When Power and Truth Come Apart

The Global Lens: The world outside, the world within. The dynamics operating at civilisational scale are the same dynamics we navigate in our own leadership and relationships. These pieces follow that thread - from the large to the personal.

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran, killing its Supreme Leader and beginning a conflict that has, now two months later, resulted in a fragile ceasefire, a blocked shipping lane, and a diplomatic process in visible difficulty. The events themselves have been covered thoroughly. What they make visible, and at a scale large enough for us all to see, is a pattern that operates at every level of leadership - when the usage of power diverges from truth there is a cost. Not in the immediate effect, but often experienced first in the relational space between a leader and the people who depend on what they say.

Talks in Islamabad ended after twenty-one hours without result; the American team's next visit was then cancelled. Iran has offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but wants nuclear discussions deferred - an offer the US cannot easily accept, since agreeing would dissolve the primary leverage it holds for the objective it went to war to achieve. Germany's Chancellor said publicly he could not see what exit strategy the United States was pursuing. A NATO ally named what the official statements had not. That plainness - saying the difficult thing when doing so has a cost - is what Courageous Truthfulness looks like. The stated position and the verifiable conditions no longer align - and the people in the room can see it.

How the truth gets lost

This is not a verdict on the rights and wrongs of the conflict. Those questions are genuine, and this is not the place to resolve them. What is observable, however, is the structural pattern: a gap between the stated position and the verifiable reality; alliances being managed rather than cultivated; relationships quietly adjusting to a credibility problem that the public statements cannot acknowledge. The gap did not arrive through a single act of dishonesty. It arrived the way such gaps usually do.

It is worth noting what the alternative looks like. Mark Carney's address at the World Economic Forum - delivered at the moment when Canada's relationship with the United States was most exposed - named the difficulty plainly and offered a way forward. That kind of speech has a real cost. That is why it matters.

Managing truth is a particular form of dishonesty - not an outright lie, but something more insidious for being harder to name. It presents as strategy: holding a position because ambiguity remains useful, deferring a commitment because the timing is not right, giving the version of events that preserves leverage. Each choice feels reasonable in isolation. Cumulatively they produce a gap - and the gap, once it is wide enough, becomes readable to the people in the room even when no one has spoken it. I recognise the pattern because I have been inside it.

When I chose safety

I've been guilty of this myself. For some years I satisfied myself with being the best at delivering leadership development programmes that others had built. It was comfortable but, over time, felt increasingly like a shoe that didn't fit. The lack of fit was around my willingness to speak up about the kind of leaders I wanted to see - and that, I hoped, others wanted to see too. Leaders who, amongst other things, were able to embody Courageous Truthfulness.

The cost was working harder than I needed to, achieving less than I should have, and carrying a private sense of misalignment I had not yet made public even to myself. The gap was a form of personal dishonesty - an accumulation of smaller choices that kept a truer account slightly out of reach, until the accumulated cost made that position impossible to maintain.

The safety I had hidden in was the decision not to reveal myself - to not be the tall poppy who sticks their head above the parapet only to be shot at. What I feared, and this feels very personal even now, is the disdain of those around me, or of those I saw as important.

For me to embrace the very value I wanted to see in others meant beginning to voice, more clearly and more openly, what I believe to be true and what I believe to be valuable.

What closes it

What closes that kind of gap is not a single disclosure. It is the willingness to let the private account and the public one converge - to say what you actually believe about where you are and what you are trying to do, and to let the relationships adjust accordingly. That is a more exposed position than managing the gap. It is also, over time, a less costly one. The relationships built on the truer account are more durable than the ones maintained through its managed version. And the people around you, who have already read the gap, are more ready for the honest account than the managed one led you to believe.

And you?

The question worth sitting with is not whether you have done this. Most leaders who have held genuine responsibility have. The more useful question is where. Most of us have reached for at least one of these:

• Underplayed a difficulty to stay safe
• Over-sold a position to maintain the narrative
• Shone a light in one direction to draw attention away from another

We tend to call these tactical judgements. They are also, if we are honest, forms of deception - the kind that accumulate quietly, at cost, and that we tend to recognise in others long before we name them in ourselves. The more searching question is:

• Where are you holding a position past the point at which you privately know it has stopped serving what you are actually wanting to do?
• Where have the public version and the private one quietly drifted apart?
• Where is the gap already readable to those around you, even though it has not yet been spoken?