Trust is a gift.

Could you describe your professional path, highlighting the two or three most important moments that led you to where you are today?

Touchette: The first pivotal moment was becoming a lawyer. Law taught me to structure ambiguity, to distinguish evidence from assertion, and to understand that while institutions depend on rules, they also depend on judgment.

The second moment came at the halfway point of my career, as Assistant Deputy Minister for Public Affairs at National Defense in Canada, during a very complex mission in Afghanistan. It taught me that leadership is not about eliminating uncertainty. An important dimension of leadership is accepting responsibility for decisions made under uncertainty. It also taught me the extraordinary importance of mission - people will endure enormous challenges when they understand why their work matters.

The third was moving to the OECD. Running operations at an international organization has taught me that institutions are far more complex than they appear. They depend on thousands of decisions nobody sees. Good institutions don’t happen by accident; they have to be stewarded.

What is excellence for you, and how do you think about organizational performance through the prism of excellence?

Touchette: Operational excellence is not perfection. It is an organization’s ability to deliver its purpose reliably, to adapt when circumstances change, and to know the difference between activity and performance. You can be very busy, producing all sorts of things, and still not deliver what you are mandated to deliver. Activity and performance are different things.

There is a paradox to operational excellence: when it works, nobody notices it. People see the great publication, the great policy. They don’t see the financial controls, the cybersecurity, the procurement process that ensured integrity, the hundreds of operational decisions that made it possible. I never judge performance by whether an organization is quiet - sometimes quiet only means nobody wants to surface a problem.

There are a few key ingredients that ensure an organization can perform. Bad news has to travel very fast upward — leaders need to hear it early and directly, not through another channel. Decisions must be taken at the right level: don’t delegate up; if you have the authority, you are responsible for exercising that authority, and you should be prepared to account for how and why you made your decision. People must understand what they are accountable for. Resources must be connected to priorities. And the institution must be able to absorb a shock without losing sight of its mission.

That brings me to robustness. For years we equated excellence with optimization - leaner, faster, cheaper. That thinking, in my opinion, is incomplete. A highly optimized organization can be extremely fragile. Excellence today requires robustness: some margin, some redundancy, some optionality, because the world is not behaving according to theory or a computer model. That is why I apply three tests – I check for outcomes, signals, adaptability. Are we producing the outcomes we said we would? Are our internal signals telling us the truth, including what we don’t want to hear? And when assumptions change, can we adapt?

My personal understanding of excellence has evolved over time. Early in my career, it was about mastery - knowing my subject, working extremely hard, not making mistakes. As I became more seasoned, excellence became about judgment: not necessarily being the person with the answers, but the person who can ask the right questions and surface the underlying issues. And now, after almost forty years, excellence is about stewardship. I am acutely aware that leaders are entrusted with great responsibilities, even if only temporarily. My obligation as a leader is not simply to perform today, but to leave the institution stronger than I found it. I keep coming back to three cardinal principles: purpose - understanding why I am here; integrity - knowing what I will and will not compromise on; and courage - acting when the answer is going to be difficult.

Reliability and robustness immediately call for trust - and trust is a rare currency.

Touchette: Inside an organization, trust is structural. Leaders, through their actions and words, either build it or damage it. One thing I learned very early: trust is not a communication strategy. You cannot communicate your way out of behaviors people fundamentally don’t trust. There has to be alignment between your words, your decisions, and your behaviors.

Then, there are three qualities people expect before they give you their trust, because trust is a gift. Competence: do you know what you are doing? Integrity: will you tell me the truth? And fairness: will you treat people fairly, particularly when it’s difficult? Trust accumulates slowly, and people constantly scan for misalignment between what you say and what you do. If they find it, they take back their gift of trust very quickly. Each consequential decision either adds to the institutional reservoir of trust or draws from it. You cannot demand trust. You have to earn it.

How do you hire? Every organization subscribes to the statement “we hire the best people.” And then I look inside many companies, and I notice they employ the same people under different names.

Touchette: Competition for scarce capabilities exists, yes. But after almost forty years, I believe organizations do not win by assembling the largest collection of individually brilliant people. Brilliant people exist everywhere – in government, the private sector, international organizations, the voluntary sector. The real differentiator is whether an institution and its leaders can turn individual capability into collective performance. I would rather have ten very good people who trust one another, challenge one another respectfully, and are committed to the mission than ten superstars each optimizing for themselves and elbowing their way ahead in the organization, rather than serving it.

So the leadership question is not simply “do I have the best people?” but “do I have the right combination of people for the mission - and have I created the conditions in which they can perform collectively?” I am not looking for people who subordinate their judgment to the institution. I expect people to subordinate their ego to the purpose of the organization they are meant to serve.

Leadership by influence is essential in international organizations. What is your practical advice for leading by influence rather than by solid reporting lines?

Touchette: I come at this from leading in knowledge-based organizations - people who are smart, capable, and fully able to question whether something makes sense. The baseline is what I said earlier: purpose, integrity, courage, and the visible alignment of words, deeds, and behavior. Authority alone cannot produce commitment, especially with knowledge workers.

Five capabilities matter. First, listening - not only politely, but diagnostically: what is really behind the stated objection? Second, framing: knowing how to place issues in the larger context, because people often see only their part of the world, and when you frame the issue in the broader purpose, suddenly it clicks. Consensus becomes possible when people see their interests reflected in a larger purpose. Third, relationships: you cannot manufacture them at the moment you need them; you have to cultivate them - be authentic, be genuinely interested in people, and be generous to people. Fourth, patience - not passivity. One trap organizations fall into is confusing inclusion with indecision. Consult, seek consensus, frame the choices - and then have the courage to make the call. Fifth, knowing when not to compromise. Compromise is not inherently virtuous. Sometimes the courageous decision is to compromise; sometimes the virtuous decision is to say no.

The world is in severe crisis on so many fronts at once. What is your personal leadership architecture when you face multiple burning platforms?

Touchette: A crisis strips leadership down to its essentials. People want three things from their leader in times of crisis: clarity, competence, and connection. They don’t expect you to know everything, but they need to know you are paying attention, that difficult decisions will be made, and that they will be told the truth.

In a sustained crisis, the leader needs personal discipline, because people are looking to you and you cannot break. First, protect your thinking time: if every minute of your day belongs to someone else, you won't have time to think. Second, maintain relationships, because you will need them; be of service to people. Third, keep people around who are willing to tell you when you are wrong, and have the humility to thank them for it. Fourth, distinguish the urgent from the important. You will have a dozen emergencies - I always talk about icebergs: there is one in front of us, but there may be three behind it, and we don’t want to avoid the first only to run into the next. And, perhaps most importantly: during a sustained crisis, the leader has to regulate the organization's emotional temperature. You cannot pretend everything is fine, nor can you panic. You must not transmit your own anxiety — while having the honesty to say you don’t have all the answers and don’t know when things will get better, only that they will. And you have to be believable.

Let me apply your distinction between the urgent and the important to AI. How do you define AI governance?

Touchette: In the current environment, management conversations around this topic seem to gravitate towards an exotic parallel universe in which this technology takes us either into a land of milk and honey or into dystopia. My approach is to go back to basics: What are we trying to achieve? Who is accountable? What risks are we prepared to accept? What decisions can be delegated, and what requires human judgment? How do we know the system is performing as intended - and what happens when it doesn’t?

Good governance starts with purpose - what problem are we trying to solve? I apply an enterprise risk management lens: you cannot govern AI intelligently if you treat AI risk in a silo. It interacts with cyber, privacy, people, reputation, legal risk, operational continuity, and ultimately institutional trust. And there is a flip side: governance must not become so strict that it prevents experimentation. The objective is responsible enablement, not paralysis. And it has to be calibrated to your means - the cost model is evolving so fast that if leaders listened to everybody who wants to do AI, I am not sure budgets would withstand it. So again: what are we trying to achieve, what problem are we solving, how much money do we have, and how do we know the technology is working for us, better enabling us to deliver on our mandate?

What are your thoughts on the next generation and how they enter the workforce in the age of AI?

Touchette: When I talk to young professionals, I tell them there are capabilities that become more valuable as machines become more capable - and that is the currency they want to be able to bring to the table.

First, judgment. AI can produce options, but leadership means taking responsibility for choosing among them. Train yourself deliberately in this discipline: how would you choose, with what criteria, by what values? Second, cultivate intellectual breadth — read history, economics, philosophy, literature, technology. I worry when I meet leaders who are extraordinarily knowledgeable in a very narrow area, because I wonder what depth of judgment they can apply to broader problems. Third - and we don’t teach this enough in business schools - institutional literacy: how budgets work, how governance is set, what the incentives are, the risk tolerance, the culture, the politics of the organization. A strategy developed without understanding how the institution works likely will not succeed. Fourth, relationships: build them before you need them. Fifth, courage - much of leadership is deciding without complete information and being accountable for the decision.

But the most important capability for the young professionals is learning to change their mind. Being dogmatic will not help. Intellectual confidence is important; intellectual humility is indispensable. If I had to reduce my career to three things, I come back to the words that shape how I think about leadership: purpose, integrity, and courage.