What Leadership Requires Before the Crisis Arrives

Ukraine, Kyiv. A powerful attack on a Ukrainian city with Russian missiles. 2024.

Over the past decade, my work has taken me across sectors and borders — through research collaborations, innovation projects, documentary filmmaking, and long conversations with scientists, policymakers and communities across Europe. Different fields, different languages, same recurring question, one I can no longer set aside:

Why do societies so often fail to act on knowledge and experience they already hold?

Europe is not short of challenges right now — geopolitical instability, economic uncertainty, technological disruption, demographic pressure, and a war fought on its border. What strikes me, looking at each of these in turn, is how rarely they arrive unannounced. The signals were there. The experience existed. The lessons were available, often for years, sometimes for decades. What was missing was the willingness to take that understanding seriously before events made it impossible to ignore.

I notice this pattern with particular clarity because of where I come from. I was born in Latvia, and I have spent most of my life there. The twentieth century for Latvia was a turbulent era defined by two world wars, mass deportations, fifty years of Soviet occupation, and ultimately restoration of independence. That history reached directly into my own family. My grandparents were deported to Siberia, and my parents were born there. My grandfather escaped Gulag. I am still, in many ways, trying to make sense of it all. What did that mean for my family, for the country, and for the thousands of others who endured the same inhumanity.

This is not distant history. It sits one generation back — my grandparents, my parents. For the last two years, I have been carrying out research on this period, because in the near future I aim to make a documentary about it. Not a historical one, but more from a broader and timeless perspective. I kept noticing the same observation: this part of Europe's twentieth century has never been fully absorbed into how Europe understands itself. It is documented, archived, carried in family memory — present, but never integrated into the shared European story. Why that gap exists is its own question, tangled up with decades of Europe's relationship with Russia. But that is a different article. What I want to name here is simply that the gap exists, and that it has consequences. This is not unique to geopolitics.

All of this also raises a question about leadership — not as an abstraction, but as something concrete. What does it mean for an individual to lead in this sense, today? And what does it require at the level of a country, or of Europe as a whole?

For me, leadership means acting courageously to integrate the kinds of knowledge and experience we often don't hear from — the overlooked, the peripheral, sometimes the inconvenient — and to act on them before circumstances force the issue.

There is a question I cannot let go of: why did a war have to happen at the border of the EU to fully recognize what had been visible and known for years? I wonder about it because I think it is the more honest version of "leadership," and because I think the answer matters for whatever comes next, in Ukraine and beyond.

I don't think the answer is more warnings, since Europe was rarely short of those.

I think the answer has more to do with attention — with building habits, institutions and relationships that take uncomfortable signals seriously before they become unavoidable. The same pattern I notice in other contexts. Scientists know things long before institutions adapt. Communities carry lessons long before policy catches up. Families carry memory long before history books revisit it. The real gap has always been between knowledge and use and in the way we listen to each other, and learn from each other.

I keep coming back to one source of hope in all of this, and it isn't abstract. It's my own family. After all of that, they still found the strength to rebuild a life and a country afterward, carrying hope for a better future in their hearts. Hardship also brings a deeper understanding of what this world is about, and how much humanness matters. That is a story of extraordinary courage. The same courage that inspires me, and what Europe needs more of now: the courage to notice, to listen, to say the uncomfortable thing before it's convenient, and to act before the cost of waiting becomes unbearable.

None of this requires grand gestures. Courage, I've come to think, rarely arrives as one dramatic decision. More often it lives in small, daily steps — the kind you and I can take through our work, through the questions we choose to ask, through the experiences we choose to voice.

This is what I have chosen to dedicate my life’s work to, in my own way.

I invite you to find yours.