Knowledge Is the Crisis Tool Most Leaders Overlook—Here's Why It Matters Now

Klaus Schmidt · 2026-09-26

### When the World's Crises Pile Up, What Actually Helps? Think about the last major global crisis you followed. A pandemic. A war. A supply chain collapse. Now ask yourself: how much of that chaos could have been softened with better information, earlier? That's the question a room full of policymakers, UN officials, private-sector executives, and young leaders wrestled with in New York this week. They gathered on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly to talk about something that rarely makes headlines but quietly shapes everything: knowledge. Not knowledge as a buzzword. Knowledge as infrastructure. As a forecasting tool. As the thing that separates a country that sees a storm coming from one that gets blindsided. ### The Case for Treating Knowledge Like a Public Utility The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation and the United Nations Development Programme co-hosted the event, and the core argument was simple: we've gotten very good at reacting to crises and not nearly good enough at anticipating them. Here's the thing—most crises don't arrive out of nowhere. They build. Slowly. In data sets nobody's reading, in warning signs nobody's connecting. By the time the emergency hits the front page, the window for cheap, easy intervention has usually closed. So what does it look like to actually use knowledge this way? - **Shared data platforms** that let countries compare notes in real time instead of after the fact - **Youth involvement** in policy conversations, since younger people often spot digital and climate risks faster than institutions do - **Private-sector partnerships** that bring real operational data into public forecasting - **Cross-border trust** so that information flows before a crisis, not just during one None of that is glamorous. All of it is cheaper than rebuilding after a disaster. ### Why Young People Keep Showing Up in These Rooms One detail worth noticing: young people were at the table. That's not decoration. It's strategy. Younger generations tend to be more fluent in the tools that matter now—satellite data, social sentiment analysis, rapid digital organizing. They also have the most to lose if today's leaders keep kicking the can down the road. A participant put it bluntly: *"You can't forecast a future you've excluded the next generation from building."* That line stuck with me. Because it reframes knowledge not as something you store in libraries or databases, but as something you distribute. Widely. Deliberately. Across generations and borders. ### The Uncomfortable Part Here's where it gets hard. Knowledge only helps if institutions are willing to act on what they learn—even when the findings are inconvenient. A government that invests in early-warning systems but ignores the warnings hasn't solved anything. A company that collects perfect risk data but buries it in a quarterly report has just built a nicer filing cabinet. The real test isn't gathering knowledge. It's trusting it enough to change course before the crisis forces your hand. ### What This Means for Everyone Else You don't need to work at the UN to apply this. The same logic scales down. If you run a business, ask what signals you're ignoring because they're inconvenient. If you lead a team, ask who's being left out of the conversation and what they might see that you don't. If you're just trying to make sense of a messy world, ask which sources you trust and why. Knowledge isn't a luxury for stable times. It's the tool you reach for when things get shaky—which, lately, is most of the time. The event in New York didn't produce a magic solution. But it did make one thing clear: the countries and organizations that treat knowledge as essential infrastructure, not an afterthought, will be the ones still standing when the next storm hits. That's not optimism. That's just pattern recognition.