LEAD48

The inquiry map

Twelve tensions the relay is exploring

The enduring LEAD48 question What kind of leadership does our world need now?

The 2027 edition question

How must leadership change when the systems people depend on are changing faster than institutions can adapt?

Every theme is a tension the question runs into somewhere in the world. Each one draws on the regions or the Global Convergence that examine it, and on the research behind them.

Start with the tension you know, not with a session. LEAD48 curates the exact conversations inside each theme from the research and the perspectives the theme needs. Where you live does not decide where you fit: a theme is open to anyone who can move it.

The themes

  1. Theme 01 · Regional movements

    When capability exists but never reaches the outcome

    Where skills, money and technology are lost between having them and getting results.

    Skills, investment, public funding and new technology are abundant in many places, yet the outcomes they promise arrive unevenly or not at all. This theme asks where exactly capability is lost between possession and result, why it so often stops before scale or before it becomes opportunity, and which existing capability is simply disconnected rather than missing. We are looking for evidence, cases and first-hand experience of the precise points where conversion breaks.

    Where it is explored

    North AmericaSouth AsiaSub-Saharan AfricaEurope

    Research and grounding

    16 sources from LEAD48's regional research sit behind this theme. Test them, extend them or contradict them.

  2. Theme 02 · Regional movements and the Global Convergence

    When the door opens before people can walk through it

    Access arrives faster than the capability to use it, and someone carries the gap.

    Digital payment rails, electricity connections, trade agreements and job pathways are widening access, but access and the capability to use it are measured and governed apart, and are often reported as one achievement. This theme asks what has to happen after the connection arrives, who carries the cost while the gap closes, and whether participation, once gained, actually changes what becomes possible in people's lives. Bring cases where access was counted as success, evidence on who is still shut out, and the strongest argument that this tension is a false one.

    Where it is explored

    South AsiaSub-Saharan AfricaGlobal Convergence

    Research and grounding

    10 sources from LEAD48's regional research sit behind this theme. Test them, extend them or contradict them.

    It also draws on the design inputs of the Global Convergence, which are grounding rather than sources: Access measured apart from the capacity to use it; Capability, as a word used differently; The eight regional research bases. Evidence that confirms, complicates or contradicts them is part of the inquiry.

  3. Theme 03 · Regional movements

    Who keeps the value when it is created

    Where the value of production and adaptation ends up, and who gets to keep it.

    A region can produce, adapt and innovate while the value it creates accumulates somewhere else. This theme follows natural resources, agriculture, energy and new technology into the systems that receive them, including informal economies that can be adaptive capacity as often as deficit, and asks what must surround production for value to be created, retained and reinvested locally. We welcome evidence and cases on who pays for adaptation and who ends up holding what it produces.

    Where it is explored

    Latin America & CaribbeanSub-Saharan Africa

    Research and grounding

    3 sources from LEAD48's regional research sit behind this theme. Test them, extend them or contradict them.

  4. Theme 04 · Regional movements

    Inherited endowment, or a leadership choice?

    How much of a transition is fixed by what a country inherited, and how much is still a choice.

    Hydrocarbon rents, scarce freshwater and high youth unemployment set very different starting positions across one region. This theme asks how much of a transition is fixed by what a country inherited and how much remains a leadership choice, and what changes when water, energy, food, cities, industry and climate can no longer be governed as separate portfolios. Perspectives from people governing coupled resource systems, and cases where the endowment did not decide the outcome, are especially welcome.

    Where it is explored

    Middle East & North Africa

    Research and grounding

    5 sources from LEAD48's regional research sit behind this theme. Test them, extend them or contradict them.

  5. Theme 05 · Regional movements

    Fund, sequence, defer or stop: when every choice is defensible

    Choosing what comes first when every option is defensible and capacity is scarce.

    When implementation capacity is scarcer than money and several necessary transitions compete, no leader can optimise every desirable outcome at once. This theme asks what should be funded, sequenced, deferred or stopped, what determines which connections or renewals must come first, who should decide, and how that logic changes where a failed experiment cannot be absorbed. We invite cases of real constrained choices, the evidence behind them and the experience of those who carried their consequences.

    Where it is explored

    North AmericaLatin America & CaribbeanMiddle East & North AfricaSub-Saharan AfricaEurope

    Research and grounding

    13 sources from LEAD48's regional research sit behind this theme. Test them, extend them or contradict them.

  6. Theme 06 · Regional movements

    Renewing a system that cannot be switched off

    Changing a model while the systems it depends on have to keep running.

    Decades of acceleration built manufacturing scale, energy systems and social institutions that are still delivering, and some of that productive scale is already becoming a constraint on renewal. This theme asks how a model is changed while the energy, industrial and labour systems it depends on have to keep running, what must change before failure forces it, and who carries the cost of the change. Evidence from pension reform, energy transition, industrial and resource policy and small-business digitalisation is welcome, as are cases where renewal came too late.

    Where it is explored

    East & Southeast Asia

    Research and grounding

    14 sources from LEAD48's regional research sit behind this theme. Test them, extend them or contradict them.

  7. Theme 07 · Regional movements

    Adapting faster without spending the trust you will need later

    Moving faster without using up the legitimacy institutions will need later.

    The relay opens on one question: how must leadership change when the systems people depend on are changing faster than institutions can adapt? This theme asks which institutions remain capable and trusted, where changing conditions are already exposing their limits, and whether institutions designed for stability can move faster without sacrificing legitimacy and protection. We are looking for evidence on trust and institutional capacity, and for cases where adaptation either spent or built legitimacy.

    Where it is explored

    North AmericaEurope

    Research and grounding

    7 sources from LEAD48's regional research sit behind this theme. Test them, extend them or contradict them.

  8. Theme 09 · Regional movements and the Global Convergence

    Deciding for people who did not make the choice

    Choices whose consequences fall on people with no say, including generations not yet born.

    Many of today's choices cross borders, outlive the institutions that make them and fall most heavily on people who had no say, including generations not yet born. This theme asks how leaders should choose under those conditions, and which of today's trade-offs would look indefensible to the people who inherit them. We invite intergenerational perspectives, stewardship practice, Indigenous knowledge and evidence from places already living with long-horizon consequences.

    Where it is explored

    Australia & PacificGlobal Convergence

    Research and grounding

    4 sources from LEAD48's regional research sit behind this theme. Test them, extend them or contradict them.

    It also draws on the design inputs of the Global Convergence, which are grounding rather than sources: Access measured apart from the capacity to use it; Scale as an answer and scale as a problem; The eight regional research bases. Evidence that confirms, complicates or contradicts them is part of the inquiry.

  9. Theme 10 · Regional movements and the Global Convergence

    When the same evidence tells different stories

    Averages, indicators and shared facts that different places, people and sectors read in opposite ways.

    National averages and shared indicators are how systems report progress, and they are also where places and people disappear. The same fact can change meaning again when it crosses into a sector with a different mandate, time horizon or tolerance for failure. This theme asks who the aggregate smooths away, what each side is actually measuring when two systems report the same number, what a regulator, an operator and a financier each see in the same constraint, and which disagreements are real rather than a difference in instruments or mandate. Bring data and measurement expertise, cross-sector practice, and lived experience from the places an average hides.

    Where it is explored

    North AmericaGlobal Convergence

    Research and grounding

    7 sources from LEAD48's regional research sit behind this theme. Test them, extend them or contradict them.

    It also draws on the design inputs of the Global Convergence, which are grounding rather than sources: Access measured apart from the capacity to use it; Scale as an answer and scale as a problem; The eight regional research bases; The eight regional programme architectures; Delivery and institutional capacity as a binding constraint; Capability, as a word used differently. Evidence that confirms, complicates or contradicts them is part of the inquiry.

  10. Theme 11 · Global Convergence

    What changes when words and answers travel

    Concepts and working solutions that change, or break, when they cross a border, a sector or an institution.

    Words like capability and renewal are used everywhere, and working answers are carried across boundaries all the time. Agreement on a word can conceal disagreement about the condition it describes, and whether a practice transfers is usually asserted rather than examined. This theme asks what stops being true one border, one sector or one institution away, what one context treats as a solution that another lives with as a constraint, and which assumptions were local all along. We especially want practitioners who have carried a practice into another system, and their accounts of what they did not know they were carrying.

    Where it is explored

    Global Convergence

    Research and grounding

    It draws on the design inputs of the Global Convergence, which are grounding rather than sources: The eight regional research bases; Capability, as a word used differently; Renewal, as a word used differently; The eight regional programme architectures; Scale as an answer and scale as a problem; Delivery and institutional capacity as a binding constraint. Evidence that confirms, complicates or contradicts them is part of the inquiry.

  11. Theme 12 · Global Convergence

    Problems no single place or system can solve

    Challenges that outgrow any one map, and consequences that travel to where no one is in charge.

    Some challenges are local only in where they are noticed, and solving a problem inside one system can create the next one somewhere else, often where nobody is watching. This theme asks which challenges can no longer be described inside one geography without distorting them, how decisions are made across systems when no authority can compel the others, and what holding a problem together would demand of institutions, money, people and time. We invite systems thinking, comparative evidence, people who coordinate across systems, and cases of consequences that travelled.

    Where it is explored

    Global Convergence

    Research and grounding

    It draws on the design inputs of the Global Convergence, which are grounding rather than sources: Conditions changing faster than institutions; Systems formally joined and operationally separate; The eight regional research bases; Choice under constraint as a leadership act; Delivery and institutional capacity as a binding constraint; Institutional maturity as asset and as rigidity; The eight regional programme architectures. Evidence that confirms, complicates or contradicts them is part of the inquiry.

Taking part

Contributor expressions of interest are not open yet. When they open, you will start from a theme and say what you can bring to it: a perspective, evidence, a case or a well-supported challenge. The Toronto Return, the relay's closing hour, is curated and is not one of the themes.

Hear when contributor opportunities open → Or follow the relay region by region →