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.

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

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.

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.