[For the last eighty years, The European Forum Alpbach has been an intergenerational and interdisciplinary gathering of leaders from politics, business, and civil society to drive ideas for a stronger Europe. This year's gathering brought together 4,000 participants, featuring speakers like Pope Francis, the former President of the EU, and a Nobel Laureate in Economics. Nipun Mehta, founder of ServiceSpace, was invited to share his insights during the opening session. Below is an edited version of his transcript.]

I'm your commercial break in between these rich political panels. [Laughs] Thank you for having me. I am deeply honored to share this space with you, to contemplate together how politics and business can shape the very course of human history.

Let me begin with a story.  At a retreat in India, right before lunch, we were told to go and sit next to someone we didn’t know. I ended up sitting with a young teenager from a village. Prior to my meal, I closed my eyes for a brief moment of gratitude – as is my general habit. As I opened my eyes, I saw the most unusual thing -- this young man was preparing a bite from my plate. My plate! [Laughs] 

Sensing my confusion, he offered a gentle explanation: “I grew up with the idea that if you want to be connected to something, you should make an offering to it. I wanted to be part of your prayer, so I thought, what better way than to share in your meal?” And with that, he extended that bite to me! Wow.

Curious, I asked him what kind of work made him come alive. With a wisdom far beyond his years, he told me a story – story of a little sparrow. “The sparrow,” he began, “heard that the sky was falling, and while all the other creatures fled, she asked herself, 'What can I do? I'm just a sparrow.' But then, in a flash of brilliance, she lay on her back, pointing her tiny feet towards the sky. 'What are you doing, Little Sparrow?' the others asked. 'Well, I've heard the sky is falling, and so I'm doing my bit to hold it up.'” He paused and then added softly, “That’s what I try to do too.”

What the sparrow teaches us is a lesson in balance—of the known, the unknown, and the unknowable.

The known is our action, the steps we take with confidence. It is the “hands” that build, the tangible efforts we make. The unknown, though it may evoke fear of uncertainty, catalyzes the realm of possibility where curiosity and a growth mindset guide us. It is the “head,” the mind that navigates the intricate web of cause and effect, where innovation and creation take root.

But the unknowable—that is the domain of the heart. It is the mystery that arrests the ego, that invites us to trust in the unseen, to believe in the emergence of something greater than the sum of its parts.  Just as hydrogen and oxygen atoms don’t possess liquid properties until they come together as water, we cannot know the emergent possibilities of our coming together. It is our hearts that can guide us to embrace the unknowable.

How, then, do we balance the hands, the head, and the heart? If we lead solely with our hands, we may act, but we risk reacting impulsively. If we lead only with our heads, we may innovate and create policies, but risk losing touch with our humanity. Gandhi once warned, “Men want their systems to be so good that they don’t have to be.” A warning, perhaps, to resist letting our humanity slip away into the cold logic of systems, to resist moving from heart to our heads. If, instead, our heart can lead our hands and head, the humility of the unknowable guides us to the doorsteps of unexpected emergence.

And such emergence is what our world so desperately needs. We find ourselves ensnared in a multi-polar crisis – from geophysical forces to inequality to military conflicts to mass migration – each overlapping, each threatening to tip us into unprecedented disequilibrium. We have no clear answers to climate change, to inequality, to social isolation, to war. We act, we think, we legislate, but it often feels like playing whack-a-mole, each new solution birthing a new problem.

What we need is heart intelligence, the wisdom of connection, where relationships weave a tapestry of new, unforeseen patterns of positive deviance.

In the realm of social change, we often fixate on measuring impact, on reaching critical mass, believing that if enough people join our cause, change will follow. But as John Paul Lederach, a renowned peacebuilder, once remarked in a circle in Sudan, “What’s missing isn’t critical mass. It’s critical yeast.” (I think in German, it’s “Hoofeh”?  Laughs.)

Bakers will tell you, to make bread, you need flour, salt, sugar, water—and yeast. The yeast, though almost invisible, is what makes everything else rise. Without it, there is no bread. Einstein once said, “You can rarely count what counts,” and indeed, it is the critical yeast that creates the platform for exponential growth. It invites a shift from quantity to quality of the platform, from “how many” to “who” – who are the right people, when mixed and held together, regenerate a non-linear, exponential growth beyond quantifiable impact?

"Times are urgent, we must slow down," Bayo Akomolafe reminds us. In our rush to measure immediate impact, to reach goals that are crisp and narrow, we may lose the broader, subtler margins where the heart’s true capacities are revealed.

From the lens of impact, the sparrow’s actions may seem insignificant. Yet, where critical mass and critical yeast converge is not in quantity, but in the organizing principle of the field in which they operate. The sparrow’s intention to serve without condition sustains the very platform of consciousness that allows a thousand flowers to bloom. She doesn’t just add a drop to the ocean; she sees the ocean in that drop. Her act, because it is given freely, without expectation, becomes the yeast of the heart, drawing a delicate line from the fleeting to the eternal, carried forward by the unseen currents of nature. And in that way, even the smallest act becomes a seed of transformation, a spark that ignites the unimaginable.

Thank you, all, for being that critical yeast of heart. When our heads and hands are led by our hearts, when we can dance with the known, the unknown, and the unknowable, and when we respond to the world’s suffering with unbounded compassion, we find ourselves baking bread together to nourish the hunger of the world!

P.S. As you head out today, you'll see a table with heart pins, each one crafted with love by women from an underprivileged community in India. Years ago, as my wife and I were visiting them as friends, those women offered us a parting gift—hand-stitched heart pins made from waste cloth. "We know you like to give," they said, "so we wanted to give you something to give away." Today, they’ve sent more of those heart pins for you. If one speaks to you, take it and put it on. But here’s the beauty of it—as soon as someone admires it, you must pass it on to them. In this simple way, these little hearts become teachers of stewarding beauty, opening hearts, and trust in our inexplicable interconnection.  Onwards!