadership cultures that face change openly rather than quietly work around it.

Lesson 2: If you can’t see the strain, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Much of what menopause brings doesn’t show up from the outside. Sleep disruption, brain fog, anxiety — none of it comes with a visible marker. But it shapes judgment, energy, and decision-making, whether anyone can see it or not. NHS England found that three in five women employees with menopausal symptoms say it negatively affects their work, and we are long overdue to systematically address this.

I know this first-hand. So do my friends, many of whom are navigating this while running organizations, serving in office, or raising families. And the husbands I know who are paying attention are learning the same lesson up close: invisible doesn’t mean insignificant.

Politics runs on the same dynamic. Care burdens. Financial pressure. Threats. Online abuse. Grief. The daily exhaustion of staying publicly coherent while privately carrying a lot. Men in politics carry this too, often with even less permission to name it. The invisible strain of public life is universal — and almost entirely unmeasured.

That’s the gap the Better Politics Index 2025 was built to address. The first global index to ask how well political systems actually develop and support their leaders, across 10 countries, found that the answer is not nearly good enough. The strain is so pervasive and so invisible that the field can’t yet fully count it: there is still no global dataset on violence against politicians, no systematic measure of what public life costs the people living it.

Institutions that only respond once someone visibly breaks aren’t wise. They’re just slow and expensive.

The takeaway: Build systems that catch strain before it becomes a crisis. Measure what’s actually happening to the people doing the governing — not just what they’re producing.

Lesson 3: The best political leaders aren’t resilient. They’re anti-fragile.

There’s a conversation I keep having — with my girlfriends, with colleagues, with women in and out of politics who are somewhere in this same territory. It always lands on the same thing: Not what this menopausal period has taken from them. But what it has built.

They’re sharper. More decisive. Done with people-pleasing. No time for drama. This is what navigating menopause produced in them. Not despite it, because of it. I’m 52, and I feel it myself: more locked in than ever on what actually matters. The dramatics simply don’t fit anymore. That’s not a loss. That’s a filter.

In his 2012 book Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb made a distinction most institutions still haven’t absorbed. Resilience is the ability to bounce back to the same state. Anti-fragility is coming back stronger and better designed. So the true opposite of fragile isn’t brute toughness; it’s intelligent strength.

Menopause is a particularly complete test — biological disruption you can’t will away, institutional invisibility, and social stigma, all at once. To come through it clearer and sharper is to have passed a test most institutions don’t even know they’re setting.

The science backs this up. The Seattle Longitudinal Study — tracking cognitive abilities in thousands of adults since 1956 — found that midlife adults generally perform better on several cognitive tasks than they did as young adults. A Stanford psychology study found that as time horizons shorten with age, people naturally narrow their focus toward what is emotionally meaningful — fewer relationships, but more carefully chosen; less novelty-seeking, more depth. Their decade-long experience-sampling study found this produces measurably better emotional well-being and greater stability. Aging is less a story of decline than of refinement.

But these gains don’t emerge in a vacuum — they depend on the conditions people age within. Without the right support, older people don’t emerge wiser — they burn out, get pushed aside, or leave altogether. Menopausal women are one of the clearest examples of this. That’s not a personal failure. It’s a systemic one.

The takeaway: Invest in leaders through the hard transitions, not just at the point of entry. The distillation that comes from genuine testing is exactly what governance needs — but only if the person is still standing.

Lesson 4: Post-peak experience is an asset. Stop treating it like a liability.

Humans are among the few mammals with long post-reproductive lives. Killer whales (and other toothed whales) share this distinction. As female killer whales age, they become more closely related to their group. Instead of competing to reproduce, they take on a different role: supporting their offspring and grandchildren by sharing vital knowledge — where to find food, how to navigate, and which waters to avoid. Researchers believe this is an evolutionary adaptation. The wisdom becomes the point.

I wear a whale necklace from my beloved Pacific Northwest partly to remember this. My friends and I joke about it — we’re in the killer whale years. The years where what we know matters more than what we can perform. Where the experience of having actually been through things is the asset, not the liability.

Politics tends to treat midlife women as though their relevance is fading at exactly the moment their most useful capacities may be sharpening. It treats older men as though years alone confer judgment — without asking what it cost to get there. Both get it wrong. The shared mistake: confusing the performance of leadership for the thing itself.

The takeaway: Build systems that transfer knowledge, not just replace old bodies with newer ones. Stop discarding post-peak experience. It can’t be fast-tracked or replicated. Losing it isn’t strategic. It’s just wasteful.

So what’s the final lesson?

Transition deserves honest leadership.

Invisible strain counts.

Anti-fragility beats brittle performance.

And experience — real, hard-won, tested experience — is infrastructure, not a footnote.

I’m 52, in the middle of this, having these conversations constantly — with friends, with colleagues, with the husbands who are trying to understand what their partners are carrying. What strikes me every time is how universal the underlying lessons are.

This isn’t really a woman’s problem. It’s a human one. And it’s a political one.

You read the whole thing. Which means the topic wasn’t the problem.

It never was.

Warmly,

Lisa

I’ve been a news junkie since I was a little kid. I credit it entirely to being dropped off at my babysitter, Bev’s, house early dawn by my hardworking, loving parents, and the only thing on TV at that hour being the news. I didn’t choose it. It chose me. Good Morning America was a favourite. And those scenes from the White House Rose Garden, a president at a podium, the flags, the gravity of it all — they got me early. Something about watching people navigate real stakes in real time never got old.

So when I say I watch a lot of news, I mean it. Decades of it. And for most of those decades, my reaction was pretty predictable. A certain politician — the one with the steady voice and the clear answer — made me feel calmer. Even when I didn’t agree with them. Even when something in me knew the situation was more complicated than they were letting on. The less certain one made me lean in, but also made me feel a little less solid. Especially when the world already felt shaky.

That has changed. These days, when I see that same clarity and confidence on screen, my first instinct is often suspicion. Not always. Not for every person in every moment. But often enough that I’ve had to ask myself why.

Here’s what I think I’ve figured out: certainty feels like safety — but only if the person projecting it has already earned your trust. If they haven’t, the same confidence that steadies others will make you feel more alert, not less.

Same signal. Opposite effect.

Understanding that gap is where better political leadership might actually begin.

Why certainty works on us — even when it shouldn’t

Our brains hate unpredictability more than they hate danger.

Research suggests that when a threat is unpredictable, we stay in a state of constant anticipatory alert — which is exhausting, both physically and mentally. When a threat feels predictable — even if it’s still real and still scary — the brain gets something to anchor to. A shape. A timeline. Stress goes down. The situation feels like something we can get through.

This is the opening that certain leaders walk through. They don’t have to be right. They just have to sound like they know. The sense of relief that creates is neurologically real — but it’s not necessarily evidence of competence.

Leadership research adds another layer. Studies suggest that in both corporate settings and politics, more confident candidates are often favored — even when their competence doesn’t fully back it up. Overconfident people are especially hard to read correctly, because they believe what they’re saying. They don’t give off the signals we associate with bluffing. So we take them at face value. And we keep choosing them.

Over time, a quiet bias takes hold. Confidence is visible, so it gets selected. Competence is harder to recognize, so it gets overlooked. We say we want wise, capable, honest leaders. Yet we keep gravitating toward the ones who simply sound the most sure.

Once in power, the experience of power itself can nurture further overconfidence — reinforcing a system that selects for confident leaders and then makes them even more so.

To be fair, some research finds that overconfident leaders can drive real benefits — employee loyalty, bold decision-making, innovation. The picture is genuinely mixed. But in democratic politics, where decisions are imposed collectively and harder to opt out of, the downside of misjudging reality is harder to escape.

But wait — sometimes certainty is exactly right

I want to stop here and push back on myself, because this argument has a real hole in it.

Sometimes certainty isn’t just appropriate — it’s essential. Churchill didn’t steady a nation by saying, “Well, there are a lot of variables here.”

When a city floods, people don’t need a leader who is openly working through the complexity. They need someone who says: Here’s what we’re doing, here’s where to go, follow me. In genuine emergencies, projected confidence isn’t manipulation.

And there’s another problem. A leader could read everything I’ve written so far and simply swap one performance for another — trading performed certainty for performed humility. “I don’t have all the answers” can be just as hollow as “I have all the answers” if the person saying it has no intention of actually finding them.

So let me try to be more precise about what I’m actually arguing — while acknowledging I may not have it entirely right (I don’t have all the answers!).

The problem isn’t confidence. The problem is confidence that has been decoupled from reality — projected regardless of what the situation calls for and whether it’s been earned. That’s what I think erodes trust over time. Not leaders who are sure when sureness is warranted. Leaders who are always sure about everything, because they’ve learned it works on us.

That distinction feels important. Though I’d genuinely love to hear if you see it differently.

Confidence is a dial, not a switch

So what might this call for?

Not less confidence. Better calibrated confidence.

In my Switches & Dials framework, confidence is considered a dial — something you tune to the situation’s actual needs. Some moments call for steadiness and reassurance. Others call for honesty about what’s still unknown. The skill is knowing which is which — and having the security to choose the harder option when it’s right.

Well-calibrated confidence might sound like this: Here is what we know. Here is what we don’t know yet. Here is what we’re going to do next.

Simple in theory. Genuinely hard to do under pressure, in public, when every hesitation gets captured and shared.

A study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that voters in the US are more likely to support politicians who display intellectual humility — openness to their own cognitive limits — because those leaders come across as both warmer and more competent. Across party lines. The effect held regardless of whether the politician shared the voter’s views.

Admitting you don’t have all the answers may not cost you credibility. Pretending you do — and being proven wrong — might. That, at least, is what the research suggests.

The Calibration Check

Before any high-stakes moment — a press conference, a crisis statement, a difficult vote — there are three questions worth asking yourself. I offer these not as a prescription, but as a starting point.

1. What do I actually know?
   Not what you’ve been briefed on. Not what sounds right in the room. What do you genuinely know to be true, right now?
   

2. What don’t I know yet — and am I covering that up?
   Overconfidence doesn’t always feel like overconfidence from the inside. It feels like clarity. Ask yourself honestly: am I filling in gaps I haven’t actually filled? Am I performing certainty because I’m scared that admitting uncertainty makes me look weak? If yes — name the uncertainty instead of burying it.

3. What’s the next honest step — and can I say it simply?
   You don’t need all the answers. You need the step. People can handle not knowing everything. What they struggle to handle, and what they remember, is feeling like you were pretending.

Dawn in the living room

Leadership is hard right now. The problems are complex, the pace is relentless, and the margin for error feels slim. But people are watching more carefully than ever. And what I see, increasingly, is an appetite for something different.

Which means the moment we’re in might actually be an opening. Not for leaders who perform uncertainty instead of performing certainty — that would just be the same trick in different clothes. But for leaders who are genuinely willing to say what’s hard, sit with what’s unresolved, and still show up with a direction.

Part of me still wants the person on screen who seems completely sure. Who makes the world feel, just for a moment, more settled than it is. I understand why that’s appealing. I feel it too.

Sometimes I imagine that little girl at Bev’s house, the living room still dark, dawn just beginning to break through the curtains, eyes fixed on the television. She was so certain — so certain — that the people on that screen who seemed the most confident were the ones most worth trusting. It took me decades to understand that confidence and competence are not the same thing. That the most important thing a leader can offer is the courage to be honest about what they don’t yet know.

I wonder how differently she would have seen the world if she’d had those tools a little earlier.

This is one way of thinking about it — and I hold it with some humility, because I’m sure it’s not the only one. The relationship between confidence, trust, and leadership is genuinely complex, and context matters enormously. What lands as honest in one culture may read as weak in another. And in highly polarised political climates, intellectual humility might get weaponised.

So I’d love to hear from you:

Do you think calibrated confidence is achievable in today’s political environment?

Have you seen a leader do this well — or badly?

What’s your experience of this, from inside politics or watching from outside it?

Warmly,

Lisa

P.S. I should say, I ask these questions about my own leadership all the time. Probably more than any other questions I sit with. I’m not writing this from a place of having figured it out. I’m writing it because I’m still working on it, and I suspect I always will be.

I once went on a date with a man who told me he wanted to marry someone willing to wear a bracelet that turned red whenever they lied.

The date did not last long.

Not because I am pro-lying. But because I could instantly think of many reasons I might want the freedom to lie: to protect someone, to keep a confidence, to preserve a surprise, to get out of danger, to avoid being needlessly cruel, or simply to buy time before saying something hard.

And then there are the less noble reasons too: to dodge embarrassment, smooth a tricky situation, cover a mistake, or wriggle out of trouble.

So, no, I do not want a “truth bracelet.” Not on dates and not in public life. My husband, after 28 years together, agrees: no truth bracelets.

And yet.

That story is useful for one reason: it reminds us that not all lies are equal. A lie to protect someone is not the same as a lie to win power. And that distinction matters.

Because Wales has just done something interesting. On Tuesday night, 17 March, the Welsh Parliament passed a law by 50 votes to 1 that creates a recall system so voters can remove Senedd members between elections in cases of serious misconduct or criminal conviction. It also paves the way for a new criminal offence covering false or misleading statements of fact made to help an election candidate during Senedd campaigns.

This will not apply to the May 2026 elections, and the offence is unlikely to come into force until 2030 at the earliest. Critics have warned that such powers could limit free speech and complicate democratic debate. Even so, Wales is drawing a line: knowingly misleading voters in order to win power should not simply be dismissed as politics.

And honestly, good. Because this is not only a legal question. It is a leadership question.

What kind of behavior do we want to normalize on the way into elected office? If someone knowingly misleads voters to get elected, that may not tell you everything about how they will govern. But it is a warning sign. It tells you something about how they see truth, power, and the public they are asking to trust them.

For too long, democracies have treated political lying like bad weather: annoying, corrosive, but somehow inevitable. We complain, fact-check, sigh dramatically, and move on.

This is where Geoff Mulgan’s – Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London — argument about a right to truth is helpful.

Liberal democracies have done a good job of protecting free speech. They have done a much weaker job protecting people from being knowingly lied to by powerful institutions. That is strange when you think about it. In finance, medicine, courtrooms, science, and consumer protection, we already accept that when the stakes are high, truth matters and deception carries consequences. Politics is more contested than those fields, of course. It involves values, interpretation, and competing visions of the future. But that is not an argument for tolerating knowingly false statements of fact in election campaigns.

If anything, democratic leadership should demand more respect for truth, not less.

Because leadership is not just about getting attention, dominating a news cycle, or saying whatever works. It is about asking people to hand you the power to make decisions that shape their lives. Voting is supposed to be an act of informed consent. If that consent is won through deliberate factual deception, leadership starts on shaky ground.

That is what Wales gets right. It says the truth is not just a nice extra in public life. It is part of the democratic infrastructure.

And it says something else important too: how people seek power matters. A candidate willing to knowingly mislead to get in is giving you crucial information about their leadership style. Maybe not proof, but a signal that citizens are not people to be respected in that model. They are rather targets to be managed.

Of course, this could still get messy. The moment you move from “deception is corrosive” to “the law should intervene,” things get complicated. What exactly counts as a false or misleading statement of fact? How do you distinguish factual deception from spin, rhetoric, prediction, or selective framing, or plain old nonsense? These are genuinely difficult legal questions — a verifiable claim like “we spent X amount on Y” can be true or false, but a promise, an opinion, or a selectively framed truth is far harder to prosecute.

So no, this is not yet a case for some grand government truth machine (or truth bracelets). It is a case for taking the problem seriously enough to try drawing a line carefully. The challenge is to avoid both passivity and overreach.

Still, here is where I land: We have spent too long acting as though honesty in politics is quaint — nice when available, but hardly essential. Meanwhile, candidates can say complete rubbish, ‘flood the zone’, and call it strategy.

If we want better political leadership, we need to stop treating honesty as optional. Not because politicians will never spin. They will. But because democracies tend to elevate the kinds of leaders their incentives reward. And, it shouldn’t be a political disadvantage to tell the truth.

A question to leave you with:

Should honesty be seen as naïve in politics, or as a basic condition of democratic leadership?

Warmly,

Lisa

What might political leadership look like if helping citizens participate was not just part of the job, but one of the best parts of it?

That question stayed with me while watching With the People, a short (~20 minutes) documentary from the Better Politics Foundation created with the Alliance of European Mayors.

The film follows leaders in three European cities: Mayor Karin Wanngård in Stockholm, Mayor Matteo Lepore in Bologna, and Michael Lakomski, the Mayor’s Plenipotentiary for Smart City in Poznań.

What I appreciated most is that it does not present these leaders as perfect or suggest their cities have everything figured out. Instead, it offers something more useful: a grounded glimpse of leadership that is close to people and open to participation.

Trailer - With the People: City Mayors Rethinking Power

A useful shift in how we see the role

We often describe politicians as public servants, and there is much to admire in that idea. Service matters.

Most people simply want public life to work: water from the tap, trash collected, buses running, streetlights on. That depends on capable institutions and public servants doing their jobs well.

But watching this documentary made me return to a reframing that has stayed with me for several years: what if political leaders are not only servants of the public, but also facilitators of citizen participation?

I first heard that idea clearly articulated in May 2023, when I recorded a podcast conversation, Embracing the Power of the Citizen Story, with Jon Alexander. Jon, the author of Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything Is All of Us, argues that:

democracy works best when people see themselves not as consumers of politics, but as citizens with agency.

In that frame, the role of leaders shifts as well. They are still responsible for decisions and delivery, but they also help create the conditions for people to contribute meaningfully to shaping public life.

Some decisions are simply better when the public is directly involved: how a neighborhood develops, how a city prepares for climate risks, and what priorities shape its future. These choices require local knowledge no leader can hold alone. In such moments, leadership may be less about acting alone and more about creating the conditions for people to contribute.

I have been thinking about that distinction ever since. And watching these three city leaders work, it felt less like a theory and more like something already quietly taking place in practice.

Why this felt familiar to me

Part of the reason this resonated so much, is that some of the most important political lessons I learned also came at the city level.

In the late 1990s, I worked as a legislative aide to Peter Steinbrueck on the Seattle City Council. He taught me something I have never forgotten:

listen deeply to everyone, even and especially, to the people who did not vote for you.

Even when it wasn’t easy, you could see that engaging with citizens was the part of the job he enjoyed the most.

City politics can be a particularly good teacher of that kind of listening and engagement. Because the issues are often immediate and concrete. A park. A bus line. A summer job. A feeling of safety on a particular street. A place to cool down in a heatwave. That closeness does not necessarily make city politics easier, but it can clarify the connections between decisions, trust, and daily life.

Stockholm: participation with follow-through

In Stockholm, Mayor Karin Wanngård shows what participation can look like when it is tied to visible follow-through.

Each year, the city creates 10,000 summer jobs for young people, and in Skärholmen, a suburban district of Stockholm, more than 800 young people took part. Last year, some participants spent their summer asking other young people what changes they wanted to see in their area. Those conducting the surveys and those responding to them shared the same sense of possibility: that their ideas might actually become a visible reality in their neighborhood.

What stood out to me was less the idea itself, and more what the process communicated:

Your opinion matters, and it might connect to something real.

The same was true for the city’s safety walks. Residents walk through their neighborhoods with city officials, raise their concerns in real time, and receive a written protocol from the city within a week. Within six months, the city reviews whether these concerns have been addressed. Residents report that since the security walks began, they have seen visible changes in neighborhoods that once felt unsafe.

That kind of direct feedback loop matters. It suggests that participation is not only about being asked, but about being able to see what happens next. Being consulted means little if you never find out what came of it.

If there is one lesson from Wanngård’s example, perhaps it is this: people trust participation when they can see that speaking up actually changes something.

Poznań: listening, learning, adjusting

In Poznań, Michal Lakomski shows another side of this.

The city’s participatory budgeting allows citizens to propose projects. The city then checks whether they are feasible, and residents vote on them. For example, one project that emerged from that process turned part of the city zoo into a Japanese garden.

The example that stood out most was the city’s response to e-scooters. When e-scooters were first introduced, it seemed like a huge win for the city. But they soon began to clutter public space and cause discontent.

To address this, Poznań consulted citizens and also held special meetings between scooter companies and blind resident representatives, because they realized that, for some people, badly parked scooters were not only ugly or inconvenient; they also posed real safety risks. That conversation helped shape a more thoughtful and effective response for affected citizens, resulting in designated parking zones.

The e-scooter example is small, but that is partly what makes it useful. It shows that participation is not some grand democratic gesture — it is often just the practical discipline of making sure the people most affected are in the room.

Poznań’s example suggests something worth remembering: leaders do not lose credibility by listening, learning, and adjusting. In many cases, it may actually strengthen it.

Bologna: broadening who belongs

In Bologna, Mayor Matteo Lepore offers perhaps the broadest version of the facilitation approach.

After pressure from grassroots activists, the city declared a climate emergency in 2018, and treated participation as a key strategy for developing a climate-resilient city.

It created Italy’s first citizens’ assembly on climate change — 100 randomly selected residents brought together to deliberate on the city’s response and help shape its direction, with participants financially compensated for their time.

In response, the city has built a permanent community hub in Montagnola Park — a space for workshops, cultural events, and climate education that has already hosted more than 180 events and engaged over 5,000 people.

Alongside this, Bologna is transforming underused urban spaces into climate shelters: places designed to offer shade, water, greenery, and social connection to residents during extreme heat. For a city that has faced deadly heatwaves, these are not amenity projects — they are infrastructure for survival, built with and for the people who will need them most.

But perhaps what stayed with me most was Lepore’s view of citizenship itself.

In the film, he argues that citizenship is not only about formal status — it is about participation. Bologna has opened parts of its participatory budgeting to non-residents, such as students and migrants, recognizing that they too help make the city what it is and are needed in concrete decision-making. It is a way of being in the city and for the city that does not depend on having the right document.

Bologna broadens who belongs by design — a randomly selected 100-person citizens’ climate assembly, and allowing non-residents to participate in decisions that affect them. We learn that when more people are included in the decision, the outcomes that follow are more likely to matter.

A few places to go deeper

That distinction between servant and facilitator also points toward a broader body of work worth knowing.

Claudia Chwalisz and DemocracyNext have been seriously developing this territory. DemocracyNext’s work treats engagement as a genuine democratic craft rather than a box-ticking exercise, and gives intellectual and practical substance to exactly the kind of leadership this film depicts.

It also connects with the Better Politics Foundation’s Circular Power Politics guide, co-written by Jon Alexander and Omezzine Khalifa, which lays out a framework and case studies showing that leadership is not only about holding authority, but also about helping power move more constructively between institutions and the people they serve — and that doing so can generate political dividends for leaders themselves.

Better, not perfect

None of these examples is presented as flawless, and I think that is part of the documentary’s strength.

With the People does not suggest there is one formula to copy. It offers practical examples, thoughtful design choices, and a few encouraging reminders that political leadership can still be relational and participatory.

In a time when many people feel discouraged about politics, that feels valuable.

Not because it proves everything can be fixed at the city level, or that flipping a metaphorical switch solves all problems, but because it shows that leadership can look different from what many of us have come to expect. These leaders are not the only ones trying new approaches, and if you know of other examples worth learning from, I would love to hear about them.

The question I am left with

Politicians still need to serve. But this film suggests they may also need to facilitate.

That will not solve every problem, but it may strengthen the relationship between citizens and public life — and make the work more gratifying for leaders themselves.

And for the leaders in this film, helping people participate does not appear to be an obligation they reluctantly accept. It seems to be one of the most meaningful parts of the work.

That may be one of the most useful lessons city leadership can offer right now.

So the question I’m left with is this:

What might change if we expected political leaders not only to serve people, but also to help people participate in shaping the future — and if citizens expected to take part in that work as well?

Because democracy does not depend only on what leaders do. It also depends on whether both leaders and citizens see participation as part of their responsibility.

Warmly,

Lisa

The full documentary With the People is available to watch here.

P.S. A Necessary Condition: Safety for Public Leaders

One honest concern many politicians share with us is that engaging more directly with the public, especially in open or less structured settings, can feel risky.

In many countries, threats, harassment, and even violence against elected officials have increased. For some leaders, the idea of spending more time in unmediated public spaces does not just raise logistical questions; it raises safety ones.

That reality should not be dismissed. Research such as Mere Mortals, the first global study on the mental health of politicians published by the Better Politics Foundation, has documented the pressures many leaders face, including harassment, threats, and the emotional toll of public life.

If we want more participatory politics, we also have to take seriously the conditions that make it possible. That means investing in better protection for public officials, addressing online and offline harassment, strengthening norms of respectful disagreement, and being clear that intimidation or violence has no place in democratic life.

Participation works best when it is safe for everyone involved. Creating those conditions is not only the responsibility of politicians. It is a shared responsibility for institutions, platforms, and citizens, too.