Lawrie Philpott: Today’s leadership listening guest is Nik Gowing, a journalist and longtime presenter of BBC World News, covering conflicts, political crises, and international summits.

After broadcasting, Nik shifted into researching how leaders handle uncertainty and rapid change. From interviewing hundreds of leaders. His core finding is blunt. Most leaders are not prepared for the speed and complexity of modern disruption. He wrote about his findings in two publications, A Sky Full of Lies and Black Swans in 2009, and in 2018, Thinking the unthinkable, a new imperative for leadership in the digital age.

There were three core findings: leaders need faster decision cycles, greater openness to uncertainty, and to let go of command and control mindsets. He also found that the biggest barrier to leadership is leaders themselves who need to drop the ego, avoid fear of being wrong, and interestingly remove addiction to uncertainty.

The spooky thing about today’s very troubled world is that Nik was predicting it some 20 years ago. So I wonder what he might say about the world’s current difficulties and what might be waiting for us in the future, possibly a very, very dark future about which we’re going to hear today. So Nik, welcome to Leadership Listening.

Let’s get started with what all this means for the Leadership, Listening audience, and where these troubled pieces of the world may go in the future.

Nik Gowing: Well, thanks, Lawrie. And, you quote the two books, the two studies in which you kindly say that we predicted much of what is happening today up to 20 years ago.

The trouble is that when we predicted it, when we warned about it, things like Brexit, things like Trump being nominated and elected, people said, what are you smoking? Why are you saying this? You know, you are just being unorthodox here. You’ve just got to understand the way things are going. What we’ve now got is a deep and dark and sinister prognosis of where things are going and things are gonna get much worse.

I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t believe that’s the case. I believe that what I’m about to say is deeply concerning and should worry us all, not just because of what’s been happening in the Iran War with the implications for oil supplies and everything that’s going on in the Gulf. This is about the end of stability.

The end of stability, the stability we take for granted, which is gonna produce cash in our pockets. Mortgages which can be repaid, a way of life which is really rather goood, with a holiday or two each year. Those kind of things, potentially partly because of AI and increasingly because of AI, are really under threat whether it’s leaders or even the middle class or the lower middle class, I don’t think most people really are wanting to accept quite a part as well from the threat from Russia to our security and safety, both in the United Kingdom and elsewhere around Europe.

And in fact, as we’re speaking the British Defense Secretary isn’t the saying publicly, the Russians are looking at our pipes and gas pipes and our cables working out what to tear apart. If we move to the kind of war that the strategic defense review in the United Kingdom warned about last year. These are dark, deep and sinister times.

It’s not just about national security, it’s about national stability, but overall, tragically, I don’t think politicians, not part of particular parties at all. I don’t think politicians and the political class can handle the enormity of what is now happening similar to what boards are having to face in huge companies as well.

They are facing new realities they’ve never really considered or confronted, and as a result they’re really destabilized by what is happening. Let me try and visualize this quickly, Lawrie, in something which we’ve summarized in a one minute video, an animation, which is about a pinball machine in a fairground, and we’ve all sometime in our lives done it trying, believing that we can somehow guide the ball.

If you remember, the ball goes backwards and forwards, flipper to flipper, moving in directions you cannot control ever faster, ever faster. That’s where we are now, ever faster and out of control and moving in the wrong direction. It’s bleak. I’m afraid it’s sinister, but when the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, says in the middle of January this year at a mansion house dinner with a black tie on, he says, we are facing now a London where there will be, quote his words, not mine, mass unemployment because of AI.

These are enormous factors. And finally, the thing that should worry us all, and you mentioned this in your intro, is the speed at which it’s happening. We can’t wait 10 years for it to suddenly develop or germinate. This is happening in 10 months, 10 weeks, even 10 days. Look at the speed of what happened in the Iran war.

These are deeply troubling times and my very strong advice to leaders or leaders of the future is not think about being optimistic or pessimistic, but being realistic, think the unthinkable, think the unpalatable. And if you think in a realistic way, a positive way, you can be positive about things which are going in the wrong direction.

Lawrie Philpott: But Nik, isn’t it true to think that… I’m gonna guess the number, 95% of the world’s population wants a roof over their head, maybe a little garden, a bicycle, a car, a holiday, a job, their health, their education. And let’s say 5% of the world’s population, the politicians and and civil servants and diplomats are there to create the conditions where that happen.

So are we looking at the 5% and what goes on there? And if I was to say to you that competence in the world of organizations is what it takes to do a job well. Do we think the politicians and civil servants and diplomats are doing their job well, or do they just not really know what they’re doing properly?

Nik Gowing: Well, there are a number of issues there to unpick, but I think the core one, which you ask is about the 5%, 95%. Of course, the public believes whether you are in Bangladesh, whether you are in Nairobi, whether you are in South America, whether you are in central London, whether you’re in central Washington or New York or wherever.

They assume that life is gonna keep getting better. Life has been like that certainly since the end of World War ii, 80 years ago. My very strong view. My very strong view is that that assumption is now flawed and is no longer something which can be taken for granted, and that’s why it’s gonna create enormous problems of instability in countries, in every country.

Whether you are in the South and facing massive development problems, or you’re in the most sophisticated countries of the West, or what we maybe shouldn’t call the West anymore, or the developed world. The assumption is, and this is why it comes down to a national stability problem, politicians are gonna have to learn to say, and as they’re beginning to have to say, in the Iran crisis at the moment, we can’t guarantee the kind of things you now assume we would’ve guaranteed.

In other words. There is a level of instability and fracturing and rupturing that’s going on to everything. That’s why I come back to the pinball. If one thing is sorted out, the ball moves in a different direction, creates another problem, and another problem and another problem. And they’re all feeding off each other.

They’re only 24 hours in a day. And economic capacity is limited to the kind of traditions which we’ve taken for granted no longer apply. That’s why what is happening, and you use the word scary. That is why what we are now facing is scary, and it’s gonna happen not in 10 years, not in 2036, 2036 is tonight at half past eight. It’s that speed, which is now about to really rock a lot of people and make people have to realize that the way they’re thinking is no longer something that can be delivered by the political class and the corporate class.

Lawrie Philpott: And if the way they’re thinking isn’t right, that, for me, boils down in the direction of the word competence and dependable relationships. And I think we live in a world where there are, by definition people therefore, who are not competent, who haven’t therefore got dependable relationships and hence the kind of turmoil that we seem to be getting into now and getting into more so in the future.

Nik Gowing: What I’m saying though, Lawrie, is that actually much of the kind of framing that I’ve just put to you. Would flaw most leaders or probably every leader. In other words, this is beyond the traditional orthodoxy of leadership to handle, and I think it’s wrong to blame people for getting this wrong. What we would say very strongly is that this is about being positive, being realistic, and about upskilling.

In other words, you’ve got competence, you’ve got ability. You’ve got skills. But learn that you’ve got to apply them and develop them in different ways now, this is about, and I use the word again, upskilling. In other words, you’ve got what we need, but now you’ve got to apply it in a different way and accept, and you mentioned this, that things of often don’t go well these days.

That much of what is expected can no longer be delivered with guarantees that certainly shareholders and those investing in companies expect. That’s why you’ve got to re-skill and be positive. Rather than saying, I’m gonna be pessimistic, you are incompetent, and so on in saying you are incompetent, you are being quite derisory of people.

I think there are a lot of good leaders around, but they’ve got to learn to speedily do the kind of things that you and I talk to them about, which is thinking in a different way, thinking in a more positive way to address and adapt to the reality of what is happening and get the people working for them and the board they’re serving to understand this.

Lawrie Philpott: And how does the impetus for that actually occur? Is it some really powerful future leader nationally and one of the more powerful nations ideally, I suspect? Is it that kind of answer or have we got to go to a worse position before things get better?

Nik Gowing: Well, I don’t think much of what is happening, people really have woken up to, I’m gonna put a figure on it now, but it’s a very arbitrary figure, there’s no data, which I’ve seen anyway, but talking to people that up to 90% of leaders simply don’t grip the enormity of what is happening. Whether political leaders or corporate leaders and political leaders of every shape and form in every kind of jurisdiction you can imagine, this is about changing the way they think, changing the way they approach the job.

The trouble is, and this is certainly what we’re seeing in the United Kingdom and several countries around Europe. The trouble is, the belief is that politicians will somehow, miraculously resolve and solve the problems. Therefore, people are moving away from the traditional political class to the fringes, like here in the UK to Reform, because Reform is promising it can do certain things.

I would put to you that even if they get to government, they will find it really difficult to handle this.

Lawrie Philpott: Yep.

Nik Gowing: These dynamics, the backwards and forwards and the inability to handle what is happening and knit it all together.

Lawrie Philpott: So Nik, after decades of interviewing world leaders, what actually separates those who sound like leaders from those who actually our leaders, if we have some examples of that, that would be mightily helpful.

Nik Gowing: In the political class you’ve of course got politicians who have to serve their party. They have to serve their party, and they will be elevated through the ranks, maybe to the top as well, by doing the right thing by the party.

I would suggest to you that Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, particularly with his speech in Davos on the 20th of January this year was very right and I would endorse it 110% when he talked about a ruptured world we are now facing, not just a world in transition, a ruptured world. But why do I say that?

Because he’s not a politician. He’s a political leader. He decided to go into politics very late, having been governor of the Bank of Canada and the governor of the Bank of England. He decided to go into the political maelstrom and what he said, and the way he does it is not traditional politics, unlike its predecessors in the corporate world we use the phrase zombie orthodoxies, and I’ve talked to many executive search firms about this and people representing firms about what they’re asked by their clients. And the clients want a certain kind of tick box approach, which is qualifications, but also record as well. I would say very strongly that what you’ve gotta do is break away from that.

You’ve gotta take risks and you’ve gotta have people who are not bound by zombie orthodoxies, orthodoxies which they’ve learned at business school, which they’ve developed in the company that they’ve, they’ve been working in, and probably through those orthodoxes are actually holding them back and not largely applicable to the new reality we face of an unstable world where the pinball is moving backwards and forwards at ever higher speeds.

This takes bravery and that’s why I come back to Carney because Carney, at the time of recording this, has been Prime Minister for about a year, but he’s shown himself to be distinguished by the fact that he doesn’t think in orthodoxies. Now, I’m not gonna talk about Trump because that has its own particular variety of unorthodoxes.

But I’m talking about those who in the political class, whether in Brazil, whether in Kenya, whether in South Africa who are really struggling with this because they can’t break away too easily from the constraints which qualified them. And therefore, one of our main findings is the qualifications which get you a job, actually disqualify you from being able to do that job. Qualifications, which get you a job, disqualify you from being able to do that job.

Because in complying with what is needed in the tick box for the executive search firms, you are actually being predictable as opposed to being unpredictable and being prepared to create new mind muscle, to think about things in a different way.

Lawrie Philpott: I spent quite a lot of my career, early career in the public service and I wonder Nik, whether politicians have sort of wandered away from an understanding of that prime accountability, responsibility vested in those two very important words from my point of view, public service. There’s this orientation towards the political party, which has to be there for a particular set of reasons, but uh, seem almost at odds with public service and if one looks at the public service in the UK I think there’s an argument which is difficult for politicians to say that the civil service is significantly broken these days. And public service through the provision of health or police or transport or whatever has suffered accordingly. Your thoughts?

Nik Gowing: You are absolutely right, but I don’t see how this is going to change. We are speaking in the United Kingdom. We’ve got a new cabinet secretary. A few weeks ago, the Prime Minister Kier Starmer issued an instruction to civil servants to be bold, to think the unthinkable, to think the unpalatable.

Having bounced this off, quite a few people, and I knew what the answer was before I even asked the question. They say, easy for him to say, but actually it’s so easy as well for to be dismissed or to be downgraded or marginalized for thinking in an unorthodox, uncompliant way. What you’ve got embedded, particularly I think in the British Civil Service, most people are brilliant as operators and they are extraordinary thinkers, but they say they are high bound and hamstrung by the fact that they’re expected to comply as opposed to think the unthinkable. Of course, unthinkables can’t be thought about, but you need to be able to think the unthinkable, or as we say, the unpalatable, think the unpalatable and raise it in meetings and be prepared to be counted.

Let me use one word here. It’s easy to be dismissed as wacky. That person, that that civil servant, that person working in that department is wacky. Don’t listen to him out of order. That wacky person is actually probably the visionary as well. If you call them wacky, you are demeaning them.

If you call them visionary. You are enhancing their status and their ability to contribute in constructive ways.

Lawrie Philpott: It’s interesting that you should say that because in my practice one of the lenses that we use is to think of people as being either a visionary or an analyst or an implementer.

And if you think about people that you know, they will fall under one of those headings. What I think we want in leaders, ideally, is one third visionary, one third analyst, one third implementer. It doesn’t happen that often that you get all of those three occurring in the same person with the same kind of Carney type energy.

Nik Gowing: with the ability to survive under the internal pressures.

And that’s where there’s a significant problem, whether it be in the UK or many other parts. Look at what’s happened with DOGE in America. Public servants of decades of service worth simply summarily dismissed. Almost without a pension. This is not the kind of environment in which people are prepared to serve their political masters, if that’s what happens and they move from one side to another, depending on which president or which political party is running the country.

This is why there are dark times, and I’ve only mentioned Trump once, but when you look at what Trump is doing and has done to the sanctity of American public policy and public life, he has decimated it. And vast areas in Maryland and the Virginia are now inhabited by people who have made a career in government and have no work at all simply because they’re not politically correct.

Being politically correct does not mean you are politically right. That’s a big problem.

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah. And I think also if we’re talking about Trump in the US, what it seems to me is being lost from the USA is that invisible credibility that has been built up over a long period of time that is being expended invisibly at a very, very significant rate.

Nik Gowing: I agree. And once expended and once demolished and destroyed, it’s very difficult to build it back because people will naturally be suspicious even if they’re offered a good pension and so on. And I think that’s what’s happening in many countries. And we’re seeing it at the moment in Hungary. We’re seeing it in France, we’re seeing it in Italy.

People who do not fit the political leanings of those in charge are summarily, marginalized or kicked out. That means that, that no one really wants to go there as a career prospect apart from allegiance to whoever is in power. This is why this is a dark time because I do not think that the kind of things, and it’s interesting going back over what happened in Ukraine and the evasion just over four years ago, the amount of thinking that went on when the evidence was clear that Putin was moving a Zapad, which is a military exercise around on the Ukrainian borders.

No one could believe, no one really wanted to say within government, this means he’s going to invade. They simply could not believe, yet the evidence was very clear and to the credit of quite a few people there were those who are prepared to put their finger up and say, we can see what he’s doing.

And it was only when actually they worked out that blood was being taken out in blood transfusions in the days before the final invasion took place, they realized that this was for real.

Lawrie Philpott: interesting that you should quote the Ukraine because a lot of people that I speak to refer to Zelensky as the poster model for leadership internationally for global stakes.

Your views?

Nik Gowing: I think it’s remarkable what he’s done. I went to Ukraine. I was in Ukraine about two months before the war started. I went to the Chernobyl plant on an incredible day in November 21,  blue sky and so on, looking at this enormous dome that the European Union has built to protect reactor number four.

But Ukraine is a very corrupt country. And I was there for the Kiev Economic Forum and they asked me to do an interview, which reverberates still, with a particularly high level person quoting from the World Bank, quoting from the IMF saying, if you do not fix the amount of corruption that there is in this country, we will no longer continue to finance you.

From which Zelensky who didn’t want to be interviewed and rushed off the platform, this was before he was wearing his war fatigues. I think Zelensky has been an incredible leader at a very difficult time, a very dangerous time facing an incredibly manipulative and absolutely determined, bloody minded Vladimir Putin determined to do everything to destroy Ukraine, but like Churchill, it’s quite probable, possible that having won whatever war we are still talking about, he doesn’t get reelected and doesn’t want to continue in politics because actually being a war leader and a leader in a time of crisis is not the same as running things and emerging from that crisis.

Lawrie Philpott: And, and when Nik, with the hundreds, nay, thousands of interviews that you’ve done on stage on camera, what are the sort of leadership behaviors that to you as the interviewer, instantly signal credibility on camera? Because many of the leaders who are looking at Leadership Listening, or listening to it have to appear in the media and on camera.

Nik Gowing: Many of them are under briefed for what they’re doing. And what they need to say, particularly during the time of crisis. And many of them run scared. And I said in my paper back in 2009, Sky full of lies and black swans. I said, you’ve got to enter this space very quickly. And I’ve interviewed several people, including the chief executive of a major Swiss bank, and I asked him about his climate policy and he essentially said, we don’t have a consistent policy.

And you could hear among an audience of 700 kind of amazement, astonishment. He’d only been in the job for four months. And I was asking him things which we’d warned I would ask about, but he seemed unsighted and he obviously regretted that moment enormously. But I see leaders and you can understand we’ve all got problems with our hard drives about how much we can retain.

And this goes back to the pinball problem about so much information, so much happening in such a short time and how many briefs you’ve got to be across, I think it’s, and I say this with sympathy, I think it’s now really difficult to be a leader because you’ve gotta be on the ball, on the knuckle, on the egg all the time, 24 hours a day.

Because if you are asked one question, and you answer it incorrectly, you are seen as incompetent very quickly. And that’s where your support staff are so important to actually condition you to be well endowed, well versed, well equipped, well informed to actually do it in a way which will convince people that what you’re saying is actual reality.

But I think what I see with a lot of leaders is fatigue. I mean, I think we can all say this, after time your brain gets exhausted by having to handle this day in, day out 24/7. And I’ve seen some leaders like Carney, who is incredibly cold in many ways, but he’s incredibly rewarding to interview because you know, you’re going to get a short answer. It’ll be accurate, it’s what he thinks, and he’ll move on in his mind that there are others who burble their way through. But the sign of a good leader, as I said way back in my Sky full of lies paper, and which you pointed out, is get into that space FF three first fast. But how flawed will you be? And there are many leaders who worry about being flawed.

As opposed to being first or fast to seize the high ground at a time when information will be incomplete, particularly in a crisis.

Lawrie Philpott: And do you think, Nik, they see you adversarially? Is that it? He, he’s trying to develop a headline to get a headline for his channel or whatever.

Nik Gowing: that’s the way of the world.

You just have to accept that that’s the way of the media. I’ve been in the media for more than 40 years. You just have to accept that that’s what you’re there for. That’s what your editors expect. And quite often it forces the leader to say things beyond what they’ve been briefed or the remarks that they’ve been prepared for.

And quite often that’s where they end up in trouble by misspeaking. But that’s what you’ve gotta be prepared for as a leader. One of the many skills you need, quite apart from chairing cabinet meetings and deciding whether to go to war, you’ve gotta know how you’re going to project this.

And I say this about Boris Johnson who I worked with when he was a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in Brussels. Remarkable intellect, but a real danger to have around because he makes stuff up. And this is what the pandemic inquiry here in the UK decided that too much of what was known was simply not accepted by what was happening in number 10 and therefore they made bad judgements. You’ve got to be on top of everything, and you’ve got to be prepared to understand that the unthinkable is thinkable. The unpalatable is palatable. It will happen. It can happen, and don’t hope it won’t happen because it will happen and you need a system around you, a level of confidence around you, which will provide you with a backing to handle this at a moment’s notice wherever you are. And we know there are many politicians and others who’ve been caught out by the rogue question and the, oh, do I have to answer that? Which, which becomes a kind of sign of weariness or inability or unwillingness to address key issues.

Lawrie Philpott: Interesting, the tiredness thing, because keeping fit as a leader, fit in your mind and fit in your body is a difficult thing with global travel and all the rest of it. Also interestingly in our practice, we reckon a good years worth of hours is around 2,500 hours. If you get towards 3000 hours of doing your job, then you are certainly invading the workaholic kind of territory, which brings a whole slew of different problems with it.

So working out in a sophisticated way what the composition of your 2,500 hours has by way of components and what skills you then need in order to deliver those components and how you play the components from time to time as circumstances change means that there’s a sort of kaleidoscope, if you like, in your parlance, a pinball of difficult decisions constantly to be made.

Nik Gowing: Yes. And there are good signs. I was very struck the president of Finland, Alexander Stubb, who I knew very well before he became president. I haven’t seen him since he became president. He was here in London recently. And I’m only going on what I’ve seen reported, but he found time, I mean, he’s very slender. He’s very tall, but he’s a fitness fanatic. And he, even when he was in the academic world and in the European Investment Bank, I mean, he was merciless about keeping his body in trim because of the impact it has on making his brain in trim. But he and Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, went for a run, I presume somewhere like Hyde Park and they were talking policy as they ran surrounded by security men, but they were getting fit as well as airing ideas. I have no idea what they talked about, of course. But you can’t imagine most people in public life having that time, that determination or the physique. I find that hard to believe that unlike a previous US President, Trump would go for a morning run. You know, there’s a chunkiness, which means it would be unsafe.

Lawrie Philpott: But notoriously, of course, Alexander Stubb plays golf with Trump. I dunno, who is allowed to win. We ought to perhaps look at that and make ourselves well informed

Nik Gowing: And how will they win…

Lawrie Philpott: And how will they win? And we’ve heard all sorts of stories.

Nik Gowing: Can I just pick that up? There is an important point there which you raise, which is that Alex has a unique ability to pick up the phone to Trump and solicit with Trump in a way which other leaders don’t, and that’s important. He’s developed it. The Pope’s funeral there was Finland sitting alongside France and alongside the United States, and there was this banter going on.

So having those personal relationships is really critical, and I take my hat off to what Alex has done.

Lawrie Philpott: Absolutely. So if we look at these emerging characteristics of leadership, you know, the things that will count, as you say face-to-face, which in my parlance is the most powerful medium of dealing with people.

So what are the characteristics of leadership that’ll really count for the remainder of this decade? We’ve now got Zoom and Teams. We’ve got a world in many senses that is shrinking courtesy of global transportation, although that’s going to get more expensive now with the oil issues.

But what are the characteristics of leadership that’ll really count for the remainder of this decade? How how’s it going to work better?

Nik Gowing: Being brave and being opportunistic? I think back to just after the Alaska summit between Putin and Trump. When Trump came back with a kind of very pro Putin view, that was on, I think a Friday, and literally over the weekend by Zoom and by Teams, a large number of European leaders said, we’ve got to go to Washington immediately to fix this with Trump.

And they went to Washington and sat around the table in Trump’s office, and really went there to flatter him, flying for eight or nine hours each direction. Now, that isn’t gonna happen frequently, but it was about being opportunistic because traditional thinking, orthodox policymaking is now no longer relevant.

You’ve got to think so differently. You’ve got to think the unthinkable. You’ve gotta have it in your capacity. You’ve gotta have it in your mind matter. You’ve gotta have mind muscle, which allows you to think spontaneously, opportunistically about what is needed and how it can be achieved and how it can be achieved amazingly quickly.

And I do take my hat off. There are times when, particularly what’s happening in the Iran War at the moment, when there have been amazing communication axes between a large number of leaders where rather than getting on a plane and flying to Brussels or somewhere else, they’ve actually convened a meeting within an hour and come to a very clear consensus on the way forward.

But that is very much about the real time problems that what I called way back, the tyranny of real time, the tyranny of real time, is that what you think is gonna happen in this time is actually gonna happen in this time. How are you ready for that? How are you equipped for it? What kind of level of self-confidence do you have?

And what kind of capacity do you have to accept? You will make errors and need to keep changing. This is why it’s about anew approach, a new positive approach. There’s nothing negative about what I’m saying. It’s about saying this is what you’ve got to cope with. Unthinkable, unpalatable.

But it is actually achievable.

Lawrie Philpott: I like your reference to all the European leaders, going short notice. It seemed to me they were in something of a sort of supplicant mode around that table. And of course, the other thing is that they’ve gotta be able to fall into place.

And that’s a great skill, fall into place as a team, if you like, who have a significant message. And I think that takes us in the direction of the old rule of three. I guess if they, the seven or eight of them had a few moments at least together before that very important meeting deciding quickly what those three messages were and then putting them over in that meeting with Trump in a uniform, team-like way.

Nik Gowing: But Lawrie, there is a cringe moment as well. There was a meeting which Mark Rotter, the NATO Secretary General had with Trump, which was obsequious in extreme. And in my view, he discredited himself. But having that ability, and it was obsequious what happened that weekend, but the leaders who got on their planes, I think there were eight of them and flew all to Washington, I think on the Sunday for a Monday meeting.

They were obsequious and they were flattering Trump. Because they’d worked out that that’s the way you make, make progress. That’s the way you make progress. In a lot of meetings as well. Every leader will have their own tactic and their own sort of dropdown menu of what they need to do and how they need to do it.

Or they should have anyway about being prepared for it, but also being prepared to say good things as well as dark things.

Lawrie Philpott: Nik, can we move in the direction of truth?  And the fact of the matter is, I think that we are now in some kind of post-truth era, which is perhaps visible for reasons that are to do with today’s world circumstances, you know, technology and media and so on and so forth.

What are the consequences of now being in a very, very powerful post-truth world where the populace just doesn’t know what to believe? Whether that is coming from politicians or coming from something that’s been created by artificial intelligence?

Nik Gowing: Hmm. I think this is a deep, deep problem. First point to make, it was Trump, who invented the word fake. Well he didn’t invent the word, but he invented the application of it. That’s ‘Fake News’. And I think this has been deeply, deeply polluting for the understanding of facts. If people don’t like what they they hear or what is said about them, or what is said about anything they think they know about, they say it’s fake.

Fake means it’s wrong. Trump labeled a lot of stuff he didn’t like as fake news. That has taken on a life of its own in ways which deeply, deeply concerned me. I get very unsettled by the number of people who say to me, that’s wrong. It’s fake. Even though it’s correct, it’s labeled as fake, which is wrong and created in order to make a point.

So Trump, in my view, has distorted and exacerbated incredibly sharply what truth really is. And you know what his email and his postings are all about. He uses the word truth. Well, we are speaking after an extraordinary outburst where Trump decided to say he was going to destroy the civilization of Persia after 7,000 years.

Was that really truth? Truth social… It’s easier to use the word truth, but as a former television correspondent who stood on street corners and been in places where you can see a certain number of things happening, I would put to you, and this is not a criticism, it’s a self-analysis as much as anything else.

There were times when I was passing judgment on what was happening, but I didn’t really know what was happening apart from what was in my eyesight. And therefore, there is a danger that people thought they were getting the truth in the past. But it was a version of events which was only a small version of events, depending on where the person giving that version of events was talking to you from.

I hate the word truth because only historians are probably going to be able to work out what was really true during a crisis or a time of real difficulty. So it’s wrong to use the word truth in my view, that suggests a hundred percent accuracy, and I don’t think you can get that in a time of crisis.

In the time where there is this pressure on realtime information, realtime information is as good as it is at the time, but it’s deeply, deeply flawed as well. You’ve gotta have ways of judging it, and quite apart from what you see on a laptop screen, or on your iPhone screen.

Too many people do believe what they read on a screen without ever questioning it. And that’s why having your own historical background history and being able to say that is wrong, even though they say it’s right is so important. Having that discrimination and the experience and what I find very concerning, it’s one of the reasons I decided to step back from being on air in my early sixties, is that I thought that there was not enough self-criticism and self-analysis of what was going on and what needed to be said.

It’s interesting now that the BBC, where I worked for 18 years now has a department called the verify department. In other words, making sure that what you put on the air is correct. And as true as it can be, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it is truth.

Lawrie Philpott: Nik, we also in my practice, have a concept that we call corporate mendacity.

The ability of organizations, leaders to lie to shareholders, to staff, to customers, lie to themselves occasionally in the sense of, you know, denial. We have spoken a little then about truth. There is also the notion of deliberate distraction. And if we go back to the case of President Trump, there is a lot of conversation about the potential for his activities to be distracting from things that he doesn’t want people to be scrutinizing too closely.

So the combination, I think of truth and distraction, which arguably is corporate mendacity, is a menacing prospect.

Nik Gowing: But you mentioned Trump and I find it deeply, deeply disconcerting that he apparently is awake at night. Or wakes up at six o’clock, seven o’clock in the morning because you can time everything from his emails and his postings and takes a view, and without consulting anybody apparently, takes a view of what his policy will be. I think that’s deeply, deeply dangerous for public governance, Even if there’s one or two people in the room with him, that he just sits there and will tap out with his fingers, presumably, what his view is, I fully agree with you, but surely here in the United Kingdom, the Financial Conduct authority is prepared to see through that corporate mendacity and the kind of scrutiny there is in the stock exchange. Its goig to ensure that that will not happen as a cultural default position. I hope so. I suspect you know more about it than I do.

Lawrie Philpott: Well, I guess the Americans didn’t think that their institutional arrangements would allow for the degree of corporate mendacity that currently exist, but it happened that way. I think the very negative ultimate destination from the US point of view.

Interestingly, for people who want to study Trump, there’s a very, very good book called The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump, written by an American psychologist called McAdams, which is a bit of a heavy read, but it explains everything if you have the time to read it.

Nik Gowing: The the worrying thing though, before we move on to what, what I know you want to talk about as well, there are many leaders or political leaders with as aspirations to be government president or prime minister who are looking to Trump and saying he’s got away with it.

That’s what I’m gonna do next time round. That’s why what Trump is doing with his mega movement and so on, is so sinister for the stability of the world because many other leaders believe they can get away with it as well.

Lawrie Philpott: And that happens in organizations. In the corporate world, it seems tome, if you’ve got, let’s say, a badly or poorly behaving chief executive, very often the next tier down and the tier below that will display what I would describe as imitative behavior.

You know, the bosses like that. That’s probably the best thing for us to be as well. Not a good proposition, I think for organizational success. If we look back then, Nik, at your time in journalism, what was your most memorable journalistic leadership moment of all of the wonderful people that you’ve had the great fortune to be able to have wonderful conversations with?

Nik Gowing: There are many, many, many experiences I’ve had. I was in all the revolutions in Eastern Europe except Romania. I was in the Soviet Union. I was in Afghanistan, breaking the news. The Russians were leaving in 1988. I was in the shipyard strikes of Gdansk in Northern Poland with Lech Walensa back in 1980. It’s frightening to think that that was 45, 46 years ago. Deeply frightening because so much is unraveling at the moment. But having been through all of those, often you leave, you pack your bag, you leave and you go get on a plane. You don’t know what the hell’s gonna happen and now what you can do with your mobile phone is so wonderful. What I can do with this (holds up mobile phone to camera), standing in front of it like anyone can with FaceTime and so on, broadcasting within 30 seconds of recording it or doing it live is nothing to what we had to endure back in my earlier days, including with film known as celluloid, where you had to ship a can of film back to getting put into a laboratory.

And that’s where I was first working at ITN and Granada Television. But I say all of that because the technology has moved on so brilliantly, which means that virtually from 99.9% of the world surface you can broadcast now.

Lawrie Philpott: Mm-hmm.

Nik Gowing: That’s both enriching, enlightening, but also quite sinister.

And therefore, places like I went to during the Revolutions in Eastern Europe back in the 1980s, the beginnings of the nineties, we had to find ways of shipping stuff out, communicating it, getting into a television station. But first of all, what two events I’m gonna just highlight.

I was in Berlin with Günter Schabowski, the Poly Bureau member from East Germany, as he revealed on a bit of paper. No one knows where the piece of paper came from. People can leave East Germany tonight and I had to make a decision for Channel Four news at the time. Does that mean the end of East Germany? And I had about an hour and a half to actually get this, and I made the right call and sent it to London.

And later that night I climbed into no man’s land outside the Brandenburg gate, which had been closed for 25 years, thinking, is this a minefield or am I going to somewhere which is about to be liberated? I could see all the Wessis sitting on the wall in front of me. I was in the east still. Was it a minefield where there’s scatter guns?

And for me, the end of East Berlin, East Germany and the Soviet Empire was when I was alongside the lieutenant from a border guard platoon yelling into his phone, I need orders, I need orders, I need orders. We’re being invaded by the Wessis. I need orders, do I shoot them? And he burst out laughing because there was no one to give him an order.

And that’s what infuriated Vladimir Putin, who’s a colonel in the KGB in Dresden, down in the south of East Germany. The second highlight, it has to be, and it shows how this happens by accident. The death of Princess Diana people still almost 30 years after I made the announcement at six o’clock in the morning still remember that. They remember where they were, what they were doing. It’s a much longer story than I’m gonna give. The day before I’d been in Japan giving some lectures at a diplomatic academy. The Japanese diplomats had wanted to go out for a drink. They didn’t tell me they were going to a karaoke bar so we had to be in a karaoke bar.

This was the Friday night. I then flew back across Siberia. My wife and I had some friends in for dinner. We drank too much Metaxa, which is a Greek brandy, and got to bed at 12:30 in the evening, which is already sort of nine o’clock in the morning Japan time and the phone went alongside my bed. We didn’t have mobile phones in those days from my editor at 1:10am saying, Dodi is dead and Diana may be dead.

I used an expletive, expletive to say, don’t wake me up at this time of the morning on a Sunday. But by half past two I was on air. Now, it was a very lonely existence because there were only three people in the office. There was no 24 hour news at the time. And because we didn’t have this there were few people phoning us in, but people were phoning us in saying they’d seen a woman walk away from the wreckage.

And this is what I call the tyranny of real time and the sky full of lies, the way people manufacture news, manufacture their idea of what has happened. Fortunately, we didn’t put any of this on air so that when I made the announcement of Princess Diana’s death, we had known for a few minutes that she was dead because Robin Cook, the then foreign secretary, was in the Philippines and had told the BBC correspondent with him that she was definitely dead because of the British ambassador.

So when you look at news and you look at what’s happening at the moment in the Middle East and also in Ukraine, although it’s partially forgotten about because of so much happening in the Middle East, much of what you report on you never know is gonna happen when you set off from London.But it does and it’s quite chilling.

But people like you ask me about these kind of events and I relate them because actually they are important moments in the firmament of news. News doesn’t happen to an agenda. Quite often it happens off agenda in unthinkable and unpredictable and unpalatable ways.

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah, that was quite a moment. We all remember where we were.

Nik Gowing: Where were you?

Lawrie Philpott: I was in Eastern Spain and on my way home on that day. because it was the end of a week’s family holiday. And, it was quite something. And I also remember seeing. Your live declaration at six o’clock in the morning as part of one of the Bond films.

If I remember rightly, there’s a little slice of your interview that appears in one of those.

Nik Gowing: Can I just tell you something? If I may, I discovered amazing things about what people really do on a Sunday morning, on an early Sunday morning, coming back from Saturday evening out, and many of them, for some reason turn on the television to find out what’s happening.

But I made amazing discoveries about who was with who and who was doing what and because of their frankness about where they were and where they, where they saw me.

Lawrie Philpott: That’s probably worth a podcast at its own right. Nik, as we look across cultures, what kind of leadership traits appear universal?

What do we need now to move towards, in order for the world ideally to be a better place.

Nik Gowing: To understand the kind of things I identified you kindly raised at the beginning. A sky full of lies (holds up copy of book). You cannot deny truth, however you’d measure truth. You cannot deny what is being produced from here. A sky full of lies comes from the Burmese government when there were demonstrations within Myanmar we were using the first generation of mobile phones and they were recording people being shot dead.

And the the Burmese government said simply, it’s not happening. It’s a sky full of lies and therefore good leadership is about accepting that even if you don’t want it to happen, it’s happened and there’s evidence for it and you can’t get away from that.

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah. We call that standing in reality. And I have to say a certain realm of words of which standing in reality is one of those phrases that has to appear in corporate life much, much more.

Because what we find is that people aren’t prepared to stand in reality. They prefer to sweep things under the carpet hoping that they will go away. And this is in the privacy of the leadership team room or the boardroom. And I think you need to be mature enough as a leadership group to be able to have those standing in reality, difficult discussions and decision making.

And the challenge is surely we ought to be able to do that in the privacy of this room rather than it appearing on the front page of the FT in a few days time and taking you by surprise.

Nik Gowing: That’s why, if I may put up that cartoon, which came from Chatham House after we warned when we were publishing this book (holds up copy of Thinking the Unthinkable by Nik Gowing & Chris Langdon) about the inability of leaders to do exactly what you’ve just said, Lawrie, and this is note, certainly for those listening, it’s a number of leaders with blindfolds on wearing their suits, all with their arms up in front of them trying to find a way through what was described in another part of the cartoon. As a jungle, you’ve got to be self-confident. You’ve gotta have your eyes open, you’ve gotta have your eyes open ahead of you, behind you, and you’ve got to have a system around you of people who are prepared to tell you.

What you don’t want to hear, but you need to hear as a leader. And that’s very difficult for many to do as we’ve seen with the kind of casualties there have been in the corporate world. But understanding that you’ve got to find ways of sensing and seeing what is happening. Like the challenge now, Lawrie from geopolitics, people can’t believe the enormity of what is happening.

They can’t believe the ruptures that are occurring. But as we speak, the British government is warning about the ability of the Russians to literally destabilize the whole of the United Kingdom. And in the defense review last year in 2025, it was made clear that we are now in a state of war.

George Robertson, the former NATO Secretary General, who led the inquiry of the Strategic Defense Review, has repeated in a new article just a couple of days ago saying, people do not realize we are now at war, but who’s preparing them for it? And that means for a company that means understanding the survivability of what you run, whether it be an infrastructure, whether it be an office building, whether it be a factory, and the kind of problem it’s facing and the kind of problems it will face.

How will people get their food? How will people get their water? How will people survive? People being completely disorientated by the reality of the pressures on them, quite apart from climate change. And the implications of AI on jobs, where jobs will simply not exist.

Lawrie Philpott: We’ll bring in, I think, Nik, all sorts of different things like universal basic income, for example, which sounds almost sort of a million miles away at the moment, but maybe with us before too long. Nik, does all of this that we’ve been talking about leave you cynical about the future or a bit more hopeful about the future?

Nik Gowing: I’m afraid I don’t think it’s either of those, Lawrie. It’s neither cynical nor hopeful. You know, my job rather like a doctor with a patient, is to look at what’s happening around me and make an analysis. I think you’ve gotta be, matter of fact about this, the Chinese have a word, which is a crisis, turning a crisis into an opportunity.

And I think that’s where we are. But the crisis is getting deeper, which means the avenue towards opportunity has got to be even sharper and even more elevated. I’m seeing change, and that’s why I’ve agreed to talk to you about this. And you have the very similar views to me about how we mobilize those in positions of power and responsibility to understand, not dismiss, to understand the enormity of what’s taking place and how it can be overcome.

In a coordinated way with confidence, because otherwise there’s, there’s gonna be all the things that you and I have talked about for the last hour is going to be piled up with this disintegration of the system and the lifestyle that we’ve got to learn, we learn the lifestyle we’ve learned to live with and to learn to expect, and therefore there are sinister avenues, there are sinister roots of travel at the moment, which I find deeply disconcerting and what is interesting I did a gathering for 40 executives at a breakfast meeting a few weeks ago, and all of them said, I’m glad we came to this. I wasn’t thinking like this. I now have to think like this.

And several of them have been in touch since saying, can we talk about it? In other words, it’s a question of catalyzing, catalyzing awareness, catalyzing, rethinking. But, you know, the world, we’re on a planet, we’ve just seen Artemis two go to the moon and back. We are a tiny ball. But I would say that the the human frailties and the human form and us as humans possibly won’t enjoy or probably won’t enjoy the level of security and self-confidence that we think we’ve developed in the last eight to 10 years.

I say that with great sadness

Lawrie Philpott: Me too. On a lighter note, Nik, we always end with your pet hate and secret passion. How do you rate those two?

Nik Gowing: My pet hate, I don’t get worked up about it, but it is actually much of what we’ve talked about, people who lie, people who set out to deceive, get the better of you.

But tragically I can say that it happens all the time. As for passions, there are things which I can enjoy, but I prefer not to talk about them.

Lawrie Philpott: Marvelous answer. Thank you, Nik. True journalistic answer. I’ll say to viewers and listeners of Leadership Listening, that if you’ve got comments and reactions, those can be emailed to podcast@leadershiplistening.com.

But in the meantime, Nik, thank you for a wonderful tour of a journalistic career and all that went with it and all the information and views that you put forward -a marvelous hour. Thank you.