Collective Leadership in Polycrisis: Lessons From A Carpet, Key, Seed Shaker, And Painting

June 12, 2025

By Aishwarya Shetty

We live in a world obsessed with crisp labels. We instinctively reach for the what, why, and how of everything. We need to set rules and frameworks and toolkits to validate our ways of doing and being. We define phenomena and then re-define it, even smaller and sharper, until it feels manageable to process. Even the idea of ‘leadership’ is not spared from this urge to codify.

Global leaders, books and (way too many) LinkedIn posts often prescribe what ‘correct’ leadership looks like – leading from the ‘front’, ‘back’ and now ‘in the middle’. In the effort to standardize leadership, we often bleach out the messy humanity that actually moves people in a messy world.

Teach For All and Education Above All Foundation convened leaders from Afghanistan, Palestine, Uganda, and Bangladesh for a panel at the Humanitarian Leadership Conference 2025, held in Doha, Qatar. The theme of the conference was timely: Transformative Leadership In Times of Polycrisis. These leaders come from contexts where “polycrisis”-  the convergence of multiple, overlapping crises- is less jargon and more a daily reality. The panel discussion became a powerful case for why times of crises warrant keeping definitions of leadership aside and doing what is right by communities, grounded in collective action and empathy.

We asked each leader to bring with them a single object - an everyday artefact that captures their community’s resilience. These objects offered a more grounded leadership syllabus than any slide deck could manage.

A Carpet From Afghanistan

Rahmatullah Arman, CEO of Teach For Afghanistan, unfurled a hand-woven carpet, its colours defiantly bright against decades of conflict. Each thread, he shared, was woven by an Afghan woman artisan, part of a long tradition of handicraft that endured years of hardship, loss, and constraints. Yet, the carpet showed how they still insist on colour and a space to just be. Arman’s leadership reflects that. In a culture where emotional expression is often discouraged, he creates intentional spaces for vulnerability. Offices and classrooms alike become places where teachers and students can be open, vent, reflect, or simply sit in silence, while colleagues do nothing more complicated than stay present and listen. The practice is unspectacular, almost stubbornly simple, yet it allows teachers to keep showing up for children in uncertain times.

From that protected, the team now expands to more communities. Empathy, care, and love begin in the classroom and grows into a nation that learns to live in peace.  Arman’s leadership is, at its core, permission to breathe. “You cannot heal others, if you have not healed yourself,” he reminds us.

A Painting From Bangladesh

Bangladesh navigates overlapping emergencies with little room to exhale: regular disasters, the world’s largest refugee (Rohingya) settlement spread across 34 congested camps in Cox’s Bazar, and most recently, a youth-led uprising that toppled a fifteen-year government amid an internet blackout. In that churn, Munia Islam Mozumder, CEO of Teach For Bangladesh, steadies her organisation by listening before acting.
Munia raised a fabric painting made by a Rohingya girl and framed by the local host community. Two communities, one canvas: a quiet reminder that durable solutions begin with shared ownership. Munia leads the same way. On August 7th, 2024, the morning after the regime collapse, Munia walked alongside school leaders, fellows, and students, grounded in the belief that when systems fall, local leadership rises. Munia’s first step was what she calls a “reflective pause”: walking the corridors, asking teachers what mattered most. Their reply was straightforward - stay with us. Fellows swept broken glass, reopened classrooms, and greeted students with warmth. 

Amidst chaos, carving out space for honest conversations and pausing to listen is not a retreat; it is the work that allows communities to co-author solutions and keep education moving when everything else stalls. Listening, in effect, becomes the operating system of transformational leadership. 

A Key From Palestine 

“We are more than our suffering,” announced Ghassan Amayra, Board Member of Teach For Palestine. “Genocide is our reality, yes, but so is our determination to live with dignity and freedom.” He held up a wooden key, carved from a 200-year-old olive tree cut down by settlers, and explained why the symbol endures. When Palestinians were forced to flee from their homes in 1948, grandparents locked their doors and carried the keys, trusting international law would soon protect their return. Those elders are gone, yet their grandchildren take those keys everywhere, as a symbol of resilience manifesting in street art, hip-hop lyrics, and even the alleys of refugee camps. The artisan who shaped Ghassan’s key could have mourned the felled olive tree; instead, he turned ruin into something beautiful. “That,” Ghassan said, “is the Palestinian approach.”

However, Ghassan grapples with “ethical complexity of hope” – nurturing young people’s ambitious dreams while naming the enormous limits they face. Hope, for his team at Teach For Palestine, is not just positive thinking, it is “tactical”. They separate hope from over-optimism by working toward small, stubborn objectives: one school rebuilt, one olive grove replanted. Mondays open with staff sharing “moments of unexpected beauty”; Fridays close around za’atar and upside-down maqluba. These simple rituals keep history, culture, and community emotions near. Therefore, by steering energy to what is controllable, he reminds colleagues, “This crisis is not new – we’ve faced this before, we’ll face it again."

An Instrument From Uganda

Uganda sits at a humanitarian crossroads. Conflict in neighbouring countries pushed millions of refugees across its borders and the country operates in near-permanent response mode, even as it wrestles with its own shortages. Kassaga Arinaitwe, co-founder and former CEO of Teach For Uganda, understands scarcity viscerally: by age ten he had lost all seven immediate family members to HIV/AIDS. His grandmother took him in, along with his cousins, stretching a meal across many plates. When he asked why they shared what little they had, she replied, “Can you imagine living in this world by yourself?” 

To illustrate that lesson, Kassaga brought a handmade seed shaker of gourds, beads, and wire. In village gatherings it sets a beat that anyone—Congolese, Burundian, Afghan, or Ugandan—can follow. Alone, each piece is insignificant; bound together, they create a rhythm that carries the weight of solidarity, shared purpose, and quiet strength. That is exactly how he leads.

When COVID-19 wiped out 40 percent of the organisation’s budget, the instinct might have been to tighten belts and lay off staff. Kassaga chose the opposite: “Do we shrink, or do we expand our hearts and hands?” He kept salaries intact, shifted trainings online, and trusted teams to find low-cost ways to keep serving their schools. Six months later, fresh donor support arrived, Teach For Uganda was hiring again and launching programmes in additional districts.

For Kassaga, crisis leadership is not about having all the answers; it is the conviction that dignity is non-negotiable and the courage to share power. The shaker’s steady pulse and his grandmother’s ethos remind us that resilience begins the moment we refuse to let anyone face the world alone.

In a sector crowded with handbooks and hierarchies, four ordinary objects in the hands of extraordinary leaders remind us that leadership in polycrisis begins where frameworks end: at the intersection of human dignity, shared agency, and practical hope. Our challenge, whether in policy rooms or makeshift classrooms, is to keep this human perspective intact.