Just over half of organisations now expect their leaders to make greater use of AI in strategic decision-making. That's Harvard Business Impact's 2026 Global Leadership Study. A separate Gartner survey this year found only 8% of HR leaders believe their managers currently have the skills to use AI effectively in that role. Do the subtraction and you get a 45 point gap between what's expected and what's actually there. The obvious response is more AI training, another workshop

Most people hear "mental performance" and think of resilience. Bouncing back. Getting through it. I used to let that assumption sit unchallenged too, and it is wrong in a way that matters if you are trying to protect the quality of your leadership team's thinking rather than just their mood. What Resilience Actually Does Resilience is what happens after a drop. Something goes wrong, capacity takes a hit, and the person recovers back to where they were. That is a real skill an

I regularly meet HR Directors who can explain, in detail, why a leader is experiencing symptoms of burnout. What they struggle to explain is why the strongest person on that leader's team handed in their notice six months before anyone saw it coming. Those two things are usually connected, and few organisations are looking at the link. Decision Debt is what happens when a leader keeps making calls while cognitively depleted, without the recovery to clear it. I've written abou

Every keynote on AI and leadership eventually arrives at the same line, and I have said a version of it myself. AI will never replace human judgement. Somewhere behind it, unsaid, is the assumption that judgement holds up on its own under pressure, which is the part I have started to disagree with. It is true, as far as it goes. It is also, increasingly, said without any explanation of what protects judgement when the pace is relentless and the decisions keep coming. The line

AI is clearing routine tasks, but it concentrates the hardest, ambiguous decisions onto leaders already drained by a faster pace. Discover how the concentrated cognitive load impacts executive decision quality and how to use the RESET Framework to protect your leadership capacity.

Middle managers are carrying more pressure than any other group in most organisations right now. They are also receiving the least targeted development in return. That gap has a name.

The emerging leaders your organisation is most invested in developing are often the ones showing the earliest signs of burnout. And the signals look nothing like what most organisations are trained to spot.

Most leadership development budgets have a resilience line in them. And most of the leaders sitting in those sessions leave with good content, reasonable intentions, and no meaningful change three weeks later. That is not a speaker problem. It is a sequencing problem. And until organisations understand what is actually happening in the cognitive system of a leader operating under continuous demand, they will keep investing in interventions that arrive too late to do what they

Most leadership development focuses on visible performance. It misses the leaders who are still showing up, still delivering, still holding the room — while the quality of their thinking has already started to deteriorate. This is The Performance Illusion. And the leaders who most need to address it are the last ones who know it is happening.

There is no shortage of advice on leading through change. Communication plans. Stakeholder maps. Eight-step frameworks. The consulting industry has built entire practices around it. And yet McKinsey research has put the failure rate for organisational change programmes at around seventy percent. That figure has been cited and debated for years. Nobody has seriously challenged the direction of it. I do not think the frameworks are wrong. I think they are looking at the wrong p

Seventy percent of senior leaders say they are making decisions while mentally overloaded. That figure comes from a 2025 UK leadership wellbeing report, and it will not surprise anyone who works closely with emerging and senior leaders. The exhaustion is visible. The calendar pressure is visible. What is not visible is what that depletion is actually doing to the quality of decisions being made day after day, week after week. This is what sits underneath the fatigue that lead