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