Beyond the strongman

Around the world, the pendulum has been swinging back toward strongmen. Across countries, guardrails built after World War II — institutions, norms, and habits of cooperation — are fraying. Raw power, zero-sum politics, and the myth of the solitary hero are filling the void.

This model is poorly suited to challenges that require collective action to protect people's lives and livelihoods in an interconnected global economy where no one is in charge. The defining challenges of our time — like climate change, nature loss, pandemics, artificial intelligence — are shared challenges. No single government or CEO can solve them alone.

Yet our politics, institutions, and too often our imaginations, remain captive to the strongman reflex: the belief that one figure can fix all the problems. It’s tempting — who doesn’t want someone else to get us out of the mess we’re in? But this instinct is not just misguided, it’s dangerous.

When problems are shared, solutions must be too. Leadership today needs to be focused on creating the conditions where many can carry it together.

That is what leaders and entrepreneurs of all ages and continents are telling us. In conversations and teaching sessions with more than 500 emerging and established leaders over the past year, we have heard the same theme again and again: a hunger for connection and a new vision of leadership that looks less like command and more like collaboration.

One American student put it simply: “Inclusivity breeds creativity. Everyone is so different, and yet we work together so well.” Another, from Indonesia, explained: “Being a systems leader means collaborating with other people, other leaders. No one rules alone.”

Among the young leaders we have worked with, we are seeing growing interest in a different paradigm of leadership, which we call Brave Space leadership. At its core is the practice of holding a brave space: creating the conditions for people to connect, take shared responsibility and act together without reverting to domination or control.

This new paradigm asks leaders to reach out and connect with others. It requires presence, honesty, deep listening and suspending judgment. It means knowing how to create the conditions for collaboration, and how to orchestrate it.

Brave Space leadership rejects the myth of the solitary hero. It recognizes that breakthroughs come when responsibility is distributed and owned collectively.

And it’s not just theory. We see it in companies collaborating across supply chains. Kering, a global luxury group, became the first company to adopt both land and freshwater science-based targets through the Science Based Targets Network. The process identified Italy’s Arno Basin as the highest-priority location for water action in its supply chain, helping catalyze a collective effort with companies and local stakeholders to address shared basin-level challenges. The pharma company GSK is showing the same kind of leadership in India’s Godavari Basin, partnering with NGOs and villages to secure water and health in a region critical to its medicines and vaccines supply chain.

We see it in scientists joining forces across disciplines, like the Earth Commission, which brings together social and earth systems sciences to uncover new insights that help ensure human needs aren’t left out when we consider the planetary boundaries for water, climate and biodiversity.

We see it in communities that are organizing with fluid hierarchies and shared responsibility. Gavi - the Vaccine Alliance, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Gates Foundation and others are now collaborating to integrate one of the world’s most complex delivery systems. Faced with extreme funding shortfalls from USAID and other overseas development aid, which could have sparked turf battles, these institutions have chosen to reinvent their shared purpose and recommit to each other and the countries they support. They’ve chosen greater cooperation over competition, so they can keep getting vaccines into children’s arms.

Young leaders are impatient to scale this practice, even as they inherit systems built on the old reflexes of command and control.

If we want their courage to ripple outward, three shifts are necessary.

First, education must teach it. Business schools and training programs should stop glorifying the lone CEO and instead make the craft of orchestrating cooperation central to what it means to lead. The shift is already underway. The Villars Institute is training students from more than 80 countries in systems leadership. The International Baccalaureate has approved a new Systems Transformation course, following a pilot proposed by UWC Atlantic, to bring systems leadership into one of the world’s leading educational systems. Both are helping prepare the next generation of systems leaders to co-hold responsibility across divides and build collaboration to address shared, complex challenges.

Second, politics must reward it. Too often, leaders rise by exploiting polarization or identity. We need political and economic systems that elevate those who bridge divides and serve the common good. Denmark, for example, has forged a new social contract on land-use - including a world's first carbon tax on livestock emissions. Policymakers, farmers, unions, industry, and environmental groups agreed on ambitious reductions in agricultural nitrogen pollution, land reform, and large-scale forest and nature restoration, all backed by a 43 billion DKK Green Area Fund.

Third, companies must practice it. Boards and CEOs should reward those who can build coalitions across silos and sectors, not only those who maximize short-term returns.

The age of the strongman may feel resurgent. But it is brittle. Shared challenges cannot be solved by iron fists. They can only be solved by shared leadership and cooperation across boundaries.

The young people stepping into leadership today know this instinctively. The question is whether the rest of us are willing to let go of old myths and make space for the kind of leadership this century demands.

If we keep longing for a hero, we will fail. If we learn to lead together, we just might succeed.