I am a lifelong believer in servant leadership. Along with many others, I share the understanding that power brings responsibility and accountability, that leadership should be exercised in the service of others and those entrusted with authority have an obligation to the people, organisations or communities they are there to serve.
Tragically for us all, recent years have brought us something else – spiteful leadership. Not a description I use lightly but it encapsulates the cruelty and disregard we’re seeing paraded peacock-like across the world stage.
We see leaders who punish those who challenge them, pursue those who criticise them, demean communities they disdain and make decisions based on personal grievance, ideology or the retention of power rather than the consequences for the people affected.
We’ve seen it repeatedly here in New Zealand, from racist insults clouding the air in Parliament as our foreign minister escaped unpunished, despite his attempt to demean his fellow MPs, through to this week’s leadership debacle. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon survived his latest leadership challenge with ruffled feathers but Chris Penk was plucked of his ministerial portfolios for dissent and unceremoniously turfed out of the nest.
Had Luxon been wise enough to end with the confidence vote, National would have weathered the storm and moved on. Instead, sacking Penk put the spite on a stick with which to poke future provocateurs and further undermined confidence in his leadership.
And this is where spite stops being political theatre and becomes everybody’s very urgent problem.
Penk’s ministerial responsibilities covered areas that matter enormously in crisis. They had to go somewhere. Already overburdened ministers absorbed them, workloads increased and dedicated attention is lost.
And as a result, we all find ourselves caught in the cascade of inability.
Spite at the top produces a deficit of oversight and a loss of operational capacity further down. In our current state of polycrisis, that’s incredibly dangerous, particularly when the squabbling seems to have squashed any sense of responsibility for the country’s well-being or political accountability for the loaded crisis stack teetering on the edge thanks to the coalition government’s actions and inactions over this term.
I use my AI Reputation Monitor to constantly track the coalition government’s reputation, social capital and licence to operate always asking the more consequential question: what is its current capability to lead the country through crisis?
That assessment was already poor. Following this week’s turmoil, it has fallen to critical.
This week’s turmoil alone isn’t responsible. It comes on top of decisions that have reduced resilience: the vindictive cancellation of ferry contracts with replacements delayed, underinvestment in infrastructure, cuts to public service capability and essential services. Now the Defence Minister, also the associate minister responsible for emergency management, has flown the coop.
So if the earthquake comes again, the storm hits again, the ferries fail again or another shock lands as we struggle to recover from the last, who leads and how effectively?
People need people to turn to in a crisis. They need confidence in those giving direction, trust in the information they receive and belief that those making decisions understand what they are doing. Spiteful, vindictive leadership corrodes all three.
This is where Alert AI and crisis intelligence can help rescue the rest of us - or at least help us keep our heads above water.
If there is a leadership vacuum above us, we need to understand what it means below. AI can help identify the pressures at the top, assess reputation and leadership capability, test potential consequences and trace them through sectors, organisations and communities. We can combine that with sector analysis, stakeholder interdependency mapping and emerging signals to give our local decision-makers the intelligence they need.
So the question moves beyond what will government do? It shifts to ‘given what we know about the situation, what do we need to do?
For a business dependent on moving goods between the North and South Islands, that might mean on going real time preparation for ferry failure, road closures, fuel shocks or damaged infrastructure. Another organisation will have different exposure. The point is to understand the cascade before it reaches you and act on the decisions within your control.
When leadership capacity is diminished, waiting for direction from above isn’t a crisis strategy. Well-constructed AI systems help us do this at speed: monitor emerging risks, interrogate reputation and social capital, analyse patterns, test scenarios and map the interdependencies that tell us who might be affected, how and where intervention can lessen the harm.
During Friday’s Alert AI session I demonstrated how I move between models according to the job I want done. My PR Knowledge Hub Reputation Monitor, customised through a Gemini Gem, interrogates real-time open-source information against reputation, social capital, licence to operate and relationship measures. Claude extends the analysis into scenarios and predictive analysis, while ChatGPT supports stakeholder interdependency mapping and the wider intelligence build.
The point isn’t ‘wow, look at what AI can do’. The point is the detail we can see because of it.
Our superpower as practitioners has always been situational intelligence and analysis, not our ability to knock out content (although we are pretty good at that too). It is about looking beyond the mountains and understanding what we need to prepare for as circumstances alter and crises elsewhere begin moving towards us.
AI helps us see the patterns and buy back the minutes that matter.
But it isn’t going to solve our leadership problem. The reality is that our leaders and decision-makers need humans far more than they need AI.
They need people prepared to bring contextual intelligence into the room and say what the signals actually indicate rather than what a leader would prefer them to show. People who understand behaviour, relationships, trust and consequences.
As servant leadership gives way to spiteful leadership, here and around the world, our roles as stewards, guardians, sentinels and sensemakers, able to stand up to vindictiveness, become ever more crucial. I’ve always maintained that our greatest capability as practitioners is courage. Leadership’s nasty turn can be witnessed particularly starkly in the United States, where perceived enemies and critics are pursued and contradiction treated as treason. All of which has consequences.
When political leadership is occupied with enemies, grudges, retaliation and self-preservation, somebody still has to anticipate the storm, keep essential systems working, ensure people know what is happening and keep organisations operating.
If national leadership cannot supply certainty, trust and confidence, then other, more capable organisational leaders must step into the light. They can convene, strengthen local relationships, protect their people and model the accountability that might be absent elsewhere. Helping people understand the prevailing circumstances and what they might mean for them is itself a leadership act.
There is an important AI lesson in there too. Agents can be orchestrated to do many things but should they be allowed to get on with crisis response by themselves?
No.
Agents will run roughshod over empathy if we let them. That is why the supervised crisis intelligence framework I introduced on Friday has humans guarding the gates. Anything can be AI-assisted but we must own the decisions. Agents can’t.
Which seems particularly important when so many of the people already making decisions on our behalf appear to have forgotten what leadership is for.
Constant crisis demands good behaviour and good behaviour from leadership is in short supply. There is much undermining, nastiness, spitefulness and self-interest. But for many populations, societies and cultures that’s not the way they work and it isn’t the world they want. Looking out for each other remains our first port of call - the anchor for who we are and how we stay afloat.
AI can provide decision-makers with better information earlier and buy us the minutes that matter to act and ward off what’s coming at us. But there still have to be decent, capable humans prepared to use those minutes well and with good intent.
Alert AI: Crisis Intelligence for Decision Makers is available as a catch-up recording through the PR Knowledge Hub Learning Centre. It explores practical AI- supported reputation and social capital monitoring, the Crisis Stack, AI-supported analysis, stakeholder interdependency mapping, scenario modelling and supervised AI and agents to turn emerging signals into decisions and action. You can see the tools in use and the intelligence framework detail if you’re interested in more.
We cannot be fully prepared for every crisis. But we can be alert, be kind and be ready to respond.