When I stepped away from senior executive life — from the titles, the institutions, the organisations whose names made people's eyes light up in a certain way — I thought the hard part would be figuring out what came next. It wasn't. The harder thing, the thing that crept up on me slowly, was realising that my sense of my own value had been quietly tied to that scaffolding for years. The White House. Equinor. Harvard. I hadn't known how much weight they were carrying for me u

April tends to be when the year snaps into focus. This month the signals were consistent: power is concentrating, trust is eroding, and the assumptions underneath many organisations' strategies are quietly becoming unreliable. Alongside the geopolitics — China's R&D spending overtaking the US, British public opinion pivoting hard toward Europe, emerging markets more concentrated than the US.

The geopolitical environment of 2026 is not simply uncertain. It is actively disorienting — and the distinction matters. Uncertainty can be managed. Disorientation produces a specific set of behaviours that, left unexamined, quietly undermine effective leadership. I see it consistently in conversations with leaders across sectors: high awareness, sophisticated analysis, and decision-making that has nonetheless become more tentative, more reactive, and more hedged than the mom

March has been a month of accumulation. Data points that individually are striking, but that together suggest something more structural: a world in transition — demographically, politically, economically, and climatically. And a parallel, personal recognition that transition is not just something that happens out there.

Most leadership teams are reacting to headlines - managing symptoms, not strategy. This three-layer geopolitical framework helps you distinguish signal from noise. Trace visible events upward to reveal the systemic and structural forces driving them, then cascade back down to spot consequences your organisation hasn't yet noticed. Signal is not what is important globally. Signal is what changes how you have to make decisions.

March has been a month of accumulation. Data points that individually are striking, but that together suggest something more structural: a world in transition — demographically, politically, economically, and climatically. And a parallel, personal recognition that transition is not just something that happens out there.

Multilateral institutions still matter - but they no longer monopolise influence. Increasingly, power is exercised through coalitions of the willing, and that changes everything for long-term strategic decisions.

February reinforced a theme that has been building for months: divergence. Between institutions and individuals. Between fragility and resilience. Between those who lean into volatility and those who retreat from it. At the geopolitical level, systems are more brittle. At the organisational level, leadership pipelines look thinner. At the personal level, responses to instability are increasingly split. The question running through all of this: who adapts — and how? What follo

Most senior panels do not fail because the speakers are weak. They fail because no one is leading the conversation. In volatile geopolitical and corporate environments, public discussions are not neutral. They signal strategy. They expose alignment — or the lack of it. They shape how leaders are perceived. Moderation is not logistics. It is strategic leadership in public.

My response to the volatility that has marked the opening weeks of 2026 has been to be slow and steady. That is deliberate. In my recent paper, State of the World 2026: Leadership When Outcomes Widen, I argue that as the range of plausible outcomes expands, leaders face a heightened risk of over-reacting

This year the drafting felt harder - because the world is more chaotic, the range of possible outcomes has widened considerably. The biggest leadership mistake I see right now is confusing unpredictability with powerlessness. When scenarios multiply, the temptation is to hedge everywhere, delay decisions, and react to noise. That feels prudent. In practice, it's often costly.

As 2025 closed, I found myself reflecting on what has shifted—and what has hardened—over the past twelve months. As we enter 2026, like so many others, I’ve been working on my annual State of the World assessment which I’ll have out in the coming weeks. An early teaser – greater volatility, more widely diverging scenarios, and the behaviours leaders will need to navigate them. Meanwhile, here are the signals from December that feel particularly telling. What I’ve Learned

My brain is changing. As many of you know, about seven years ago, in my mid-40s, I had breast cancer. Six months later, after several rounds of chemo and radiotherapy, I am clear. The only overt reminder is the pill I take every morning. But there’s another reminder that I notice now and again, and that is that my brain feels different. About a year after my treatment, I saw my surgeon and explained that I felt like I’d lost about 30% of my brain power. I switched medicatio

Power, data, and imbalance. This month I’ve been struck by how unevenly the benefits of technology and growth are distributed — between nations, between systems, and sometimes within ourselves. From the rise of “embodied AI” in China to the deepening digital divide across the Global South, and from new thinking on growth to the psychology of loss and change — here are my October insights. What I’ve learned about the context Friedrich Merz, Germany’s Chancellor, noted that reg

INSIGHTS SEPTEMBER 2025 September has been a month of dissonance — between speed, and depth, alignment and drift. Between work and...

The age of distraction is also the age of obsession. This line resonated with me deeply this month as I reflected on how attention has become our most valuable—and contested—resource. From China's $680 billion clean tech investment to the 95% failure rate of AI pilots, the patterns emerging in our world mirror the challenges we face as leaders...

Xenia Wickett - AI After a demanding June, July gave me space to reflect, reset, and work on some of the longer-term institutional goals...

Xenia Wickett - Executive Coach, Moderator, Geopolitical Advisor June 2025 Insights June flew by. Intense, energetic, and full of...

For 80 years, the US anchored the global system. Now, uncertainty reigns. Will America turn inward, fuelling division and instability, or recalibrate and remain a key—if less dominant—global player? For business leaders, preparing for both futures is essential as geopolitics becomes a central concern. Which path will rise, and how will you navigate the complexity ahead?

The pace and pattern of change today demands more than traditional leadership instincts. In a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, clarity is no longer a luxury—it’s a strategic asset. This short piece explores the structural shifts I believe every senior leader should understand—from fracturing global trust and economic headwinds, to demographic divergence and the strategic implications of the energy transition.