Leadership Quote by Harri Holkeri

Holkeri’s line is the kind of deceptively plain political wisdom that only lands because it refuses the cheap comfort of certainty. “Consensus-building” doesn’t begin with shared facts or a grand moral principle; it begins with an almost grudging acknowledgment that the other person’s world is internally coherent. The phrasing matters: “your own truth” isn’t “the truth.” It’s a demotion of ego dressed up as practicality, a reminder that negotiation fails less from bad math than from identity threat.

The subtext is distinctly late-20th-century, post-ideological Europe: a smaller nation’s statesman trained in coalition government, multilateral institutions, and the daily grind of compromise. Holkeri (a Finnish prime minister and later a UN mediator in Kosovo) is speaking from arenas where moral clarity is rarely enough and where insisting on a single narrative can turn talks into theater. His “truths” aren’t necessarily equally valid in some philosophical sense; they’re equally real as political forces. Treat them as delusions and you harden the room. Treat them as lived convictions and you create the first sliver of movement.

There’s a strategic tenderness here, but not sentimentality. Holkeri is advocating a discipline: bracket your righteousness long enough to map the other side’s incentives, wounds, and face-saving needs. Consensus, in this view, isn’t agreement on reality; it’s an engineered overlap between competing realities, built by a negotiator who understands that people don’t abandon “truth” under pressure - they defend it.