There’s a noticeable shift in the tone of leadership conversations right now.

It’s not panic.
It’s not excitement either.

It’s something quieter.

A loss of certainty.

Not just about markets or technology, but about how leaders know they’re making the right decisions at all.

Boards don’t say this out loud. Executives rarely frame it this way. But it’s there, sitting underneath conversations about AI, workforce change, regulation, climate, geopolitics, and digital transformation.

The old markers of confidence aren’t holding.

Experience doesn’t guarantee relevance.
Data doesn’t guarantee clarity.
Speed doesn’t guarantee correctness.

And that’s unsettling for people whose role is literally to decide.

We built leadership for a world that no longer exists

Most leadership models were designed for a time when:

• Change was linear
• Cause and effect were visible
• Expertise aged well
• Decisions could be escalated safely

That world rewarded certainty.

Today’s world punishes it.

Leaders are now operating in conditions where:

• Signals contradict each other
• Consequences lag decisions by months or years
• Technology reshapes systems faster than culture can respond
• Reversibility is limited

In this environment, confidence without foresight isn’t reassuring. It’s dangerous.

What boards are actually afraid of

When boards raise concerns about AI, disruption, or “future readiness,” they’re rarely worried about tools.

They’re worried about being accountable for decisions they don’t fully understand until it’s too late.

The real fears I hear, again and again, sound more like this:

• What if we optimise for efficiency and break trust?
• What if we automate judgement we can’t ethically defend later?
• What if speed makes us look competent right up until failure?

These aren’t technological questions.

They’re leadership questions.

And they don’t have clean answers.

The end of certainty doesn’t mean the end of leadership

This is the critical pivot many leaders miss.

The loss of certainty isn’t a leadership failure. It’s a leadership transition.

The job is no longer to appear confident about the future.

The job is to design organisations that can respond well when the future arrives unevenly.

That means:

• Making assumptions visible
• Stress-testing decisions beyond best-case scenarios
• Understanding ripple effects across industries, systems, and people
• Creating shared language for uncertainty rather than suppressing it

This is where foresight becomes practical.

Not as prediction.
As preparation.

Why foresight belongs in the boardroom, not the innovation lab

Too often foresight is treated as a creative exercise, a strategy offsite, or a future trends presentation.

That’s not where it earns its keep.

Foresight belongs at the decision table, because it helps leaders answer three uncomfortable but necessary questions:

1. What are we optimising for, knowingly or not?
2. What trade-offs are we making invisible?
3. What future version of ourselves are these decisions locking in?

Without these questions, leadership defaults to momentum.

And momentum is not a strategy.

The quiet pressure leaders are under

Here’s the part most people don’t talk about.

Leaders today are carrying past trauma and future anxiety at the same time.

Past trauma from crises survived.
Future anxiety about crises perceived but not yet experienced or named.

This combination creates decision fatigue, over-caution, or reactive boldness. None of these are good places to lead from.

The organisations that navigate this best don’t demand certainty from their leaders.

They build decision comfort, shared understanding, and permission to pause where pausing is wise.

What effective leadership looks like now

It looks less like knowing and more like navigating.

Less like control and more like stewardship.

Less about being right and more about being deliberate.

The leaders who stand out are not the loudest voices predicting what’s next. They’re the ones creating environments where:

• Humans remain accountable
• Technology remains a tool, not an authority
• Decisions are explainable, defensible, and adaptable

That’s not softer leadership.

It’s stronger.

A final reflection

Certainty isn’t coming back.

And that’s not a failure of leadership.

It’s the invitation to a different kind of leadership altogether.

One grounded in foresight, humility, and preparation.

You can’t predict tomorrow.

But you can prepare for it.

And the leaders who do will be the ones others trust when certainty disappears.

Choose Forward

—
Morris Misel

By Morris Misel

Keywords: AI Ethics, Business Strategy, Leadership

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