Holding together what wants to fall apart
8 December 2025, Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl
There’s a moment that keeps replaying in my head from last week … a short walk down a narrow corridor in a government compound in Region A. The minister’s team had just stepped out to prepare the signing room, leaving a kind of hush in their wake. The air was both triumphant and tense, the way it often is when years of fractured coordination finally decide to cooperate for an afternoon. That corridor, with its flickering lights and institutional fatigue, is where system leadership really lives.
System leadership isn’t the polished panels or the big declarations. It’s the practice of holding together what keeps drifting apart. And in my experience, almost everything in a modern multilateral system has its own centrifugal force pulling at it, politics, history, crisis, funding, personality, timelines, even the basic physics of geography. Yet the work continues because someone, somewhere, insists the pieces stay connected long enough for progress to form.
Over the past week I moved across three regions and one complicated multilateral structure, let’s call it System X, and the pattern was unmistakable. In Region A, we were finalising a strategic agreement between our institution and a major ministry. Years in the making, endlessly re-routed by political shifts, personnel changes, and a few near-deaths. The officials were gracious, sharp, and visibly carrying old disappointments from prior attempts. The ceremony felt smooth, but behind it sat hundreds of hours of trust-repair, clause-adjusting, and the work of aligning expectations that lived in five different time zones.
Then there was Region B, where coastal ecosystems are showing stress signals that everyone feels but not everyone wants to say out loud. The scientists there have been piloting a nature-based solution that is elegant in t
heory and precarious in practice. They’re watching temperatures rise, salinity shift, and the foundations of local livelihoods tremble. Every conversation carried ur
gency beneath the polite phrasing. And still, their ability to respond is tied to institutions built for calmer decades.
And then Region C, where a government is enthusiastically exploring AI in food systems. The ambition is refreshing. The infrastructure required to support it… less so. We kept circling the same unglamorous truth: without basic interoperability, time, space, data meaning, AI is wishful thinking. You can’t innovate on top of a system that doesn’t know how to speak to itself. I had the uneasy recognition that our own institution has similar gaps. Everyone wants the leap and sometimes no one wants to admit the ground underfoot is thin.
Hovering above all this was System X, an ambitious (yet wobbly) multilateral structure trying to reform itself mid-flight. Overlapping committees. Decision processes that assume information flows which mostly don’t. Leaders with good intentions brought into machinery that doesn’t match their speed or clarity. None of it malicious, all of it difficult.
And somewhere in the middle, there we were, all of us, trying to create coherence out of contradiction.
System leadership, at least how I’ve lived it, isn’t about alignment in the glossy sense. It’s more like a human force field. You stand in the middle of competing demands >> scientists needing clarity, boards needing defensible decisions, governments needing speed, communities needing stability, staff needing structure, ecosystems needing decades of repair. You don’t solve it, you need to hold it, you need to shape it and at times, you stop it from spiralling. You build a bit of coherence today so tomorrow isn’t swallowed by entropy.
It’s exhausting and hopeful in equal measure.
And when it works, even briefly, you can feel the system exhale. You see it in a minister’s thanks, a scientist’s relief, a board’s cleaner decision, a partner’s regained confidence. You see it in the quiet fact that something finally moved where nothing moved for years.
The path forward
Now, this is not my grand plan, they are just simple practices that make systems less brittle and leadership less lonely
- Name the fractures > Systems don’t heal what they refuse to acknowledge.
- Invest in the plumbing >Data interoperability, information flow, clarity of roles, the boring things that make everything else possible.
- Protect trust like infrastructure > It cracks faster than it forms.
- Build coherence in small increments > Enough of them, over time, become momentum.
In fractured systems, progress is never spectacular. But it’s real. And sometimes, that narrow corridor in Region A, the one that smelle
d faintly of old paper and new possibility, is where the future starts.
