Invited to the CogX Festival in London in September 2023 to answer the question “How do we get the next 10 years right?”, Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan delivered a keynote on leadership. Her argument: progress is not automatic, and what is missing today is not technology but political will.
Progress is not inevitable
We carry the world’s information in our pockets and AI writes content and code, she said, so it is tempting to treat progress as a law of nature. Yet about 14,000 children under five still die every day of preventable causes, while public attention goes to life-extension treatments, billionaire feuds and space tourism. Development data show that much has gone right, but “we are the ones who chart the course and hold the wheel”. After almost 25 years in her role, and many visits to refugee camps from Jordan to Greece to Bangladesh, she says her idea of leadership has been turned upside down. She proposed three ways to “flip the leadership script”.
Doubt, and learning to follow
The first is doubt. Public debate, she said, is “certitude on steroids”. She gave the example of the overcrowded boat that sank in the Mediterranean in June 2023, with more than 600 dead: within hours, each camp used the tragedy as proof of its own view on migration. Psychologists call this “myside bias”. It lets people point fingers instead of asking how such a thing could happen. Dropping zero-sum thinking would let countries see migration as a possibility too: by one estimate, the UK and Europe could be short of 44 million workers by 2050.
The second is followership. Great social movements were built by the first women at suffrage meetings, by those who boycotted segregated buses, by South Africans who refused to carry apartheid passbooks. Faced with the climate crisis and the 1.5-degree threshold, she cited research suggesting that a movement can succeed once 3.5% of a population takes part, and quoted environmentalist Bill McKibben: the most important thing an individual can do is to be “somewhat less of an individual”.
Thinking with the heart
The third is empathy. In 2011, when Syrians began fleeing the war, King Abdullah decided to open Jordan’s borders: “There is a hungry child and a desperate mother at our border. How could we not let them in?” Today one in eight people in Jordan is a Syrian refugee. She contrasted this with the 110 million people forcibly displaced worldwide, mostly hosted by lower- and middle-income countries, and with the gap between appeals for Ukraine, 70% funded within a month, and for Sudan, less than 30% funded after four months. “What good is artificial intelligence if we cannot summon authentic empathy with it?” Judge conviction by the capacity to doubt, leadership by the willingness to follow, and decisions by whether they use both mind and heart, she concluded, and the next ten years can be the greatest era of progress humanity has known.