"We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now." Martin Luther King Jr.'s words felt unusually apt this August — a quiet month on the surface, but underneath it, a world moving faster than most of us, and our institutions, which are trying to keep pace with it.

We each carry a picture of ourselves in our heads. Other people carry one too. The trouble is, neither picture updates as often as we do — and in a world moving this fast, a static identity isn't a stable foundation. It's a lag. I see this constantly in client work, and I've lived it myself. Here's what I've learned about closing the gap between who we were, who we are, and who we're trying to become.

I haven't written about geopolitics in months. Not because I've stopped watching – I track global dynamics as closely as ever – but because most of what I had to say fell into one of two camps: either it was already obvious to anyone reading the papers, or it was a prediction that I no longer trusted enough to make. That's not absence of thinking; it's a diagnosis.

Summer tends to narrow the news to a few loud stories. Beneath them, July was unusually dense - on AI, on China, on the quiet reconfiguration of institutions most people haven't noticed yet. Worth paying attention.

Recently I've had conversations with two high-performers facing the same inflection point. Both are technically exceptional. Both have been promoted on the strength of that. Both are now discovering that the skills that earned them that promotion are not the skills that will make them successful in their new roles.

Gold has just displaced US Treasuries as the world's top reserve asset. That one data point is worth sitting with — and it wasn't the only signal this month that suggested something structural is shifting beneath the noise.

Five years ago, preparing to leave Equinor, I gathered a small group of close friends and asked them what they actually saw when they looked at me. My best friend Sophie didn't hesitate. If there was anything important that needed doing — anything at all — she'd turn to me. Without fail, I'd get it done.

May was a quieter month — not least because I spent two weeks on the East Coast of the US. But quieter months have their own signals. Markets calm in the face of extraordinary human cost. China rewriting the clean energy story. And a personal question I've been sitting with about what it means to really show up.

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