The King's guiding principle

I have a friend, Knut, who after many of the New Year's speeches has said: "Do you remember what King Harald said?"

I’ve been thinking about that lately. Because it wasn't necessarily the grand words. Often, it was said quite simply, but something stuck. A thought, a question, something about who we want to be and what kind of community we want to have. Knut may have captured something essential there. King Harald set thoughts in motion.

Now King Harald is gone, and I have thought several times about what it means to succeed as a king. A king has limited formal power, after all. He cannot instruct the people, and he cannot decide what we should think. Yet, strong expectations come with the role. A role is, after all, precisely a set of expectations.

We expect the king to represent something more than himself. That he, in one way or another, stands there on our behalf, both when we celebrate and when we mourn, and perhaps most of all when something happens that makes us feel small and quite powerless.

The king's vision. A notion of what you are to serve and what you are to stand for when situations change and it is no longer so easy to know what is the right thing to do. What holds firm? What do I want to be true to? Who do I want to be when it actually matters?

I don't know what Harald himself would have called his vision. But when I look at the way he filled the role over many years, I think something remains consistent: people first, dignity, consideration, community, and a "we" that should ideally become larger, not smaller.

I remember the New Year's hurricane that hit the Northwest in 1992. At the time, I worked at Felleskjøpet. I didn't lose anything in the hurricane myself, but many of our owners did. Farmers had houses, barns, and outbuildings damaged or destroyed, and through my job, I saw firsthand how hard this hit many people.

The iconic images of Harald in a blue puffer jacket and rubber boots, out among people who were trying to understand what had happened and what now had to be done. He couldn't repair the houses, undo the destruction, or remove the sense of helplessness.

But he could show up.

That has remained with me as a powerful image of leadership. When a person in an important role uses their attention to show respect, closeness, and consideration, it can mean more than we sometimes think. It says: I see you. What has happened to you concerns me, and us. You are not alone. It doesn't solve the problem, but it can build trust. And in demanding situations, trust is often one of the most important forces we have.

We saw the same thing, in a completely different way, after July 22nd. Harald did not try to explain the inexplicable. He was visibly moved, but at the same time held fast to something we needed to be reminded of: freedom, democracy, and community. Sometimes we don't need a leader who pretends to have the answers. We need someone who stands steady enough that the rest of us can find our bearings.

The speech in the Palace Park in 2016: "Norway is you. Norway is us." I believe that sentence will live for a long time because it changed the boundaries around the word "we." Harald spoke about people with different backgrounds, different beliefs, different loves, and different lives. He didn't make the differences smaller. He made the community larger. That is a quite important difference. It is easy to gather people against someone. It is far more difficult to gather people around something.

And sometimes, community must also mean seeing what we would rather not see. When Harald acknowledged the injustice the state had inflicted on the Sami through the policy of Norwegianization, it wasn't a pleasant story about Norway. But community does not become stronger by sugarcoating reality. Sometimes someone has to say that we did not do this well enough, we must see this, and we must learn from this.

I felt that Harald also had an ability to challenge us without standing there with a wagging finger. He could present a different picture and let us think for ourselves. Who is "we," really? Is our circle large enough? That is perhaps something of what Knut has reacted to after the New Year's speeches. Harald didn't always tell us what to think, but he could make us think a little about who we wanted to be.

And then there was the consideration. The way he met people in grief, after disasters, and out in small local communities. But also when people had achieved something.

The meeting with Ståle Solbakken and the national team after the World Cup also stands out. Outside the Palace, people were celebrating. Inside, the King met the team with pride and gratitude. He understood that this was about more than football. For a few weeks, many of us had felt something together—the nerves, the joy, the pride, and the community. There, too, he represented the rest of us in a way.

Humor also meant something. The dry, slightly warm self-irony made the role less stiff and reduced the distance. He could joke about his own death when it was mistakenly reported, and about his own slowness in understanding the woman he had lived with for a whole lifetime. He could carry a great role without constantly making himself feel great.

Values mean little if they only exist in ceremonial speeches or on the wall. They must be recognizable when reality hits. In a puffer jacket in the Northwest, in the words after July 22nd, in who gets a place in the "we," in the willingness to see what we haven't done well enough, in the consideration, in the humor, and in the joy shared with people who have achieved something.

Wisdom lives in what we say and in what we do.

King Harald was a human being. For many years, he filled a demanding role in a way that earned him the trust of so many. Perhaps leadership is less about the magnitude of our role and more about what we use it for, who we see, what we stand firmly for when things get tough, and what people are left with after meeting us.

Perhaps King Harald’s guiding principle was precisely this: to serve something greater than himself, and to make the "we" a little larger.