AI can get a leadership team to an answer faster — but getting to an answer faster isn't the same as thinking better together. The conversation a team has on the way to a decision is often where collective intelligence is built, and it's the part we most risk skipping. AI is speeding leaders up — but at what cost? I use AI every day: to research, summarise, test ideas, challenge my thinking and get to an answer faster. Increasingly, so do the leaders and teams I work with, an

If your team's most honest conversation happens in the corridor after the meeting, the problem isn't that people have more to say. It's that they didn't say it when it mattered. The meeting after the meeting is a signal worth paying attention to. We've all been in the meeting after the meeting A team meeting finishes. Everyone nods; the decision has been made. Then people walk back to their desks together. "What did you really think?" "I'm not sure that'll work." "Neither am

A little tension in a team isn't a warning sign. Handled well, team tension is one of the clearest signs that smart people are thinking hard together — the goal isn't to remove it, but to make it productive. Why a harmonious team isn't always a high-performing one When a team works well together, we tend to expect things to feel harmonious. I'm not so sure. Put a group of smart people around a table with different experiences, responsibilities and perspectives, and disagreeme

Developing individual leaders makes each person more effective. Team coaching makes a leadership team more than the sum of its parts. That's why the strongest leadership teams don't choose between the two — they invest in both. Why great teams need more than great individuals Every elite sporting team has a coach. Not because they're failing, and not because they're inexperienced — because talent alone doesn't create a great team. Yet in organisations we invest heavily in dev

As leaders, we consume a lot of information — books, podcasts, articles, keynotes. Yet many teams keep having the same conversations and making the same decisions. Ideas don’t change teams. The conversations they create do.

Under pressure, leaders tend to default to “I” — carrying more on their own, making the calls themselves, trying to find a way through alone. It's understandable, but it's backwards: the more complex the challenge, the less likely it is that one person holds the best answer. The most effective leaders do the opposite, and lead together. Why uncertainty pushes leaders into “I” mode We've been noticing a pattern across organisations: the greater the uncertainty, the more leader