he architects of global order keep searching for where consensus went. It hasn’t gone anywhere. If there ever was a true shared consensus, which is debatable, it was crafted over time via relationships and discussions around a shared vision. Today, the speed of change has outrun our ability to build those relationships before the next disruption arrives.
The fracturing of vision(s) across AI, geopolitics, energy, health, and development is more than a temporary disruption to be managed back into alignment. It is a signal. The frameworks that organized international cooperation—built for a slower, more legible world—are no match for the speed and complexity of what’s emerging. Pushing harder on governance–first or tech–first lenses at the G7 and VivaTech won’t resolve the divergence. Instead it will deepen it, because both approaches assume the problem is a deficit of the right rules or the right tools. The actual deficit is something else entirely. We must also turn away from assumptions about sequencing, the idea that consensus must be achieved before action is possible. In a world moving at this speed, we must build toward consensus but cannot wait for it.
What appears absent from every debate that will be had at Paris this year is the human layer. Do people, institutions, and communities actually have the capacity to navigate acceleration? We seem to be afraid to target the human element and instead look for technical gaps to be filled. But if we don’t double down on the human layer we won’t get to create visions around which to build alliances and consensus.
Every major theme on the table ultimately depends on populations and their institutions that can collaborate across difference, sit with ambiguity, think in systems, and adapt faster than the problems they face. We need to put as much energy into fostering the human side as we do AI.
For our education systems this means building new foundational literacies—not just digital or civic literacy, but the capacities to think critically, collaborate across differences, and reason toward shared human solutions. These are not soft skills, they are the load–bearing infrastructure of everything else we are trying to build. The same intentionality is required across institutions and industries. In current practice, where metrics are in place for measuring people’s outputs but not their capacity, the truly human side is treated as an afterthought. This must change to treat human agency, adaptive capacity, and collaborative intelligence as strategic investments.
The fragmented visions on display heading into Paris are not a failure of leadership. They are an honest reflection of a world that has outpaced its systems. We cannot piece the old story back together. What we can do is write a new one if we’re ready to, and that readiness is something we can intentionally build.
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The fragmentation is the message
Image via Jonathan Castañeda For Unsplash+
June 12, 2026
Fragmented global visions on AI, geopolitics, development, and more are typically cast as a governance failure. This is a mistake — the fragmentation signals a human capacity crisis, writes Sean Slade.
T
he architects of global order keep searching for where consensus went. It hasn’t gone anywhere. If there ever was a true shared consensus, which is debatable, it was crafted over time via relationships and discussions around a shared vision. Today, the speed of change has outrun our ability to build those relationships before the next disruption arrives.
The fracturing of vision(s) across AI, geopolitics, energy, health, and development is more than a temporary disruption to be managed back into alignment. It is a signal. The frameworks that organized international cooperation—built for a slower, more legible world—are no match for the speed and complexity of what’s emerging. Pushing harder on governance–first or tech–first lenses at the G7 and VivaTech won’t resolve the divergence. Instead it will deepen it, because both approaches assume the problem is a deficit of the right rules or the right tools. The actual deficit is something else entirely. We must also turn away from assumptions about sequencing, the idea that consensus must be achieved before action is possible. In a world moving at this speed, we must build toward consensus but cannot wait for it.
What appears absent from every debate that will be had at Paris this year is the human layer. Do people, institutions, and communities actually have the capacity to navigate acceleration? We seem to be afraid to target the human element and instead look for technical gaps to be filled. But if we don’t double down on the human layer we won’t get to create visions around which to build alliances and consensus.
Every major theme on the table ultimately depends on populations and their institutions that can collaborate across difference, sit with ambiguity, think in systems, and adapt faster than the problems they face. We need to put as much energy into fostering the human side as we do AI.
For our education systems this means building new foundational literacies—not just digital or civic literacy, but the capacities to think critically, collaborate across differences, and reason toward shared human solutions. These are not soft skills, they are the load–bearing infrastructure of everything else we are trying to build. The same intentionality is required across institutions and industries. In current practice, where metrics are in place for measuring people’s outputs but not their capacity, the truly human side is treated as an afterthought. This must change to treat human agency, adaptive capacity, and collaborative intelligence as strategic investments.
The fragmented visions on display heading into Paris are not a failure of leadership. They are an honest reflection of a world that has outpaced its systems. We cannot piece the old story back together. What we can do is write a new one if we’re ready to, and that readiness is something we can intentionally build.
