“We are only as blind as we want to be.” Maya Angelou
I am sure we can all remember a time when we didn’t want to or chose not to see something, or when we didn’t allow ourselves to see what was happening. Why? Because it was easier, quicker, and more efficient for delivering short-term results. The quote above speaks to our willful ignorance – our tendency to overlook truths that are too messy to examine. AI is going to change that. It will reveal the habits we avoided, the patterns we denied, the truths we softened and the comfort zones we created for ourselves. There is a quiet sense that the game has changed, and the real upgrade isn’t technological, it’s human – intensely human and therefore, by default, messy!
I will always remember learning to drive and marvelling at how useful it was to be able to constantly see behind me and understand the lay of the land. As I look back on 2025, I keep coming back to one uncomfortable truth: AI didn’t change leadership this year, it just made it impossible to fake. It won’t replace leaders, but it will reveal what they do and don’t do. It’s fascinating to observe and reflect.
We’re in an era where AI improves weekly, organisations restructure quarterly, and humans update their emotional software maybe once every five years if we’re lucky. This tension shows up regularly, and comes very much to the fore in my recent podcast conversations with Andrea Iorio (listen here), Rasmus Hougaard (listen here) and Nikki Barua (listen here) regarding the reinvention paradox between agentic AI and human change. One truth emerged so clearly that it now seems all too obvious: AI isn’t disrupting leadership, it is exposing leadership and its inherent patterns. This constant tension between automation and collaboration is revealing the human systems we let run on outdated operating models. Indeed, we’re currently optimising ourselves out of the very capabilities that matter most – the informal intelligence, the relational precision, and the ability to hold complexity without collapsing into binary thinking.
There’s a Japanese legend that says: ‘If you feel like you’re losing everything, remember, trees lose their leaves every year, yet they still stand tall and wait for better days to come.’ What if progress was about stillness and patience as opposed to hustle and impatience? The temptation, as we step into 2026, is to carry on with the familiar latter. But the power of leadership necessitates leaders to step back and be still, to recognise their important new role in the new reality and understand what makes people (feel) uniquely valuable rather than focusing on (machine) productivity.
What this year actually taught us
I’ve spent the past twelve months in coaching sessions with brilliant, committed senior leaders and teams who are somewhat stuck. Not because they lack strategy or intellect or tools, but because they’re trying to think their way out of fundamentally human problems. Here’s what kept showing up: leaders feeding complex situations into AI tools and getting back perfect technical answers in 15 seconds – systemic maps, risk indicators, decision flows, beautifully packaged scenarios. All correct, but all useless in a way. The Board of Innovation AI playbook tells us that the single biggest reason enterprise AI fails is that companies still treat it as a tool instead of a general-purpose technology. Until that mindset shifts, AI will keep producing pilots, not transformation. AI cannot see the protagonist’s inner doubts, the unspoken team hierarchy, the informal alliances and the identity gaps beneath the surface. For years, we’ve been able to hide behind complexity or governance models. AI changed this, not necessarily because it is smarter than us, but because it is faster at exposing what’s already there:
- cultures running on performative transformation
- meetings where people talk but don’t say anything
- decisions endlessly delayed because they’re emotionally uncomfortable
- leaders trying to think their way out of human tension
We keep upgrading platforms while running them on obsolete human systems. We talk about ‘digital maturity’ but avoid conversations about relational maturity:
- who really decides
- who never speaks
- what gets punished quietly
- where fear lives
- which identities are propped up by titles rather than contribution
No transformation can outrun the human system that resists it, and as we move into a more digital world, the resistance is showing up everywhere. Looking back, 2025 felt like a collision between Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Saramago’s Blindness: we stood in the same organisations, facing the same facts, the same data, the same disruptions – yet walked away with radically different truths. This wasn’t because reality was unclear, but because seeing it fully would have required change. In keeping with Rashomon, our interpretations were shaped by identity, power, and self-protection; like Blindness, our greatest risk wasn’t lack of information, but the quiet, collective choice to look away. This year stripped back the comfort of plausible deniability. AI, complexity, and crisis didn’t distort reality but sharpened it. And what became impossible to ignore is that blindness in organisations is rarely accidental. It’s relational. It’s systemic. And it persists only as long as we allow it.
One of the biggest leadership myths we carried into this decade was: if someone has the skills, they’ll step into the role. However, this is no longer the case and we are now seeing:
- leaders with all the competencies, paralysed by self-doubt
- leaders over-controlling because their identity is fused with certainty
- leaders hesitating because their internal narrative hasn’t caught up with their external responsibilities
Skills don’t fail under pressure but identity does. When identity and role are out of sync, behaviour collapses back to the old story – every time. The uncomfortable yet liberating realisation of not being stuck because I don’t know what to do, but being stuck because who I am no longer fits the system, is one of the most frequent conversations I have had this year. This is a good sign. There are choices: Do I change the system? Do I change my relationship with the existing system? Do I create a new system – as Buckminster Fuller always advises – to make the old one obselete? Never has this been truer than now.
The importance of systemic patterns
We humans are pattern-making machines. Our brains, our teams, our organisations are all wired to recognise and reproduce patterns because this keeps us safe. We don’t just see patterns, we need them to reduce uncertainty, and, under stress, the human nervous system locks onto simpler patterns to survive. If you can’t see the pattern you’ll keep ‘fixing’ the event and wondering why the system keeps smiling at you! Donella Meadows defines a system as elements interconnected in a way that produces ‘its own pattern of behaviour over time’ – so the system is not the org chart or processes, but the recurring behaviour. Data in Meadow’s sense is behaviour over time – exponential growth (reinforcing loops), goal-seeking stabilisation (balancing loops), oscillation (balancing loops and delays) and overshoot and collapse (reinforcing growth that pushes a stock past a limit). A stock is particularly interesting in culture change work as it is an accumulation that changes slowly. If I translate that into human systems, trust, fatigue, credibility, resentment, agency and capability all behave like stocks. For example, if psychological safety or trust in teams (stock) has been drained for months, one offsite isn’t going to recalibrate the flow. The pattern will keep showing up. Gregory Bateson goes deeper than this and talks about the relational dance of interacting parts, or the ‘relationship over time’. This leads us back to the fact that most culture problems are in fact relational issues in protection mode. AI cannot help us here, over and above highlighting patterns.
Here’s another inconvenient truth that has also been made visible by the onset of AI. You can buy software. You can hire consultants. You can create complex and ambitious roadmaps, but you cannot buy in or outsource different behaviours. AI learns through feedback loops but so do we. AI has become very good at revealing the patterns we preferred not to name: performative alignment, polite avoidance, hero leadership or over-intellectualisation. Behind every stalled project sits a pattern we didn’t change or a conversation we didn’t have. Change work fails when it asks for new behaviours without changing the environment, i.e. asking teams to feel safe in a system that keeps proving they shouldn’t. The pattern wins!
The four leadership muscles that actually matter now
If this year taught me anything, it’s that leaders who thrive aren’t the most technical or the most strategic – they’re the ones building four very specific capabilities:
1. Ambidextrous thinking
Holding data and doubt, speed and reflection, strategy and story, speed and stillness.
This isn’t about being right or wrong, it is about equilibrium and balance – being comfortable with both realities existing at once. Holding polarities is one of the most fundamental and hardest things to do, as our brains home in on a more binary and linear mode to frame our patterns as certainty. Yet as leaders, we need to be able to flex this muscle constantly to navigate uncertainty and bridge the ever widening gap between the speed of change for tech and humans – constantly adapting, accepting that there may not be one right answer, and admitting that we don’t know (yet).
2. Humour as a cognitive technology
Ah yes, humour – a cultural minefield! I will always remember what I have now coined ‘my moments of solitude’ when I tried to translate my English jokes and quips into French when I first arrived here. They fell flat on their face often – nothing to do with the language barrier, but rather with cultural resonance and understanding.
However, humour, when broken down into its mechanics and effect on stress, is actually a very powerful regulation tool. Why? Because it disarms the fear of judgement, creates micro-liberation from ego and opens the system. It can also lower threat, create distance, and help the nervous system breathe. In moments of intensity, humour does something powerful: it signals safety, restores perspective, and moves the brain from reactivity to choice. 2025 reminded us, in keeping with the age-old adage of ‘better to laugh than cry’, that sometimes laughter is the most intelligent response to complexity. I’ve watched humour do more for stalled transformations than any roadmap. It tells us we’re safe, we’re human, we can handle this. In a workplace defined by uncertainty, that matters more than any perfectly crafted strategy deck or speech.
3. Informal (relational) intelligence
Here’s what has become crystal clear: transformation doesn’t live in roadmaps. It lives in the fabric of the organisation or team – in the whispers, side chats, and coffee-machine moments (physical or virtual). It comes from what is not being said just as much as from what is being said, from who people trust and look at before they answer. Formal structures still dominate our organisations, but informal networks run the system. It doesn’t yet have a chapter in most leadership books but it’s everywhere in practice and there is lots of data to back up the importance of relational precision. It is the ability to choose the right human interaction at the right moment with the right emotional intention: to know when to challenge and when to support. AI brings cognitive precision and data brings operational precision but only humans can bring relational precision.
Innovisor tells us that 3% of the informal influencers in organisations can effect 90% of change (read here). This is a huge untapped pool of relational intelligence. In my recent podcast with Celine Schillinger, author of Dare to Unlead, she tells us that leadership is a collective capability (listen here) and in my recent podcast with Hilton Barbour, he gives us the questions: What is the relative energy in the system? What is flowing between these people that have an outsized influence on the colleagues around them? (listen here).
The real operating system of your organisation isn’t the org chart but the stories told between meetings. Since the onset of ‘flatter organisations’, we have been faced with a more interconnected and relational way of working to optimise people and results, but the behavioural and relational precision necessary to do this is not yet a common theme. Leaders who learned to read – and work with – the informal system moved faster, deeper, and with far less resistance. Those who didn’t are still wondering why nothing shifted. Leaders who ignore this lose before they begin.
4. Situational courage
This means speaking up before certainty exists; naming the emotional elephants in the room; choosing transparency over comfort – in short, being willing to be afraid and speak anyway. As Brené Brown reminds us, ‘courage is fear walking’. We must move into action. Courage is naming the tension early, admitting uncertainty, contradicting the algorithm when context demands it, and challenging silent power structures. 2025 demanded more than ever that we get comfortable being uncomfortable, that we show up afraid and do it anyway. The leaders who moved systems weren’t fearless, they just didn’t let fear make their decisions. 2026 will demand a lot of walking!
Until organisations shift who speaks, who avoids, who decides, what gets rewarded, and where fear lives, nothing will change. Leadership is becoming less about having the answer and more about our relationship with the answer. People hide, hesitate, and overcompensate, but until leaders upgrade their identity, new behaviour will not stick. Strategic clarity is key going forward, but what if a 100% technical solution isn’t viable? Here, presence and human wisdom matter more than speed or strategic clarity. This is leadership artistry, and it’s the capability that will define the next decade.
So… what did 2025 really ask of us?
Not to become more technical, faster or ‘AI-proof’, but rather to think about our innately human capacities – to become more human, more aware, more discerning and critical of AI outputs. We also need to be more courageous, more relational and more honest about the systems we’re part of and what that means for us and our identity. As leaders, our ability to hold this paradox and lead transformation is key. AI didn’t replace leaders in 2025, it replaced the illusion that we could keep leading in the same way. The paradox is now undeniable: the more we automate our organisations, the more we must humanise our leadership. The future belongs to leaders who can bring presence, courage, humour, and relational precision into the room – one conversation at a time. Not the smartest leaders, the most talented or the most technical, but the most courageous, curious, emotionally aware, and attuned to informal signals.
So here are my questions for 2026: What pattern have you been hiding behind in 2025? What conversation will you no longer avoid in 2026? What would it look like to lead with a little more courage and humour, and a lot more humanity?
Thank you for reading.
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